When an interpreter or translator is certified, you can trust them to deliver quality. If you want to ask if a driver is qualified, you ask for a driver's license. Realtors are certified for their work. You don't just hire them because they say they are good. CPAs go through a credentialing process. In Oregon, we [...]
Certification is key to quality language access. It includes both interpreting and translation. Poor quality translations and interpreting events lead to serious risks. When patients leave a doctor’s office, if they don’t understand the information they took home, they run serious risks. If a parent does not understand the Individualized Educational Plan for a student, [...]
I have an iPad ProPlus. I started using these apps on my iPhone as an interpreter, but was dissatisfied with the readability and upgraded the screen size one level at a time. Many of these apps are at least as up to date as my paper dictionaries. They are faster and more reliable than doing [...]
What can be truly measured? I believe that listing the units by which something is measured is essential. In language proficiency testing, there are many scales being used. Level 1 can mean many different things. I will use units of length as an analogy. MIT students got this right when they measured in smoots. In [...]
On April 16 three OSTI interpreters interpreted for Dr. Rigoberta Menchu at Portland Public Schools. What was so cool about this? I had been in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador back in 1987, one year after the Civil War officially ended in Guatemala. I remembered the trucks running around with military weapons in “democratic” El [...]
I wrote this post in December of 2014. In April 2020, during the COVID crisis, there is a lot of remote interpreting. Only a few months ago, about 80% of the interpreting in the United States was done on-site, face to face. Will we return to face-to-face as a preferred mode of communication? Time will [...]
