Spanish medical interpretation can mean the difference between good and bad patient care for millions of Americans.

According to a 2005 study conducted by the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, the number of elderly Latinos in the U.S. will climb to 13.8 million by 2050. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Latinos 65 years and older are projected to outnumber all other elderly minorities by 1 million as soon as 2030. In addition, Latinos have lower mortality rates than non-Hispanic whites in the 65-and-older age bracket. All of this adds up to a potential patient care crisis that can be avoided with proper language services.

There will surely be an influx of elderly Latinos that need health care in the coming decades, and in many cases, there will be a language divide between those patients and their care givers. In such cases, Spanish medical interpreters will serve a vital role. While family members could interpret for some patients during medical examination or hospital stays, in most cases, being somewhat bilingual is simply not enough. Who would you trust to help care for your family member?

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To verify that an employee or potential employee can speak or write another language at the level you need, you must test. In most professional circumstances, it takes more than a simple interview: you need to be confident that the language testing methodology you employ is both valid and reliable. Validity requires that the test accurately reflects the skill level required to perform the job. You want to know whether an employee or potential employee can use the language at the level you need, and legitimate testing services will offer protocols to measure performance versus a standard. ALTA’s language testing services address these needs for validity and reliability by providing the following:

• Valid testing methodology supported by statistical analysis
• Native speakers administering the tests
• Security of the test materials and results
• Process for reviewing and appealing test results.

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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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Arabic has proven to be a difficult language to test.

In Western countries, the intricacies of the Arabic language are not common knowledge. The idea of a diglossia, in particular, has little context in English and other Germanic languages and Romance languages. What is meant by diglossia is the co-existence of two separate versions of a language, often representing a hierarchical delineation.

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