In accordance with Assembly Bill (AB) 635 (Atkins, Chapter 600, Statutes of 2016) which was passed with little objection, and Senate Bill (SB) 165 (Atkins, Chapter 365, Statutes of 2019) which passed unanimously:

On August 31, 2021, the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) announced that Medi-Cal beneficiaries will be receiving increased interpreter support in several regions in California, including Contra Costa County. The aim of this was to ensure that all patients, no matter what language they speak, are able to receive the care that they deserve without having to worry about communication.

The project is called Medical Interpretation Pilot Project. Through the legislatively mandated project, medical interpreters in the following languages are needed or will be called upon. This is to cover Medi-Cal assignments in the area either on-site or remotely, either via phone or video conferencing.

Arabic
Armenian
Cambodian
Cantonese
Dari
Farsi
Hindi
Hmong
Japanese
Korean
Laotian
Mam
Mandarin
Mien
Mixteco
Pashto
Punjabi
Russian
Spanish
Tagalog
Thai
Vietnamese

Monterey Language Services is proud to be part of the MIPP team, providing interpretation services in Richmond/Antioch area.

Through accurate and clear translation of corporate communication materials, customers and employees can gain a better understanding of the corporate message and guidelines and can thus better contribute to the greater success of the corporation.

Global companies working with Monterey Language Services are growing stronger because they have chosen a translation and interpretation company that gives individualized attention to each translation project entrusted to them.

Our company stands firmly by what we believe in and provides the following to our global corporate customers.

Specialty: Translation and interpretation that require high level of expertise

Domains: Medical, legal, technical, and business subjects

Approach: Clear, accurate, and complete translation and interpretation

Value: Professional, efficient, and high quality services

Languages provided: Over 175 languages (including Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, Malay, German, French, Indonesian, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Hindi Norwegian, Polish, Russian and more)

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

Our interpreters are professionally qualified. They have studied translation and interpretation at the graduate or undergraduate level, or are professionally certified, or have received training in medical, legal and technical subject areas. They are experienced medical interpreters, legal interpreters and technical interpreters. Furthermore, they pursue continuing on-the-job training and education.

Our interpreters are not only local, able to come to our headquarters or to our client sites to perform services, but also distant, working remotely through a range of technology options such as video remote.

Our interpreters work consecutively, but also at conference, offering simultaneous interpretation.

Monterey Language Services has been providing language support to hospitals for years. A short list includes Spanish, ASL, Vietnamese, Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, Tagalog, Russian, French, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Punjabi, Gujarati, and indigenous languages such as Triqui, Mixteco, Zapotec. Even when a rare language is needed, we can vet and bring interpreters to our customers in a matter of hours.

We stand by ready 24-7, either work with a regular schedule of interpreting appointments, or provide last minute on-demand interpretation, for example for a hospital’s emergency needs.

It is our goal at Monterey Language Services to provide a full line of interpretation services. And it is to that end that we maintain our huge pool of professional interpreters to serve you whenever or wherever you need them.

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Since its creation, Twitter has been a worldwide phenomenon that has connected everyday people with their favorite celebrities, friends, and everyone in between.  Although the service has been provided worldwide, the company has been trying to translate the business tools into 33 languages in order to reach an even broader audience.

These languages include: Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Urdu.

At the Twitter Translation Center, translators can sign on using their Twitter account and help translate various blocks of text for the company. The upside for the translator is experience in the field, as well as their name possibly on the “Top Ten Translators” for those who have been translating the most.

The @MRYLanguages Twitter account isn’t in this top ten just yet, but it does connect directly with Director of Translation Mei-Ling Chen where she will gladly answer questions posed about the company, translation services, or any other related topic in the industry.

It is the time of the year when the Chinese people celebrate the full moon.  Speaking of the full moon, it plays a major role in folk tales.  It is when werewolves come to life.  A werewolf is of course a human who turns into a wolf. 

It is worth noting the origin of the word werewolf.  The first part of the word most likely derives from Old English wer, meaning “man”, thus the word plainly means “man wolf” (or “wolf man”, to match the movie title).  The translations in many other Indo-European languages agree with this root, like hombre lobo in Spanish and λυκάνθρωπος in Greek.

