Why "They Speak English" is a Crap Excuse

Of all the arguments I’ve heard against professional translation (and I’ve heard a few), “they speak English” has got to be the worst.

I am not a natural salesperson.  I feel funny inside when I think of cold calls.  So when I try to sell a client translation, it’s not because selling is what I do; it’s because I think translation will help them in what they do.  I love the idea of helping a growing business, of working with a company that is going into a country for the first time.  So much is new.  Everything’s exciting, brimming over with possibility as jobs are created and new markets born.

I get especially excited when I see another Kentucky business expand internationally.  I’m proud of my state, but you must admit we’re not known for being the most international people on the face of the planet.  We do wear shoes, but we’re not exactly seen taking them off at airport security as we fly to exotic destinations, either.

What we are known for, though, is hospitality.  As my grandfather put it, Kentucky is “south of the river.”  And while Kentucky’s being southern vs midwestern is cause for debate, when you’re south of the river, we put on that Southern hospitality shine.  Except when it comes to international business.  And there, we are some of the most inhospitable people in the nation.

I made a sales call this morning to what Louisville considers to be a large business.  They’re going international, preparing to open up locations in eight Middle Eastern countries.  It was easy to get the name of the person in charge of this international expansion.  This is a typically Southern company, after all, hospitable in the fact that the polite person (no push-button system here) who answers the phones will say, “Why, sure, sugar, I can put you through to her!”  This restaurant sells itself on Southern kitsch and making you feel comfortable.  But evidently, their highly-marketed hospitality stops at the Atlantic.

In no uncertain terms did the contact tell me that the company has no intent whatsoever to ever purchase translation.  When I asked her why (call me a glutton for punishment), she said, “They speak English over there.”

This has to be the worst argument against professional translation I have ever heard. 

For starters, it’s just lazy.  Instead of judiciously considering communications and how to improve them, let’s just make our foreign partners do the work.  Let’s not actually make any effort to make sure our message is perceived in the way we want it to be; let’s just assume they’re getting all of our highly colloquial, Kentucky-specific references and that nothing is lost in (lack-of-)translation.  It’s not like there’s a professional translation provider six minutes from the office or anything.  It’s not like a simple look at the American Translators Association website would give us access to 11,000 members ready to serve.

This argument also makes you look like a dumbass.  Now, forgive me for cursing in my blog, which I know is an unprofessional move on my part, but there’s no other word for this than “dumbass.”  You don’t have to watch “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader” to know Arabic is the main language of choice in the Middle East, among others.  If anyone reading can think of a better word than “dumbass” for a college-educated adult who doesn’t know this, I’m happy to hear your suggestion.

But the reason that burns my biscuits most is that it’s completely lacking in Southern hospitality.  I don’t know about y’all, but my momma told me to always accommodate the other person above myself.  When you are a guest in someone’s home, you do as much as you can to put them out as little as you can.  You make your own bed, you help with the dishes, and you don’t eat the last piece of pie.  So why is it so hard for people to transfer this attitude to their companies?  Why is it so hard to realize that going into someone else’s country, asking them for their money, then making them speak your language is so highly rude?  Forget being ruder than eating the last piece of pie, it’s even ruder than I’ve been to this company in my blog entry.

Momma also taught me that honey killed more flies than vinegar and that no one listens when you’re yelling.  So I truly had a hard time deciding to write this blog.  We are good to our clients. We care about them and like to consider ourselves accommodating to all levels of professional language services purchasing experience.  We’ll work with new and first-time buyers when many providers of our caliber won’t.  Again, I love to help a growing company move into new markets, but I grow weary.  I grow tired of this attitude that goes against the grain of everything I’ve been taught, all I know to be logical.  If we cannot be professional, if we cannot be accommodating, then what can we be?

Part Four: How Do I Choose the Best Language Agency to Serve my Institution?

(Back to Part 3.)

When you contact a prospective language agency, you will want to inquire about a wide range of issues in order to gauge the likely quality of the services.

