Workforce Language Services

I just came across this page. It’s humorous stuff and makes us all laugh. I highlighted some of my favorites below, but by all means visit the original page…

In a Tokyo Hotel: Is forbitten to steal hotel towels please. If you are not person to do such thing is please not to read notis.

In a Belgrade hotel elevator: To move the cabin, push button for wishing floor. If the cabin should enter more persons, each one should press a number of wishing floor. Driving is then going alphabetically by national order.

In a Paris hotel elevator: Please leave your values at the front desk.

In a hotel in Athens: Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 A.M. daily.

In a Yugoslavian hotel: The flattening of underwear with pleasure isthe job of the chambermaid.

In a Japanese hotel: You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.

On the menu of a Swiss restaurant: Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.

On the menu of a Polish hotel: Salad a firm’s own make; limpid red beet soup with cheesy dumplings in the form of a finger; roasted duck let loose; beef rashers beaten up in the country people’s fashion.

In a Hong Kong supermarket: For your convenience, we recommend courageous, efficient self-service.

Outside a Hong Kong tailor shop: Ladies may have a fit upstairs.

In a Bangkok dry cleaner: Drop your trousers here for best results.

In a Rhodes tailor shop: Order your summers suit. Because is big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation.

A sign posted in Germany’s Black Forest: It is strictly forbidden on our black forest camping site that people of different sex, for instance, men and women, live together in one tent unless they are married with each other for that purpose.

In a Zurich hotel: Because of the impropriety of entertaining guests of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose.

In a Rome laundry: Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time.

In a Czechoslovakian tourist agency: Take one of our horse-driven city tours — we guarantee no miscarriages.

Advertisement for donkey rides in Thailand: Would you like to ride on your own ass?

In a Bangkok temple: It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man.

In a Tokyo bar: Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts.

In a Copenhagen airline ticket office: We take your bags and send them in all directions.

In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.

In the office of a Roman doctor: Specialist in women and other diseases.

In an Acapulco hotel: The manager has personally passed all the wate served here.

From a Japanese information booklet about using a hotel air conditioner: Cooles and Heates: If you want just condition of warm in your room, please control yourself.

From a brochure of a car rental firm in Tokyo: When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor.

Two signs from a Majorcan shop entrance:
- English well talking.
- Here speeching American.

This article describes the shift away from immigrants’ native languages toward English - at the expense of what would otherwise be a very valuable asset: bilingualism.

LAWRENCE — After a lunch of hot dogs and rice, Jordy Berges blasted a ball off the wall of the lunchroom at his mother’s office, his stomping grounds for the summer.

“No juegues aquí,” Yovanna Berges scolded her 7-year-old son, telling him in Spanish to stop.”Sorry,” he answered her, in English.

Berges, an immigrant from Peru, is growing accustomed to such conversations with her son. She is struggling to raise him to speak English and Spanish fluently, which might not seem like a big challenge in the city with the highest proportion of Latinos in Massachusetts. But researchers say Berges and immigrant parents nationwide are confronting a difficult truth: Their children are losing their languages.

This article addresses the legality of English-only policies in the workplace. Such policies open employers to being sued for discrimination, but perhaps more importantly, they create an environment of intolerance and can lower employee morale. As Ronna Timpa notes, “Imagine how you would feel if you couldn’t speak your own language in the bathroom.”

Some companies are adopting policies that require employees to speak only English on the job, spurring a backlash of lawsuits alleging that such rules can discriminate against immigrants.The English-only policies are coming as the number of immigrants in the USA soars: Nearly 11 million residents are not fluent in English, according to U.S. Census data, up from 6.6 million in 1990. Nearly 34 million residents are foreign-born, according to 2003 U.S. Census data. That’s up from 24.6 million in 1996.

This article describes the efforts to improve communication in the workplace through job-specific language training.

Non-English-speaking workers may have difficulty understanding safety warnings, company policies, product specifications and other important communications. That, in turn, can raise safety concerns and insurance costs, lead to run-ins with regulators, promote poor quality, and generally make an owner or a manager’s job more difficult. “It can contribute to workers’ compensation costs and a wide variety of issues,” says Virda Rhem, a member of the national workplace diversity panel of the Society for Human Resource Management in Washington, DC.
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A common question among employers is what to do about Spanish-speaking employees who use Spanish among each other at work, leaving the those who don’t know Spanish in the dark. LatPro provides advice on this topic.

