The Linguists Radio

Hello Linguists! Last week was my birthday and nothing brings me more happiness than knowing that more and more amazing people are interested in being here in The Linguists Radio! Today, our special guest is instructor Marco Hanson, a master license court interpreter, an American translators association certified Spanish-English translator with over 20 years of experience, and the co-owner of Texan Translation. Marco told us that he has kids going to college and they are following dad's steps by studying languages, and they have a lot of fun by having words of the day in four different languages! I definitely going to steal that! Like many of our other guests, Marco has noticed that in most of the cases, an interpreter o translator began the journey by going to college for something else and ended up in this career and he is not away from that group. His very first experience with languages was when he was a teacher of 7 years old Spanish students, and he highly recommends doing this if you are starting o practicing a new language, children have fewer problems pointing out details and misspellings, and that makes you feel so embarrassed that you really will feel motivated to get things right. We talked about how many people are bilingual o plurilingual but also, how does the "feel" of the languages is transmitted when the person you are talking to can tell you are not a native speaker, and when this happens, it doesn´t matter how good your language is, other skills are needed. Also, how important is it to be certified since once you get it, some career doors are now open. He leaves us a very useful tip, which is to work in your branding, the client that is usually monolingual does not judge us always by the way we translate or interpret but the way how we introduce ourselves as professionals.

Hello Linguists! Today at the Linguists Radio we have Natalia Noland! Natalia has been an interpreter and translator for over 30 years,  she holds a Master's degree in English Language and Literature, Ph.D. in Linguistics, she has been teaching English and translation in institutions of higher education for over 35 years. She also has extensive administration experience having served as a highschool vice-principal. Currently, she is offering AAS, a level 2 certificate for interpretation that she personally developed at Houston community college. She is an eminence with that extensive biography! Natalia gives us an interesting insight, is not enough to know two languages or to be bilingual, you have to learn how to do interpretation, there are a lot of skills or needs that need to be qualified in order to be an interpreter. I highly encourage anyone who wants to continue their path in this amazing career to watch until the end of this interview.

Hello Linguists! Today at our show we have a special guest as we had each week since the first episode. Ernesto Jimenez is an interpreter that has developed this career since 2008, and since his first job, he fell in love with the challenge and the process. He also became aware of the difference between being bilingual and being an interpreter, two years later he started working as a community interpreter where he committed more to the career by getting his state certification. Currently, he is working as a linguistic advisor with advertising agencies, production and direction agencies generally behind the scenes and many of us have seen in his role as an interpreter in Judge Judy's TV show. Ernesto describes being an interpreter as being on an adventure, every day the world is getting smaller and sometimes the only barrier that exists between people is the language. It may sound cliché as he said, but there's a whole world where we as interpreters can be part of such unlimited things. This interpretation world, this translation is much bigger, amazing, exciting than our first began at interpreting and translating.

Our guests today are the owners of Nightingale,  providers of American sign languages ASL services since 1987. Anthony one of the founders comments that translators and interpreters are two different cultures and the people that get into that field are usually not aware that translators work more with contracts, words, and literature while interpreters are dealing with live things all the time, a peculiar statement to be honest. One of the experiences they told us in this interview is that at the beginning it was trouble to find interpreters and translators for languages with limited diffusion,  and also with habilities to be interpreting live. They also comment that RSI interpreting is not always the first option for ASL interpreting since some tech issues make it slow or difficult to understand. ASL is a language that involves more than using your hands and in this pandemic-era the use of masks limits how the interpreters can interact because ASL interpreters are finding trouble communicating facial gestures. Did you know that you can find small variations of ASL across the country? This blew my mind!

What a week.. and what a year huh? It's 2020 and it had to be special, right? As I established at the beginning that in this platform I want to share as much information as I can put out for you if you want to train or be a better interpreter. One of the tools I've recently interacted with was Acibo where you can find lots of courses to begin training for consecutive interpreting, simultaneous interpreting, and site translation. Another important tool we speak about in this podcast is SCSI that focuses a lot on interpreting training, an important thing about this school is that all their teachers are certified, court interpreters. A very well known and high prestige school for interpreters is the University of Arizona, they have the national center for interpretation, this University holds boot camps once or twice a year where they just GO AT IT, personally, I recommend this program because it provides the information you won´t be able to find easily anywhere else.

