Workforce Language Services

It’s no secret that the construction industry is becoming more and more Hispanic, and we continue to see this trend in the media and from our clients. This article outlines the importance of learning Spanish to better manage an Hispanic worforce.

Recent years have seen a large influx of Hispanic workers into the allied trades, particularly drywall and concrete work. In fact, a 2004 study by professors at the Texas A&M University reported that Hispanics are the fastest-growing minority population in the construction industry.

The recruitment of Hispanic workers into the construction industry is complicated, however, by the large number of immigrants who speak English sparingly, if at all. Whether the language factor contributes to the inordinately high percentage of Hispanic fatalities in the construction industry, which was the focus of the Texas A&M study, is open to debate. But no one doubts that it is imperative for supervisors to be able to communicate with workers — and for workers to be able to communicate with each other — on the construction site.

Lately the industry has been shifting direction regarding the language issue. Years ago, the effort was directed without much success at urging Spanish-speaking workers to learn English as a second language. Now, there are programs through Associated General Contractors that provide Spanish-language training for English-speaking construction superintendents and foremen.

 The power of the Latino market can be seen everywhere you look. In California a new publication was announced to specifically target the Latino bridal market. Bodas USA is providing culturally relevant bridal information for this growing market.

“For the first-time brides and grooms to be that are monolingual or that are bilingual will have access to a Spanish-language brides magazine that is relevant to their culture and their language, and that is our motto: Your Wedding, Your Culture, Your Language,” said publisher Lilian de la Torre-Jimenez, a former senior newspaper reporter, editor and magazine writer.

…

“The Latino weddings featured in our premiere issue will definitely shed a light on the bride and groom as an important consumer, it will showcase that Latinos “Tiran la Casa por la Ventana” or the equivalent of “no expense spared” when celebrating a wedding. We want to guide the couple in planning their wedding but we also want to empower them with columns on relationships, nutrition and finance so they can plan a successful life together and with their families,” said De La Torre-Jimenez.

“Our editorial team is made up of Latino professionals who are experts in wedding planning, cuisine, travel, relationships, nutrition, entertainment, photography and in many more areas, but most importantly our stories are not translations but rather written in Spanish with a cultural touch that only Latinos can relate to,” said Bodas USA La Revista(TM) editor Katia Ramirez-Blankley, former editor of La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language in the nation. “We are happy to be part of the Latino wedding celebration.”

As this article notes, language use and language preferences differ 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.

With an increase in immigrants of all language backgrounds, hospitals are recognizing the need for additional full-time interpreters. The Chicago Tribune notes that it’s not just Spanish-speaking patients, but patients of many languages backgrounds, that increasingly need interpretation services. Rather than rely on a family member or custodian to interpret sensitive medical information for patients, hospitals increasingly use telephonic interpretation and have increased their onsite interpretation staff. They also are finding, however, that it’s not just the language but the culture that comes into play in the clinical setting.

One minute, Cristina Villanueva is in the neonatal nursery explaining to a Spanish-speaking mother why her English-speaking doctor won’t let her baby go home right away. The next she is hurrying to the emergency room to interpret for a Mexican patient admitted for a bleeding ulcer. Then it’s off to the front office to assist a Spanish-speaking woman about to have an MRI.

From the delivery room to the chaplain’s office, Villanueva and a team of 10 other Spanish-speaking interpreters spend their days crisscrossing Sherman Hospital in Elgin, where nearly a quarter of the patients are Hispanic. Villanueva lives with the constant chirp of her pager. She says she walks up to 6 miles a day in her thick-soled, black shoes, dashing through the hospital’s halls to keep up with Hispanic patients’ needs.

Spurred by the surge of immigrants in the suburbs — and a growing awareness of the potential dangers of miscommunication — hospitals and clinics that once relied on secretaries, janitors or even children to explain complicated medical terminology and deliver life-altering diagnoses are increasingly hiring interpreters, training bilingual professional staff and using phone interpreting services to bridge the language gap.

Health-care advocates say the need has become especially acute in communities trying to keep pace with fast-growing immigrant populations.

This article notes the tremendous growth in limited English proficient residents in Arkansas and the need for interpreters of all language backgrounds for legal proceedings.

State law requires interpreters during legal proceedings if a defendant or witness has trouble with English. It’s up to individual judges to decide who is in need of an interpreter.

If a defendant can’t pay for the service, taxpayers foot the bill.

A 1999 Arkansas Supreme Court order put the responsibility of certifying interpreters in the hands of the state Administrative Office of the Courts, which has seen a dramatic rise in the demand for foreign language interpreters.The use of court interpreters in Arkansas has increased by 384 percent since 2004, leaving a small pool of interpreters scrambling to courtrooms across the state.

Last year, the state sent interpreters to court 5,000 times, compared to around 1,000 times in 2004, the first year the office began keeping those figures.

That doesn’t account for an unknown number of cases in which courts or defendants arranged for interpreters when state funds ran out. When that happens, courts are responsible for paying for interpreters.

When we started this business, the intention was to figure out how to provide services that help people communicate in the workplace. It seemed simple and straightforward.  I didn’t realize how politically charged and intertwined our type of services can be, and how perspectives of limited-English populations really fall across the political spectrum. Below is an example from the UK where translation services are becoming a political battle.

But from another perspective, it also shows how important providing communications in one’s own language can be to government and social services. Read more.

CUTS to translation services will not improve integration and will affect the most vulnerable people, according to the council opposition group.

A Conservative newsletter for the Town ward claims that the council had decided to “radically reduce translation services”, however, a spokesman from Enfield Council said the authority was awaiting guidance from the Government before implementing any changes.

