CHINESE/ENGLISH INTERPRETERS

HELLO CHINESE/ENGLISH INTERPRETERS 

We required 2-3 interpreters for a 3 day conference in Shenzhen, China from March 17-19, 2014.

We are also looking for interpreting equipment for up to 100 attendees. 

Interpreters must be based in Shenzhen. Travel and accommodation will not be provided. 

Please contact us at careers [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com with availability and rates. 

IMPORTANT: Please also make sure to register with us at the link below to be considered for this and future projects. 

http://www.worldlanguagecommunications.com/careers

JAPANESE/ENGLISH INTERPRETER - VARIOUS US LOCATIONS

HELLO JAPANESE/ENGLISH INTERPRETERS

We are looking for interpreters in the following cities and dates for a series of focus groups. 

Tampa/Florida: February 19th and 20th

Chicago/Illinois: February 21st 

Dallas/Texas: February 24th and 25th 

Each interpreter will report to each Focus Group venue. Interpreter MUST reside in the destination city. No travel will be provided. 

Material for the focus group will be provided in advance if there is any. 

Please contact us at careers [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com with availability and rates. 

IMPORTANT: Please also make sure to register with us at the link below to be considered for this and future projects. 

http://www.worldlanguagecommunications.com/careers

Thank you! 

CHINESE TO ENGLISH TRANSLATORS NEEDED

We have a large amount of translations from CH>EN starting with a project for today.

While we require translators from CH>EN and EN>CH, we ONLY hire translators who are native in the TARGET language. No exception of any kind will be made.

Our first project we need a translator for today must be a NATIVE ENGLISH translator.

Please send your rates and CV to careers [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com

Please also make sure to register with us here, to be considered for this and future translation projects:

http://www.worldlanguagecommunications.com/careers

MANDARIN/ENGLISH INTERPRETER

We need an interpreter for a client meeting on Wednesday, 1/22 for 6 hours in Los Angeles.

Please contact us if available and with your rate here:

careers [at] worldlanguagecommunications [dot] com

Please make sure to register in our database to be considered for this and future projects.

You can register here:

http://www.worldlanguagecommunications.com/careers

A Deaf Linguist Explores Black American Sign Language

by Heidi Landecker

Students were required to wear hearing-assistance devices in schools like the Southern School for the Colored Deaf and Blind, in Scotlandville, La. The school was established in 1938. (Image courtesy of Joseph Hill, Black ASL Project)

Joseph Hill, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, believes he is the only black, deaf, Ph.D. linguist in America, and maybe in the world. “Just me,” he told an audience of about 40 people on Sunday at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. “No pressure,” he added.

Hill, who is 34, and tall, was giving a talk, “How Black ASL Can Create Opportunities for Diversity in Sign-Language Research,” as part of a symposium on diversity in linguistics. He was speaking in American Sign Language, of course, but because his lips moved along with his hands, to a listener in the back of the room it seemed as if he, and not the interpreter, was talking. That is, until Hill’s lips stopped moving and the voice of the interpreter kept going. (The interpreter turned out to be seated unobtrusively at the front, speaking into a microphone with his back to the audience, so he could read Hill’s signing.)

Before Hill got to the research opportunities, he gave a brief history of how deaf education led to Black ASL. The first school for the deaf was established in Hartford, Conn., in 1817, by Thomas Gallaudet, a hearing American whose son would later found Gallaudet University, in Washington, and a deaf Frenchman named Laurent Clerc.

For the complete article, click here 

Baby Talking to Infants Help Them Learn to Talk Faster, Learn Language Skills Earlier

By Esther Tanquintic-Misa

A new research from the University of Washington has revealed baby talking to infants can help them learn to talk faster and learn language skills earlier.

Specifically, parents or caretakers who baby talked infants in one-on-one conversations and emphasised vowels and different sounds within words are helping these young children achieve earlier language development. According to Dr Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington, babies love listening to parentese, that high-pitched baby talk that uses extended vowels. And given a choice, infants would select to listen to parentese over the usual ways adults speak to each other everyday.

Using audio recordings of interactions between 26 children and their mothers, researchers found that babies responded all the more when parents or caretakers spoke in exaggerated 'baby talk' in one-on-one situations. In these times, babies babble, which is a precursor to word production.

"The fact that infant babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is," Ms Kuhl said.

Children who were often baby talked immediately had an average of 433 words by age 2, versus the average 169 words from children who didn't experience being baby talked.

But not all parents apparently can do baby talk. Others have it like it's an additional talent. Others have to cautiously work on it for the sake of their babies. For the latter, scientists advised to try just chatting aloud to your child as you go about your everyday activities.

For complete article, click here 

Minding our Business Language 

Business should be about serving customers and hopefully making a profit in the process. But there are other aspects to business life that some find amusing, while others consider upsetting. As a new debate starts on whether we should be teaching young people languages like Chinese and Arabic to reflect the changing dynamics in world trade, the quality of our business communication in English remains a fascinating topic.