Quality of interpreting
• How does the agency recruit interpreters/translators?
The most successful agencies recruit interpreters on an ongoing basis from a wide
range of sources. They will maintain close on-going relationships with the
immigrant and refugee communities from which interpreters may come, as well as
with professional interpreter organizations and training programs. Agencies which
are vague about how they recruit may have difficulty filling your needs long term.

• How does the agency screen interpreter candidates?
Different agencies will have different minimum requirements for interpreters.
While there is some debate whether it is necessary (or even possible) to require that all interpreters have a college degree, all interpreters should certainly be screened for their language skills in both active languages. Screening techniques range from an informal conversation to standardized testing, so ask specifically about how screening is done. As is often the case, standards for common language interpreters (like Spanish) are likely to be higher than standards for interpreters of “hard-to-find” languages.

• Does the agency require interpreters to have received professional training in
interpreting?
As few health and human service interpreters come with degrees in interpretation,
it is very important that interpreters receive some form of professional training as
interpreters. Does the agency require training? If so, how many hours? Trainings
can run from four hours to over 200. Obviously, the longer the training, the better,
but 40 hours is a common length for basic training programs. What does the
training cover? Ask to see the curriculum. The course should, at a minimum, cover
the interpreter role, ethics, modes, basic conversion skills, handling the flow of the session, intervening and medical terminology. The more participatory the course,
the more skill building and practice included, the more effective the course will be. Ask also about the credentials of the trainer. The impact of a course often depends on who is teaching.

• Does the agency require any continuing education of its contractors? If so, how much and what sort of proof do the contract interpreters have to offer?
Continuing education is important and reasonable to expect of interpreters who
provide services regularly. The California Healthcare Interpreter Association (CHIA)
has chapters in the Bay Area, the Los Angeles area, the Central Valley and the
Sacramento area that may provide continuing education for health care interpreters.

• What percentage of the agency’s interpreters is certified?
It is useful to know how many certified interpreters the agency has in each language; however, true certification programs are rare. At the time of this writing, there is no publicly available certification process for health care interpreters in California. However, there are several other forms of interpreter certification of which you should be aware.

The Federal Court system certifies interpreters in Spanish, Haitian Creole and Navajo. The California Personnel Board also certifies court interpreters in Spanish, Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog and Vietnamese. There is a “Medical Interpreter” certification for legal interpreters providing services for Workers Compensation exams, but this test is not designed to certify clinical interpreters and is offered only in Spanish.

Language Line Services (LLS), a for-profit telephonic interpreting agency, has developed a valid internal certification process, which at this time is available only to LLS interpreters.

American Sign Language interpreters may be certified by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) or the Registry for Interpreters of the Deaf (RID), with a variety of special certificates for particular venues. The two organizations have also formed a joint task force, the National Council on Interpreting which is developing a new, joint certification process.

The American Translators Association (ATA) accredits translators into English from Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish; and from English into Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

The Department of Social and Health Services of the State of Washington also has a certification program for health care interpreters who speak Spanish, Russian, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese. The state also offers a “qualification” test to interpreters of other languages. Especially with telephonic providers, you may find interpreters in their pools who are certified through this process.

If an agency tells you that all its interpreters are certified, ask who has certified them. If the certification is internal to the agency, ask to see the reliability and validity data to make sure that it is truly a certification test and not simply an assessment. Obviously, you would like to see more certified interpreters than not in an agency’s interpreter pool. However, if it appears that few of the agency’s interpreters are certified, take a careful look before assuming that interpreter quality will be poor. It may be that the agency provides services largely in uncertifiable languages, or that training is being used in lieu of certification to guarantee quality.

• What Code of Ethics are the interpreters/translators asked to follow?
At present, there is no one code of ethics for health care interpreters that is
nationally accepted, although California Healthcare Interpreters Association
(CHIA) has recently published a draft code of ethics8 and the National Council on
Interpreting in Health Care is currently working to build national consensus
around a single code of ethics. As a result, at this time each agency may have its
own code. Ask to see it, and ask how interpreters/translators are instructed about
it. If the code is simply mailed to interpreters, it will be doubtful that they will
really understand it.

