FRENCH to UK ENGLISH TRANSLATORS

FRENCH to UK ENGLISH TRANSLATORS

We have a very large project from French to UK English which we expect to last for a year.
We are looking for teams of translators.

Email us at careers [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com with your availability and rates and we will send you sample text to translate.

Thank you

Court Chaos as interpreter service goes private

Channel 4 News reveals evidence of failings inside Britain's privatised court interpretation services. As Darshna Soni reports there are claims unqualified translators are covering criminal cases.

For video click here

Every single day, in courts across the country, professional interpreters help to translate proceedings for defendants, witnesses and victims. They take pride in their work - or at least, they used to.

At the beginning of February, the Ministry of Justice privatised the system of booking interpreters across the criminal justice system. It awarded a lucrative contract, worth £300m, to a relatively small company from Oldham called Applied Language Solutions (ALS). The contract was supposed to save £18m a year - but critics say it is already costing that much.

Professional interpreters say Britain's reputation as having the fairest legal system in the world is being undermined by privatisation. ALS have cut the rates of pay offered to professional interpreters, and as a result many are boycotting the company. It's claimed that as a result, the company is struggling to recruit enough translators.

Desperate measures

We've travelled to courts across the country and heard of cases having to be adjourned and even dismissed every single day, when ALS interpreters fail to turn up. Many court clerks have told us they aren't even given notice.

In some cases, the clerks have to resort to desperate measures. "The clerk had to go online and use Google translate to explain the bail conditions because the ALS interpreter didn't turn up. That's just not right."

For complete article, click here

Data Analysis Shows 49% Increase in Interpreter, Translation Service Industry Jobs; Appointment-Plus Interpreter Scheduling Software Sees Bump in Usage

Published 10:02 a.m., Thursday, March 29, 2012

Data analysis by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc (EMSI) reveals that interpreter and translation services was one of five industries that experienced 40 percent or greater job growth during the economic downturn of the past five years. Appointment-Plus interpreter scheduling software has experienced an increase in adoption among interpreters, translators and interpreting service providers that utilize the application to automate, simplify and improve their appointment-booking processes.

Scottsdale, AZ (PRWEB) March 29, 2012

The number of jobs in the interpreter and translation services industry increased by 49 percent between 2007 and 2011, despite the economic downturn. These figures from Economic Modeling Specialists Inc (EMSI) coincide with current trends seen by Appointment-Plus, which has experienced a recent increase in the number of interpreter and translating services and businesses implementing its interpreter scheduling software to improve their appointment-booking processes.

The increased demand for interpreters and translators resulted in a net gain of over 7,000 new positions in this industry, according to EMSI’s data. Managing this continued surge of customer and client appointments is quickly proving to be a challenge for many of these service providers, especially for those still relying on more traditional methods of scheduling and managing appointments, such as scheduling them over the phone and recording details in a paper appointment book or spreadsheet. That’s why more and more of these professionals are looking for an alternative to help them automate and streamline this oftentimes tedious and time-consuming task.

As many of these professionals are quickly learning, the answer is Appointment-Plus interpreter scheduling software, the worldwide experts in online scheduling solutions and creators of the scheduling industry’s most flexible and feature-rich system.

“Requiring appointments for interpreting and translating services is a necessity for most professionals in planning their daily schedules, but managing this process can be burdensome for both them and their customers alike,” says Bob La Loggia, CEO of Appointment-Plus. “Automating the scheduling process with Appointment-Plus can free up a significant amount of time to focus on more pressing tasks and gives you the peace-of-mind that your scheduling processes are being managed efficiently and effectively.”

Appointment-Plus interpreter scheduling software and its Scheduling Cloud™ engine instantly transform the scheduling process by allowing customers and clients to schedule their interpretation and translation services right online, without having to pick up the phone or send an e-mail. Among the services scheduled through Appointment-Plus are: 

• Medical and legal interpretation at hospitals and healthcare facilities.
• Document and verbal interpretation at legal translation services.
• Translation and interpretation aid at municipal, state, county and local government agencies and departments.
• On-site and telephonic interpretation at private translation service providers.

For the complete article, click here

Two-year translation delay derails child sex abuse trial

 

 

BY LORI CULBERT AND JONATHAN FOWLIE, VANCOUVER SUN MARCH 30, 2012

Thirteen charges laid against a father accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting his teenage daughter were stayed because of a two-year delay in translating his statements into English.

It is a shocking story that was "fumbled" by the justice sys-tem, said Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.'s representative for children and families. She raised multiple concerns about the case in a report released Thursday.

"Allowing budgetary considerations to outweigh the plight of the vulnerable children involved in this case is shocking, unacceptable and should never happen again," says her report, The Impact of Criminal Justice Funding Decisions on Children in British Columbia.

The failure to provide the translation services within a reasonable amount of time led a Provincial Court judge to stay the 13 charges because the father's right to a fair trial had been breached.

As a result, Turpel-Lafond said, a heartbreaking message has been sent to the complain-ant in this case - as well as to other victims - "that she didn't matter enough" to the judicial system.

