Back when I was calling in my stories from the telephone booth, I was also learning about the care and feeding of editors. They like a hook, something to make the story you pitch seem fresh and newsworthy. So what’s an intrepid reporter supposed to do when he wants to rehash some three-year-old study on bad medical interpreting practice? Regular readers will know that this little topic is my top choice for serious axe-grinding.
OK. But still no hook. How about this… Kids’ doctors avoid professional translation. 1000 days later, has anything changed?
Hmmm. Weak. It will just have to do…
This from UPI, “U.S. pediatricians use family members instead of professional translators with non-English-speaking patients, says a new study. [At least it was new back in April 2007.]
“Seventy percent of physicians surveyed said they use the patient’s bilingual [...]

Speech researcher Swathi Kiran of Boston University works with bilingual stroke victims to help them relearn words lost to aphasia. As reported in Scientific American Mind, she found that these recovering patients improve faster if they start with the hardest stuff first.
“She has found that when pa­tients practice the language they speak less fluently, their vocabulary grows in both languages. But when the patients study words in the language they are more comfortable in, only that language improves.
“[She and her colleagues] found that training patients in their weaker language results in transference to the stronger language. Something about thinking in the weaker language automatically helps the stronger language, because they have to do some kind of translation to make sense.”
Researchers show pictures which patients then must name. They’ve found that naming pictures [...]

I know a lot of readers of this blog are bilingual switch hitters, speaking two languages, sometimes more, sometimes even multiple languages at the same time. Comes in handy, especially when you are doing multiple language puns, which are an even lower form of humor than monoglot puns. More seriously, are you the same person in one language as you are in another? Do bilinguals have split personalities? If so, which one of you is reading this?!!
A few years back, researchers at the University of Texas asked bilingual Mexican-Americans “a set of questions designed to assess personality, such as ‘Are you talkative?’ and ‘Do you tend to be disorganized?’ Many participants changed their answers when questioners switched from Spanish to English or vice versa.”
“When participants spoke in English, their responses emphasized [...]

I watch the Super Bowl for the ads, which I suppose is kind of like saying I read Playboy for the articles, except that in the case of the Super Bowl ads, it’s true.  “Parisian Love” by Google was by far the best ad, and it was probably the first time I teared up watching someone else do a Google search. (I tear up plenty on my own searches… try Haiti and you’ll know what I mean.)
The Google ad (first TV ad ever for this advertising firm) tells the story of a romance helped along by a series of Google searches conducted by some guy who finds a new life after a plan to study abroad in Paris turns into love, marriage, and a need to know how to assemble [...]

Legislative lip service talks multilingual medical care, for Medicare beneficiaries. But the best intentions of regulators still leaves lots of LEP (Limited English Proficient) patients  in the lurch. According to The California Medicare Part D Language Access Coalition report “Please Hold”, subtitled “Medicare Plans Leave Limited English Proficient Beneficiaries Waiting for Access,” getting help when you don’t speak English is tough. They had a bunch of callers playing LEP Medicade recipients call and try to get some questions answered. Responses, detailed in earlier posts, are anecdotal, and sound very familiar to what we’ve seen.
These guys were pretty hard on the telephone interpreting services that most healthcare providers rely on to improve access for non-English speakers. But as is clear from the report and again my own experience, that LEP problems don’t magically [...]

How will changes to Medicaid provisions affect care for Limited English Proficient (LEP) beneficiaries? Probably not much, despite considerable room for improvement. Click here for Part 1, where an advocacy group tried to reach out for medical help in languages other than English. The chief finding: Its’ not so easy to find someone who speaks your language if your language isn’t English. But even if you do find someone who speaks your language, your problem.
When callers connected to someone speaking their language, they often did not get the information they were seeking. Beneficiaries who connected to someone speaking their language frequently encountered inaccurate interpretation, lack of basic standards of interpretation, long wait times and unhelpful or rude customer service representatives. Sounds a lot like customer support in English! But it gets worse.
Interpreters failed [...]

Businesses can only spread as far and as fast as they can find people speaking a common tongue, but researcherss at IBM may have the breakthrough. CNN’s Matt Ford’s reports on n.FLUENT at IBM.
The multinational currently has 100 staff working on an internal project named “n.Fluent” that offers instantaneous translation across a variety of platforms.
“n.Fluent” began in 2006 as one of 10 innovations sponsored by IBM’s chairman Samuel J. Palmisano. The company decided that the language barrier was a key issue, both for global businesses and companies with clients worldwide and so resolved to find ways of addressing the problem.
Vernacular and jargon can be particularly problematic for translation software, so “n.Fluent” has been designed to learn from its mistakes and pick up specific terms used within IBM.
To do this the [...]