• What protocols are interpreters expected to use?
Are the interpreters expected to use first person interpreting, that is to say “I have a stomach ache” instead of “The patient says she has a stomach ache”? Are they
expected to do a pre-session with the patient and provider to clarify their role and
how they will interpret? Do they provide culture-related information if
communication has broken down due to cultural reasons? Will they advocate if
necessary? How are in-person interpreters told to dress and present themselves?
How are the interpreters instructed to handle difficult situations? Many agencies
will have an orientation apart from formal training to teach interpreters the
accepted protocols of that particular agency. Ask to see any instructional materials
that are given out and make sure the protocols are in keeping with professional
practice and your internal guidelines.

• How does the agency provide long-term quality assurance for interpretation?
After the interpreters start to provide services, is there any mechanism in place to see how they are doing? Are interpreters periodically monitored in any way? Or will the agency rely on complaints from you as a quality assurance technique?

• What mechanisms does the agency have to instruct interpreters about specific policies and procedures of your institution?
How does the agency communicate with its interpreters? Is there a newsletter,
monthly meetings, a Listserv? As you work together, it will certainly be necessary
for the agency to communicate details to interpreters about working at your
institution, whether there has been a change in parking designations or there are
new instructions on getting encounter forms signed. Make sure the agency has
some structured way of contacting its interpreter pool.

• Does the agency specialize in any particular industry(ies)?
Some agencies serve all venues: legal, medical, insurance, social service, financial, customer service, educational, etc. Others will specialize in only one or two industries. While a more focused agency will not necessarily give better service, it is easier for interpreters to interpret effectively in fewer venues, simply because this requires a smaller range of specialized vocabulary and protocols. Some large agencies may have different cadres of interpreters to serve different venues, or may provide assistance with vocabulary development to interpreters who serve multiple venues. If the agency serves a wide range of venues, you might want to ask specifically how the agency guarantees quality across so many different situations.

Interpreter service

• Available languages
You will want to ask the agency about the depth and breadth of its interpreter pool.
How many interpreters does it have actively available on a daily basis? How many
in each language? How many are really qualified? Some agencies seem to have an
awfully long list of “available languages,” making one wonder if those interpreters
would really be available if and when you needed them.

To evaluate what you learn about the agency’s capacity, you will need to know your organization’s language needs, both by language and by demand. What are your top five languages? Which language requests have you found especially difficult to fill? Some agencies specialize in certain language groups: Spanish only, Asian languages only, “hard to find” languages only, ASL only. Instead of expecting one agency to cover all your language needs, it may be better to have multiple contracts with various agencies, and use each for the service in which it specializes.

• Back-up alliances
Some agencies have agreements with other agencies to back each other up if one
agency cannot cover a request. While this practice will certainly expand the
agency’s capacity, you will want to make sure that the allied agencies maintain the
same standards that you would expect from the contracted agency.

• Responsiveness
What percentage of all requests is the agency able to fill? This data the agency
should be tracking and should be willing to share. Remember that no agency can
fill 100 percent of requests.

• No-show rates
How often do this agency’s in-person interpreters fail to show at appointments? As
with response rates, the agency should track this and be willing to share the data.

• Connect times (for telephonic interpreter services)
What is the average connect time? Connect times of 45 seconds or less are
competitive; more than that is questionable. Also, ask how connect times are
calculated. They should be counted from when the call starts to ring at the agency
until an interpreter is on the line. You also might want to ask about connect times
on your most common languages. Since it may well take longer to get an interpreter
in a rare language than in a common one, chances are that connect times for
Spanish will be less than the average.

• Special equipment requirements (for telephonic interpreter services)
Many telephonic interpreter services will be able to recommend specific speaker
phone technologies. A few require particular equipment in order to provide their
service. Since additional technology will certainly add to cost while potentially
improving quality, it is important to hear what technology upgrades you may need
to work with each agency.

