Beyond Words Language Blog readers might know ALTA primarily as a translation company, but we are also national leaders in the Language Testing sector. Our leadership in medical, government, and corporate language testing keeps us busy with interesting projects for clients and partners. In the last year alone, we worked with Walmart, Kaiser Permanente, International SOS, major US airlines, financial institutions, and non-profit organizations throughout the world.

We test nearly 100 languages, but just as our top translation services provide an interesting glimpse at language trends for business and government, the top languages we test reflect much about current political and economic conditions, and the importance of valid and reliable language skill verification for business, health care, and national security. Here is the data on the top languages we tested in 2011:

Top 10 Languages Tested (2011)

The Top 10 Languages Tested by ALTA Language Services in 2011: English, Spanish, Pashto, Arabic, Dari, Japanese, French, Farsi, Korean, and Russian.

Other Language Testing Articles

Language Testing: How Test Validity Works
Language Testing and Health Care Reform:
ALTA and Kaiser Permanente Breaking Cultural Barriers
Psychometricians: What They Are, and What They Do
What is the Angoff Method?
Norm Referenced vs Criterion Referenced Testing
Multiple Choice Test Development 101
The Value of Independent Language Testing

After providing translation services for more than three decades, ALTA Language Services has developed a rigorous approach to ensuring translation quality. In 2011, we took our commitment to quality to the next level and applied for ISO 9001:2008 certification for our translation quality management system. ALTA passed the compliance audit with zero nonconformities, a feat achieved by fewer than 5% of the companies that pass their initial registration.

ALTA’s Translation Quality Management System outlines a clear path to quality translation work, beginning the moment a document is received for a quote up to completion of the project. The TQMS requires ongoing commitment from translators, project managers, and upper management.

As part of this process, we are constantly looking for ways to improve ourselves. We strive for high-quality translations, quick turnaround times, and a high level of customer service. ALTA’s translation team holds regular project audits to review our performance in all of these areas. We place tight restrictions on translator selection and continuously monitor translator performance. Through this process we have developed a robust team of some of the most skilled translators in their fields, many of whom have been working with ALTA for more than a decade.

For more information about ISO, please visit: www.iso.org.

A few weeks ago, one of the Russian adults that I tutor in English cheerfully opened her door to me with the words, “With Thanksgiving!” When she saw the bemused look on my face, she added very formally, “I congratulate you with the American holiday of Thanksgiving.” After I thanked her, I launched into an explanation of why the Russian greeting template does not hold in the English language. Typically, in English, we congratulate people on their accomplishments: “Congratulations on your graduation”; “Congratulations on your new baby”; and the like. We do not congratulate one another with holidays, instead wishing everyone a happy, merry, or joyous celebration. But not all languages follow suit. Below are some deviations and permutations in multicultural well-wishing — from, perhaps, the most cross-cultural of celebrations. In honor of a certain Baby New Year’s big day, the examples compiled are birthday greetings.

My student astutely said the words “with Thanksgiving” because, in Russian, all birthdays and holidays are greeted with congratulations and shortened to “with [insert any holiday]“, like c днем рождения (“happy birthday”). Romance languages typically coincide with English, such as the Spanish feliz cumpleanos, French joyeux or bon anniversaire, and Italian buon cumpleanno. German expands just a bit with alles gut zum Geburtstag, expressly wishing someone all the best on his or her birthday. Rather appropriately, the makers of Esperanto decided to compress and simplify the greeting, but still wound up with three versions: feliĉan datrevenon, feliĉan naskiĝtagon, and feliĉan naskiĝfeston.

Many languages also take the occasion of a birthday to wish the birthday boy or girl a long life, such as the Greek χρόνια πολλά (hronia polla), meaning “many years.” Most Chinese dialects use the same format, as do many other Asian languages.

Whichever language you choose to express wishes of health, happiness, and love to those around you this winter, we at ALTA hope you enjoy a joyous holiday season!

