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With more than 45 million Latinos in the United States and the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasting the ethnic group to account for 30% of the population by 2050, Latinos are now the fastest-growing segment of the population. Restaurants are now targeting the Latino population with Spanish-language signage, marketing campaigns, translated menus and other strategies.

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Multicultural literature seems to be the new buzzword in books. Why this sudden demand for multicultural lit? If you think about it, over half of all kids under the age of 5 are minorities, and multicultural kids want to see themselves represented in what they read. Plus, book editors and agents see the value in the growing market.

Young adult writer Ingrid Sundberg blogs about this new trend, examining the genre and also providing tips for writers of multicultural lit. She talks about how to write about culture while avoiding cliches, about whether you have to be an “insider” if you want to write about a particular culture with authenticity, and how to get sources.

Here are a few words of Sundberg’s advice:

How Do You Approach Multicultural Books the Right Way? 

• Take evaluative measures. Be aware of how to avoid stereotypes. These can be the greatest pitfalls.
• No distortions! Befriend people in the culture. Ask questions, check facts. Find primary and secondary sources and have them help check your dialog, etc. People love to talk to writers!
• Beware of insulting those in the culture. Make sure your characters are fully developed and multi-layered.  Complex!
• Be aware that there are different dialects within the same language (Spanish for example). People speak differently in California vs. Arizona vs. Texas vs. New Mexico. Think about this like the use of the word soda. It can be called: soda, pop, or coke, all depending upon where you live and the slang for that area.
• Characters should be strong enough to solve their own problems. Don’t have another culture bail them out! There should be personal strength within the character.
• You don’t have to be PC on every little thing. But be careful, there is a fine line.
• The idea of the hero is important in race related books. Don’t have the characters bail out, or undermine the culture.

Read Sundberg’s full post about multilingual lit here.

We’ve seen many recent examples where language comes into play in our healthcare system (see “Poor prescription translations have dangerous results“; “Do Latinos receive adequate healthcare in the U.S.?“). Now, the NYTimes reports that some hospitals are looking beyond language to confront larger cultural and diversity issues that affect care.

In New York, hospitals are realizing that their patients, who come from all over the world, may not be accustomed to U.S. practices and protocol. So, they’re adopting new methods to make sure their patients feel comfortable during a stay, no matter where they come from.

At Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, a borough that is home to 2.3 million people from more than 100 countries, lactation consultants spend extra time explaining to Bangladeshi women that the yellow breast milk they produce right after birth is not dirty.

Female obstetricians are always on duty overnight at the hospital’s maternity ward in case a Muslim woman arrives in labor and does not want to be treated by a male doctor.

At the diabetes nutrition classes, where participants are mostly from Latin America, diet plans incorporate items like guava paste, plantains and chayote squash.

At Mercy Medical Center in Merced, Calif., shamans tend to the spiritual needs of the hospital’s many Hmong patients. Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital in Houston has a floor devoted to Asian patients, where the menu offers a selection of Chinese and Vietnamese comfort food, like chicken congee soup and steamed dumplings.

If you’ve ever been hospitalized overseas, you probably felt an extra level of discomfort caused by unfamiliarity with the medical practices, or simply the food served at the hospital cafeteria. Imagine how your experience might have been improved (and how much more you might have understood about the procedure or condition) had your healthcare provider understood where you came from.

That’s exactly how hospitals are starting to think. “Doctors and nurses are interviewing religious leaders, visiting cultural centers and even traveling abroad to better understand their patients.” It’s a great start!

Read the full NYTimes article here.

Latin Americans are the fastest growing population of Twitter users in the world, and are engaging in all forms of social media. Marketers who are attempting to access the potentially huge Hispanic market in the U.S. have a tough choice now: Spanish or English?

Andy Checo of Hispanic PR Chat gives his insight into this area. His main idea is this: language is ultimately irrelevant. Companies need to be “in-culture” in order to relate to their target audiences, no matter what the language.

He recommends using English if the majority of your target audience wouldn’t get the cultural message in Spanish. “We all know that if your audience is an acculturate Hispanic they will be able to relate to the bachata group Aventura as they would to Damien Rice, but can your non-Hispanic audience relate to Aventura?”

Use Spanish if your target audience is communicating in Spanish. “Are people commenting in Spanish? Asking you questions in Spanish? If so, why would you choose to communicate back in English?”