• Disaster recovery system (for telephonic interpreter services)
If there were to be some sort of national disaster, access to telephonic interpreters would become more important than ever. Or, if there were a local disaster near your agency’s call center, communications might be interrupted. Since your agency depends entirely on phone lines and computerized switching systems, what plan is in place if the lines go down? Some telephonic interpreting agencies now have completely redundant communication systems, allowing them to easily switch
systems if one technology fails. It is especially important to ask about disaster
recovery systems if you are contemplating using a telephonic service as the sole
provider of your interpreter services.

• Switching equipment (for telephonic interpreter services)
For those with experience with call centers and telecommunications, information
on the agency’s switching system can tell you a great deal about how prepared it
will be to handle a large volume of calls, track connectivity statistics and provide
accurate billing and reporting.

• What additional services are offered?
As mentioned above, some agencies offer ancillary support services that may be of
use to you. The more services they offer, the more of a partner they can become.

Administrative
• Fees
Of course you will want to ask about fees. In-person interpreter services are usually charged by the hour, with a one-hour minimum, although this may vary based on location. Telephonic interpreter services are usually charged by the minute. Fees
may vary based on language or by the time of day of the service. In addition, there
may also be a one-time set-up fee, a monthly minimum, volume discounts and
cancellation fees. Make sure you know all the fees before you sign up.

• Cancellation policies
What is the agency’s cancellation policy? If you cancel a request for an interpreter, will you be charged? Most agencies will not charge if the cancellation is more than 24 hours before the appointment. Some agencies will charge, as they feel it only fair to pay the interpreter whose time has been reserved and who may not be able to get another appointment to replace the cancelled one. Same-day cancellations are almost always charged.

• Company history
Learn as much as you can about the people at the agency. Who started it? What
was the founder doing beforehand? Does the founder have previous experience in
the language field? How long has the agency been in business? How quickly has it
grown? Who are the key players at the agency and what are their backgrounds?
These questions can give you a feel for the people behind the logo: the people with
whom you will be dealing, and the people whom you will need to trust in order to
build a working business relationship.

• Industry involvement
Is the agency at all involved in helping to build the health care interpreting field? Is the agency a member of CHIA, of the American Translators Association (ATA), of the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC)? Does the
agency provide scholarships for interpreters to get training, or support local
training efforts? Agencies that are supportive of the field are demonstrating
commitment to quality interpreting that may be reflected in their services.

• Key documents
Ask to see a standard contract and an example of a billing statement. If you are
going to need specific data on your bill that is not routinely provided, bring that up in negotiations to assure that the agency has the capacity to track that data.

Finally, after you have asked all your questions and reviewed all the materials provided to you, ask for references. While it is not appropriate to request a complete client list, agencies should be able to put you in contact with a few current clients. When you talk to the references, ask for specific information as opposed to general impressions.

If you are contracting for telephonic interpreter services, your last step is to request a test call. This means that the agency allows you to put through one interpreter request free of charge in order to test how the service works. You may want to try an uncommon language to see if the agency can really come through, or you may want to request your most commonly needed language, to see how the agency will respond in the situation for which you will most use it.
Either way, a test call can be most revealing and will give you a good feel as to how the agency will really function.

Choosing an agency (or agencies) may seem rather complicated, however a quality agency will be your best partner in meeting your language needs. Having to recontract with new agencies because the old ones didn’t work out is a major investment of effort. It’s worth the time up front to choose an agency that can serve your needs well so that you can both get about the business of providing language access.

Source: Roat, Cynthia E. “How to Choose and Use a Language Agency: A Guide for Health and Social Service Providers Who Wish to Contract With Language Agencies.” Los Angeles: The California Endowment, February 2003.

(Go to Part 5.)

