Here’s a case where proper translation and interpretation would alleviate a growing problem - access to prescription drugs. The reality is that many non-English speakers could be put in harms way in many medical situations daily, at the hospital, in a clinic, with their family doctor, in schools and at the pharmacy. Without translations bilingual staff, how can one ensure proper health services? Read more.

Pharmacies across the city routinely fail to help non-English speakers understand their prescriptions, raising the chances that customers could harm themselves by taking medicines incorrectly, immigrant advocacy groups charge in a discrimination complaint that they plan to file today with the New York attorney general’s office.

The complaint names 16 pharmacies in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island, most of them operated by chains. It argues that federal civil rights law and state health regulations require pharmacies to provide linguistic help to guarantee that people who speak little or no English receive equal access to health care. That assistance should include interpreters at pharmacies and written translations of medication instructions, the advocates say.

One of my favorite authors growing up was Ayn Rand.  In connection with the 50th anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, the Latin Business Chronicle asked three prominent Latin American admirers for their impressions of Rand and her books. One of the interesting insights was the power of her book and her influence based on recent translations of her works.

Has Rand’s influence and popularity grown in Latin America thanks to recent translations into Spanish of her work?

Carpio: Totally. If you look at the last 20 years, of 100 people [in Latin America] that knew of Ayn Rand, that figure has grown hundredfold today. They are young people, entrepreneurs and intellectuals.

Ibargüen: Yes! I believe Grito Sagrado from Argentina, and my friend Fredy Kofman have done a great service to the Spanish-speaking world publishing a new, and uncensored edition [of Atlas Shrugged] wonderfully edited.

Chafuen: Only recently some of the most famous books by Rand have been translated into Spanish. Atlas Shrugged, of “La Rebelión de Atlas” is one example. This is thanks to the admirable work of Rosa Pelz, in Argentina, who deserves much credit. It is rather unfortunate that these translations have come out when due to other circumstances, the enemies of freedom are on the upswing. I think her impact is yet to be felt.

As is the case with so many US cities, the Latino population in Chicago - the country’s third largest - is continuing to grow and influence the language, culture and feel of the area.  This article provides some excellent statistics to help understand the Hispanic/Latino landscape.

With the third largest Latino population in the country, the Chicago area is no stranger to the Hispanic forces that have reshaped the nation.Latinos have driven Chicago’s population growth, stirred changes in the city’s neighborhoods, redirected marketing campaigns and changed the face of the city’s schools.

Even as the pace of immigration slows, the Hispanic population continues to boom as Latino immigrants have kids here.

It is a community set to influence the city’s future, even as it undergoes its own evolution.

Whereas Hispanic immigrants used to put down roots in Chicago, now they’re flocking to the suburbs, where the Latino population has grown by at least 250,000 since 2000—bringing the total Latino population in the six-county region to 1.7 million, 20 percent of the population, said Sylvia Puente, director of the Center for Metropolitan Chicago Initiatives at Notre Dame University’s Institute of Latino Studies.

The face of the Latino community in Chicago is changing, too, as American-born Latinos outnumber and outpace new immigrants, Puente said. With Latinos accounting for 85 percent of the growth in the region’s labor force, ensuring that the children of Latino immigrants are educated is crucial for the region’s economy, she said.

“Will the Latino labor force have the requisite skills to take over? If not, we’ll have a major labor force skills shortage,” Puente said.

Most Latinos vote Democrat, but increasingly more are registering as Republicans or Independents, said Michael Rodriguez, director of field operations for the Chicago-based U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute. They also are becoming more politically involved: Young Latinos in Chicago are registering to vote at four times the rate of their peers around the country, Rodriguez said.

The boom in American-born Latinos has marketing implications, as advertisers who were funneling money to Spanish-speaking media realize the spending power of the better-educated, higher-earning second- and third-generation Latinos.

“There’s this perception that everyone speaks Spanish or watches Univision, but my Spanish is very much limited to when I’m with my parents,” said Jaime Viteri, founder of Chicago Latino Network. “In terms of media, we’re pretty much assimilated.”

Hailing from Mexico, Argentina and many places in between, Chicago’s Hispanics make up a diverse community.  Click to read more and see detailed statistics on Chicago’s Latino population.

There are few things more powerful than a parent who is engaged with their children’s education. With this in mind, IBM seems to be reaching out to Spanish speaking communities to help them access information that has been difficult in the past. While I’m not clear on the value of another web-based automatic translation tool, anything that is done to bridge language barriers and to improve eduction is important.   Read more.

Spanish is the primary language spoken in Isabel Perezs home.

“Because I don’t speak English that well, it’s difficult to help my children with their homework. Sometimes I don’t understand it,” said Isabel Perez.

Today, Perez can use new translation software.

IBM showed it off at a technology fair, held at San Joses Herman Intermediate School. The fair was aimed at getting Hispanic students excited about science and technology.

The free software is currently available only to schools and nonprofit organizations through an IBM grant.

It translates entire websites and even email from English to Spanish and vise-versa within seconds.

“We currently have three grant sites locally, and hopefully plan to get it implemented into Herman next year, once we complete the donations with their computer lab,” said Jennifer Hernandez from IBM Corp.

“This technology will allow me to communicate with my kids teachers, check on their progress and make sure their homework is complete,” said Perez.

“Our main goal is to get more parents involved in the students education,” said Lourdes Esparza from San Jose Unified School District.