While most European languages are specific about the animal into which a human transforms, the Russian description of “werewolf” is more general.  For example, a Russian word used for “werewolf” is оборотень, which is closer to “shape shifter”. 

Shape shifter?  Folk tales the world over have frequently contained shape-shifting beings.  Our speculation might be that the Russians’ fear of wolves co-opted the idea of a shape-shifting being.  Could the use of this word in Russian be because of the differences between Russian culture and other cultures?

By the way, according to ethologist Valerius Geist of the University of Calgary, wolves are usually not a direct danger to humans as long as they are well fed, but if they start going hungry, they can turn aggressive.

Do you know how it feels to handle 19 languages in one week? You might think it is a lot to manage, but in fact, it is AWESOME! Other than dealing with the language routine, we amuse ourselves with some of the interesting differences between languages.

Did you know that…

– translation of “Sincerely yours” in Russian depends on gender? How you translate it depends on who is signing it, man or woman.

– in many languages, including Polish, addressing someone depends on gender?
Szanowny Panie [for men]!  Szanowna Pani [for women]!  

– Finnish attaches case markings directly onto the noun? (“Facebookin” in Finnish for the possessive noun “Facebook’s” in English).

– Chinese likes to convert nouns in English to verb forms a lot? In Chinese, “renewal of company values” is commonly & easily switched to “renew company values.” (perhaps it is because a Chinese verb makes no difference between past, present, future, gender, singular and plural form!)

– in Portuguese, we do not repeat terms as much as in English? (variety=better style)

– written Spanish tends to use more synonyms than written English? For example, you can rotate between “compañía” and “empresa” as translations for “company.”

– in Turkish, indented paragraph alignment in a ‘written letter’ is a punctuation rule?

– Triqui, an indigenous language in Mexico, has three variations? Alto, Media, Bajo (high, middle, low) and they can’t understand each other.

Every language has its own intrigue and subtleties, and when comparing one language to another, these differences stand out. That is, their intrigue is magnified. This is one of the reasons we are drawn to working on so many languages simultaneously

The City of Marina, where Monterey Language Services is headquartered, is the 7^th largest multilingual city in the United States. 

On its 35^th anniversary, we would like to wish the City a Happy Birthday in the following languages: Spanish, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Afrikaans, German, Tagalog, Hebrew, Samoan, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, and Portuguese.  Thanks to our many translators who responded quickly to contribute to this special occasion.

Hindi and Turkish just got in:

Hindi – जन्मदिनमुबारकहो!

Turkish – Mutlu Yillar Sana

Happy 35th, City of Marina!

The New York Times Sunday magazine section has a fascinating article entitled “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” which discusses recent research on how one’s mother tongue shapes one’s experience of the world.  A must read.

“If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions.”

“Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim…Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her?”

“The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter…”

Reference:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

Lee Eisenberg, one of our team members and Russian-to-English translators, shares a wonderful story about how he handles translation between two different cultures using the definition of “real estate” as an example, and how subject knowledge is important for a translator.

The picture of him was taken in St. Petersburg, Russia, standing on the frozen Gulf of Finland.  By walking north, one could theoretically walk all the way to Finland.

Full Story by Lee Eisenberg:

Language is the symbolic representation of culture so to produce a meaningful translation from one language to the next requires domain knowledge about the target culture.

The experience that helped me more than any other to understand the need for domain knowledge was my internship in a Moscow real estate office.  Translating Russian documents into English not only taught me the specific Russian translation to real estate (недвижимость), but also taught me how to think about real estate differently.

The word недвижимость literally translates to “immobility,” because real estate does not move once it is built.  This forces one to ask why real estate is called that in English; what does the concept of “real estate” mean?  So, I did some research and found a definition.  Most languages treat real estate as something physical, while English uses a legal definition.  There are more explanations of the words “real estate” at:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1555/why-is-it-called-real-estate

In conclusion, I would recommend practical translating experience in a specific domain in which one is translating to anyone who is entertaining a career in foreign language translation.