Linking In and Face(book)ing Off

When it comes to social networking, where's the line between personal and professional? My answer, in form of the article "Linking In and Face(book)ing Off," recently ran in Multilingual . Feel free to read it below:

From LinkedIn to Facebook, we as individuals are much more visible on-line than we used to be. The opportunities to see and be seen grow every day as sites like XING, Ryze and Spoke enter the scene alongside more personal social networking websites like MySpace and Match.com. What this means for a translator is that instead of your cleverly crafted ProZ.com page or the well-written biographical paragraph on your company website, prospective clients could very well stumble upon pictures of you at your cousin’s bachelorette party instead. And even if you keep your social networking page risqué-photo free, that’s not to say your cousin might not put those pictures online herself, which means that snapshot of you drinking beer in nothing but a cowboy hat would be just as findable in for clients. Before, the running joke was you only had to watch out for things like that if you ran for office. But now, thanks to the internet, all those youthful party nights could be posted and searchable, whether you inhaled or not.

The fact of the matter is, whereas prospective clients used to learn more about you from you or other human references, such as mutual acquaintances, they now tend to Google search you as an individual. Yes, if you work for a language service provider, they’ll most likely Google the LSP, too, but first they’re going to Google you. Combine that with the fact that most people don’t fully understand their Facebook or MySpace privacy settings, and those pictures you only meant for your friends to see might come up in a prospective client’s search long before any well-prepared, professional information you may have posted. And with a search spider that changes its algorithms with the will of the gods, the way Google determines what web surfers see and the order in which they see it is unpredictable at best, meaning you don’t know which hits the searcher will get to first.
Of course, if you followed my mother’s advice, you would act with decorum at all times, meaning there wouldn’t be anything that a prospective client could find that you wouldn’t want him to see. Drunk college photos wouldn’t exist and there’d be nothing embarrassing for you or your cousin to post to begin with. But, no matter who you are, dear reader, I’m willing to guess that at some point in your life, you’ve done at least one thing you wouldn’t want your mother to know about. Rule number one: If you wouldn’t want your mother to know about it, don’t put it on Facebook (or any other similar site). Period.

Rule number two: If you wouldn’t put it on your Facebook page, don’t let your friends put it on their pages either. How do you find out if this has been done? Facebook should tell you you’ve been tagged (Facebook lingo for “labeled” or “named”) in a photograph. It’s a default setting that can’t be changed. If this happens, simply click on the link telling you this has happened. It should bring you to the picture, where you can click “untag.” Once you’ve untagged yourself, no one can tag you back. It won’t remove the picture, but it will remove your name from it, which is the important part. Names are what’s searchable.

But for those of you who like to do embarrassing things on a regular basis and who want to put pictures up for the internet world to see--hey, those folks are out there--there are ways to get around this. They all boil down to rule number three: keep your private and your professional lives separate. On or off-line, this is simply a good guideline to follow. The National Council on Interpreting in Health Care recommends a similar division as part of its code of ethics for interpreters; the French live it out as a national way of life. Just as no prospective client wants to see you at your cousin’s bachelorette, no friend wants to hear you go on about work all the time. It’s simply a good rule. But when we switch on that computer, some of us forget. And like the eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings, the lidless eye of Google sees all.

This brings me to rule number three: use an alias for personal networking and your real name for professional networking. In the least, it’s a chance to get creative. You can make up a regular-sounding pen name (ex, Suzanne Smith) or take your initials and turn them into a name—for example, my initials “TB,” could be “Tee Bee” online. Or, you could pay tribute to a historical or literary figure you like (ex, Annie Oakley or Frodo Baggins). Again, names are what are searchable here. Using a pseudonym will allow you to maintain a personal profile without inadvertently mixing in your professional life and without having unwelcome hits from prospective clients on your personal page. It’s also much safer should you ever be stalked.

Rule number four: Know which networking sites are personal and which are professional. LinkedIn, XING, Ryze and Spoke are all professional. Facebook, MySpace and Friendster are personal. Keep them that way. Currently, I have 97 Facebook “friends.” Only three of them were originally work contacts and I thought long and hard before adding each one. Simply put, as the CEO of an LSP, it does nothing for my or my company’s image for prospective clients or contractors to see pictures of me dancing the Electric Slide at my cousin’s wedding--note I did NOT say bachelorette party. The three work contacts I have on Facebook are individuals who I would consider friends in real life, contractors--note I did not say clients--who I’ve come to know and who I would be proud to Electric Slide with in real life any day.

