As strange as it sounds, there is yet another language that in name only, sounds like “Romans” or even “Romany”, however “Romang”, couldn’t be further unrelated from either of these languages.

Roma or Romang is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 1,700 people (as of 1991) in the Jersusu Village on Romang Island in Maluku, Indonesia.

Although Reliable Translations is located in Los Angeles, California, we are international in many ways. We may not yet have Romang translation or interpreting available, however we do have Malay translations, or “Bahasa Malaysia” as it is called most recently; and many other languages of various places around the world.

Esperanto is the most successful international auxiliary language to date, with up to two million speakers worldwide. It was invented in the late 19th century by a Polish doctor, Ludovik Zamenhof, who wanted to end inter ethnic conflict by providing everyone with a common tongue. Zamenhof’s aim was a language that was simple to learn and politically neutral.

Esperanto gained in popularity after World War I, but it was suppressed in Poland during World War II, and many associations that promoted it, including the League of Nations, did not survive the war. Today, the closest thing we have to the ‘international language’ dreamed of by Zamenhof is the very non-simple, perhaps not so neutral English.

Although Reliable Translations does not translate or interpret in Esperanto, we do a fine job at doing so in close to 50 languages!

Why is Los Angeles so linguistically diverse?

The quick answer: because it has attracted people from a wide variety of countries, and these people have brought with them their native languages.  This large and sprawling megalopolis boast’s some of the best weather in the US, is home to one of the world’s busiest airports, and is one of the most commercial and industrial cities in the world.  Since the days of the Gold Rush, Los Angeles has been seen as a land of opportunity and has attracted people from all over.

LA: The mixing bowl of Languages

While Spanish has been spoken in LA since even before Spanish settlers would name it Los Angeles (Spanish for The Angels), heavy immigration last century (especially in the latter half, following a series of economic crises in Latin America) would result in heavy migration to Los Angeles and result in Spanish becoming the 2^nd most spoken language in LA (and the US in general).  While Chinese immigrants speaking Cantonese began migrating here in the early days of the Gold Rush and construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, an influx of Chinese immigrants following the loosening of immigration laws would make LA home of a large population of Cantonese and Mandarin speakers.  Economic uncertainties would also drive South Koreans to the US, many of whom would settle in LA’s Koreatown (affectionately known as K-Town).  Japanese has been spoken in LA since at least the mid-late 19^th century when the first major migration from Japan made its way here following the Meiji restoration in Japan, but subsequent migration would result in more Japanese-speaking households in Southern California in general.

The need for Translation in such an integrated society

The result of this diverse inflow is an ongoing interaction between large population of people, many of whom speak different languages.  This has many implications for everyday life (including the workplace, the legal/justice system, as well as the medical and retail industries).   The result is the obvious need for translation services to maintain steady, ongoing social and commercial interaction in such a large, fast-paced society.

A translation agency helps businesses, courts, and other establishments maintain their everyday functions.  A good translation agency goes beyond translating mere words but also understands and conveys the differing nuances and assumptions different cultures bring with them, avoiding miscommunications and misunderstandings that a mere word-to-word translations usually results in. Reliable Translations is one such agency.  Using only certified translators and interpreters, RT provides unparalleled translation and interpretation in all languages.

 Los Angeles Links and Resources

Author: Chris Casarez

-Cristal

(Please see Corrections & Amplifications below.)

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that “to have a second language is to have a second soul.” But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky’s theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and ’70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don’t really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn’t differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world’s languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn’t necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don’t use terms like “left” and “right.” Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, “There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, “Where are you going?”, and an appropriate response might be, “A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?” If you don’t know which way is which, you literally can’t get past hello.

About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.” Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn’t normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn’t encode or remember the agent as well.

In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase “ripped the costume” while the other said “the costume ripped.” Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read “ripped the costume” blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.

Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.

