Over time, that belief became a body of real work—interpreters stepping into hospitals, conferences, community events, and live situations where clarity truly matters. In those moments, language is not abstract; it is urgent, emotional, and deeply human.

A single sentence can carry relief, confusion, hope, or fear—and interpretation becomes the bridge that makes understanding possible.

But just as importantly, the company has always carried a second heartbeat: culture, celebration, and connection.

From holiday greetings and cultural festivals to team gatherings, music, and shared moments of joy, Monterey Language Services reflects the full range of human experience—not only the serious and high-stakes, but also the warm, expressive, and communal.

This same spirit flows through its growing archive of 90+ videos, capturing both critical real-world interpretation work and the lived culture around it.

What has been built is more than a language services company—it is a record of human connection in every form, and a foundation that blends professional expertise with genuine cultural life.

The untold stories of medical interpreters: Courage, Compassion, and Connection:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr2GRCtm5U6yonnL_e6hj_en&si=0z_JL70pKBssc6k9

★Major Playlist

Our Work in Action: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr1i2DMoYWim6SbHeROKNqXX&si=3SEjeLcffgexBSh9

Multilingual Localization: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr2wkV_G7CLhoSINDOXe1pKj&si=ClzGP-3Gg7umHUSj

Global Family Celebrations: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr32m8jh4UgmCEInXVan-bLI&si=4ugEd-9QKmLbOXiS

Translation and Interpretation Services: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr3VduLMGzD9UGzQZ5ZVfoGO&si=G15LG9oTInQurc6Z

Chinese Localization Sample and Case Study: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr14xqfiR38Mp-EhHAmclsUY&si=rd3Xocb0Ud9nWNc1

Interpreters and Voices: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr2MdhbLPPGszMw8Rdc5J9aI&si=HbiwF9bT4zr6S3hd

Mood Booster: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr3OJJh-NjBcMrvH9VCN0fsi&si=EFMYK_1Ai1UzvcDR

★Featured videos About Us

Interpreters and Music: https://youtu.be/yl0vHQPHXA8?si=PygDRdShZgsLiGRR

The series consists of three engaging parts:

1. Educational Video: An introduction to the key terms and concepts in the song, providing valuable insight into its cultural and historical references.
2. English Translation: A clear and thoughtful translation of the lyrics, making the poetic beauty of the song accessible to a broader audience.
3. ASMR Lyrics Reading: A soothing experience featuring an ASMR reading of the lyrics, allowing you to enjoy the lyrics in a unique and calming way.

Click to watch all three parts combined in one video on YouTube.

Feedback Received

It is delightful to be able to engage our clients in a dialogue about culture, poetry and translation!

A client of Monterey Language Services shared a wonderful interpretation of Blue and White Porcelain of her own with us after reading our translation. She thought the song described the beloved landscape scenery of China as captured in blue and white porcelain pottery.

How did this story happen? Let us share how Monterey Language Services turned this beautiful piece into a fascinating project!

Spreading the Joy of Translation

The song “Blue and White Porcelain” by Taiwanese artist Jay Chou was released in 2007, so why did we choose it for our 2024 summer project? The idea didn’t come after a lot of planning or brainstorming, but as a sudden enlightenment.

At the start of the summer, Mei-Ling kept hearing “Blue and White Porcelain” in different places, so she decided to learn it. The more she sang the song, the more the beauty of the Chinese culture embedded in the lyrics resonated with her. Appreciating the poetry of the lyrics, Monterey Language Services decided to share the song with a broader audience by translating the Chinese lyrics into English.

Even non-Chinese speakers were able to join in this effort. In this video, Layla, a Spanish interpreter whose native language is English, read the translation as a poem. We then developed the reading further using ASMR techniques.

This story is an inspiring example of the power of translation to facilitate communication between people of different languages and cultures.

Collaborative Teamwork

This project is the product of collaboration between many colleagues and professionals. The end result surpasses what one person is capable of doing alone.

We started the project with Christoph, whose Chinese-to-English translation follows the syllable-count and meter of the original song and provided the foundation for what was to come. See our previous blog post for more information.

After the English translation video was complete, Shreya joined in. She suggested adding an educational video with eye-catching images to explain the key terms in the lyrics.

Layla thought the English translation was poetic, so she performed a reading in her clear and gentle voice. Her soothing tone inspired Shreya to suggest creating an ASMR version.

Finally, we wanted to create a complete sensory experience. Gary edited the background music and added sound effects such as rain falling on leaves, fire crackling, and pottery wheel clicking. These effects enhanced the video and made it atmospheric.

