A new online resource for legal interpreters and translators has recently become available thanks to Vancouver Community College. A team of language professionals collaborated to compile an online legal dictionary consisting of 5000 Canadian legal and court-related terms in English, as well as six other languages: Chinese, Farsi, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. This multilingual glossary of legal terms can be found here: Multilingual Legal Glossary
The resource is the result of the collaborative efforts of terminologists, bilingual lawyers, legal translators, and linguists, as well as other qualified and experienced members of the legal and multicultural communities of both Canada and the country of origin of each language included.
A quick search of one commonly used legal term, “defendant,” yielded excellent results in Spanish, providing a thorough definition for the term in both English and Spanish. This is an excellent resource for anyone working within the legal arena, especially legal translators in Canada. While the dictionary aims to “explain Canadian legal terminology and to provide foreign language equivalents for concepts related to Canadian law,” many of the included concepts and terms are universal across the English language.
Add this site to your working list of references and support Vancouver Community College’s efforts! To help spread the word, ALTA is going to add a link on the Free Resources for Translators page. I hope to see more online reference resources of this nature in the coming years.
Hurray! Yipee! Wowee! Let’s hear it for my favorite part of speech: the interjection! Interjections help to express emotion on the part of the speaker in written language. They are usually separated off from the rest of a sentence by commas or exclamations points. In any language, interjections make the written word more expressive.
I recently read a book titled The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremburg Trial that I thought I would recommend given that the pool of information regarding the history of interpreting can be somewhat limited, or difficult to find.
Written by Fracesca Gaiba, Origins describes how the Nuremburg Trial, conducted from November 1945 to August 1946, was the first international gathering in which simultaneous interpretation was used. Gaiba recreates the events that brought simultaneous interpreting to the court system through a combination of interviews with Nuremburg interpreters and staff, as well as extensive literature and audio review of resources pertaining to the trial. Four languages, English, French, Russian, and German were used throughout the trial. Every listener in the courtroom was equipped with a headset and a selector switch at his or her seat. The listener could then choose one of five “channels” he or she wanted to listen to during the trial: the verbatim speech, English, French, Russian, or German.
California has set a precedent yet again in the world of interpreting by becoming the first state in the U.S. to pass a law requiring that health insurance organizations provide interpreting and translating services to patients with limited English proficiency (LEP).
The law “requires health, dental and specialty insurers to provide subscribers with translators (sic), at least by telephone, while visiting their doctor, pharmacist, ophthalmologist or dentist.”
Senate Bill 853 was officially signed in 2003, but insurance companies had until January 1, 2009 to comply with the bill.
Kudos to California for being at the forefront of providing language services to LEP residents. Let’s hope that other states follow suit.
La Malinche, Doña Marina, La Chingada. No matter what name you use, there is no doubt that she is one of the most influential interpreters in history.
Doña Marina, who came to be known in Mexico as La Malinche, was born the daughter of a cacique during the rule of the Aztecs in the early 1500s. As the daughter of a cacique, she was considered part of the noble class and allowed the opportunity to attend school. Not much else is known about her early years except that her father died and she was sold into slavery (it is not known whether she was sold by her family or kidnapped and then sold), eventually ending up in the hands of Hernan Cortes and the Spaniards during their conquest of the Aztecs.
It is also not known how Cortes became aware of Malinche’s linguistic skills, but within a few weeks of being sold to him she had begun interpreting. In one of the first documented incidences of relay interpreting, La Malinche and a Spanish priest named Gerónimo Aguilar worked as a team to interpret for Cortes by transferring Nahuatl (the Aztec language) to the Chontol Mayan language to Spanish.
They continued this practice until La Malinche was able to learn Spanish and interpret directly from Nahuatl to Spanish for Cortes. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, an eyewitness to Malinche’s skill as an interpreter, stated that “Without the help of Doña Marina, we would not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Angoff Method is a widely used standard-setting approach in test development.
In plain English, it is a kind of study that test developers use to determine the passing percentage (cutscore) for a test. The passing grade of a test can’t be decided arbitrarily; it must be justified with empirical data. The Angoff method relies on subject-matter experts (SMEs) who examine the content of each test question (item) and then predict how many minimally-qualified candidates would answer the item correctly. The average of the judges’ predictions for a test question becomes its predicted difficulty. The sum of the predicted difficulty values for each item averaged across the judges and items on a test is the recommended Angoff cut score. Here is a real world example that illustrates the process:
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.
Presently there are over 6,000 known living languages in the world.
Over the years, I have compiled a list of several great websites that I use as starting points for language research. Recently, as part of a language testing project, I had to locate people capable of administering Speaking and Listening tests in Marshallese.