Many consider the jargon used in offices to be a pointless irritation. A survey of 2,000 managers in the UK by the Institute of Leadership and Management found that the most irritating phrases according to those surveyed were ‘thinking outside the box’ – meaning to look at things differently. This was followed by ‘going forward’ which simply means in the future. ‘Let’s touch base’ – used when the person wants to call, e-mail or meet to discuss an issue – was a close third.

Chrissie Mahler, founder of the Plain English Campaign, believes there is a serious side to the irritation and overused jargon: it could be holding business back. She insists: “Management-speak gets in the way; it acts like a barrier to procuring new business. It is downright dangerous... the longer mangers sit around like gnomes with their fishing rods in a pool of ‘blue sky thinking’ the longer it is going to take for the economy to bounce back.”

Terry Smith is the CEO of Fundsmith, a UK organisation that aims to promote simple business communication. It has just published an amusing paper entitled Banned Words and Phrases. Having been involved in financial services for nearly four decades, Smith is particularly interested in analysing official corporate communication. Company management, analysts and commentators often communicate with investors in a language that is at times obscure, if not outright misleading.

For the complete article, click here 

Making Arabic compulsory in Pakistan’s schools? Why?

By Farahnaz Zahidi 

This will be a rewarding move if the ministry also considers what is being taught to students in the name of Islam and more importantly how it is being taught. PHOTO: REUTERS

Arabic came into my life out of a desire to know and understand what was written in the Holy Quran. My curious, questioning mind needed answers and I now know that a one-on-one relationship with the Quran has the potential to alter my life forever.

Having lived that, I thank God repeatedly for being blessed with the understanding of Arabic. It is wonderful when you no longer have to rely on translations to understand your faith. Translations are a great starting point, but the Quran’s feel tends to get lost in translations.

You understand what it is saying when you read, say, translations by Marmaduke Pickthall, Abdullah Yusuf Ali or Fateh Muhammad Jallandhari, but you lose out on the nuances and the delicate meanings.

You do not get to know that the word ‘Bushra’ means happiness that starts reflecting on one’s skin and that all Arabic words from the root letters ‘Jeem Noon Noon’ allude towards things that are not visible – things like Jannat (heaven), Jinn (creatures of the unseen world) and Junoon (trance or mania).

Understanding Arabic gave the five prayers more soul and the Ramazan taraweeh became a joy for me.

Another step forward was reading other Islamic literature sources in depth, like Sahih Bukhari and books about the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). One relishes the sweetness of why the Prophet (pbuh) nick-named Hazrat Ali (ra) ‘Abu Turaab’ and the poems that Hassan ibn Thaabit (ra) wrote in defence of the Prophet (pbuh).

Even apart from Islamic literature, the richness of the Arabic language is undisputed. Knowing the language opens the door to the poetry of Ibn al Farid and the spiritual treatise of Ibn Qayyim al Jawzi.

For complete article, click here 

Lost in translation: Spanish version of health insurance website beset by problems

Mirroring problems with the federal health care website, people around the nation attempting to navigate the Spanish version have discovered their own set of difficulties.

The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late.

A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form.

And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read "for the caution of health."

"When you get into the details of the plans, it's not all written in Spanish. It's written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them," said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami.

The issues with the site underscore the halting efforts across the nation to get Spanish-speakers enrolled under the federal health care law. Critics say that as a result of various problems, including those related to the website, many people whom the law was designed to help have been left out of the first wave of coverage.

Federal officials say they have been working to make the site better and plan further improvements soon. Also, administrators say they welcome feedback and try to fix typos or other errors quickly.

"We launched consumer-friendly Spanish online enrollment tools on CuidadoDeSalud.gov in December which represents one more way for Latinos to enroll in Marketplace plans," said Health and Human Services Department spokesman Richard Olague in an email to The Associated Press. "Since the soft-launch, we continue to work closely with key stakeholders to get feedback in order to improve the experience for those consumers that use the website."

For complete article, click here 

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - The Golden Globe Awards are put on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — a group of journalists who cover movies for international publications — so it's fitting to pay special tribute to international filmmakers.

The HFPA did that Saturday at its 11th annual Foreign Language Film Symposium, which drew the directors of four of the five foreign-language films nominated at Sunday's Golden Globes.

Abdellatif Kechiche of France ("Blue is the Warmest Color"), Thomas Vinterberg of Denmark ("The Hunt"), Paolo Sorrentino of Italy ("The Great Beauty") and Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi of Iran ("The Past") discussed their work with each other and an audience of fans at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre.

Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, whose film "The Wind Rises" is also up for a Globe, wasn't able to attend.

Apart from Vinterberg, who also works in English, each director was accompanied by an interpreter. All said that despite working in disparate languages, film transcends any such obstacles.

"Film is beyond all spoken language," Vinterberg said. "The more local I get in my writing, the farther my film reaches."

His nominated film, "The Hunt," stars Mads Mikkelsen as a lonely teacher whose life is upended by an innocent lie.

For complete article, click here