Workforce Language Services

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.

Dr. Pauline W. Chen writes for the New York Times that during the care of a liver transplant patient named Armando, she would often use the few words she knew in Spanish and gestures to communicate. Admittedly, asking “Dolor?” and giving a thumbs up was a shortcut that she and many doctors resort to when time and resources are short.

Doctors may not know how much this shortcut can compromise a patient’s well being.

For over a decade now, researchers have documented the effects of language barriers on health care. Patients who speak English poorly or not at all face longer hospital stays, an increased risk of misdiagnoses and medical errors, and decreased access to acute and preventive care services, often regardless of socioeconomic or insurance status. These disparities exist, in part, because of a lack of access to trained medical interpreters and translation services.

But according to a new study published in The Journal of General Internal Medicine, doctors’ assumptions about communication — what they deem important in a conversation — may also have a role.

The study points out that many doctors neglect to use an interpreter simply because they don’t deem it important. If they can get by with minimal language skills for a quick check-in with a patient, they assume, why bother?

The fact is, everyone wants to talk to their doctor. Click here to read what doctors and hospitals are doing to understand their patients.

With funding support from the Missouri Foundation for Health, Centro Latino will provide health literacy and access for Latinos in mid-Missouri.  Thomas Adams, lead program officer, states that they already have various programs with components for Latinos, but this new initiative solely focuses on helping low-income, rural Latinos understand and access health care.

The agency is not new to assisting this demographic with their health care needs, but the new model will essentially allow them to guide limited English proficient Latinos through a health care system they may not understand very well:

Public health and social service have always been a large part of Centro Latino’s service to the community. Over the past decade, it has helped visitors with many procedures that can make health care complicated for those who struggle with English or are new to the area, like the filling out of medical forms, the translation of documents, the procuring of care for those without insurance or documentation.

“I just want the people to feel comfortable and supported and not alone.  Many times when one arrives here they feel very alone,” said Zapata, who has already begun her work with Promotores.

With the new program, Crespi expects its public health and social service efforts to be even more organized than before. He also hopes that the program will encourage more people to take advantage of the number of resources provided by Centro Latino (ESL classes, Spanish courses and an after-school youth program).

Follow this link to read the entire article from the Missourian.

Despite the regularity with which I find articles from all over the U.S. about interpretation in the court system, I am still amazed that each new article brings up something I’d not previously considered.

For example, take these articles from the Los Angeles Times and South Oregon’s Mail Tribune.  The LA Times article chronicles the difficulties courts face when trying to find a speaker of a rare language. In this case, they had to rely on telephone interpretation during the trial of an indigenous dialect spoken by only 7,000 people in Mexico.

In Ortiz’s case, attorneys initially thought he would need a Zapotec interpreter, court records indicate. A Spanish interpreter told officials he thought Ortiz spoke Mixe, an indigenous language spoken in eastern Oaxaca by an agrarian people who have increasingly been migrating to northern Mexico and the United States to find work.

So began the search for an interpreter for Ortiz.

Even among the indigenous populations in Oaxaca, Mixe is spoken by few people. And the language has four to eight variants that have grown apart over centuries as they were passed down orally with no standardization. Different variants of Mixe can be as different as French is from Catalan or Romanian, said David Tavárez, a linguistic anthropologist at Vassar College.

To read more about the search for an interpreter who spoke this particular dialect, click here.

The second article got me thinking about the emotional highs and lows of being an interpreter:

The job can be tough, especially when an interpreter has to communicate bad news. Stawsky has been in situations when a doctor has told a patient he has a terminal disease. She also has worked as a 9-1-1 operator and been part of some extremely stressful calls.

“I have had to take breaks from interpreting because of these situations,” she said. “As an interpreter you cannot say to the person, ‘I am so sorry for what I have to tell you’ and then say what the doctor said. You have to say exactly what the doctor says without putting yourself into the conversation. It can be hard.”

Some of Stawsky’s most trying jobs involved debtors seeking to collect money from poor families.

“Those calls are probably the most stressful,” she said. “Debtors can be very harsh.”

Go here for the rest of this article.

A Newburyport, Massachusetts local paper profiled a Brazlian woman who works for the courts as an interpeter.  The article details not only her language skills and passion for travel, but her take on the important work of working as an interpreter. 

The article also highlights the complex interplay between the role of interpreter as a bridge for non-English speakers and the need to remain objective and simply transmit the ideas from one language to another:

There is no program to teach them about the law. They may get arrested because they don’t have the appropriate driver’s license. Even when they become aware, they don’t understand completely if they don’t have an interpreter. For example, they might think if they go to court, the judge can give them a driver’s license.”

 Although Dutra understands firsthand the problems that immigrants sometimes face while adapting to a new country and culture, her job requires her to remain objective.

 The job of the interpreter is to translate exactly what has been said, she explains. The interpreter is not an advocate for the victim.

 “We’re just there to convey information to both sides,” Dutra says. “We’re not an advocate at all. We can’t give the victim any moral support. That’s for the victim’s advocate. We have to remain impartial.”

