Translation services are essential for immigrant and multicultural families. In the U.S. 44.7 million immigrants made up 14.7% of the national population in 2018, including 21.9 million women, 20.3 million men, and 2.5 million children, according to the American Migrant Council. In the U.S., the most commonly translated documents are birth certificates, marriage certificates, and [...]
Occasionally, we will get questions about product packaging from clients who are moving to new language markets. Granted, this can be tricky territory and if you don’t think it is, search for translation errors online and see how many of them are related to product packaging. I wanted to take some time today to put together [...]
A few weeks ago, I attended the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder meeting. During the meeting, I was surprised to hear Warren Buffet put into words my exact thoughts concerning AI. If I recall, he said current artificial intelligence is more hype than results. I was pleased to hear him say that because it reflected my recent [...]
While modern medicine advances at a staggering pace, some hospitals and health care providers are finding it difficult to break down language barriers, sometimes resulting in tragic accidents. It’s common to see family members, including children, step in, and translate to hospital staff, often with little fluency. The following are three tragic cases of malpractice [...]
Many of our conversations surround metrics and data. For many years we have tracked everything from client feedback, employee and contractor feedback, to detailed feedback on every project. It’s an amazing system and network of data that rolls in thanks to excellent process design and amazing systems. At any moment, we can tell a client what [...]
The other day I read an article about a language called Ayapaneco. Wikipedia states that there are approximately 15 speakers whose ages range from 67 to 90. What caught my attention about the language, however, was not its rarity, but the story surrounding it. In 2010 a story started circulating stating that the last two speakers [...]
The history of interpreting is almost as old as language itself. From the Tower of Babel to Luis de Torres (Christopher Columbus’ official interpreter) and the Aztec slave woman interpreting for the Spanish during their conquest of the Aztec empire. Interpreters have been conduits for communicating everything from religious, legal, business to medical messaging. In more [...]
What do the following names have in common; Jimmy Carter, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Thamsanqa Jantjie? If your guess was biggest, baddest or most humiliating misinterpretation blunders, congratulations. Jimmy Carter: You might be thinking, “Since when did the 39th President of the US get involved in interpretation?” Well, in a speech carried live on Polish national [...]
For most people around the world, Valentine’s day is a holiday to show love or affection to important people in their lives. Its common to receive chocolate, flowers,and cards to make that special someone feel loved. While the tradition is nearly universal around the globe, the Japanese approach is quite different. As with most Western holidays [...]
The need for communication has been around since antiquity, and although the origins of language in the human species has been the topic of much discussion for millennia, there has been no consensus on the origin or age of human language. That withstanding, no one can deny the evolution of language and the potency and effect [...]