Q: “I have several bilingual employees who speak Spanish at work among themselves. Most of my workers speak little or no Spanish, and some have complained because they feel uncomfortable when they can’t understand the conversations going on around them. How should I handle this?”

A: I am sure that the language skills of your Spanish-speaking employees were probably one of the reasons you hired them. Being bilingual is a huge advantage in today’s business world, not just for the employee but for your business because it allows your company to communicate with a larger percentage of the marketplace.

For advice on what to do in this situation, click here.

With each generation in the US, Latinos are finding more career opportunities - in part because of their culture and language skills. HispanicBusiness cites the Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement (HACE) 2007 Latino Professional Pulse Survey.

Hispanic professionals are better educated than their parents, optimistic about their future and generally younger than their non-Hispanic counterparts, according to a recent survey.

The Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement (HACE), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help Hispanic professionals at all stages of their careers, recently released the results of its 2007 Latino Professional Pulse Survey.

 As this article notes, language use and language preference varies dramatically based on generation in the US and level of acculturation.

When it comes to reaching Hispanics, using Spanish-language advertising might seem like a no-brainer. But according to a new study from Simmons Research, a New York-based tracker of consumer behavior, that’s not necessarily the case. While first-generation Hispanics prefer Spanish-language advertising because it’s easier to understand, second- and especially third-generation Hispanics are somewhat indifferent to it.

In this article in the Economist, the author describes the somewhat suprising down-side of English as the global language of business: that it may hurt business by making it difficult to find speakers of “less glamorous European languages”.

IN RECENT years Brussels has been a fine place to observe the irresistible rise of English as Europe’s lingua franca. For native speakers of English who are lazy about learning languages (yes, they exist), Brussels has become an embarrassingly easy place to work or visit. English is increasingly audible and visible in this scruffily charming Belgian city, and frankly rampant in the concrete-and-glass European quarter. Now, however, signs of a backlash are building. This is not based on sentiment, but on chewy points of economic efficiency and political fairness. And in a neat coincidence, Brussels is again a good place to watch the backlash develop.

Here is another story about the challenges of and need for providing professional translation. I cut the story down, but you can read the entire article here. There were two paragraphs that need to be pulled out that speak to the importance of professional translators:

A cursory survey of documents provided in Spanish by various agencies turned up many riddled with errors, from misspellings and grammar problems to literal renderings bordering on the incomprehensible.

Huszar thinks that written translation should be done by native speakers who have lived in a Spanish-speaking country and studied at the university level. Inaccurate translations or those using “Spanglish” only add to the distortion of the language, she says.

How do The Dalles families who speak only Spanish get information on vital services from local public agencies? More or less imperfectly, it seems, especially when it comes to written text.

Local strategies for providing information in Spanish run the gamut from manual translation work by paid, qualified staff to computer-assisted, on-the-fly translating.

And everything in between — or nothing at all.

“They’re not that good,” says Casa Loma resident Fanny Vazquez of the majority of translations done here. The young mother, who was raised in The Dalles and speaks both Spanish and English, often accompanies friends from her west-end apartment complex as an interpreter.

“Most of the Mexicans don’t even understand how they [translate] from English to Spanish,” she says. “[They think], ‘What are they talking about?’”

Still, whatever the challenges, methods, and flaws of the practice, many agencies are increasingly attempting to serve the growing Spanish-speaking community through translation.

“It just makes sense,” says Wasco County District Attorney Eric Nisley, who knows of no legal requirement outside of the court system to provide for interpretation or translation into a language other than English — except sign language and braille, as mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Still, he says, many organizations have made a policy decision to provide information in Spanish, finding that it gives them an economic advantage — or a service advantage in the case of public agencies.

……To arrive at the translations, she says the PUD worked with a Spanish teacher at the high school, then incorporated modifications based on comments from their janitor’s wife.

The school district, on the other hand, relies heavily on bilingual employees, including two elementary school principals, for its frequent bilingual communications.

