Workforce Language Services

Google has refined its translation tool to a point that “can make the language barrier go away,” as one of the principal scientists of the company’s machine translation team said. Now handling 52 languages, Google is yet again a visionary in an area most internet/computer companies have ignored over the years.

Remember those funny Babelfish translations you’d get at the dawn of the internet age, the computer translator that would give you “They are a small potentiometer, short circuits and a beer of malzes of the tea” for “I’m a little tea pot, short and stout”? Google has made those roundabout interpretations all but extinct.

How does machine translation work? And what makes Google’s so good?

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.

Let’s be clear, no computer translation program will ever be able to capture the linguistic and cultural nuances beyond  the text. Only a thinking human can interpret text that way, and as we’d always prefer, a professional one with lots of experience. Google recognizes this too, but for anyone needing a quick translation of a news article, Google translations certainly will capture the “essence” of the story.

The New York Times reports: click here.

Click here to watch WLS’s founder and president Jill Bishop eloquently explain our language and cultural training services at the Midwest Security & Police Conference/Expo. (Once you’re on the page, click on the video icon.)

Some talking points:

Hispanics make up around 15% of the U.S. population, and that number will triple by 2050. Is your organization prepared for the linguistic and cultural challenges?

In our “Spanish for Law Enforcement” trainings, WLS doesn’t focus on that grammar you learned back in 9th grade and have forgotten since. You’ll learn industry-specific terminology that you can use instantly on the job. We’ll help you anticipate challenges and find the appropriate solutions.

WLS offers onsite, customized trainings and workshops to help employers (from police departements to restaurants) prepare their employees for any linguistic or cultural situation that may come up in their industry.

As Jill says, “It’s all about the expressions you need to do your job better.”

A labor group surveyed restaurants in Chicago and found significant segregation between front-of-house workers (waiters, hosts) and back-of-house staff (busboys, dishwashers). The study “found that nearly 80 percent of whites work in the front, nearly two-thirds of Latinos in the back.”

To those of us who have worked in the restaurant business this doesn’t seem like news at all – the discrimination is all too prevalent.  Common all over Chicago’s pubs and steakhouses, we see that “taking the order or seating the clients is the girl next door or a suave older man, most likely white, while a cadre of young Mexican men construct the meal behind the scenes.”

Taking the issue to task, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Chicago teamed with the Working Hands Legal Clinic to file a federal lawsuit against one Andersonville eatery, claiming that the establishment mistreated its kitchen staff. McCormick and Schmicks’ chain just settled a $1.1 claim from black employees who said they weren’t considered for hosts and servers.

But in the restaurants’ defense, aren’t they hiring based on a special skill set required for that position, not based on race? For example, knowledge of food and wine pairings or simply communicating a food order in English.

I would argue that while restaurants don’t always discriminate blatantly, they rarely train or promote their current back-of-house staff. Wouldn’t a restaurant get better long-term results from a staffer with a long employment history at the restaurant, happy to be promoted, than a new hire? Busboy to server would be the perfect transition, for example.

To read the full report in the Chicago Tribune, click here.

Motivos, a bilingual Latino youth magazine (by and for youth) out of Philadelphia, is more that just a publication. On a Friday night, when the last thing on most teens’ minds is work, a half a dozen of them are huddled around a table in a basement room of Benjamin Franklin High School, talking about fonts.

The magazine is a for-profit enterprise that has been operating out of the high school since 2008. Virtually all of it is written, edited and illustrated by 14- to 24-year-olds under the direction of founder Jenée Alicia Chizick. Chizick is passionate about educating and motivating the often under-served teens.

“When you’re not educated it’s harder to get into decision-making rooms,” Chizick told an audience during an author series at the community workshop Taller Puertorriqueño in North Kensington in November. “I wanted to make sure from the get-go that the students that the magazine employs were in the decision-making rooms, so part of the model is that those schools that subscribe in bulk to the magazine then can choose one or two students to serve on the advisory board.”

Schools see the magazine as a way to boost enrollment of underrepresented students. Amid the student-penned poems, cultural columns and relationship advice, readers encounter occasional articles supplied by a university admissions department.

Chizick has already inspired many students who now go to college and are seeing opportunities abound. “‘Everything that she does, she has a reason for it and she explains it,’ said Keisha Frazier, a Motivos contributor studying broadcast journalism at Temple. Frazier said traveling to the National Council of La Raza annual conference with Chizick a few years ago was a life-changing experience.”

Read the full profile here.

Great news for parents of bilingual kids: the first entirely bilingual brand of children’s toys has hit the market. Atlanta-based Smart Play, LLC launched Ingenio(TM) which features “10 portable, affordable toys and games that teach a comprehensive range of early learning skills in English and Spanish – fine motor, reading, writing, math, vocabulary, geography and problem solving.”

