An Interpreter’s Role – and Risks – During a Pandemic
As the coronavirus continues to make international headlines, interpreters may be weighing their own personal risks against their need – or ability – to work. Interpreters who operate as independent contractors often work in multiple settings across a variety of sectors, including clinics, businesses, conferences, schools, and other educational facilities. Without paid sick days to […]
Frogs Don’t Say Ribbit, So Why do We? How Languages Represent Animal Sounds
What animals make the following sounds: “oink-oink” “knor-knor” “groin-groin” “boo-boo” and “nöff-nöff”? Trick question – all these sounds are made by a pig, albeit in English, Dutch, French, Japanese, and Swedish, respectively. If you listen to a pig in Sweden and a pig in Japan, though, they sound the same. The sounds that animals make […]
The Precautions that Help Protect Hospital Interpreters from COVID-19
Hospital interpreters are some of the most careful people I know when it comes to infection prevention. In the first hospital where I worked, my colleagues regularly wiped down their desks with disinfecting wipes at the end of the day. They had rank-ordered the bathrooms in areas they frequented by cleanliness, and would walk up […]
How Much Money Do Interpreters Make?
As more non-English speakers enter the United States, the demand for interpreters — who convert oral conversations from one language to another — is growing fast. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of interpreter jobs in 2018 topped out at more than 76,000. Job growth over the next eight years is […]
Does Artificial Intelligence Process Language with Bias?
Many large internet platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are beginning to rely on artificial intelligence to help stop the spread of hate speech online. The hope is that AI programs using complex natural language processing technology will eventually be able to identify hate speech much faster and more accurately than human beings. It’s a […]
Foreign Words You Already Know: 5 English Language Cognates
Even if you’re not bilingual, you likely have a much more robust foreign-language vocabulary than you think. That’s because many words in other languages – especially the Germanic and Romance languages – have twins in English. Sometimes they’re fraternal, and sometimes they’re identical, depending on spelling and pronunciation. But one thing’s for sure: there are […]
Can Animals Talk?
It’s an age-old question, and one that continues to be widely debated in the scientific community: can animals talk? And if so, might we someday be able to converse with some of our furry, scaly, or otherwise slimy counterparts? Over the centuries, there have been countless anecdotal examples of animals that have learned to use […]
Is Body Language Universal?
In 1967, Albert Mehrabian published a groundbreaking research paper that established the 7%-38%-55% rule. This rule states that, in decoding messages about positive and negative feelings, only 7% of our conclusions come from the words spoken by the person we’re listening to. 38% comes from tone of voice, and the majority – a hefty 55% […]
5 Difficult Words to Translate
There are some foreign words that just don’t have an English equivalent. These types of words are often dynamic and multi-faceted, originating out of cultural practices that are different from those of English speakers. Language professionals face an incredible challenge when they’re called upon to translate concepts or words that don’t exist in the target […]
How Does the Sound of a Word Relate to Its Meaning?
In psychological experiments first conducted in 1929 and then repeated in 2001, scientists asked a group of individuals to give a name to two unnamed shapes. The scientists were trying to determine whether the names for these shapes would be arbitrarily selected by the participants or if there was a more intuitive process behind the […]