The Canadian Bureau of Public Services and Procurement (PSPC) is the government agency that oversees the Translation Bureau, which is in turn in charge of supplying linguistic services to Parliament and federal departments. In April 2024, PSPC published a statement announcing the approval and implementation of additional health protection measures for interpreters.

As the use of remote meetings for official government business increased in the 2010s, interpreters began experiencing and reporting issues related to working conditions in these scenarios, all exacerbated during pandemic-related virtual interpreting. At that time, the Translation Bureau provided what it deemed were “firm recommendations” on interpreter protection during virtual Parliament sessions, but no measures were actually implemented until much later.

Source: https://slator.com/

Full article: https://slator.com/canadas-translation-bureau-ordered-again-to-address-interpreter-hearing-injuries/

The EU border agency Frontex has been accused of exploiting staff by using a contractor who it is claimed offers interpreters an effective wage of less than €2.50 (£2.11) an hour.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/14/eu-border-agency-frontex-accused-exploiting-interpreters-pay

Canada’s Board of Internal Economy (BOIE), which manages finances for the House of Commons, has approved a six-month pilot project that allows the use of “external” and “remote” interpreters for parliamentary sessions. The pilot project enables the House of Commons to hire freelance interpreters directly, excluding the government’s own Translation Bureau.

Continue reading on Slator

SAN DIEGO, May 9, 2022 —In an age when there is an app for everything, Interpreters Unlimited (IU) has just launched a brand-new smart phone app for booking language services. No stranger to technology, IU has always stayed on the cutting edge of tech from creating their own proprietary client web portal software to creating the industry’s first auto scheduling system. Now, in 2022, it only makes sense to provide services through a smart phone app.

Read the full press release on Slator

Hundreds more Afghan interpreters and their families to be welcomed to the UK as fears grow for their safety

https://news.sky.com/story/hundreds-more-afghan-interpreters-and-their-families-to-be-welcomed-to-the-uk-as-fears-grow-for-their-safety-12321222

These months of confinement have changed our lives in many ways, including how we teach and learn. Despite the terrible consequences the pandemic brought to the professional interpreting world, there have been positive effects: a profession more united than ever before, and the possibility to attend courses, workshops and classes remotely from every corner on earth.

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Interpreting is a professional field. What was once done by whoever was bilingual now has an established certification process. There are less and less reasons to work with unvetted providers. This timeline tells the story on the West Coast, where I live. I am from Oregon, where I am certified as a healthcare interpreter and a court interpreter. The story is told from an Oregon perspective. However, nothing happens in isolation. Oregon often works in partnership with the other West Coast states, or observes their work closely. What happens in the court interpreting field affects the work in the healthcare interpreting field. The story would not be complete without the federal context. Therefore, there are elements from all West Coast states and the history of court and healthcare certification is intermingled.

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Although we are still in the middle of a world-wide pandemic, I have heard from several colleagues that some courts in the United States, and elsewhere, are back in session and they are asking court interpreters to attend in-person hearings. Courts may have their reasons to reopen, but I think is a bad idea for interpreters to answer the call at this time. Covid-19 is very contagious and continues to spread all over the United States and many other countries. This is not the time to risk our health, and perhaps our future, to make the not-so-good court interpreter fees. Technology is such that courthouses can hold virtual hearings, or distance interpreting if they want to have in-person sessions. There are solutions for all judicial district budgets, from fancy distance interpreting platforms, to Zoom, to a simple over-the-phone interpretation with 3-way calling and a speaker phone. Federal courts have provided over the phone interpretation in certain court appearances for many years.  Most hearings are short appearances that do not justify risking the interpreter. As for more complex evidentiary hearings and trials, just as conferences have temporarily migrated to this modality, distance interpreting can happen with a few adjustments. If in-person court interpreting is a bad idea right now, in-person interpreting at a detention center, jail or prison, is out of the question. At least in the United States, detention facilities are at the top of places where more Covid-19 cases have been detected.