To read the entire article, click here. 

An article in the Dallas Morning News describes the current scarcity of licensed court interpreters in multilingual Texas.  This scarcity is attributed to the rigorous certification procedure, which one interpreter points out is a positive thing because Texas is a state with the death penalty. 

As a border state, Texas has a unique cultural mix that integrates Spanish into daily life and Anglicisms which creep into speech in Spanish.  This, along with false cognates and idioms, makes the interpreters job all the more complex and specific to the region:

Precision was at play at a recent training session for court interpreters in McKinney. Elegible in Mexico commonly means a person who legally can be elected. It doesn’t mean eligible.

“It is an Anglocism; but Anglocisms are becoming more and more common,” Holly Mikkelson said as she led the training for the Texas Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators.

Mikkelson warns about the word crimen. It doesn’t mean just any crime but is instead reserved for unusually violent crimes. In English, the word “delinquent” refers to a petty offense by a minor. But in Spanish, delinquencia can mean any crime by a person of any age.

To read the article, click here.

Closed Caption Latina is a Florida company which provides simultaneous dubbing and subtitles for Spanish-speakers and the hearing impaired.  Maria Victoria Diaz, a Colombian immigrant and co-ounder of the company makes the case that their services help non-English speakers and the hearing impaired participate more fully in public life in America:

“Whether it is the visually or hearing-impaired, or the immigrant who doesn’t speak English, we’re not going to be able to fully participate in this society unless we understand how things work here,” said Diaz, a Colombia native. “Television, videos and DVDs are a great way of getting those cultural and social nuances.”

Diaz moved to Longwood from Bogota in 2005 with her mother and her then- 8-year-old daughter.

“I have felt the weight of isolation, the absence of friends and family,” she said. “We have to become more integrated to the American experience to overcome these things. But if you don’t understand what is being said on TV, it becomes that much more difficult.”

Diaz got her start with grant money from the Department of Education to provide video description of Plaza Sesamo (the Spanish-language version of Sesame Street) and from that start, more clients signed on for her services.

To read the entire article, click here.

How cool is that?  Just when I was lamenting the fact that there is such a high demand for qualified translators and interpreters, but very few places to study for these fields, I find an article describing elective courses in translation and interpretation.  Three of the students in the program have already passed the Department for Social and Human Services certification test and are planning to take the test for court certification next spring.

It’s exciting to see that youth who’ve grown up bilingual are able to get the training necessary to capitalize on that as early as high school:

Sergio Jara has spent his youth interpreting for his Spanish-speaking parents during trips to the store or translating letters in the mail.

It’s just something you do to help your parents, said the first-generation American.

Even though he already spoke the language, he studied Spanish in middle school and during his freshman and sophomore years at Pasco High School. He knew there were “slight differences” in the Spanish he learned at home and the proper language taught in the classroom.

“I want to perfect it,” he said.

In planning his junior year curriculum, Jara’s counselor recommended he take English/Spanish translation and interpretation.

The two-year elective program is offered at Pasco High and New Horizons High School in Pasco. It is geared at helping students develop interpreting skills so they can get a job in the medical, legal or social services fields.

Given his upbringing, Jara expected it to be effortless but soon found he was wrong.

“It was easy because I know both languages but that is only part of it because you have to create these skills with these languages to help you,” he said.

Click here to read the entire article.

An article in the Washington Business Journal details the growth of the translation and interpretation industry due to both to globalization and the increasing number of non-English speakers in the U.S. 

According to the American Translators Association, in the past 10 years, the $11 billion translating and interpreting industry has experienced tremendous growth, increasing at a rate of 10 percent to 15 percent annually.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts this growth will continue. Translation and interpretation is expected to increase at a rate of 24 percent over the period of 2006 to 2016, a rate of growth significantly higher than the average for other occupations.

The article also mentions that, while the industry is growing rapidly, the U.S. is behind Europe in programs to train and certify translators and interpreters. 

To read the article, click here.

Language Lines is often mentioned in articles about strategies for working around language barriers.  But this particular article about Pasco County’s demographic shift shows the impact that Language Line has had on communicating with non-English speakers at County offices. 

The article also provides a brief history of Language Lines Services and how heavily it’s currently being used:

Language Line Services, based in Monterey, Calif., has been around since 1984. The company’s first client was the police department in San Jose, and it has had cops and courts as clients ever since. Language Line now has approximately 25,000 clients, according to spokesman Dale Hansman, including hospitals, airports, grocery stores, credit card companies and 75 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. The company has 5,000 translators who speak 176 languages.

The economy is hurting. Not Language Line. Language Line is growing. The number of calls is going up. The number of clients is going up.

“It’s not a novelty,” Hansman said last week. “It’s a necessity.”

In Pasco, public transportation uses language line, the libraries use it, the 911 call center uses it, the sheriff’s office uses it.

To read the entire article from the St. Petersburg Times, click here.