Hundreds of people, including doctors and patients alike, rallied last Wednesday in Washington for health care reform. Included in their message was a call to change racial and economic disparities that affect millions of patients in the United States.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 30 percent of minority women have no access to health care.

Protesters heard stories of Asian women skipping mammogram tests because of cultural and language barriers, mothers choosing between feeding their children or going to the doctor, and of a 49-year-old woman who died in the waiting room of an emergency room last year before she received any help.

“This is not about the health care we want,” [Eleanor Hinton-]Hoyt said. “It’s about the health care we need, that we deserve: Health care with no language barriers and that provides the necessary cultural understanding to patients’ needs.”

Supporters of health care reform that encompasses the U.S.’s multi-lingual population (and the language barrier that results in treatment) want to faciliate the process of credentialing medical translators.

Learn more about multicultural health care reform in this article.

WLS Translations, a division of Workforce Language Services, LLC, is dedicated to providing the highest quality translations, transcriptions and interpretations, flexible service and competitive rates.

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Crowdsourcing—in this case, a mass, large-scale hiring of “translation of, for, and by the people”—is a widely used initiative for global companies to translate and localize their Web sites. Facebook, Microsoft and Plaxo are a few who have crowdsourced, and the results have been largely positive. Because users themselves contribute the content, Facebook in Mexico won’t have the exact same Spanish as Spain, for example.

LinkedIn is embarking on a crowdsourced translation project, but the translators they surveyed want nothing to do with it. What’s their beef? First and foremost, the work is not paid, which they believe undervalues their profession.

Here’s one view on their side:

When non-professionals do work for free, it undermines the very profession that freelancers have struggled to build. The job is so oft-misunderstood that translators frequently hear comments like, “Oh, my sister took some French in high school… I bet she’d be a great translator!” This is akin to telling your doctor, “I took a biology class once… I bet I’d be great at your job!”

The translators may be missing the point, however. Companies that crowdsource don’t do it to save money, they say.

…Research reveals that the companies engaging in this practice do so for three reasons: speed (faster time to market), quality improvement (end-user involvement boosts quality), and reach (a collaborative approach extends global reach through word-of-mouth marketing and community-building).

Click here to read both sides of the argument in the full article.

It’s no Esperanto, but “Toki Pona,” a lingo invented by Canadian Sonja Elen Kisa, has people talking. Based on an intentionally minimal lexicon of 120 words, Kisa created the “simple language of good” during a period of depression.

An article explains that her method is backed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language affects the way people think and behave. A psychiatrist quoted in the article says that Toki Pona “is meant to focus on the positive, so negative thought patterns and cognitions can be transferred and eliminated by simply using the language.”

More about Toki Pona:

Its minimalism is attracting a growing following of Toki Ponians. Since publishing the tenets of her language on the Internet in 2001, Ms. Kisa, 28 and based in Toronto, estimates several hundred people have dabbled in it - and at least 100 speak it fluently, mostly in online chat rooms and blogs.

A Colorado programmer is developing an apocalyptic computer game with Toki Pona as the spoken language. An Israeli-German singer and member of the Stuttgart Chamber Choir is including it in a concert of musical pieces composed in constructed languages, alongside Esperanto and Star Trek’s Klingon.

Click here to read the full article by Siobhan Roberts.