In the days leading up to the massive protest at Moscow’s Bolotnaya (“Swampy”) Square, numerous blogs, tweets, and posts across the city called for a careful, civil, peaceful gathering of tens of thousands of Russians fed up with their government and electoral system. A common trope held that revolution in Russia has had and can have horrific repercussions. The people have seen their revolts herald political movements worse than the ones that preceded them, and they were not keen to repeat that mistake. The people treaded softly, spoke gingerly, and made modest (by Western standards) demands: Annul the election results and hold a new election, have electoral commission chief Vladimir Churov resign, and free the scores of political activists arrested as a result of protests held earlier in the week. Some also called for a Russia without Putin.

Not since the early 1990s has Russia seen demonstrations on such a scale. Talk of rigged elections and federal corruption are not novelties here, but until now, most Russians had resigned themselves to powerlessness against an unassailable system. The Levada Center, one of Russia’s largest non-governmental polling and analytical organizations, published data earlier this year suggesting that 62 percent of respondents believed that the 2007 elections were rigged in favor of United Russia, the ruling party. Yet 2007 did not see tens of thousands of people organized in peaceful protest. The December 4th elections represent what many observers and experts believe to be a point of no return for the Russian ruling elite; concessions, however small, will need to be made.

Although numerous stumbling blocks were tossed in front of the protest’s organizers—including scheduling important exams for schoolchildren and university students on Saturday afternoon and forcing a change of venue from Moscow’s Revolution Square to Bolotnaya Square, an area far less suited for large gatherings—the protest began punctually at 2:30 pm and ended just as punctually at 5:30 pm. It remained non-violent, non-aggressive, and even the rapport between demonstrators and police was civil and cordial. For most of the three hours, the adolescent police officers stood scratching their whimpering, muzzled dogs and looking bored. The rumored instigators—people purportedly paid by the ruling party to taunt and jeer and provoke others into a state of angry disarray—were nowhere in sight.

As the demonstration ended and snow began to cover the ground, protesters trickled out of the square, across the footbridges, flags slapping in the wind as the nationalists, as the communists, as the liberals—as representatives of every underrepresented party—headed home, pausing only to trample a United Russia poster left torn and filthy on the muddy ground.

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Photograph © Maria Khodorkovsky

November 21, 2011

For Immediate Release

Global Success Centers Selects ALTA Language Services

ATLANTA, Georgia – The Global Success Centers is pleased to announce that ALTA Language Services has been selected as its preferred translation services provider. ALTA Language Services is an Atlanta-based translation services business with over 30 years experience supporting internationally minded small businesses and Fortune 500 companies. Competitive pricing, broad language coverage, ISO process controls, and the ability to support voice, document, and website translational needs are the reasons ALTA was selected over its national competitors. “ALTA is one of the best in the business and we are excited to have them as part of our network,” says Mike Gomez, President and COO, Global Success Centers. “The mission to dramatically improve the success rates of small businesses coming to the U.S. is a noble one,” says Rob Jones, CEO, ALTA Language Services. “We are pleased to be part of this endeavor.”

CONTACT INFO:

GLOBAL SUCCESS Centers

Dawn Ely, Founder, CEO, 678-249-4894

Mike Gomez, Founder, President and COO, 678-908-8433

http://www.globalsuccesscenters.com/

ALTA Language Services

Jonathan Woodroof, Account Director, 404.920.3836

http://www.altalang.com/

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Modern English is threaded through with all manner of polite turns of phrase, evasive maneuvers, and superfluous tautologies. We do not ask a question; we ask if we may ask a question. We say “I’m sorry” when someone tells us that he has been sick, as if we had a hand in orchestrating the flurry of microbes that wreaked havoc on his body. And we ask to be excused as a preface to myriad statements that discomfort and inconvenience neither the speaker nor the listener. Politeness seems to be a built-in component of the English language and a familiar and comfortable trope for most Americans and Brits.

