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Over the past several decades, as the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States has risen sharply, the language itself has come to change and evolve. While it may not come as a surprise to most people, driving through places like Miami, Southern California, and many parts of New York City, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, you might feel as if you’ve found yourself smack dab in the middle of Central or South America. However, what many people may not realize is that the rapidly shifting demographics that have seen the population of Latinos/Hispanics grow from 9.6 million in 1970 to nearly 58 million by 2016 has also seen exponential growth in rural America. In places like Wilder, Idaho, in the heart of rural America, the Latino population has grown such that it has reached a majority of nearly 76% of the population.

Our medical interpreter training program, Bridging the Gap, is one of the leading programs of its kind in the U.S. today. Through our fully licensed program, we prepare bilingual individuals to work as professional medical interpreters in both hospital and clinical settings. Course environments are active, and students learn through participatory training techniques, including role-playing, group discussions and practicing medical interpreting.

Chinese has undoubtedly become one of the most popular languages for translation and localization over the past two decades owing to the dramatic growth of the Chinese economy, including the now more than 800 million Internet users in China with more disposable income to spend, and an e-commerce market expected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2022. Not to mention, with the more than 2.8 million Chinese speakers in the United States – which represents the third most spoken language in the country (after English and Spanish) – Chinese translation, interpretation, and localization services have become even more vital.

In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing language industry landscape, the two key considerations for both language service providers (LSPs) and their clients are price and quality control. These two factors form the basis for LSPs to market and sell their services, as well as how clients choose between the enormous variety of LSPs in the marketplace. However, one frequently overlooked – yet increasingly important – consideration is the issue of information security and confidentiality when it comes to clients’ content and data.

The survival of a language services provider (LSP) rests, quite simply, in its ability to provide quality translation, interpretation, and localization services to its clients. However, given that language is a human function prone to error, misinterpretation, and a high degree of nuance, establishing a standard framework to help ensure quality services and quantify benchmarks and quality metrics has represented an ongoing challenge for LSPs, industry advocates, and clients.

This Article was featured in The Cincinnati Business Courier.

Many of you have wondered how you can know if a translation is any good. It’s a common question. After all, if you spoke both languages involved, in many cases you wouldn’t even need the translation.

There has been some recent debate (perhaps controversy!) about the alleged dubious quality of the Spanish version of the Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) website, healthcare.gov (see CNN and Washington Post). Some are arguing that in creating the Spanish version of the site, authors must have employed a service such as Google Translate to have ended up with such awkward phrasing. No matter what you think about this practice or Obamacare, I am happy that there is a debate happening about the use of machine translation. Even with great advances in recent years, automated translation services, like Google’s and Bing’s, can yield unpredictable results. While it’s probably fine for me to use them to understand my Quebecois friends’ Facebook posts, using it in medicine is irresponsible and dangerous.

There is no doubt that tech firms have made great strides in automated language translation in the last decade. Advances in processing power, algorithms, and voice recognition are now providing almost seamless communication between humans and machine, yet human-to-human communication using a machine interface is still fraught with difficulties and dangers.