Rule number five: When it comes to your career, Link(ed)In and Face(book) off. The LSP owner or freelance linguist who does not make good use of online social marketing is missing out on a globally-sized chance to get her name out there. Clients Google your name because they want to know more about you. Meet their need and give them the information they desire. Just control what information is out there.

Having a strong LinkedIn profile allows you the opportunity to get more information in front of your target market. LinkedIn will allow you to post your educational background, client recommendations and any type of awards or honors you might have received. A LinkedIn page presents more information than a paragraph-long biography from your company site and it is less industry-specific than a ProZ.com profile, which uses abbreviations and terminology, such as ”WWA” or “Kudoz,” which can occasionally be confusing to clients from outside the language services industry.

The biggest benefit to LinkedIn is that it’s primarily a computerized version of the Good Ole Boy Network. A Southern US term for an international phenomenon, the Good Ole Boy Network is social networking at its best and most efficient—the simple rule of doing business with those you know before you do business with a stranger. People were loyal to their friends and family first long before Al Gore did or didn’t invent the internet. Before the web, however, you had to keep in your head who knew whom that did what. Now, thanks to LinkedIn, it’s all on a computer. Need a lawyer in the Greater Atlanta area? Well, you know Amy who knows Jason who’s Georgia Bar certified. The flip side of this is that Jason may need legal translation, so with the click of a button, LinkedIn will tell him that he knows Amy who knows you and that you’re a legal translator. The more contacts you have on your account, the better, as the more individuals the site is able to link you to. But beware adding too many connections, or you’ll break rule number six.

Rule number six: Only link to people you actually know. There are scammers on LinkedIn who only want access to your information so they can junk email you. Because here’s the thing, see: when you add someone as a contact on LinkedIn, he gets access to your email address, which is generally not viewable to someone unless he’s a contact. Also, email address privacy protection aside, when you add someone as a contact you are publically saying, “Yes, I know this person.” To share some more of my mother’s advice, birds of a feather flock together. You are who you run with. You’re known by the company you keep. Feel free to insert your own appropriate adage here. Do you want to run the risk that you take when you link yourself online to a complete and utter stranger?

That being said, there are different groups on LinkedIn, such as “TopLinked (Open Networkers),” and “MyLink500 (Open Networkers),” which promise that all members will accept any invitation to link profiles from anyone, no questions asked. Obviously, the thousands of members of these groups would disagree with me. But another piece of advice my momma gave me was that quality beats quantity any day of the week. It’s better to have a solidified network of those you know than a weaker network of those you don’t.

Rule number seven would then be obvious, I would think: Don’t click to add me on Facebook or LinkedIn just because you read this article.

The Vendor-Client Relationship

Thanks go to Rina Ne'eman with Rina Ne’eman Hebrew Language Services for finding this video and showing it at this year's TCD conference:

Who Do Amateurs Practice On?

No long post today, just a couple of ideas for thought:

We've all seen bilinguals looking to get their "start" as interpreters. But my question is, who are they starting on? And what are they starting with?

All these thoughts tonight got started when I found where I'd written down a Cynthia Roat quote after hearing her speak at a medical interpreters' conference in Lexington, Ky. I put it here below, then leave you with that:

"The emergency room, the courtroom, these are not the places to be practicing!"

Multilingual Article Out

It's been a good month here at In Every Language, with the ATA Chronicle having recently published my and Madalena's article (please see post below) and with Multilingual running an article of mine this month. The virtual edition hit the e-stands today and the print issue should be in the mail for any of you who subscribe.

Called "LinkingIn and Face[book]ing Off," the article discusses the (non-)professional nature of social media, sharing the do's and don't's of using LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media tools for business purposes. After the print issue has had a little room to breathe, I'll run the quick pointers here on the blog.