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Emergency doctors at Tucson Medical Center will now be able to communicate with deaf patients through the help of off-site translators using American Sign Language.

Tucson-based CyraCom International Inc. has negotiated a contract with TMC to provide a video-based interpretation service.

Although hospitals are required to provide translations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, it can take time for an interpreter to arrive in person.

This Video Relay Interpretation (VRI) service will cut down on wasted time and the cost of interpreters.

The system is similar to other video-chat services, but uses high-definition images to ensure the gestures that make up American Sign Language (ASL) are clear, through a secure Internet connection that meets hospital privacy guidelines.

The video-chat system means a single interpreter is able to serve more people. And ASL interpreters, who are licensed by the state, are in high demand.

This is a service the hospital provides, and deaf and hearing-impaired patients will not be charged for access. The system will become “the standard of care” for patients with hearing difficulties.

However, in some circumstances a live interpreter can still be requested, especially when the patient cannot clearly see the screen.

See: Arizona Daily Star

Nearly half of all court interpreters in the Greater Toronto Area, some with more than two decades of experience, were informed this week they had failed a new test administered last year.

These results could lead to widespread delays in trials and new grounds of appeal for defendants convicted of serious crimes.

Of the 225 people tested, 108 did not receive a passing grade, according to the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General. Many more received a conditional pass.

Only one Mandarin and one Tamil language interpreter passed the test. Only two Vietnamese interpreters received a passing grade, according to a source familiar with the results.

Stella Rahman, president of the Court Interpreters Association of Ontario described the new test, conducted by the Vancouver Community College, as unfair and not an accurate indicator of whether someone is a qualified court interpreter.

Brendan Crawley, a spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General said that the tests were based on transcripts from actual court proceedings in Ontario.

The results are expected to lead to an updated registry of accredited interpreters that will exclude many people who have been working in the courts for several years.

If an accredited interpreter is not available then court staff will search a list of those with a conditional pass. Failing that, an unaccredited interpreter will be asked to come to court and face questioning by the judge, the Crown and the defence to see if the person is acceptable.

See: National Post

Merriam-Webster  has signed an agreement to provide Bookshare with worldwide rights to its entire collection of key references works. This contribution will expand the Bookshare library which today serves over 90,000 members with print disabilities, such as blindness or low vision, a physical disability or a severe learning disability that affects reading.

See: PR WEB

The latest release of SDL Translation Management System will feature the industry-recognized LISA QA Model and SAE J2450 linguistic standard. These are designed to help manage the quality assurance process for all components of a localization project.

According to LISA, 20% of all companies involved in localized product testing use the LISA QA Model in some way, and SAE J2450 originates from SAE International, formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers and a standards-setting body in the automotive industries.

As well as supporting these industry standards, SDL customers can now also create their own customized review models by defining error categories, severities, weights, scoring methods, and acceptable thresholds.

See: Econtent

Live virtual medical and life sciences panel discussion to be hosted on Tuesday, May 11, 2010.

Translating and localizing medical and life sciences content has unique challenges and can take on life-and-death importance. In today’s demanding economic environment, global manufacturers of medical device, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare products often face decreasing translation and localization budgets, yet are still obligated to meet stringent quality guidelines demanded by international regulatory bodies.

The virtual panel discussion will feature several expert customer-side localization professionals from the medical and life sciences industry. Panel members will answer and discuss pre-submitted as well as live questions from the audience.

See: Earth Times

NEW DELHI: Faulty instructions in the Hindi version of paper II in IIT-JEE 2010 could cost students who took the test in Hindi a whopping 48 marks.

The English version of the paper, section IV of paper II had two questions each having four parts (A, B, C and D). However, the translation of Hindi version of paper II said something else.

Kumar said that while English version clearly stated that each question was of eight marks, the Hindi version said each question was of three marks.

See: The Times of India

The language barrier problem becomes a very real one on the battlefield. Troops attempt to interact with the local population on a daily basis, but without enough human translators to go around, miscommunications abound and opportunities for mutual understanding are lost.

