An Example

Imagine an elderly woman being brought to a hospital, accompanied by her grandson. The family has only recently moved to the USA from Oaxaca Mexico, but the elderly woman’s first language is Triqui Bajo, an indigenous Oaxacan language. While her grandson understands his grandmother’s speech and can communicate with her, his native language is Spanish.

If an Triqui Bajo interpreter were not provided, the woman would have to speak to her grandson in Triqui Bajo about the pain in her stomach, the grandson relaying her words to the best of his ability in Spanish to the interpreter or hospital staff. Like the children’s version of the “telephone game,” there’s a high chance that some, if not much, information will be lost. As the grandson was not well versed in Triqui Bajo, he may be missing critical vocabulary, such as anything from “fracture” to “pneumonia,” “hernia,” and beyond.

What this Means

This lack of a matching language pair can inhibit the service that a client receives. In severe cases in a medical setting, this can be a matter of life and death. This case study highlights the importance of translators and especially interpreters who are fluent in minority languages. It’s critical to find people with knowledge of these languages. If due to the last minute nature, an in-person interpreter is not available, remote interpretation methods should kick in.

Imagine that they were able to get an interpreter for Triqui Bajo and English; this would allow for a direct flow of communication between the elderly woman and the hospital staff. Response time for treatment would subsequently be quicker, and the woman might therefore feel more comfortable and confident that she is receiving adequate care. While the grandson might need his own English/Spanish interpreter to understand fully the treatment decisions, that could easily be delegated to another interpreter and not require a stretched out “telephone game” where meaning can be lost.

Monterey Language Services provides translation and interpretation services for all languages and is very strong in providing Triqui Bajo interpretation Services. Every day, we send Triqui Bajo interpreters to cover medical interpretation assignments or IEP (Individualized Education Program) assignments. There have been some high profile Triqui Bajo legal interpretation cases served by Monterey Language Services as well.

It’s an unfortunate fact that many people have false ideas about language. For example, hearing a non-standard dialect of English—such as African American Vernacular English or Appalachian English—might cause someone to think the speaker to be not well-educated, when in actuality, linguistic choices don’t necessarily reflect the intelligence of the speaker. A separate “dialect,” also called a “variety,” of a language can create cohesiveness in a smaller group among speakers and allow members to feel more at ease.

A so-called “language” tends to be the “ideal” way to talk by the most powerful group among a larger whole, whether in one country, several countries, etc. For example, when our colleague, Olivia, studied Japanese in college, she was taught the Tokyo dialect, because that’s where the current capital of Japan is, as well as its center of its business and trade. When she lived in a homestay in Nagoya, a major city to the west of Tokyo, she was surprised when some people would conjugate verbs differently or use sentence endings she’d never heard of.

An “accent” can sometimes be used interchangeably with “dialect/variety”; however, this isn’t quite the case. “Accent” refers to how a person pronounces words (think a New Yorker saying “I’m walkin’ here!”), while “dialect” or “variety” refers not just to pronunciation, but also grammar and vocabulary (like “I gone down to the meeting, but wasn’t nobody there” or “bald” for a treeless mountain in Appalachian English).

In the article mentioned above, the individual said he spoke “pidgin” English. A “pidgin” is a form of language that arises when two or more groups who do not have a language in common must speak together, and create simplified, rather limited vocabulary and grammar structures. Linguists tend to consider pidgins as incomplete languages, as they do not generally have a fully structured grammar. A pidgin may form into a “creole” when fully developed vocabulary and grammar develop from children who learn to use the pidgin as their native language. An example of a pidgin sentence is: “Dem neva cam?” for “They haven’t come yet?”

The world of linguistics goes even farther and deeper than just these examples, and are just some of the things we need to think about as language service providers. An interpreter might need to study up on a dialect before helping a client, or a separate person might need to be found altogether if the interpreter knows nothing of the specific language variety.

As a language service provider, we think of these different scenarios, cases, and variations all the time. It’s our responsibility to provide our clients with quality service, and getting to the heart of linguistic differences is just one aspect of that.

As an interpreter, there are many ways you can do community outreach and help more people get vaccinated. There are resources in other languages that speak to different information about the pandemic and vaccines, such as WHOs website, Boston Medical Center, Washington State Health Department, or even Orange County’s NC Health Department. Helping others to understand the vaccine and then help them get it is a very important service to the community and one that you can help with.

For an interpreter, first, the most obvious thing to do is set up an appointment to get your vaccine if you haven’t already. To do so, you will be able to be allowed into more places, and you will overall be more comfortable being outside. Though many businesses and areas are beginning to open up again, some places will only let you be present if you are fully vaccinated. By being fully vaccinated, you will be able to be anywhere you need to be. The other advantage is that you will have the experience of being vaccinated so that you feel more comfortable in conveying messages to the patient you are interpreting for. Your confidence might even be able to ease some of their anxiety.

After, you are vaccinated, you can help interpret at clinics, pharmacies, hospitals, or at vaccination areas that are set up outside of hospitals. The places that most likely will need the majority of help are the areas that are set up outside of hospitals. Depending on the population of the area that you are in, there might be a different concentration of non-native English speakers. For example, in California, there is a significant amount of Hispanic people, so there is a great demand for Spanish interpreters. If you are interested in helping as a volunteer interpreter, you can try looking on the internet for places that need interpreters. You could also join a medical hotline that hospitals use when they need an interpreter.