We are proud to mention that the younger generation also played a part. The background image of the ASMR video was drawn by De-Yi Lee, a junior high school student.

For this project, we have many people to thank, including the song’s original composer and singer Jay Chou and lyricist Vincent Fang. The song inspired a lot of creativity, which has made this project very enjoyable.

Through the collaborative efforts of many talented individuals, we were able to produce a video with a clear vision.

Video Editing

The combined video has three parts, and we created it in three different phases. As the videos consist of many different elements, video editing was required to combine and synchronize them. Smoothing the audio and creating seamless transitions between different segments were also fun to handle.

In the introduction to Parts One and Two, we used a stunning animated image of falling flower petals, while a blue and white bowl rotates in the background. On its own, the animation is beautiful, but when put it into our video, we felt that the speed was a little too fast.

The video is aimed to relax rather than energize, so we decided to slow the animation down, reducing the speed by half. The effect was immediate and magical. The animation was seamlessly integrated into the rest of the video.

From start to finish, we made sure that there are smooth transitions throughout the video. Our aim was to find a balance between joy and serenity as well as between majesty and simplicity, while maintaining a relaxing mood on the whole.

Translation Journey

Before translating the lyrics, we took the time to decide on our approach. We weren’t merely trying to produce a mechanical, one-to-one translation of the words. Instead, we aimed to create a singable English version that mirrored the rhythm and flow of the original song.

At the same time, we also wanted to faithfully convey the story told by the original lyrics. Therefore, every word went through a great deal of consideration and scrutiny.

To keep the translation accessible and easy for a non-Chinese audience to understand, some proper nouns had to be dropped. These included references to a Song dynasty style potter’s mark on a vase, and a town in Jiangnan, a region in China known for its romantic river scenery.

Both terms are richly evocative to a Chinese listener, but their dense cultural meanings could not be explained within the limitations of the syllable count.

For the Song dynasty reference, we simplified the phrase to “old potter’s mark”. Although “antique” may have been better at capturing the intended meaning, “old” was a better fit for the syllable count.

On the other hand, we omitted the reference to the Jiangnan region altogether. As Jiangnan’s literal meaning is “south of the river,” we gave up geographic specificity but kept its romantic associations by using the word “enchanted” in the same line.

After a process of painstaking deliberation, we are happy with the translation. It is both faithful to the original lyrics and singable to the original meter.

Interpretations of the Song

Song lyrics can be considered a form of poetry and can have many different interpretations. During the translation of the song, we had a debate about whether the speaker in the lyrics is addressing a blue and white porcelain vase or a human love interest.

One interpretation was that the speaker is an art lover recalling his encounter with a beautiful blue and white porcelain vase in Jiangnan. The art lover’s treasure hunt led him to discover the porcelain vase hidden behind a splashed-ink landscape painting among other works of Chinese art.

The other interpretation is that this is a love song that uses metaphors from Chinese art to describe his longing and the beauty of his lover.

Creative translation, also known as transcreation, of works such as “Blue and White Porcelain” can spark lively discussion, as there can be many different interpretations of the same text.

We often present clients with guidance on how to work with interpreters, and frequently get asked about AI. This is because many people are waiting for the day that they can simply go online and use AI to seamlessly translate between two different languages, but we would like to say it out loud here: THAT DAY HAS YET TO COME.

Please also check out this flip-book we’ve made https://heyzine.com/flip-book/20de67a12a.html

Please also check out our playlist for Chinese localization case studies: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr14xqfiR38Mp-EhHAmclsUY

We localized the Interpreters and Music video into traditional Chinese as an example to compare translation accuracy between humans versus AI and to identify some classic AI issues.

One of the biggest weaknesses of AI is that it often struggles with names. For instance, the name “Laura” was translated into both “蘿拉” and “勞拉.” When we saw this inconsistency in names, we looked at each other with amusement because this happens all the time. Some may say AI spelling names incorrectly isn’t a big deal since it’s an easy fix. However, for those people, we’d like to share a real-life example.

In a lease contract we worked on, Paragraph 1 said that the landlord shall be known as ‘A’ and the tenant as ‘B’. Paragraph 2 called the landlord ‘C’ and the tenant ‘D’. This was a document with 30,000 words that a client asked us to quote for reviewing the translation, which had probably been done by an AI. Just in terms of reviewing names, how much effort would it take to find out if there were places that call the landlord “E” and the tenant “F” and so on? Not to mention all the work it would take to find other mistakes that humans typically need several rounds of review to detect.

Our analysis also uncovered that AI defaults to using the pronoun “你,” referring to males and offering no female form “妳.”