In recent years, the Defense Department has deployed electronic translation devices to improve the situation. But most of the technologies provide only phrase-based English-to-foreign language communications. Troops said they would prefer to have handheld systems capable of instantaneous two-way translations so that they can hold normal conversations with civilians.

Language translation technologies are not only useful for the Defense Department but also for other government sectors.

“We have a huge and growing demand to understand what’s being said and written in other languages,” says L. Paul Bremer, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who joined AppTek’s board after experiencing some of the translation problems firsthand.
Technology including automatic speech recognition and machine translators can make human translators more effective, he says. The productivity gains are north of 80 percent when you put this kind of technology in place.

Though machine translators are hitting the market in larger numbers, the intelligence and national security communities are still placing their primary emphasis on hiring thousands of human translators.

Human translators feel threatened by the technology because they think it will supplant their jobs.  This is not going to replace human translators. But the technologies can make them much more productive and increase the capability of analysts throughout the intelligence community and elsewhere to cope with this unprecedented amount of information that’s coming across their desks every day.

See: National Defense India

Literature and education for visually challenged persons in Assam is heading for a revolutionary change with the development of computerized transcription of Assamese language into Braille, using Duxbury systems – the world’s leading software for Braille that would automatically convert Assamese language written in Unicode – computer language into Braille.

See: Eastern Panorama

New for 2010, The London Book Fair is pleased to announce the introduction of the Literary Translation Centre which will bring publishing and translation communities together to raise the profile and increase the quantity of literary translation in the UK and abroad. English is both an important market for translation as well as having long been recognised as an important staging post in translation from one language to a third language. The UK is also an important hub for those organisations focused on translating foreign literature, making The London Book Fair an ideal location for this vital new feature.

See: Booktrade.info

The American Indian Language Policy Research and Teacher Training Center in the College of Education and the Language, Literacy & Sociocultural Studies Graduate Student Organization are hosting the 2010 International Indigenous Language Policy Research Conference.  The conference, which will be held in the Student Union Building, will focus on the impact of national and local policies on the survival of indigenous languages throughout the Americas.

Some of the topics and issues that will be explored during the conference include: International social, economic, or political polices and their impact on grass root efforts for Indigenous language maintenance and revitalization; national education policies and their on impact Indigenous language maintenance initiatives; the role of school and community-based efforts in the survival of Indigenous languages and key issues, and challenges facing Indigenous language communities.

Housed in the College of Education, a central aspect of the Center’s mission is to facilitate an international dialogue about policy issues that will foster a better understanding of the unique issues challenging Indigenous communities in the maintenance and survival of their respective languages. Its goal is to explore the commonalities that will help build collaborative support and advocacy of Indigenous language maintenance efforts by bringing together scholars and advocates representing diverse language communities.

See: UNM Today

Duong Thu Ai, the translator with the highest number of books published in Viet Nam, talked with Trung Hieu about his work.

Over the past 21 years, translator Duong Thu Ai, a member of the Ha Noi Writers’ Association, has translated and compiled nearly 200 books totalling more than 70,000 pages.

See: Viet Nam News

Lionbridge  has appointed Jack Noonan to its Board of Directors. Throughout his 30-year career, he has served in several Chief Executive and management positions with industry leading software companies.

See: TransWorldNews

Julia Chambers took the part-time job as an interpreter one year ago with the Monroe Public Schools. Now, she is among the nearly two dozen interpreters used by the district.  Chambers’ job may have sounded like an oddity decades ago, but today, many school districts in Snohomish County say interpreters and translators are just another part of doing business.

Kevin Hendzel, a spokesman with the American Translators Association based in Alexandria, Va., said the reason for that shift can be attributed to President Bill Clinton’s executive order in 2000. That federal mandate required schools receiving federal aid to provide translation, addressing the written word, and interpretation, for oral remarks.

Twenty years ago, if the parents didn’t speak English, there was simply a communications gap.

While the executive order may have formalized the need, many local districts said they already had the practice in place. The services have been used in Mukilteo, Lake Stevens and Granite Falls for as long as anyone can remember.