The power of well-chosen words can inform, influence, educates, and retain others. The impacts of words on different people vary because it depends on the understanding and in what manner they conceive it. Our profession as interpreters consists of believing in this power and when I think of Darinka Mangino I think about the epitome of the power of words. Darinka Mangino is a conference and court interpreter for Spanish, English, and French, she holds a master's in Advance studies for interpreters trainers from the University of Ginebra. She is a member of the international association of conference interpreters (AiiC) and the Mexican College of Conference Interpreters (MCIC). Darinka is also a professor and a founder of Lexica Aula Virtual para Interpretes and a founding member of Proyecto Cenzontle. In today's episode, Darinka starts the conversation about the power of words and it's magic and how we can use this as a tool to evocate different feelings. Also, we have a wide conversation about how our career is still not seen as a profession it's seen as maybe...a skill? Interpreting and translating as careers have changed over the years, not in terms of developing new skills but in terms of experiencing and facing new times with standards, associations, and knowledge that can help us pave the way into the road we want to take our profession.

Language interpreters play a crucial role in international business, politics, and important systems. Imagine presidents getting together without an interpreter or a hospital with a sick foreign patient. Interpreters work with clients on a daily basis with commerce, trade, courtrooms, and negotiations and that takes our profession far from simple, and far from uniform in its nature. Although interpreters share with translators the skill to know more than two languages, how and where they do, that depends a LOT on the situation. And this is when our guest of today enters, please claps to Mario Sulit. Mario is a licensed court interpreter based in Dallas, Texas, he came to the profession in serendipity, one random night he was asked by an investigator he knew if he would translate for him in a murder investigation, after making it clear that he had no qualifications for the job he had his first formal interpretation, upon returning from moonlighting the idea came. The next day Mario started researching what it would be his new career and the rest as it's told is history.

How you doing guys! In the episode today, we have Gabriela Magaña as a guest, she is a licensed nutritionist, artist, and Spanish-English interpreter at the Executive Office of Immigration Review as well known as the Immigration Court. Gabriela is from México, she got her degree as a Nutritionist and started working in the newborn area of an important hospital over there, then she moved into the USA and got her second degree in Arts in Painting at the University of San Thomas. Gabriela started 5 years ago as a medical community interpreter using all the experience she got from being at hospitals in Mexico, but she wanted more and that's how her journey as a legal interpreter began. In this 50 minutes podcast, we had the opportunity to share some experiences we had in the immigration court and how emotional they can be since it's inevitable to form some bonds with the applicants when you hear their story and find out that you are with them in the, if not, the most important interview they are going to have in their lives, an interview that determines their future in the United States of America.

Episode 2 of The Linguists Radio went into "Han style" ... Solo. Pamela carried the episode taking a look at some important technologies for translators and interpreters nowadays, which far from posing a threat to our work, have proven to be really useful for us! For example OPI that stands for Over the Phone Interpreting and VRI, Video Remote Interpreting, has become really popular during the pandemic since it's versatility for hospitals, courts and other businesses. Also we share some Remote Simultaneous Interpreting(RSI) and other interpreting platforms that allows us to develop our careers without exposing our health in this times. Are you familiar with these RSI platforms?

Hello everyone! Pamela and Nora present "The Linguists Radio", a new space created to meet colleagues and share exciting experiences in all the different fields of interpretation, translation, and linguistics. In this first episode aired in May 2020, we introduce ourselves as professional performers and talk about how we fell in love with this, still unknown and underrated career. Furthermore, we, translators, interpreters, and linguists, are not out of this new reality and we need to adapt to these new times and explore different opportunities where we can apply our knowledge. We also talked about the fact that our professions are still not taken seriously, and there is no awareness of all the preparation and study we do to translate and interpret. Don't miss a single chapter every Thursday via live streaming and then in podcast format.