Workforce Language Services

Some New York schools are expanding their course offerings to give students a competitive edge in an increasingly multinational and technologically advanced world.  These include: Arabic, Mandarin, and nanotechnology. 

In line with the thinking that the earlier the better, the Albany City School District is starting a dual-language immersion class for four-year olds this fall:

There will be nine children whose native language is Spanish and nine whose native language is English in the new dual language pre-K at the Delaware Community School. It had been offered for K through grade 5 students since 1996.

“The parents have been asking for this for years,” said Spanish teacher Melanie Pores, who helped develop the program. The new pre-K teacher will be Ana Banda-Wemple, who had been a bilingual teacher in Peru.

“We’re piloting this approach for pre-K,” said Pores. The students will alternate languages for half of each day. The little tykes will attend a full day of instruction, from 8:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

“Our schools are becoming more multi-cultural and bilingual at a fast pace,” Pores said. “Our English speakers and Spanish speakers learn from each other, working in the same classroom.”

To read the entire article, click here.

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.

In addition to Spanish-language radio and television spots, Chase is also rolling out new services to make banking easier and more accessible to Hispanics.  These include a Spanish-language website, documents in Spanish at local branches, and more bilingual tellers. 

As Rebecca Vargas, head of multicultural segments at Chase, says:

“It’s not just a matter of talking to Hispanics in a culturally relevant way, which these ads achieve. But it’s a matter of having the bilingual employees in the branches, the products they need and being in the places in where they live.”

The article also briefly mentions that the needs of Spanish-speaking customers differs from those of the general population, and Chase hopes to provide more fiscal guidance and assistance in attaining financial goals to Latinos.  This is part of Chase’s long term strategy to serve more Hispanic customers in their own language.

Though details on 2008 ad spending weren’t disclosed, Vargas noted that Chase has committed to better serving the Hispanic market and expects to come back in 2009 with additional marketing programs.

“We’ve always spent a significant amount of money for Hispanic marketing, but this year we are changing the media mix a bit, maybe spending a little more on radio without forgetting TV,” Vargas said. “We’re also doing more grassroots activities, festivals and looking at things that we can do to serve Hispanics in their language of choice.”

This terribly sad story needs no preface:

Before Teresa Sanchez and her brother Omar Aquino were shot and killed in their Mountain View home, Sanchez is believed to have made a desperate call for help.

Investigators believe she called 911 from her cell phone, whispering to the CHP dispatcher someone was breaking into her home, but before the dispatcher could confirm the address, the call ended.

“From what they could tell, she said she lived on a street that sounds like Clemon Street. We don’t have a Clemon Street or anything that remotely sounds like that here in Mountain View. So at that point we spent time repeatedly, the dispatchers and officers trying to call back the number in hopes of getting her back on the line,” said Liz Wylie with the Mountain View Police Department.

Dispatchers tried to pinpoint exactly where the call was made from, but unfortunately they received word that shots were being fired before they could ascertain where she called from.  Even more unfortunately, the victim disconnected before the number appeared on the dispatcher’s GPS unit. 

While this tragedy strengthens the reasons for having multilingual services for 911 calls, I still wonder if, in this case, there would have been time to access a Spanish-speaking person to get the correct address.

While immigrants with limited English skills are increasingly able to access medical care in their native language, this trend has not carried over into the pharmacies where they fill their prescriptions.  A Gotham Gazette article about this issue quotes a report by the New York Academy of Medicine in which they found that two thirds of pharmacies in the NYC area do not provide translations of prescription instructions despite the fact that 88 percent of city pharmacies serve limited English speakers. 

Obviously this could prove disastrous or even fatal for limited English speakers who either take their medicine incorrectly or don’t take it out of fear that they’ve misunderstood the directions.  Health care advocates working with city council members are currently working on legislation that would require translation services:

“Giving New Yorkers access to the information they need starts with simple, common sense steps, like providing translation services and extra medical instruction for those with limited English proficiency who are filling prescriptions,” said Gotbaum in a prepared statement. “Our proposed legislation will help break down the barriers many currently face when seeking health care and ensure that no New Yorker is left guessing when it comes to questions about their medication.”

Concerns from the pharmacies about implementing such legislation include worries about lack of pharmacists in general, much less multilingual ones, the dangers of providing incorrect translations, and the inability to serve all customers in neighborhoods with more than one dominant language. 