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Translators will work with new equipment that will help them maintain social distancing.

Spanish translator Meiby Huddleston is relieved to be working with new headsets with microphones that can transmit over to the client’s headset.

“In my case, it’s one of those situations where I have to be next to them,” she says. “So, that was something I personally was very concerned about, not only for myself, but if I get sick and transmit it to somebody else.”

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For many in line English isn’t their first language, making it harder for them to understand the process.

The multiple translators which specialize in Vietnamese and Spanish, can help people step by step, so that their needs can be met.

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Every time I open a social media platform or check my email I find a message from a distance interpreting platform inviting potential clients and interpreters to a free demo session, an advertisement from an interpreting agency announcing they offer the most affordable remote interpreting services, or they have opened an interpreting hub; and I see dozens of posts from interpreters (known and unknown) showing pictures of their laptops, headsets, and microphones while they smile and stare at the wall in front of their desks.

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The Norwegian Police announced on June 18, 2020 the winners of the NOK 140m (USD 14m) nationwide framework contract for interpretation services covered by Slator back in February.

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Learning a foreign language has led to a Manawatū man interpreting for Japanese rugby clubs and the All Blacks. Rush, 37, has been a Japanese translator for 15 years, but has been at home since Covid-19 interrupted the Japanese rugby season. Rush works as a translator for the Kobelco Steelers in Kobe, near Osaka. Continue reading.

Covid pandemic coverage — Because personal protective equipment is in short supply in hospitals across the country, few clinical interpreters are able to work in person with Covid-19 patients, as they normally would. Most language interpretation is done remotely. Communicating through an interpreter doubles or triples the length of a medical exchange, adding new confusion and anxiety to situations that are already stressful for patients and their families. And the conditions of Covid-19 care — the rapid pace at which cases evolve, the desire of hospital workers to limit the duration of their exposure to patients — create numerous obstacles to effective interpretation.

Continue reading on The New York Times.

Covid pandemic coverage — All across the country, people are calling out and paying tribute to “health care heroes” — medical workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis who have been going above and beyond, putting themselves at risk to help save lives. But among the doctors and nurses and aides and technicians and hospital maintenance workers, there’s one vital group of health care professionals that can often go unnoticed: foreign-language interpreters. And now, especially, those who work remotely via video or phone.

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Turn on your TV and you catch a clip of an international summit. There you’re likely to see heads of state or official representatives wearing headsets as they listen intently to what the current speaker has to say, though they don’t speak the same language. The information will be simultaneously interpreted by professional conference interpreters, who are located in nearby soundproof booths, and sent to the heads of state. However, conference interpreting can be used in a wide range of settings—anytime there is an important meeting where not all participants speak the same language.

Much has been written about the history of written translation, but not as much ink has been dedicated to the history of interpreting, or the history of conference interpreting in particular, even though the use of interpreting predates the origin of writing. This may be partly a function of interpreting’s more ephemeral nature, as well as its lack of status traditionally, but this is changing along with the use of interpreting.

Over the course of the last century, geopolitical necessity helped to shape modern interpreting into the forms we know it today and gave rise to the professionalization of the conference interpreter.

Read the full article on Responsive Translation

When Ericka Guadalupe Vásquez Flores began working as a translator for detained migrants and their lawyers in the United States, she could not stop thinking about her younger brother, Bryon.

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Covid pandemic coverage — Although UK interpreters in the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI) have been granted key worker status, they have not, at this writing, been granted the rights that go along with it, such as fair pay and safety guidance.

Continue reading on Slator.

Covid pandemic coverage — In light of the current global pandemic, the US government expanded Medicare coverage to include medical services furnished through telehealth beginning March 6, 2020, “on a temporary and emergency basis.” Continue reading on Slator.

This blog post lists 150 free books for translators and interpreters. More.

See: Infotra