Workforce Language Services

An article profiling the Milla family is the first in a series of three pieces about language immersion in Lake Oswego, Oregon.  Curently, the Lake Oswego School District has no Spanish immersion program but the Milla family would like their children to be immersed in the Spanish language.

Steve Milla is of Peruvian descent and conducts most of his business at his law practice in Spanish:

Today 95 percent of his clients are Hispanic. About 50 percent of his work is immigration-related, he said, but he also does personal injury and a little criminal defense “to keep a foot in the courthouse.”

“Then I get people who ask questions like: ‘My rent is late. What do I do?’ Or they have questions about leasing a car,” said Steve, who does almost all of his business in Spanish. He’s had people come in wondering why they don’t own their car after years of payments only to explain to them the difference between leasing and buying.

“I am helping people to make better decisions in the future,” he said.

Both his legal assistant and receptionist are bilingual, and Steve said he wouldn’t hire anyone who is not bilingual – which means he can never hire his wife.

To read the entire profile, click here.

New Mexico, New Jersey, and California are among a handful of states that have passed legislation requiring the public institutions with health education programs to provide cultural competency training to students. 

Having culturally sensitive medical practitioners is imperative in both areas where there is a large number of one specific culture or nationality as well as in areas with multiple cultures, languages, and national origins. 

“We don’t expect that a provider is going to know everything about every nationality,” said William Flores, chairman of New Mexico’s task force charged with developing the curriculum. “The critical thing here is developing sensitivity and the understanding that not every culture responds to medical providers in the same way, sees medicine in the same way.”

Dr. Elizabeth Szalay, an associate professor of pediatric orthopedics and pediatrics at the University of New Mexico’s Carrie Tingley Hospital, said that it’s important for doctors to understand how patients may be different, but patients also need to be open about themselves, by asking questions and revealing their beliefs, concerns or fears.

When treated patients of various ethnicities, health care providers need to be sensitive to the fact that what might be offensive to one culture is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged in another.  The article gives the example of eye contact:

When a doctor doesn’t look an Asian-American patient in the eye, that might be seen as a sign of respect. But making eye contact is encouraged with black patients, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which has published a guidebook for culturally competent care.

To read the article, click here.

Some corporations are responding to the increasingly adversarial immigration debate with programs like Marriott International’s “Thirst for Knowledge,” which provides language instruction and assimilation assistance for their immigrant employees. 

This program and others are backed by some legislators:

The initiative is supported by a bill recently introduced in Congress. Sponsored by Rep. Mike Honda, D-Campbell, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., it would provide $350 million for immigrant family literacy programs, individual tax credits for teachers and corporate tax breaks for firms that offer educational workplace programs like “Thirst for Knowledge.”

In addition to support from private firms that employ thousands of immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere, the bill is backed by the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, which recently issued a report about U.S. business and Latinos’ contributions.

The report points out that Latinos make up more than 14 percent of the U.S. workforce and own more than 2 million businesses. It says that foreign-born workers have much to offer but need more help to master English and become more invested in U.S. society.

To read more about this positive move away from xenophobia and toward integration of a large population of U.S. residents, click here.

The Pew Hispanic Center just released a report with findings that a quarter of Latinos don’t get any health information from health care providers.  Rather, 8 out of 10 get the majority of their health information from radio and television. 

The report’s findings define the challenge for health care professionals to strategize about the most effective way to get necessary information to this growing demographic:

“When it comes to meeting the health needs of Hispanics in America, one size does not fit all,” said Debra Joy Perez, senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “National and community health experts need to factor in differences between subgroups, such as language spoken, assimilation and country of origin, and develop innovative solutions that meet the diverse needs of the Latino community.”

To read the release and be able to download the full report, go to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation page.

According to state estimates, there are about 97 different languages spoken in North Carolina.  While the police have adapted to working with a large number of Spanish-speakers, they have yet to do the same with native speakers of various other languages. 

The Guilford County Sheriff’s Department has received funding to purchase hand-held translation devices to bridge the language barrier between officers and residents.  The unfortunately named Phraselator will be used in an attempt to better serve North Carolina residents who speak increasingly varied languages.

If an officer, for instance, ever wanted to ask a suspect if he or she needed to use the restroom in Cantonese, the officer has been unable to do so – but that will change soon.

In order to use the device, an officer needs to know the language the person speaks, so Barnes said the devices’ real usefulness will probably be when deputies are serving papers, conducting evictions or carrying out similar day-to-day activities.