This fact becomes readily apparent when traveling abroad, for most countries and most languages do not tread as softly. I am currently living in Russia, a country not particularly renowned for its timidness of speech and thought, and find myself playing the timid, overly-polite American on a regular basis. In restaurants, for example, it is not customary to address the server with a tremulous “excuse me” before requesting something. Russians yell out “девушка” (young woman), “молодой человек” (young man), or “женщина” (simply, woman) to catch the madly-scurrying server’s attention. In buses, passengers hand their change over to the driver with the word “берите” (“Take it” as opposed to our “Here you go”). In the latter example, the Russian phraseology may ruffle Anglophone feathers because it puts the onus of responsibility on the person providing the service rather than the one requesting it. While the end result is the same, modern English demands that we skirt around brute, bare facts with the pleasantries of circuitous wording.

The psychological aspect of polite versus direct language is perhaps even more interesting than the linguistic one. While it may be difficult to disentangle the history of language and general behavior as it pertains to a nation, it is easy to see the link between the two. Modern Russian’s relative absence of pleasant, but ultimately unnecessary euphemisms, is reflected in modern Russians’ direct, no-holds-barred approach to dealing with people and situations. Modern English’s abundance of such phrases speaks to our desire to please and comfort and create an amicable atmosphere. The people that stand behind both forms of communication are similar in their desires, intentions, dreams, and aspirations, but their approaches are modeled on the current climate of their countries and their languages.

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Illustration © Lee Gone Publications

Of the fifteen languages that the State Department has termed “critical needs” languages for national security or commerce, the popularity of Arabic among American students has shown the most marked increase. According to a 2010 report by the Institute of International Education, the number of American undergrads studying in Arabic-speaking countries increased from 562 students in 2002 to 3,399 in 2007. While that number is still significantly smaller than that of students traveling to the United Kingdom or China to study, it is indicative of a growing emphasis on one of the world’s most volatile and relevant regions.

Public and private schools alike have made strides to implement Arabic-language programs, and the number of students taking Arabic courses has doubled between 2002 and 2006, according to the Modern Language Association. More and more students, parents, and policymakers agree that the inability to speak a foreign language puts many Americans at a competitive disadvantage with citizens of countries that begin mandatory foreign-language study starting from the elementary school years. In a 2008 town hall meeting in Powder Springs, Georgia, President Obama himself expressed embarrassment at not being able to speak a foreign language, urging Americans to ensure that their children will speak at least one language other than English.

The move to bolster foreign-language education, however, is not without its contentious points. Last year, a number of middle schools in Mansfield, Texas were awarded a Foreign Language Assistance Program grant by the Department of Education. This five-year, $1.3 million grant caused an uproar among Mansfield’s parents when they were caught off-guard by the mandatory Arabic language and culture courses that it would bring in its wake. As a result of resounding disapproval, the program has been put on hold indefinitely. Despite a few initial sputtering starts, Arabic-language courses are gaining momentum, and students from elementary school to continuing adult education classes are trying their hands at this difficult but rewarding language.

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Photograph by Hishaam Siddiqi

Crowdsourcing endangered languages is one way to preserve languages in peril of disappearing. Biagio Arobba’s website LiveAndTell, for instance, uses a social media interface to archive Native American languages. Still, other methods have recently been developed to catalogue and disseminate endangered tongues. Spearheaded by Laura Welcher, the Rosetta Project is a product of The Long Now Foundation, “a foundation created to encourage clock and library projects. (Other Long Now projects include the building of a 10,000 year clock in a mountain in Texas and Long Bets, “an arena for accountable predictions.”) While LiveAndTell offers an interactive and accessible means of preserving and using an archive, the Rosetta Project swings to the other side of the spectrum: the long term archive.

