Though these two piano short clips are not played perfectly or professionally, we hope you can still feel our most sincere wishes being conveyed to you. There’s a certain rawness and unpolished sound from the music that goes straight to the deepest of our emotions. We don’t have to be a professional musician to tell a story or convey emotion, and that’s exactly what human touch or human aura is all about, and that’s what we would like to share for this year!

Happy New Year to everyone from Monterey Language Services! We wish you good health, peace, and success in the coming year! We have also prepared a holiday playlist for you to enjoy.

Please join us wholeheartedly in greeting the year 2024! Here’s to a year of aura and joy. Have a wonderful holiday season!

First music: played by Mei-Ling, our director of translation
Second music: played by Mei-Ling’s piano teacher Dian

Happy New Year to everyone from Monterey Language Services! We wish you all the greatest in the coming year – Good Health, Happiness, and Success!

May all the challenges and adventures you tackle give you knowledge and wisdom for the next ones! Please join us in greeting the year 2023 wholeheartedly with all our colleagues, friends, and loved ones! Happy New Year!

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!

2022 will be a new, fresh start for all of us to accomplish even more than we were able to in 2021. We wish that all your dreams come true in the new year!

Please join us in greeting the year 2022 wholeheartedly with all our colleagues, friends, and loved ones! Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from everyone here at Monterey Language Services, and we wish you good health, happiness and success in the coming year!

Here is some food for thought: The following are some health tips from a small Chinese article found on the internet, which shares a few Chinese principles on how to live a healthy life.

Monterey Language Services has translated and summarized parts of it and hopes that this can become a thought-provoking little tidbit for everyone as we reflect on how to stay healthy, especially during the holiday season.

Chew Carefully

Diabetes is a systemic metabolic disorder. One main cause is a pancreas that’s working too hard. One way to avoid overworking your pancreas is to reduce the burden on it by chewing your food slowly!

The “One Less, Three More” Rule

One Less: Less eating
Three More: More rest, More water, More sweat

Sweat Is Your Friend

Sweat can be a powerful ally because when your body is sweating, it helps protect you from all kinds of diseases!

Eat Until You Are Only Half Full

The more you eat, the more oxygen your body uses up. This creates a lack of oxygen in the cells, leading to more pressure on your heart and thus, higher blood pressure. So, eating until you’re only half-full is actually a good idea, since your body will use less oxygen. When your body signals hunger, it’s the best time for it to detoxify and increase the functioning of your immune system.

An empty stomach and a warm, sweating body are an effective way to stimulate your body’s metabolism, to cleanse/detoxify the blood and to activate the regeneration of cells! When your digestive system is in action, it slows down your body’s natural method of detoxifying itself.

Oxygen Is a Panacea

Oxygen is a panacea that helps the body cure diseases. It strengthens the body’s immune system and the ability of the glands responsible for regulating it. It also controls the ability of cancer patients to fight the disease!
Chinese article source: https://www.fun01.cc/post/489843/

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to request a quote from us.

As another year passes behind us and a new one begins, may nature’s beauty surround you and may your life be filled with all the blessings the universe has to offer.

The universe is filled with wonders big and small, from a single grain of sand to the sun in the sky. Nature’s beauty is all around us – the endless blue horizon, an ancient rock, palm trees rising from the sand.

Other miracles of life are invisible: do we see the wind, or just feel its warm breeze? The clouds in the sky are too high to touch, but we feel their rain. Everything is connected and part of the same wonder, even us.

If at first you don’t see life’s blessings, don’t be discouraged: remember that like the wind they are all around, and you feel their cool breeze! Yes, it’s important to be at peace with our environment and the people we are with. Let’s be patient, communicative, considerate, and think of others – because everything is part of the same harmony.

As interpreters, it’s our mission to bridge the gap of different ideas, backgrounds, languages, and cultures. Being an interpreter is a noble calling, we are blessed by those we have served!

In the same spirit, let’s all once again remind ourselves: to be communicative to bring people closer together and let them see that we were never that far apart to begin with.

From the team of Monterey Language Services, happy holidays and may 2017 bring you peace and prosperity.

We asked all of our colleagues to choose some of their favorite songs to be added to a playlist. They made some great choices!

The result is a Mood Booster playlist which shares our positive energy and happy mood, and give others something very special for the holiday season. We had a wonderful experience making this playlist and cherish the energy it brings to us and others!

This has been a process in the making, which started last summer when working with John. Mei-Ling had a chance to learn John’s work rhythm and energy, and it gave her the idea that all of us have an energy to share, and music is a great medium to present that. Emma helped the idea evolve: she made a wonderful start in putting together the video idea and it was completed by Mike, who is a professional music video producer.

Thanks to all our colleagues for their contributions to this project! The playlist really reflects Monterey Language Service’s work together as a team, and all the different energy everyone brings to the team and to others. We hope you will enjoy listening to it as much as we did making it!

From the team here at Monterey Language Services, happy holidays and may you and your loved ones have a blessed Thanksgiving!

We are so very proud and grateful that you remain our friends and continue to support us.

Happy New Year! To a year of growth for us all!