"It is so important that victims have the opportunity to come forward and that there is a prosecution. Prosecution allows individuals to be empowered and - it gives a sense of closure to have a trial," Turpel-Lafond said in an interview.

The increase of non-English-speaking residents in B.C. makes this case of particular concern, she added.

Attorney-General Shirley Bond said Thursday she is "incredibly disappointed and devastated" by the handling of this file.

"There is no excuse for what happened in the case," she said. "It was an operational decision not to assign the resources that were necessary. That is unacceptable. I have already had conversations with Crown and with police authorities."

The facts in the story are disturbing. The girl's family came to Canada as refugees in 2005 and settled in the Lower Main-land. Their names are not revealed to protect the identity of the victim, but the judge's ruling says statements to police were made in Russian and an unusual dialect.

For complete article, click here 

Arcadia city officials grapple with Chinese language ballot error

Arcadia city election officials have spent the last week trying to minimize the confusion from a Chinese translation error on the all-mail ballot for the city's general municipal election in April.

The ballot, mailed to residents this month, provided instructions in four languages. English, Vietnamese and Spanish speakers read that they should "vote for no more than two" of the five candidates for City Council.

In Chinese, the instructions read: "Vote for no more than three."

Ballots with more than two votes for city council members, however, would have been flagged as an "overvote," voiding that portion of the ballot.

"We've never had an error like this before," said Lisa Mussenden, Arcadia's chief deputy city clerk and records manager. "The city is going to do whatever it can to reach out and try to minimize the error."

Since last Wednesday, when a Chinese-speaking voter called the city clerk about the translation error, officials have published notices in local papers, printed fliers and announced it at last week's candidates' forum hosted by the Arcadia Chinese Assn.

What's Your Multilingual Online Strategy?

Marianne Aiello, for HealthLeaders Media, March 21, 2012

Most hospitals are well equipped to serve non-English speaking patients, from employing certified translators to stocking multilingual health flyers in information racks. But few are just as able to communicate with those same patients online.

It's time to say basta, assez, and enough.

This cyber language barrier must be torn down in order to ensure all patients receive the most relevant and accurate healthcare information.
New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) is tackling this issue by embedding a translator tool on its website. The tool was developed by the New York City Technology Department for all of the city's agencies. It uses the free Google Translate utility to provide an accurate translation of the site into 34 different languages.

"Since high quality healthcare depends on accurate communication with our patients, effective communication is an important component of HHC's commitment to patient safety," says Ana Marengo, HHC's senior vice president of corporate communications and marketing.  "The ability to translate the information on our website allows us to offer important information to patients who might otherwise not be able to get it."
Nearly 2,500 people used the translate tool on HHC's website in 2011, a 16% increase over the previous year. This illustrates how important it is to reach out to multilingual and multicultural groups online as communities continue to become more diverse.

For complete article, click here

The Foreign Language of 'Mad Men'

The show is known for historical accuracy. But do the characters really talk like people from the '60s?

AMC

With Mad Men's return on Sunday comes the return of the paeans to the show's attention to period detail. By various reports, Matthew Weiner devours half-century old letters, dresses actors in period undergarments, and even throws out suspiciously attractive fruit to ensure that nothing dispels the perfect illusion of the 1960s.


As a historian, though, I'm particularly interested in the show's language. In my research, I've been struck again and again at just how profoundly language changes from decade to decade. New expressions, phrases, and meanings are constantly entering into English. How true to the jet age could Mad Men'sdialogue really be? The normal way to test things like this is to use personal expertise to notice a phrase that sounds wrong, and then to hit the reference books to confirm the hunch. This generally works for the most egregious mistakes: while watching Mad Men, lexicographers noticed the wrong edition of a dictionary, media types picked up on Joan Holloway's statement that "the medium is the message" in 1960, before McLuhan published, and the more historically minded noted the usage of "military-industrial complex"months before Eisenhower coined the phrase.


There's another approach that's less subtle, but far more comprehensive; check everything, whether it sounds inaccurate or not. Using digitized books, movie subtitles, and tools like the Google Ngram viewer (which was first developed in 2010 by the Harvard Cultural Observatory, where I have a fellowship this year), it's possible to write a computer program that looks at every single phrase to see if it really appeared in print in the 1960s. Doing so creates, essentially, an anachronism machine that ruthlessly seeks out and tags every potentially inaccurate line (of a certain length) in the script. Using a similar method, I was able to find dozens of mistakes in Downton Abbey; of course we all think Mad Men is better, but is it really?


For complete article, click here

Scots pupil aged 14 speaks an incredible six foreign languages

Mar 31 2012 By George Mair

bruce baillie-hamilton Image 2

A SCOTS teenager has been named the most multi-lingual child in the UK.

Bruce Baillie-Hamilton, 14, can speak six foreign languages as well as English.

He started learning Russian at home and then took up Mandarin “for a challenge”. Arabic was next and he has already achieved grade A passes in each of them, at GSCE or AS level.

Bruce, whose ambition is to become an international businessman, is also learning French, German and Spanish at Beaconhurst School in Bridge of Allan, near Stirling.

He was named Britain’s most multi-lingual under-15 in a competition run by publishers Harper Collins.

For the complete article, click here