Patterns in language offer a window on a culture’s dispositions and priorities. For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we’ve found the transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to justice). So does the language shape cultural values, or does the influence go the other way, or both?

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn’t tell us whether it’s language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what’s needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects incognition.

One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too. And if you take away people’s ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.)

All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.

Corrections and Amplifications

Japanese and Spanish language speakers would likely say “the vase broke” or “the vase was broken” when talking about an accident. This article says that Japanese and Spanish speakers would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.”

—Lera Boroditsky is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html

Reliable Translations wishes you a happy holiday season and a very prosperous New Year! –Cristal Muñoz

Interpreters are very well paid individuals; most make in a few hours what a well-paid, middle class individual makes in a day, so why shouldn’t they look like it? Dressing to impress is not the same as showing off or making yourself look more important than others; it is simply a way to show that you are a dedicated professional with high standards and that you take your profession seriously.

To help you avoid common pitfalls, here is a short list of DO’s and Don’ts

• Always dress in business attire (the style can range from business-casual to formal, but never dress in regular clothing unless specifically instructed to do so).
• Never wear flashy colors or jewelry, or dress provocatively in any way. Good interpreters are inconspicuous, great interpreters aren’t even noticed. Avoid flashy ties, overdone make up, pinky rings, wigs, wearing sun glasses indoors, bringing lap dogs….you get the picture.
• Never wear jeans, regardless of how fancy or expensive; it can still be deemed as disrespectful, unorganized and tasteless.
• Never wear tennis shoes or sport shoes, unless specifically instructed to do so. Ladies, never wear very long heels; this too can be considered tasteless; you are there to interpret not to find a rich boyfriend.
• Clothing must always be pressed and look relatively new. Wearing a suit from the 80’s (I don’t care if it’s Chanel) can (and does) give the impression that you are down on your luck. Down on their luck interpreter = doesn’t make enough money = must not be that good = maybe he overcharged me = I’ll have to check around to make sure he really is a pro.

As a seasoned Conference Interpreter, I’ve often found myself quite appalled by all the faux pas and blunders that are so common amongst fellow “professional” interpreters. I have lost count of the times I was stuck inside a booth, dreading the next few days as I dealt with an individual who consistently arrived late, made it a point to put down the technicians (bad idea, my friend! Who will get you out of a pickle the next time you trip over a cord and your entire console shuts off mid-session?), disappeared out of the blue to go talk on their cell-phone, grudgingly carried out their 30 minutes of interpretation and the list goes on!

So when I stumbled upon this little gem of an article (courtesy of the AIIC), I knew I had to share it. Read it over and then print it out and save it for a rainy day…you never know when you’ll be stuck with a primadonna next and you can always pull it out and show it to him/her with a saccharine smile pasted on your face.

In the booth

• Remember that an interpreting booth is a confined space. Act accordingly;
• Keep the documents neat and orderly;
• Do not smoke;
• Switch off your mobile phone;
• Take care not to wear jewelry that can make noise, like wrist bangles;
• Agree on preferred seating and lighting arrangements with colleague(s);
• Turn volume down on your headset if you leave the booth;
• Keep quiet when not working (microphones pick up all background noise so do not shuffle papers, be careful when pouring water, do not eat or make other unpleasant noises);
• Talk into the microphone (some colleagues who regularly work for TV can offer precious advice). But don’t speak too close to the microphone as this will distort the sound;
• Check the team’s language combination and preset the relay switches;
• Make arrangements in relation to working time and changeovers and do not leave the booth when off mike unless it is necessary. Do not disappear for too long.
• Agree the length of your working stints as suits the meeting – but change over during a natural break in speech;
• Be prepared to help your colleague, but not intrusively. It is usually clear when someone needs help with finding a document or a new term;
• Make sure you know how to operate the equipment;
• Try to work with the headset volume low so you can modulate your voice and make sure you monitor what you say either uncovering one ear or leaving both half covered. Remember that adjusting the bass and treble can help as much as increasing volume;