AI have translated love song titles like “Suddenly Missing You” and “Stuck on You” into traditional Chinese, using the male form. The male singers may not prefer using the male form of “you” in their love song titles. Otherwise, a native speaker in traditional Chinese would feel kind of strange, reading it.

We inserted line breaks on messages that appear in the video. With line breaks, AI seemed to lose the context of the lines.

Line breaks are important. We are often requested to insert line breaks in Asian language marketing materials. Take Japanese line breaks as an example. There are some basic rules for line breaks or how to break words up, but at the same time, there are a lot of exceptions, which humans can easily catch if they understand Japanese, but not AI. In other words, humans break things apart (debriefing) and put them together in a creative way, which AI is just not capable of.

It turns out that AI struggles to translate any segment accurately and, at times, produces unnatural and contextually absurd translations. As shown in the screenshot below, even with a relatively short source text, the quality of AI translation was unbelievably subpar.

AI translated “interpretation” as “explanation” due to a lack of context.
AI translated “Performance” to machine’s performance rather than that of the interpreter’s.
AI mistakenly translated the meaning of “like” as “to be fond of” instead of “similar to.”
AI word-for-word translation for “big heart” doesn’t make sense to a Chinese audience.

It’s clear to us that AI is not able to handle messages that are broken down by line breaks. This then leads us to a question: How well could AI handle entire messages without line breaks?

We conducted a retest by removing all the line breaks on messages. In this attempt, the text was formatted in a more machine-friendly way to enhance AI’s understanding. But even so, post-editing remained an essential step, with 80% of the segments requiring significant human intervention. Without this crucial step, AI translations either come across as rigid and less relatable to our audience, or contain mistranslations. Below are some examples.

Example 1:
The AI translation appears rather stiff because the word “sync” was translated literally. The audience might wonder what it means to “sync” one language to another. Human translators are able to further explain the context of sync, that is, interpreters “listen to one language and convey it in another language.”

Example 2:
AI translated “more emotionally acute” as “more impatient,” which not only deviates from the intended meaning of the source, but also negates the impact of the word “music”. During post-editing, we replaced it with “more emotionally sensitive,” which is more contextually accurate.

Example 3:
AI did word-for-word translation again. It doesn’t sound like what a normal person would say in Chinese. As a dynamic language, Chinese favors verbs over nouns and usually keeps sentences short. Therefore, in post-editing, we restructured the sentence to make it fit a typical Chinese writing style, and flow more naturally.

Example 4:
AI’s translation of “concentration” lacked clarity. Without referring to the source, it was hard to grasp the intended meaning. So, we opted for a more precise choice of words.

Example 5:
AI does a literal translation, full of ambiguity and rigidity, which doesn’t make clear sense to a Chinese audience.

Translation is supposed to flow naturally to engage the audience. It is the more immersive and relatable experiences that make humans feel comfortable. These are exactly the areas where we as interpreters and translators can contribute to.

There may be a lot of gloom and doom from some in the community who think that their jobs are at risk, however, the reality is that we’re training AI to speak our language, but they aren’t able to fully understand it like we can. They can process it, try and find the corresponding pattern in their database, and come to a conclusion that they think is right, but they won’t always be. That’s where interpreters and translators will always have the edge over AI. Human creativity and our ability to understand what’s important, and the culture embedded in it, enables us to make sure that we are conveying the intended message.

We tried one of the latest AI platforms to translate one of our office videos into Mandarin.

While we were impressed by the seamless process and the voice cloning feature that enhanced voice modulation, we couldn’t help but notice pronunciation and translation errors in the generated video. Given that Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, tones can become a source of misunderstanding if not pronounced correctly. The chosen video introduces the rental service of our conference room, making “conference” a high-frequency word. However, throughout the video, AI consistently pronounces the Chinese word for “conference,” as “memory,” with tones differing from the former. Also, “state-of-the-art” in Chinese is pronounced the same way that “cash” is. This could undoubtedly complicate the message we aim to convey if left alone.

The translation issues we caught are mostly recurring problems caused by machine translation as discussed above. Take the first sentence as an example. AI translated “Looking for a conference room to have a meeting over video or in person?” as “Can you look for a conference room via video or in person meeting?” AI’s rendition deviates from the original meaning, which is likely caused by line breaks, leading to confusion and miscommunication. Such discrepancies underscore the importance of post-editing and human intervention to refine machine-generated translations.

Our conclusion becomes clear.

