A few months ago I wrote about Maya Hess and her big “Red T” education effort. Maya has set up a page on Facebook. “The Red T raises awareness of the plight of translators and interpreters working in conflict zones, detention camps, and prisons,” she says.
Maya believes that the profession is under siege, and “its practitioners face extreme distrust.” Her advocacy is driven by years of interpretation for national security and law enforcement.
“In Iraq, while interpreting between troops and local populations, interpreters wear face masks to avoid being recognized, denounced as traitors, tortured, or killed when they return to their communities. In Afghanistan, letters are slid under translators’ doors threatening the execution of their families. In the United States, linguists for alleged and convicted terrorists have been accused/convicted of aiding [...]

A language goes extinct every twenty-two minutes. Maybe. It might be less frequent; in fact, they probably don’t go extinct but once a week or something. But once every twenty-two minutes is a much better meme. You watch. It will get around.
Whatever the rate at which languages are going extinct, when you take a language offline, a lot goes with it. Like the sum of all human knowledge. A whole way of thinking, of viewing, of knowing, lost forever, a little universe collapsing past the event horizon.  Forgotten. Or if preserved, shadows of meaning on word lists and reels of tape, unused, unfelt, unknown, lost to the hearts of man.
“Efforts to stanch extinctions of linguistic, cultural, and biological life have yielded a ‘biocultural’ perspective that integrates the three,” blog Maywa Montenegro and Terry [...]

That the limited English proficient (LEP) may have a harder time in the emergency room is no surprise, since sometimes it seems that LEP is just an abbreviation for “leper” when it comes to communication. And it’s no secret that professional interpreter services in the emergency room make for happier patients and providers.
But a team of researchers at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. decided to take a closer look to figure out how different methods of interpretation delivery stacked up satisfaction-wise.
They put professionally trained medical interpreters on the floor of two New Jersey emergency rooms to provide on-site Spanish-English interpretation. This was the treatment group. The control group got the standard operating procedure for these hospitals, which included the usual mix: telephone interpreters, ad hoc interpreters, and no interpreter at all.  And guess what? Everyone preferred having [...]

Now, riding a bike, that’s something you don’t forget, no matter how long you’ve been off two wheels. A few years ago we rented some bikes in Amsterdam and, even after all those long years without two wheels between my legs, I found I could still push a pedal or two around and about the canals. Now, I was no Lance Armstrong―probably peddles and chews gum at the same time―but I hadn’t been able to ride and chew before either.  The same thing is true when it comes to language acquisition. Once learned, you don’t forget, or at least you don’t forget as much. Languages learned during childhood and later lost nevertheless leave their tread marks on the neural pathways of the brain decades after the language is no longer [...]

“Traduttore, traditore,” as the Italians say, was a big concern for Maya Hess. She was speaking at the American Translators Association Translation Company Division (ATA-TCD) Conference in Scottsdale, where she introduced the “Red T” initiative to combat the notion that translators were traitors.
In Iraq, interpreters working with American soldiers wear face masks to avoid being recognized. These Iraqi citizens are denounced as traitors, or worse, tortured and killed just for helping Iraqis and Americans talk to one another.
The same life-threatening problems for linguists continue in Afghanistan today, as well as in many other places around the world. Even in the United States, Maya has seen interpreters convicted of aiding and abetting terrorism.
Maya wants to combat this widespread translator=traitor mentality through an ambitious program of global education which she calls Red [...]

For a hundred years, the great ships of the strangers coasted by. Sometimes they came in to trade, sometimes to rob and kill. They were the “metal men,” these Europeans, and the Indians along the coast of New England wanted their knives and axes, but feared the violence and disease they brought.
There was no common language. They relied on the most ancient of diplomatic arts to communicate–kidnapping. One of these hostage heralds (and he may have gone willingly) was Tisquantum of the Wampanog, whose village stood where the Pilgrims would one day settle. He lived for years in Spain and England, learned their languages and ways. They nicknamed him “Squanto and he became their guide to their new and his old world. When he eventually returned home, he found [...]