Spanglish is also an option, but again, it depends on the needs of your particular audience. Just listen to them!

Read Checo’s full advice post as originally posted on his website here, or reposted on hispanicPRblog here.

As a translation manager, I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about mistranslations—everything from the shocking result of companies incorrectly punctuating ‘n’ in ‘año’ (that makes ‘year’ into ‘anus’ in Spanish), from the urban legend about Chevrolet’s “Nova” brand car, the car the wouldn’t go.

At the link below you’ll find a laughable list of translation and localization blunders. If you value your company’s message and want the same idea to come across in another language and culture, a little investigation goes a long way!

Here are just a few examples:

• Coca-Cola tried marketing its domestically successful two liter bottle in Spain. It finally withdrew the bottle from the Spanish market when it discovered that the refrigerator compartments were too small to hold the liter size. (eBook “How to Localize Products for Success in Foreign Markets” by Silk Road Communications.)
• A major soapmaker test marketed a soap name in 50 countries, and what it found was enough to make them change the name. The proposed name meant “dainty” in most European languages, “song” in Gaelic, “aloof” in Flemish, “horse” in one African language, “dim-witted” in Persian, “crazy” in Korean, and was obscene in Slavic languages” (Silk Road Communications eBook)
• When Pepsi began marketing it’s products in China, they were using a slogan that read “Pepsi Brings You Back to Life”. Translated into Chinese however, the slogan meant, “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave” (Business Link West Yorkshire website, www.blwy.co.uk)

Click here to read the full list.

Popular parenting blogs and websites show that many New York families are hiring babysitters to speak a second language with their children at home. When only a few years ago the trend was the opposite (only English-speaking nannies at home), New Yorkers now believe it’s important for their children to speak two or more languages.

That has certainly helped Elena Alarcón, a nanny born in Mexico who attended school in the United States. Ms. Alarcón recently completed 15 interviews with parents living in Brooklyn, and all of them insisted that if hired, she speak only Spanish with their children.

“I thought I would have to speak English with the families,” Ms. Alarcón said. “I was surprised they wanted me to speak only in Spanish.”

Ms. Alarcón now works for Yashmin Fernandes, who became fluent in Spanish living and working in Latin America. Ms. Fernandes speaks in Spanish with her daughter; her husband, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, speaks in English. “His family is the Spanish-speaking side,” Ms. Fernandes said, “but I was more adamant about getting a Spanish-speaking nanny.”

The New York Times, which reports on this trend, explains some of the benefits and disadvantages of trying to raise a child bilingually. For example, if the nanny is the only person speaking a second language, it probably won’t stick unless it’s also reinforced in another environment.

The WLS blog featured a study about raising bilingual children (http://workforcelanguageservices.com/blog/2009/07/24/sponges-inside-the-minds-of-bilingual-babies/) that explains benefits that the NYTimes article also mentions. There are significant cognitive differences between a bilingual child and one who speaks a single language. For example:

…bilingual children do better at complex tasks like isolating information presented in confusing ways. In one test researchers frequently use, words like “red” and “green” flash across a screen, but the words actually appear in purple and yellow. Bilingual children are faster at identifying what color the word is written in, a fact researchers attribute to a more developed prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive decision-making, like which language to use with certain people).

What’s important, above all, is for children to receive consistent exposure to both languages.

Read the full NYTimes article here.

Many Korean immigrants have recently found themselves in the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center taking classes in—what else?—Spanish. People like Sue Choe, who owns a laundromat in Koreatown, see many reasons to learn the language that many of her customers speak.

Aware of an ugly history between Korean-Americans and African-Americans–one that erupted into violence in some cities in the 1990s–Korean business owners are trying to soothe mutual suspicions with Spanish-speaking workers and customers. The effort is mostly born of an increasingly interdependent employer-employee relationship.

It is just one of the ways in which new waves of immigration and intermigration between neighborhoods is fast changing the city, mixing new combinations of ethnic groups together and forcing them to search for ways to coexist as so many previous generations of immigrants did.

Beginning a community dialogue is important, especially recalling the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles. It’s also important because Koreans and Hispanics don’t just live in the same communities, they work together too. Hispanics have become the primary labor pool for Korean business owners, and cultural differences have erupted in the workplace.

Latino workers, many earning less than the minimum wage, complain that their Korean bosses neglect to pay overtime and are often callous about days off or job-related injuries.