Now, some letters to Everett students’ homes are drafted in five different languages — English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Vietnamese. The district’s automated phone-call system also leaves messages in preferred languages.

This is the most important way to ensure our families are part of the education process.

None boomed as greatly as the Hispanic population. According to the U.S. Census, the county had 28,600 Hispanics in 2000. By 2008, the most recent year with data available, that number leapt to 47,100.

Monroe has felt that growth. At Frank Wagner Elementary School, for instance, the school posts messages on its outdoor reader board in both Spanish and English. Interpreters also are a regular sight. Their use has become more common as the community has grown and families have moved to the area that have different native languages.

See: Herald Net

H5 and Linguistic Systems have entered into a strategic alliance to offer businesses an integrated solution for foreign language data services in the context of litigation, compliance, and enterprise information governance. H5 specializes in information retrieval products and services, making them an excellent match for taking on such an endeavor with Linguistic Systems, a leading provider of language translation services.

The move comes as the boom in global trade has led to a greater need for translation services, with a projected 26 percent increase in translation industry by 2014, according to federal statistics. The two companies aren’t the only ones establishing themselves in the translation market, Google being just one example. H5 and Linguistic Systems plan to enable companies to streamline the translation processing, review, and analysis of large documents in foreign languages, which will save companies on costs and increase the accuracy of translations.

See : Venture Loop

Beginning next fall, Northwestern College will offer a new major in Spanish translation and interpretation. The program is designed for bilingual high school graduates who desire to earn a bachelor’s degree in a liberal arts setting and work in the burgeoning fields of translation and interpretation.

The program seeks to help meet a growing demand—locally, statewide, nationally and globally—for translators and interpreters. For example, there are only 11 class A certified interpreters for Iowa’s court system, one of whom is Northwestern professor Piet Koene, who will direct the new program. In addition, the major will provide translators and interpreters for church work, an area of increasing importance as the global church shifts more and more to the south, including Latin America, and as churches in the U.S. seek to extend their ministries to the Spanish-speaking population.

The major includes six new courses, one of which is a senior-year practicum in which students will serve as professional interpreters and translators. The program consists of 35 credit hours in Spanish, translation and interpretation; an additional 14 hours of cognate requirements such as courses in public speaking, linguistics and the law; and classes in a variety of disciplines to meet Northwestern’s general education requirement.

See: Northwestern College

The voice can sound like a robot  — and the translations are often less than perfect. But half a dozen bilingual speakers of Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish said the application works surprisingly well for basic phrases.

Check out the interview with Franz Josef Och, who leads the machine translation (MT) team at Google and has been the driving force behind the company’s Translate application.

See: Brand X

As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.

See: The New York Times

Interpreters are the link that allows 27 countries to talk to one another, conveying the complexities of EU affairs into 23 official languages and preventing the European Union enterprise descending into Tower-of-Babel-like confusion.

The Commission’s interpretation service alone has a full-time staff of 500, backed by up to 400 freelancers when the pressure gets overwhelming, with demands to translate Estonian into Danish or Greek, or Portuguese into Maltese and Slovene.

See: Reuters UK

April 8– Joe Davidson wrote in the Washington Post today on a speech by John Negroponte to the American Foreign Service Association, in which he said that the “greatest challenge” facing the Foreign Service is people with the language proficiency to “develop the contacts, the knowledge, the insight, the local and area expertise” to help develop foreign policy. The GAO said in Oct. 2008 that nearly one-third of officers in worldwide language-designated positions did not meet the foreign language speaking and reading proficiency requirements for their positions, up slightly from 29% in 2005. Arabic and Chinese are especially deficient. In Iraq, 57% of Foreign Service officers lack sufficient language skills.

See:  The Washington Post

The best part about apps is that they expand functionality in devices like the iPad. The latest iPad app from Nuance Communications, maker of acclaimed voice recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking, will do just that by allowing users to control the iPad and write text with their voices.

See: TechNews Daily