Court interpreters have a difficult and complex job.
They are not only expected to know two languages completely, they must also know and use various forms of those languages. Court interpreters regularly work with a range of people, including judges, attorneys, witnesses, litigants, and experts in specific subject fields, such as medicine or forensics. To interpret for such a broad scope of courtroom participants, an interpreter must have a considerably large vocabulary that includes legal language, subject-specific language, formal standard English, and colloquial expressions in both the source and target languages. To top it off, there are actually three different kinds, or ‘modes’ of interpreting that each require slightly different skill sets. In the following paragraphs, I will describe each of the three modes.
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Presently there are over 6,000 known living languages in the world. I have been working as a project manager in the language industry for several years now, and I still have a hard time imagining all of those different languages being spoken everyday.
Sometimes the projects that land on my desk deal with languages that I have little knowledge of before being given the assignment. This means that I have to do a lot of research before some projects can get underway. Over the years, I have compiled a list of several great websites that I use as starting points for this language research. Recently, as part of a language testing project, I had to locate people capable of administering Speaking and Listening tests in Marshallese.
What is Marshallese and who speaks it?
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