The news is refreshing to teachers and parents who have long desired Spanish language toys for their children, especially as nearly 25% of the country’s children between ages 3-6 are of Hispanic origin (a number that is rising). Bilingualism at a young age has proven benefits, such as “greater cognitive flexibility, improved powers of concept formation and enhanced creativity.”

Read the full press release here.

An estimated 850,000 adults in the Greater Chicago area have limited English competency skills, according to Literacy Chicago. With many of their children in English-speaking public schools, this creates a huge problem for Chicago schools.

Parents may not need the English communication skills on the job, but without the ability to speak in English, they are unable to communicate with teachers and other parents, as well as their children. One example:

Although Maximina Esteban’s work as a house cleaner does not require her to speak English, her duty as a single mother of two sons does.

Born and raised in Chicago, Esteban’s children, 11 and 7, spend most of their days at school speaking English rather than Spanish.

Despite her attempts to get them to speak Spanish at home, they reply in English, especially her younger son. He understands very little Spanish and rarely uses it with his mother.

Literacy Chicago, which provides free English language training to adults, had their federal funding reduced by 13% for the 2010 fiscal year. They anticipate greater cuts in 2011. Other organizations with English literacy programs are facing similar cuts.

Explains Medill Reports of Northwestern University, “This threat of budget cutbacks makes immigrant parents particularly vulnerable. With fewer opportunities for free English instruction, they will continue to struggle to communicate with their children and their teachers.”

Read the full story here.

While Latinos make up more than a third of the Texan workforce, they earn 35% less than their white counterparts, reports the Texan Tribune.

On average, they earn about $11.50 per hour, compared to $17.90 for non-Hispanic whites. The gap is larger here than in the rest of the country: Outside of Texas, Latinos earn $12.42, while their Anglo counterparts earn about $17.55.

Regardless of skill, Latinos were responsible for most of the expansion in the state’s labor pool since the mid-1990s and have been a boon to the state’s economy. “The Latino population’s increase transformed Texas’ labor force and led to faster economic growth,” the report says. “Latinos accounted for 76 percent of the state’s labor force growth between 1994 and 2008.”

One factor that may account for the discrepancy is the education gap. 40% of Latinos age 25 or older didn’t graduate from high school, compared to 5% of whites. However, some educators say that cultural and economic factors often trump the importance of going to school; the responsibility to take care of one’s family has an impact on dropout rates.

Read more about the Latino pay gap here, in the Texan Tribune.

…a really amazing food blog called The Homesick Texan. Really as much about Hispanic-American culture/nostalgia as it is about food, the blog features gorgeous photos, mouth-watering recipes, and great stories about living the Tex-Mex life.

http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/

Should names of the likes of Cesar Chavez and other Hispanic historical figures be erased from the history books? Some people in Texas seem to think so, and so the State Board of Education will put the question to a vote.

The online magazine Latina Lista takes a strong stance against this in an editorial titled “Latino leadership needed to counter TX State Board of Education’s attempt to write minorities out of history.”

The article cites a new study from the Southern Education Foundation that reports that for the first time in history, more that half of students in the 15 Southern states are children of color—African-American, Hispanic and Native American. Latina Lista sees this as a blatant reason not to cut minority leaders out of the textbooks.

These SBOE board members, along with their appointees, who adhere to the perspective that it is repugnant to teach children about the historical contributions of Latinos and African Americans show they are no better, and given recent quotes attributed to some who were involved in setting the Social Studies standards, are essentially rewriting U.S. history to conform to their distorted views of how they wish to see the United States.

Click here to read the full (heated) opinion.

A “cesta” (”basket,” in English) is a lending circle in which 6 to 12 individuals contribute a monthly sum of money, and the pooled funds serve as a credit line for the members involved. It’s a model that’s well known in Latin America, but cestas are only now beginning to pop up in the U.S.

An organization called the Mission Asset Fund (MAF) is helping cestas in California link to the credit market, so that the peer-to-peer groups can establish credit histories. In San Francisco, 44% of households have no credit history at all, and more than half of Latino adults don’t have bank accounts.

“This data is very discouraging,” says MAF executive director José Quiñonez. “But we decided, really our whole approach has been, to try and view the community from a positive perspective, to appreciate what they have, not what they lack, and to build on what they have.”

The cesta banking model has been called a breakthrough, and one that non-profits can replicate.  Members must act democratically to decide how much to contribute, and who has priority to withdraw their credit. Groups are usually founded among family members or circles of friends where there is a high level of trust. “The pressure to obey the agreed rules, however informal, is more social than legal.” The goal for most members is to get out of credit card debt with other lenders, and expand business operations.

To read more about cestas and how they’re growing in Latino communities around the U.S., click here.