Barnes has been making moves to address the county’s language issues for a while; for instance, his department pays a 5 percent salary premium to any officer fluent in Spanish, and it offers a free course to those who wish to learn Spanish.

To read the full article, click here.

The movie industry is one industry that truly knows no borders, as Hollywood films are broadcast to audiences all over the world.  But there are both cultural and linguistic considerations when translating movie titles, and they don’t always get them right. 

Some of the translations may seem funny when translated back to English and others may be overly specific, even possibly giving away the ending.  But as movies cross international borders, marketers are placing more importance on how those titles are translated.

Sometimes, titles must be changed to avoid offending the public. Capote became Truman Capote in France because capote is slang for a condom, said Bettina Vogt, president of Cine-Lingua, a Montreal-based company that does translation for the movie business.

But more often, Vogt said, studios are trying to make sure that titles roll off the tongue, no matter what the tongue.

Hence, The Dark Knight is known as Il Cavaliere Oscuro in Italy - an exact translation. But in Mexico, it’s Caballero de la Noche, or Knight of the Night.

“Caballero Oscuro sounds too evil in Spanish,” said moviegoer Viviana Hernández as she waited for her film to start at Mexico City’s Altavista Mall. “People would think it was a horror movie.”

To read the entire article, which includes numerous examples of movie title translations, click here.

A recent series of workshops aimed at educating Indiana teachers in how to be more culturally competent and sensitive to their students’ backgrounds and cultures.  Cultural competency training is even more imperative in school districts where teachers are overwhelmingly Caucasian compared to less than half of their students. 

A lack of cultural competency can severely affect students’ performance and self-esteem, thus perpetuating the cycle of low attainment for minority students:

Education experts say that teachers have a moral obligation to avoid unfair assumptions about students from other cultures.

Traditional efforts to raise teacher awareness of other cultures have focused on helping the predominantly white teachers in urban schools understand the backgrounds of black children.

But they now focus as much on helping middle-class teachers understand the impacts of poverty, American-born teachers to realize differences in Latin American cultures and teachers of all races to see contrasts in parenting styles.

It is essential for every teacher of any race to examine the stereotypes they may hold, and how those affect their classroom interactions, said Khaula Murtadha, an education professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

“With those assumptions that are made about children of different cultural backgrounds, we can see lower grades, we see higher dropout rate,” she said. Because teachers build on what children already know, when they understand “a child’s cultural background, they scaffold on that child’s knowledge.”

Within the article, there are specific examples of insensitive treatment by teachers and assumptions that teachers make about students based on their country of origin or socio-economic class.  Despite the fact that incidents such as these are commonplace across the country, it still deeply disturbs me that there are still practictioners of “helping professions” who choose not to honor each student’s unique perspective and background.

For some time now, various industries have been reaching out to Latino consumers in an effort to increase sales.  As the Latino population increases, there has been more coverage of the increased buying power of this demographic.

But a recent Washington Post article speaks to the effect that a lagging economy has had on Spanish-language radio stations and the decline in radio advertising from both Hispanic-owned businesses and real estate agencies.

The article mentions how Spanish-language radio stations and realty companies became more intertwined as the housing market took off, but now economic factors are negatively affecting both sectors:

But these days the subprime mortgage meltdown has hit many Spanish-language radio stations hard. Real estate companies that targeted the Hispanic community have closed their doors or cut back on advertising and sponsorships. Aragon has lost most of the real estate agents who once advertised with him. In Prince William, where authorities are cracking down on illegal immigrants, many Hispanic-owned businesses have also slashed their ad budgets as fewer customers walk through their doors. Radio Fiesta’s ad revenue from Hispanic businesses has declined by about 40 percent over the past year; it’s down 10 percent from non-Hispanic businesses, Aragon said.

To read the full article, click here.

Various sectors are reaching out to Latinos because of the increase in their numbers and buying power.  And the financial industry is no different.  In fact, based on the stats provided in a Diversity Spectrum article, financial institutions might see unprecendented growth over the coming years as they reach out to Latinos in the U.S.

From the article, here is the potential for growth broken out in numbers:

Perhaps the most significant attribute of this population, for financial institutions, is the fact that roughly 56 percent of U.S. Latinos are currently “unbanked.” Whereas other market segments are nearly saturated, the Latino market remains largely untapped by the financial industry. It’s easy to understand why an increasing number of financial institutions are turning their attention to the Latino market. The upward trajectory of these trends has given rise to projections of dramatic growth in the Latino demand for financial products and services. The FDIC predicts that Hispanics will account for 50 percent of all retail banking growth over the next two decades, and according to TowerGroup, that number could be as high as 70 percent over the next five years.