“We need to be sensitive to our Spanish-speaking population,” says Dry Hollow Elementary principal Greg Bigelow, who does most of the translating for his school and, together with Chenowith Elementary principal Matt Ihle, quite a bit for the district office as well.

Bigelow, who has a degree in Spanish, which he originally learned working with Hispanics in high school and then perfected on a Spanish-speaking church mission to Chicago, says he considers it “really critical” to try to reach all parents of schoolchildren.

He explains that there’s someone at every school — be it an administrator, teacher or assistant — who can do translation. The high school also recently contracted out a translation of its handbook and prospectus, according to vice principal Nick Nelson.

Wasco Sherman Public Health faces a daily need for translation services, according to Maria Pena, a bilingual community health worker. The agency has a contractor for written translation, provides all its paperwork in Spanish and has nine bilingual staff members and a nurse practitioner who can provide on-site attention or interpreting.

Molly Rogers, director of the Wasco County Department of Youth Services, says she is fortunate to have even one bilingual, bicultural secretary, who serves people “multiple times a week” in Spanish over the phone.

Her department also contracts with a couple of local interpreters and tries to recruit bilingual probation officers, something she finds “very difficult” due to the scarcity of candidates and the competition for them.

Trudy Townsend, who administers the Wasco County Commission on Children and Families as part of Youth Services, says her agency has done everything from buy materials in both languages, to hire out translations, to rely on bilingual staff from partner agencies for help.

“We truly believe translation needs to be professionally done by someone who is qualified to do it, but we generally don’t have the money to do it that way,” Townsend explained.

……

Northern Wasco County Parks and Recreation District faces an equally infrequent need to translate, says administrative secretary Jennifer Botts. In the few instances when she has had to, Botts, who does not speak Spanish or have the luxury of a bilingual co-worker, has resorted to computer translation, imperfect as she knows it is.

“If there’s a need, I’ll do everything I can, and hopefully we’ll just work together to get the closest translation possible,” Botts said.

And yet, as Vazquez’s comments indicate, the closest translation possible seems to be an elusive thing in The Dalles.

A cursory survey of documents provided in Spanish by various agencies turned up many riddled with errors, from misspellings and grammar problems to literal renderings bordering on the incomprehensible.

Silvia Huszar, a Colombian native who lives in White Salmon and teaches Spanish at Columbia Gorge Community College, has seen her share of bad translations as well.

Huszar, who does translation free of charge “for fun and to help people out,” thinks computer translation is a major culprit. “It’s crazy,” she says of the text that results.

Another problem, she says, is that many people here speak “Spanglish,” a mix of English and Spanish that causes them to say things like “pushar el carro” (push the car) that don’t exist in Spanish. Before she came here, Huszar says, she never heard an application referred to as an “aplicacion,” but only by the proper term “solicitud.”

Huszar thinks that written translation should be done by native speakers who have lived in a Spanish-speaking country and studied at the university level. Inaccurate translations or those using “Spanglish” only add to the distortion of the language, she says.

How about this problem… Translating English candidate’s names into Chinese characters so that non-English speakers can vote without assistance. However, transliterated Chinese characters can have various, and sometime unpleasant meanings. Quality translation is important, and not just for presidential candidates.

Hope Chu of the Organization of Chinese Americans says hers is a tonal language in which a sound has many meanings. Take the “ma” in Barack Obama. It can mean “horse,” “mother,” “how,” “what” or “to scold.” And while Obama comes out as “Oh Bus Horse” in Cantonese, in the Mandarin dialect the Democrat’s full name, according to a translation provided by Galvin, means “Oh Intellectual Overcome Profound Oh Gemstone.” Or, says Siri Karm Singh Khalsa, president of The Boston Language Institute, “Europe Pulling a Horse.”

If Obama’s alias appears inscrutable, Clinton’s sends an unpleasant message: “Upset Stomach.” Phil Singer, spokesman for Clinton’s campaign, says Chinese-American campaign workers told him that the characters usually used in Chinese-American media for her name mean “Like Prosperity.”

Not all translations are distasteful. Neither Thompson weighing a bid for the Republican presidential nomination is likely to get hot or sour over his Chinese name. In Mandarin, Fred Thompson’s name could mean “Fortune Virtue Soup.” In Cantonese, Tommy Thompson is “Beautiful Soup.”