These stories have become so commonplace - it’s amazing. The real question is who is doing these translations? One would think an airport understands the importance of global travel and communication with an international customer base. And they should also never be using translators who aren’t native in their translating language… On the other hand, translation is an art, not a science, so there will be variation. But in a single building, single project, there needs to be consistency. However, these types of stories are always interesting…

With the rise of international travel, language issues also have become critical. Should signs be multilingual? Which language gets top billing?

Translations can be especially tricky because even within the same language, idioms vary from country to country. At Hartsfield, where Delta Air Lines Inc. has been expanding into Latin American markets, officials last year began posting some signs in English and Spanish. But controversy erupted over the Spanish translation for “gate.” Delta finally decided on “salida,” (Spanish for “exit”), but some Spanish-speakers complain the word should be “puerta,” or “door,” says Mr. Yee.

Joe Labozan of Carter & Burgess prowls the world’s airports pondering questions such as, why does one sign say “toilet” and another say “restroom”? Inconsistency is one of his signage peeves. Other common problems include too many signs that create confusing clutter, and a lack of signs at “decision points” such as corridor crossings or the bottom of escalators, where people pause to decide their next move.

US Airways Group Inc. recently called in Mr. Labozan to diagnose problems in its terminals at Philadelphia’s labyrinthine airport, where passengers have such a hard time transferring that the airline has dedicated an employee to giving directions.

Translation of documents, interpretation and related communication tools are a necessary part of our culture, not a luxury, and not only for the global businesses. And while some school districts claim that providing translations of documents for parents is codling immigrants, this school district in Utah actually taking that a few step further by creating their own department of translation. Read more.

With 74 different languages spoken by families in the Granite School District, communicating with parents may take more than just sending a note or a phone call home.
“[Its] an absolutely important role for our district to get translation and interpreting services centralized,” said Rob Averett, district director of elementary school services.

This summer Granite added the Translation and Interpreting Department to offer support services for parents, students and district staff.

Before the addition, schools had to find their own interpreters and translation services. “We saw the need for it and recognized the need to reach out to the community,” Everett said.

…Prodan said one of the goals is to make sure parents are well-informed and for them to feel engaged in their child’s education.

“If we connect with the parents a lot better, we can get better results,” Prodan said. “This program really serves the community. . . . I’ve seen the good results that come out of it.”

Staff can send written work for translation to the office to provide information to those parents who have limited English skills.

Translation holds so many places in our society, and it can be very interesting to learn about some of them. I’m not a big opera fan, and I never thought about translation needs of an opera house. In the Baltimore Sun, they wrote of an opera performance where a poor translation lead to a distraction of laughter during the performance.

The Baltimore Opera Company’s opening performance of Verdi’s darkly beautiful ‘La forza del destino’ was nearly ruined for me by a sound not typically associated with this work: laughter. No, I’m not talking about the mild comic relief Verdi intended, a la Shakespeare, in a couple of scenes involving an out-of-sorts friar. The giggles and guffaws came instead in the midst of deadly serious business. I consider the primary culprit to be supertitles, the translations of the text projected above the stage. Sometimes I think people were better off not knowing every line in an opera.

…The line in ‘Forza’ that started the laughter Saturday night at the Lyric Opera House came at one of the most introspective and lyrical passages in the score, when the doomed Alvaro contemplates his misery. The original words from the libretto are probably best translated as ‘Life is hell for those who are unhappy.’ The translation used here (if memory serves) was ‘Life is miserable when you are unhappy.’ Either way, it’s not a great line — in English. And I can understand why it would strike some folks as comical. I still wouldn’t disturb a performance by laughing, or blurting out, as the man behind me did, ‘Boy, that’s profound.’ The point, expressed by Alvaro in more poetic Italian, is that the heavy curse of a cruel fate has made him feel that living without his beloved Leonora is worse than not living at all. When people are robbed of what gives them happiness, life is hell. Not such a belly laugh, now, is it? I hope the opera company will replace that supertitle translation in the remaining performances, and just get the gist across, not worrying about the closeness of the translation. Or just remove it entirely. Nothing, at any rate, should disturb Antonello Palombi’s gorgeous singing in that scene.

It may strike most of us as a minor difference in meaning, but to the intended audience is meant a lot. Like many translations, it’s not the literal meaning of the words, but the shades of language and communication that are so difficult and so important to capture. Read more.

This is a fun site - translations of High School the Musical in Spanish. But what’s more interesting to me is the preface that describes the translations…

Welcome to Breaking Free, a humble site for fans of the Disney Channel Original Movie High School Musical who are either Hispanic or studying Spanish in school. After hours of strategic paraphrases, syntactical experimentation, revisions, and verbal debugging, I am pleased to present a complete collection of all the songs from the movie translated into Spanish.

What makes these Spanish lyrics useful is that I did not translate the songs literally. The translations here are pro canendo (Latin: “for singing”) translations. Each one remains as faithful as possible to the meaning of the original lyrics while expressing that meaning in words that fit the rhythm and melody of the song. While some specific meaning is sacrificed, the loss is minimal and well worth the preservation of the musical quality.

Translation is not a static job. A good translation is not about a literal word for word English to Spanish change. You need to take into account context, subject and purpose. In this case, the purpose is to have singable and possibly rhyming / musical lyrics. Read more and enjoy the music.