However, you should be careful of scams that might take advantage of you. You can find out if something is legitimate or not by searching it online or by looking at the various resources on the FCC, FTC, or US National Cyber Awareness System. If you do happen to come across a scam, you can report it to the FTC so that they can investigate it and hopefully shut it down so that no one else is affected by it.

Put yourselves in the shoes of their website’s visitors, and you will find out what they are thinking: “Cool! This website is in my native language! I can breeze effortlessly through anything in this website, even when I’m not in my home country! I will definitely visit this website again!”

When your website speaks their languages, they can browse through your website easily. They come and stay. That’s it. Better yet, they can see your website easily, even when they type the keywords in their own languages in the search box!

You can have great website traffic and new customers! We are here to help! Monterey Language Services is equipped with a strong team of experienced project managers, expert translators, quality assurance specialists, marketing professionals, and localization engineers to give you a multilingual website!

Contact us and embrace a flood of visitors to your website and welcome new customers to your company! The website localization services that we provide specifically aim to achieve the above goals.

1. Translate website content clearly and accurately
2. Translate all SEO content in order to rank high in search results
3. Maintain translation of the website to keep them up to date
4. Keep records of previous translation and reuse them

Connect and communicate with your customers who speak languages other than English! We cannot wait to hear you tell us about all the new leads that your website brings in!

To see more details about website SEO (Search Engine Optimization), please see our article on GALA (Globalization and Localization Association), a well-known association in localization industry:

http://www.gala-global.org/press-release/improving-world-economy-increases-need-e-commerce-translation

According to an article posted in The Australian, this has become the case. However, they further go on to explain that the movement to reclaim dying languages has grown in larger numbers. However, any attempt to save languages will have to grow in larger numbers in order to have a chance of success. The problem is the vast majority of people feel it is too difficult to learn another language, thus simply choose not to.

Despite this, there are still millions of people that share a passion for languages. On the Monterey Peninsula alone there are hundreds of students fully devoted to learning new languages. With this undeniable passion, the culture of languages will still be here to stay for a good while.

The full article from The Australian can be seen here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion/stop-revive-and-survive/story-e6frgcko-1226385194433

Now, it’s not entirely logical to think that one person could talk to that many people or know that many languages. But interpreters may know many various languages, and may have to greet thousands of people daily. Monterey Language Services alone has interpreters in over 175 languages, enough to say hello to the vast majority of those 6.5 billion people.

Someone could be thinking: Why would it be necessary to be able to say hello in that many different languages? Well, consider someone with a role in customer service. Tourists from other countries still have stuff to buy, so they have to shop in stores here. Nothing is a better greeting than a simple hello in their native language. Also, it even just makes you sound smarter knowing many different languages.

Photo taken from
http://www.mozilla.org/causes/subtitles/?utm_source=gsnippet&utm_content=subtitle&utm_campaign=s010410

We had a large interpretation event for a group coming from all over Latin America.  This brings up interest in the discussion about the varieties of Spanish.

Is a pato a duck?  Or is it a Puerto Rican derogatory term for a gay man?  Or is it a bedpan?  In Puebla, Mexico, the word is used to mean bedpan, while in the Baja Peninsula, silleta means bedpan.  No matter how you use any of these words, they give you a glimpse into the diversity that is the Spanish language. 

Spanish is the native language of over 300 million people worldwide, making it the second-most widely spoken language in the world.  It is the official language of twenty-one countries, and practically each one has its own version of the language.

There is US Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Caribbean Spanish, and European Spanish.  European Spanish is the most basic form of the language.  Caribbean, Mexican and Latin American Spanish are essentially mixtures of the original language with indigenous words, and people often drop final S and intervocalic D in some of the countries.  US Spanish is more influenced by US English, and has led to informal versions of Spanish like Spanglish and Tex-Mex.

Spanish is of course a Romance Language, meaning that it is based in Latin.  Still, it has acquired words from other language groups.  Arabic gave the language aceite (oil) and Frankish gave the language guante (glove).  Numerous words of course entered the language from American Indian languages: huarache (slipper) and aguacate (avocado) are examples.  More recently, English has contributed words like modem and Internet to Spanish.

It should come as no surprise that certain letters have different pronunciations in different countries.  In Spain, LL is pronounced as L followed by Y; in Mexico it is simply pronounced as Y, and in Argentina it is pronounced ZH.  Another example is the letters Z and C: Z and C preceding E or I are lisped in Spain; in other countries Z and C preceding E and I are pronounced like S (in Spanish, this is called seseo).  Andalusian explorers influenced the Latin American pronunciations of the language.

Spanish, like other languages, has changed over the centuries, especially as it has travelled around the world.  One of the most significant changes that the language has undergone can be seen in the use of the second-person plural.  For second-person plural familiar, Spain has the word vosotros, meaning “you all”.  However, outside of Spain, this conjugation only appears in common speech in Argentina, Chile, Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines.  In most of the Hispanophone world, people use ustedes for second person plural, both for familiar and formal, while vosotros sometimes appears in older writings.

This begs the question: why do certain words have different meanings in different countries?  It is possible that the specific mixture of people in a given region creates a new interpretation of a word.  As a result, what is a neutral-sounding word in one country might be an impolite word in another country.  But even without an answer, that topic is another indicator of the richness of language, and should give anyone a strong appreciation of language.