Teamwork

• Get to the meeting on time; a good rule of thumb is to get there 30 minutes before it begins, at least on the first day;
• Introduce yourself to colleagues and the technician;
• Do not hesitate to help your colleagues on the team with difficult or obscure terms; they in turn will help you;
• Tell your colleagues if you’re a beginner; they will be supportive;
• It is bad manners to brandish your business card at a meeting you haven’t organized. Let the consultant interpreter/team leader do the PR work;
• Don’t be worried about not knowing something. Languages are difficult;
• Remember you’re part of a team, so be supportive of your colleagues;

Survival kit

• Don’t forget your spectacles
• Notebook
• Pens and pencils and pencil sharpener. Highlighter
• Wipes for cleaning the headset
• Bottle opener
• Throat sweets/voice tablets (avoiding crinkly paper)
• Paper clips/stapler
• Binoculars are useful in big conference centres where the interpreters are a very long way from the speakers and screen.
• Bring along a printed invoice in advance if you’ve been asked to. A scribbled bill on scrap paper looks unprofessional.

For a detailed guide of booth etiquette, you can also visit this link: http://aiic.net/page/1489

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Interpreter Skill Map: http://www.nationalnetworkforinterpreting.ac.uk/tasks/int_skills/player.html

Tact & Diplomacy: http://www.nationalnetworkforinterpreting.ac.uk/tasks/tact_diplomacy/player.html

Training Resources: http://interpreters.free.fr/

Hi Folks! I wanted to share with you this article I came across some time ago regarding the difference between interpreting and translations. Often times people misguidedly think that all it takes to be a good interpreter or translator is to simply speak two or more languages, but that couldn’t be further from the case! Each discipline requires its own set of linguistic abilities. Hope you find it useful!

The Difference between Interpreting & Translation

Interpreting and translation are two closely related linguistic disciplines. Yet they are rarely performed by the same people. The difference in skills, training, aptitude, and even language knowledge are so substantial that few people can do both successfully on a professional level.

On the surface, the difference between interpreting and translation is only the difference in the medium: the interpreter translates orally, while a translator interprets written text. Both interpreting and translation presuppose a certain love of language and deep knowledge of more than one tongue.

The Skill Profile of Technical Translators

However, the differences in skills are arguably greater than similarities. The key skills of the translator are the ability to understand the source language and the culture of the country where the text originated, and, using a good library of dictionaries and reference materials, render that material clearly and accurately into the target language. In other words, while the linguistic and cultural skills are still critical, the most important mark of a good translator is the ability to write well in the target language.

However, even bilingual individuals rarely can express themselves in a given subject equally well in both languages; and many excellent translators are not fully bilingual to begin with. Knowing this limitation, a good translator will only translate documents into his or her native language, and this is why we at Language Scientific absolutely require it of our technical translators, in addition to their subject matter expertise.

An interpreter, on the other hand, has to be able to translate in both directions on the spot, without using dictionaries or other supplemental reference materials. Interpreters must have extraordinary listening abilities, especially for simultaneous interpreting. Simultaneous interpreters need to process and memorize the words that the source-language speaker is saying now, while simultaneously outputting in the target language the translation of words the speaker said 5-10 seconds ago. In addition, interpreters have to posess excellent public speaking skills, and the intellectual capacity to instantly transform idioms, colloquialisms and other culturally-specific references into analogous statements the target audience will understand.

Interpreter Qualifications

Interpreting, just like translation, is, fundamentally, the art of paraphrasing – the interpreter listens to a speaker in one language, grasps the content of what is being said, and then paraphrases his or her understanding of the meaning using the tools of the target language. But just as you can not explain to someone a thought if you did not fully understand that thought, neither can you translate or interpret something without mastery of the subject matter being relayed.

This article was procured from: http://www.languagescientific.com/interpreting-vs-translation-services.html