Cllr Jayne Buckland, Labour councillor for Haselbury ward, said: “By scrapping translation services, some of the most vulnerable people in our borough, people who pay council tax, who are entitled to services, would be prevented from accessing key services.”

She said proposed cuts to translation services - affecting translation in official documents and on signs - would affect a range of services, and criticised the comments in the In Touch with Town newsletter, saying they had caused alarm.

Conceptually this idea is great, but in practice I’m not sure what the value is. IBM has created a grant program to allow non-profits and schools access to their new web-based translation software. Bridging language barriers and improving education is great, but I’m not clear if this will accomplish the stated objective.

Imagine for a moment if the flood of emails you receive daily suddenly became an indecipherable series of fonts and symbols. Unfortunately, this scenario is a reality for many Spanish-speaking individuals with limited English skills. It’s a situation that is especially frustrating for parents when it comes to online correspondence with their child’s school.

IBM’s ¡TradúceloAhora! (TranslateNow!) grant program is offering an innovative solution. Using IBM’s WebSphere® Translation Server software, hundreds of schools and nonprofit organizations around the world are accessing ¡TradúceloAhora! to not only translate web sites from English to Spanish automatically, but also to translate emails bidirectionally (English-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English).

And I am really not clear on what the value of this is over the many existing automatic translation software. And by reading in the FAQ section, I don’t get a better feeling for it.

How does the translation software used in ¡TradúceloAhora! compare to other available products?

It is as good or better than anything currently available. Automatic translation software overall is a “work in progress” and is far from perfect. However, those using the software can easily have a sense of the content on the web as well as access to the bidirectional email translations. With continuing feedback from users, IBM will continue making improvements that will increase the translation quality.

The translations contain incorrect or poor Spanish; why?

Language analysis and interpretation is a difficult task. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art translation software makes mistakes and doesn’t produce texts with the fluency that human translators have. The good news is that progress in human language technology is rapidly improving the quality of automatic translation. IBM is at work to continually improve the accuracy of automatic translation.

So, in their own materials they admit that their software is “as good” as what’s already in the marketplace (for free). And more importantly, the also state clearly that their translations produce translations that are full of mistakes. Maybe one day machines will be able to understand context, but until that day it will be very difficult for machine translations to replace true communication.

The New York Times today reported Census Bureau’s findings that 40% of immigrants settle directly in the suburbs upon arrival in the US.  In Chicago, like so many places these days, we’re seeing this more and more - but it doesn’t mean that the suburbs are at all equipped to handle the influx.  This is not just Latino immigrants, but immigrants of all backgrounds.  From a language perspective, the more prepared the suburbs can be to accommodate these new residents’ needs, the better for everyone.

About 4 in 10 immigrants are moving directly from abroad to the nation’s suburbs, which are growing increasingly diverse, according to census figures released yesterday.

The Census Bureau’s annual survey of residential mobility also found that after steadily declining for more than a half-century, the proportion of Americans who move in any given year appears to have leveled off at about one in seven.

A spouse’s nagging or entrepreneurial vision - both reasonable motivators for starting a business. In this article, the author describes a growing English school in China. With more than one million students and an increasing need for English-speakers, schools such as these are fueling China’s more than $3 billion language training industry.

Yu Minhong attributes his decision to abandon a teaching career and go into business partly to his wife’s intense nagging.

“Some of my friends were making more money and my wife wanted me to be more successful. She felt that, compared with them, I was a loser,” he says with characteristic candour.

Mr Yu rose to the challenge, founding New Oriental and turning it into China’s biggest private education company, with English-language schools and other learning centres in 34 cities.

In the latest financial year, more than 1m students enrolled, boosting New Oriental’s revenues by 36 per cent to more than Rmb1bn ($136m).

The overwhelming majority of students come to New Oriental to learn English, often to prepare for an entrance exam to a US university. Increasingly, however, the incentive is simply to land a better job in China.

Mr Yu says: “If you look at a city such as Beijing, there’s an international event every day, so English speakers are clearly in great demand. And the Chinese people also know that, with English proficiency, they can probably double their salary immediately.”

The lure of a lucrative career has driven a rapid rise in education spending, which now accounts for about 15 per cent of China’s overall consumer spending, second only to food, according to JPMorgan.

Even for those who speak English well, there’s often a need to modify speakers’ pronunciation to help ensure that they are understood. This article describes this type of training in more detail - training that we at Workforce Language Services also offer.

It was not what Sergei Petukhov said. It was how he said it.

“The way I said ‘accent reduction,’ he couldn’t understand me,” Petukhov said. That was enough for Petukhov, a Moscow native who works for the law firm Kaye Scholer as a scientific adviser, to get his employer’s approval to pay for training to decrease his Russian accent.

He is one of many educated, non-native English speakers working in the United States who take voice training and accent reduction to improve presentations, workshops and everyday conversations with their American-born co-workers.

Petukhov’s accent coach, Jennifer Pawlitschek, said that from her experience in New York, the field is growing. “Here it’s hot, and I think it’s because it’s an international crossroads,” she said, both because the United Nations is in the city and because of New York’s role in global financial markets.

Pawlitschek, who has a Master of Fine Arts degree in drama from the University of California, Irvine, said “the posture of the mouth” affects accent. She teaches how to change “the way you hold your jaw, lips and tongue,” along with stress and intonation.

She contended that the term “accent reduction” is a misnomer. “Accent reduction is learning an accent. It is learning an American accent,” she said.