A 2006 article from the New York Times detailed the findings of researchers who surveyed the practices of pharmacies in the Bronx.  While their research was limited to that particular borough,  those conducting the study suggested that this problem is most likely not limited to this corner of the country, a suggestion that is further backed up by the more recent article. 

The amazing cultural diversity in Toronto is cause for celebration, with more than a hundred languages being spoken in the city, but it also causes challenges for police when fighting crime.

But a recent article in an Ontario newspaper higlights some of the creative ways that Toronto police are attempting to bridge the divide between non-English speakers and their ability to access safety resources and navegate the justice system:

In recent cases, such as the shooting of innocent bystander Hou Chang Mao, Mills created an online video appeal in Mandarin, English and Cantonese. In a recent human trafficking ring investigation involving women from Eastern

Europe, lured to Canada then forced into the sex trade, Mills videotaped a Russian-speaking officer encouraging more victims to come forward that was posted on websites frequented by Russian Canadians.

He said technology is helping break down the walls of silence.

“I think it is really useful. It’s just going to take a little while to penetrate into getting to the right places in the community,” he said.

I’d love to see American police departments attempt innovative solutions to cultural and language barriers as the Toronto P.D. has. 

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.

I just came across this article below. It may be two years old, but it’s still interesting and relevant as the Hispanic marketplace expands to a trillion dollar arena. It all comes down to speaking your customer’s language - Spanish is good for business. Read more.

Hispanics are outpacing others in navigating the newest horizons of the wireless world. They’re placing greater importance on taking pictures with their phones and sending text messages far and wide, according to market research companies. They are more likely to have unplugged their land lines altogether. And compared with the general market, they shell out 10% more money for their wireless bills, according to some estimates.

Without credit, and with a busy schedule and a home base that is constantly changing, she finds a land line impractical. Yet in a new place with no family, as part of a culture where family is central, having a phone is her lifeline.

On a recent morning waiting for a city bus, Carolin talked with her 8-year-old son, who lives in Guatemala. She smiles as she holds up an image of him — smiling back at her — set as her cellphone “wallpaper,” the display on her phone’s screen. “My phone is indispensable.”

Telecommunications companies have taken note, rushing to capture the market of 40 million Hispanics in the U.S., from new immigrants to affluent Latin Americans who have been in the U.S. for decades. The prepaid phone market has exploded, which draws those unable or unwilling to sign a contract.

Companies such as Cingular Wireless are offering competitive rates abroad, and targeting niche audiences with Spanish-language games and news or salsa ring tones.

“Communication is extremely important to this particular group of individuals, who are coming from all parts of the world,” says Alisa Joseph, vice president of advertiser marketing services of Scarborough Research, in New York. Her firm found that Hispanics pay an average of $67 a month for cellphone bills, compared with $60 for the general population.

I really don’t know much if anything about the game/program/way-of-life of Second Life, so this fascinates me. It’s a virtual world created by people - partially based on reality, partially based on fantasy - I think. I’ve recently read stories about companies doing business and marketing through SL, I’ve read about labor unions calling for strikes of businesses through SL and people even setting up virtual meetings in SL. But what struck my interest this morning was reading that people are now using this program for virtual cultural exchanges and foreign travel - complete with real-time virtual translation into the local language. I should probably try this program out. I wonder if when you get into this program there are also virtual workplace miscommunication too. Read more.

“My family and I used to go to Europe during summers when I was growing up,” said Allen, who goes by Flipper Peregrine inside Second Life, and who in the real world (Real Life to Second Lifers) heads a tech company in Pennsylvania. “But here you can just hop from spot to spot and do what you would do in a summer and see the amount of diversity you would see during that time.”

…According to Catherine Smith, director of marketing at Linden Lab, makers of San Francisco-based Second Life, it makes sense that virtual tours would become popular in this world with an average population between 40,000 and 50,000 at any given point in a day.

For Smith, the fact that 70 percent of the audience in Second Life is from other countries makes it a good way to explore new places and learn about different cultures from all over the world. It also provides an opportunity for those who can’t travel to experience what a trip to a certain place would be like using an engrossing three-dimensional platform.

“There’s millions of different reasons why people don’t travel more,” Smith said. “This is not a complete experience but the start of one.”

Smith admits that she likes being able to go to Japan and look at Japanese clothes and get a taste of what that world is like and then teleport home. She doesn’t need a passport and she can even use the free translation program - called Babbler - that does real-time translation in Japanese, as well as Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, German and Spanish, among others.