According to the website, the Rosetta Project “serves as a means to focus attention on the problem of digital obsolescence, and ways we might address that problem through creative archival storage methods.” The people involved in the project, like Laura Welcher, are trying to achieve this goal through the digital archive – the first prototype being a three inch in diameter nickel disk inscribed with 14,000 pages of information. Unlike a computer disk, however, the Rosetta disk is etched with images, not code, so any person can read it with the right magnification. The website states that “with minimal care, it could easily last and be legible for thousands of years.”

Since developing the prototype, the Project has gone on to etch sets of parallel documents in over 1,000 human languages with the belief that by recording all languages, they have provided a key to deciphering any language in the future (much like the Rosetta Stone was the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphics). Today, they have inscribed over 2,500 languages and the project has expanded to an internet archive. Open-access, the archive can be used by anyone with access to the internet.

All this said, the project is still growing and one key event was the recent Rosetta Project event in San Francisco. Over 100 educational and cultural organizations were invited to attend, and “the organizers [were] hoping to capture 50 different languages during this ‘record-a-thon‘ with webcams and cellphone cameras and in a studio.” With over one hundred languages represented in the Bay area, the location was undoubtedly a good place to start.

While Welcher and the Rosetta Project’s goal is wider in scope than Arobba’s crowdsourced LiveAndTell, it’s easy to compare and contrast the two in an attempt to find the “better” solution. Arobba criticized the Rosetta Project for being too static, for not responding to speakers and learners soon enough – indeed, it does take time for the project to record, etch, and archive new language material. On the other hand, the Rosetta Project addresses the need for a research-backed archive of the world’s languages. LiveAndTell, while easy-to-use and instantaneous, is self-editing, like Wikipedia. Its users must patrol the accuracy of new words or phrases logged on the site.

Essentially, the two projects focus on different needs and different approaches for language conservation. One is for the public, the other is for researchers or those in academia. It remains difficult to argue which, if any, is truly better than the other. In the end, languages and dialects continue to be recorded – and that is always a good thing.

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Photograph of the Rosetta Disk’s face. See more images at the Rosetta Project website.

Many young Americans experience their first taste of foreign cultures and distant lands while in college, taking a semester or year abroad to hone their foreign-language skills, broaden their cultural understanding, and, more often than not, party with the locals. Now, faced with a dearth of jobs at home and the prospect of moving in with mom and dad, many American youth are turning their skill-sets and desire to travel the world to teaching English abroad.

Being one of those young Americans, I have spoken with many college graduates who have decided to forgo grad school or the daunting recession-era job search, opting instead to teach English abroad. Whether through international placement programs, TEFL/TESOL certification courses, or their own initiatives, these students are finding a wealth of opportunities teaching their mother tongue to children and adults. Below you will find some helpful information about getting started in ESL teaching.

Organizations and agencies like the Peace Corps, the State Department (which administers the Boren Fellowship), and the Institute of International Exchange (which sponsors the Fulbright Fellowship) have given young people the opportunity to conduct research and provide international assistance for several decades. More recently, however, multitudes of language-driven programs have cropped up, some global and others country-specific, that help connect potential ESL teachers and their students. One such company, Oxford Seminars, provides a handy inventory of the introspection and preparation required to begin teaching abroad. Doing the sort of preliminary research suggested on their site is the best safeguard against succumbing to the initial difficulty and discomfort inherent in living and working abroad.

While many ESL jobs do not require certification, others demand either TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) or TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) credentials. As the market for qualified native speakers becomes more competitive, many agencies supplant hands-on teaching experience with training and certification programs in which the teacher is granted certification through either online classes or in the course of teaching abroad.

The options for teaching abroad have expanded rapidly in the past few years, giving more Americans the opportunity to immerse themselves in foreign cultures and languages while providing non-native English-language learners with invaluable skills and knowledge. More information for potential ESL teachers is available on the U.S. State Department website, as well as through most major university sites.

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Pupils with counting-frames in classroom, about 1930. Courtesy of Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo