Blog
Culture Conversations
I have developed a series of cultural conversations to help immigrants and members of the host society understand each other better and interact more effectively. This Proposal for Culture Conversations outlines my experience with Cultural Conversations. [...]
Cultural competence
The following are three different ways to define cultural competence or competence in intercultural communication. In today’s environment diversity training is very common, and it is important to understand what aspects of this are relevant [...]
Humor in interpreting, translation and life
Check out this video, “Qué difícil es hablar el español” with English subtitles. 5000 words… the frustrations of unreasonable deadlines for translators. Es preferible reír que llorar. You just have to take life with a [...]
CLAS Standards
This week I was reading the CLAS Standards. CLAS stands for Culturally and Linguistic Appropriate Services. I went to the Blueprint on the CLAS site, and downloaded the Blueprint. The full Blueprint is available for [...]
Language Proficiency Testing with LTI
First of all, why test for language proficiency? We are not generally reliable judges of our own abilities. This Wikipedia article shows that many studies reveal that we have a tendency to overestimate ourselves. The [...]
Risks in interpreting
Unfortunately, problems aren’t generally solved until they are acknowledged. For example, communities do not generally install traffic lights, at a cost of $140,000, until there have been several accidents at the intersection in question. In [...]