In turn Korean owners, at times unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, see ingratitude and disloyalty in their employees’ complaints. They argue that their up-from-the-ground businesses are a team effort that also has the owners working long hours.

Disputes have hurt both sides.  Learning to understand the cultures around you (and their languages) is a great start. Read the full Chicago Tribune article about this issue here.

Want to learn the languages spoken in your neighborhood? Visit MultilingualChicago.com to learn about language classes and workshops in your area!

While WLS adamantly and singularly advocates human translation (that is, translation done by a professionally trained person, not processed by a computer), there is a case to be made for machine translation in select circumstances. A NYTimes editorial disputes the advantages and limitations, looking at Google Translate in particular.

When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January, aid teams poured in to the shattered island, speaking dozens of languages — but not Haitian Creole. How could a trapped survivor with a cellphone get usable information to rescuers? If he had to wait for a Chinese or Turkish or an English interpreter to turn up he might be dead before being understood. Carnegie Mellon University instantly released its Haitian Creole spoken and text data, and a network of volunteer developers produced a rough-and-ready machine translation system for Haitian Creole in little more than a long weekend. It didn’t produce prose of great beauty. But it worked.

But the editorial’s author David Bellos concludes that beyond emergency or wartime scenarios, machine translation doesn’t have much hope. No Google translation should ever be accepted as a “correct translation.” “Google Translate gives only an expression consisting of the most probable equivalent phrases as computed by its analysis of an astronomically large set of paired sentences trawled from the Web.”

And where do those probable equivalent phrases come from? Human translators!

The data comes in large part from the documentation of international organizations. Thousands of human translators working for the United Nations and the European Union and so forth have spent millions of hours producing precisely those pairings that Google Translate is now able to cherry-pick. The human translations have to come first for Google Translate to have anything to work with.

So, we must give credit where it is due. Credit to the astonishing advances in machine translation technology since Cold War spy games, and even more credit to the hardworking human minds that transform language and culture without having to manually compute a lexicon.

Click here to read the full editorial.

When Roxana Soto and Ana Flores retired from careers in TV and print journalism and became mothers, they were both amazed at the misinformation and lack of resources for parents who wanted to raise their kids bilingually and biculturally. So, they started SpanglishBaby, an online community dedicated to raising bilingual children.

SpanglishBaby is more than a blog (although it does have excellent daily blog posts with expert advice). It’s committed to providing resources to answer any and every question that might arise. Sections include ‘Must Reads,’ ‘Daily Learning,’ ‘The Culture of Food,’ ‘Ask an Expert,’ and ‘La Tiendita,’ among others.

La Bloga writes about SpanglishBaby:

According to Soto, Spanglish Baby’s first year has been full of both challenges and surprises. Among the former she cites the typical trials of starting a blog: building consistent traffic and creating fresh and interesting content. A loyal readership has emerged over the past months and, to celebrate this and its successful first year, Soto and Flores completely redesigned the blog, allowing readers to navigate the site more easily and to have a more participatory role. They’ve also added five regular contributors who, according to the editors, provide fresh perspectives on bilingual parenting on a weekly basis.

Check it out here! www.spanglishbaby.com

On Sesame Street, neighbors work their problems out with smiles under cloudless skies. Kids learn the letters of the alphabet and sing songs, and in the tradition of the 40+ year old TV show, they learn that their world is diverse—and that’s okay.

The question, then, is how to bring these same messages to a world divided, where neighbors do not work out their problems with smiles, much less in the same neighborhood: Israel and Palestine. We post this great NYTimes Magazine article (although published last year) here as a very interesting read as well as a case study for localization in a controversial environment.

This season’s episodes of “Shara’a Simsim,” the Palestinian version of the global “Sesame Street” franchise, were filmed in a satellite campus of Al-Quds University, a ramshackle four-story concrete structure that houses the school’s media department and a small local television station. The building sits in an upscale neighborhood on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah, not far from the edge of the Israeli settlement Psagot. Like many structures on the West Bank, the Al-Quds building seems to be simultaneously under construction and decaying into a ruin. Some walls are pocked with bullet holes, from when the Israeli Army occupied the building for 19 days in 2001, during the second intifada. In another life, the building was a hotel, and the balconies out front where TV crews and students take smoking breaks overlook the crumbling shell of its swimming pool.

Read on…