In this age of AI becoming more prevalent, humans just need to work smarter to beat out AI. As individuals in an evolving world, it’s important to accept technological advancements, but also understand that AI lacks creativity, individuality, improvisation capability, and the understanding of human cultures. That’s how humans can break through and go beyond AI’s limitations.

Christmas

A major holiday in the US and the world is Christmas, where Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ by giving gifts to friends and family members. It is a great time to remember what to be thankful for, repaying gifts, and giving kindness to others. Being such a significant holiday, December is often filled with Christmas imagery like trees, sparkling ornaments, and songs that fill malls, supermarkets, and radio stations.

Hanukah

Also written as Hannukah or Chanukah, this holiday celebrates the famous story about how, during a days-long fight against Syrian Greeks, candles continued to burn for eight nights rather than just one as was expected. Subsequently, Jerusalem was recovered by the Jewish, and the Second Temple was rededicated to the Jewish people. The significance of the holiday symbolizing resistance and religious freedom cannot be overstated.

Hanukah is observed by lighting the candles. On each of the holiday’s eight nights, one additional candle is lit by the ninth candle, called shamash (“helper” or “attendant”), until all eight candles are lit together on the final night of the celebration. Hanukah has attained major cultural significance in North America and elsewhere, due to often occurring around the same time as Christmas.

Kwanzaa

Like Hannukah, imagery around Kwanzaa also includes candles, one of which is black, three are red, and three are green. The black one, which represents the African people, is used to light the others; red represents the struggle that Blacks have gone through, and the green represents hope and future.

Kwanzaa is actually a newer holiday that began in 1966, created by Dr. Maulana Karenga after the Watts riots in Los Angeles. The holiday celebrates Black heritage and lasts for seven days, with each day highlighting a different principle: Unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith.

Las Posadas

Spanish for “The Inns,” Las Posadas is a Christmas-adjacent holiday that is celebrated in Mexico and some other parts of Central and South America such as Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The holiday takes place between the 16^th and 24^th, and acts as a reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, searching for safe lodgings for Mary to give birth to Jesus. The holiday highlights the importance of faith, prayer, and pilgrimages.

The nine days interval for this holiday represents Mary’s nine-month pregnancy. Each night, a child dressed as an angel leads others through the community, where they stop and ask for lodging. When they are refused lodging, those in the procession sing Christmas carols. At the end of every night, after the group is accepted into one of the homes or a church, mass is held, and children break a pinata that is usually shaped like a star—the one that led the wise men to Jesus’s birthplace.

Multi-Cultural Celebration

December is a wonderful month of the year; people from all over the world are taking multi-cultural celebration of holidays. The holidays bond us together as a family, a community, a nation, and even a whole world. Throughout the holidays, we can feel a sense of belonging and reflect on what is important to us. At Monterey Language Services, we will continue doing what we believe in—that is, to help community communication through translation and interpretation. We are thankful for having you to make our work meaningful and enjoyable. Happy holidays from the Monterey Language Services team, we send you our warmest wishes for a wonderful holiday season!

People have come up with all sorts of ways to show appreciation and help each other during these hard times. In cities across the world, when 8 PM rolls around people head to their balconies and yards to cheer, clap, bang pots, and make as much noise as they can to show their support for health care workers. There are countless examples of individuals taking action to make the best of the situation, like this neighborhood in Oakland that threw a “social distance block party” and these people performing music and leading exercises for their apartment buildings.

Social media is a great tool for helping people and spreading positivity. People are using social media to connect people who need help with people who can provide that help. For example, the app Nextdoor (a social media app for your neighborhood) has developed a “help map” feature, where participants can sign up to be “helpers” in their neighborhood. Anyone in the area who needs extra assistance knows that they can contact these people to run errands, do check-ins, etc. Cultural institutions, like museums, are using social media to connect with their fans in new and fun ways. For example, the Getty Museum has posted a challenge online for people to recreate works of art with everyday objects. The results are creative and hilarious, and bring some lightness to the difficult situation of being stuck at home.

Companies and corporations are also taking huge steps to help people during this pandemic. General Motors has partnered with Ventec, a ventilator supply company, to drastically increase the number of ventilators that are being manufactured. This has the added benefit of keeping many GM workers employed that might otherwise have lost their jobs. Some distilleries, such as the Shine Distillery in Portland, have started making hand sanitizer, a critical resource that is currently quite difficult to obtain. These are just a few examples; please check out this Forbes list for more.

At Monterey Language Services, we love seeing all the ways that individuals, organizations and companies are coming together to provide help in this difficult situation. We are doing our best to provide help how we can: we are continuing to provide translation and interpretation services for any client that needs it. We also want to spread the message that we are here for each other, and we can get through this together!