One Profession, One Voice: Selling the Interpreting Profession to the Public

Nataly Kelly, Chief Researcher at Common Sense Advisory and regular contributor to the Huffington Post, recently created a professional meme for the Interpreting Profession as part of her blog, The Interpreter’s Launchpad.

“What I Do” memes are popping up all over social media, and provide an often humorous look at how professions are commonly stereotyped. The meme for The Interpreter, however, gets to the heart of a deeper dilemma facing our profession. A common stereotype implies a common understanding of what a given professional does. For interpreting however, few people actually know: a) what we do; and b) why it matters.

Interpreters routinely complain about poor recognition, low pay, lack of prestige, and how undervalued the service we provide is. However, before something can be truly valued, it must be first perceived and then understood.

Interested in doing something about our professional image?

At InterpretAmerica we feel strongly that it is up to us, members of the interpreting industry, to create that perception and understanding. To that end, we have invited award-winning communications consultant Spencer Critchley from Boots Road Group, an advertising, public relations and digital media firm, to moderate the PR Workgroup Session: One Profession, One Voice – Selling the Interpreting Profession to the Public. Attendees will receive a crash course on PR and then work to create unified messaging for the profession, continuing the discussion that began during the 2^nd North American Summit on Interpreting. Your contributions will be captured and published as a beginning publicity template for our industry.

Complete details can be found at www.interpretamerica.net/summit. Early bird rates, student and teacher discounts, and poster presentation submissions all still available! Register now!

Change is Coming Whether We Want It or Not: Interpreting and Technology

Imagine the following scenario: An Arabic-speaking patient and her nurse are waiting for the interpreter to arrive to help with complicated post-surgery discharge instructions. The interpreter is held up and the nurse is called to tend to another patient. Even though she knows it is against hospital policy, she takes out her smart phone, taps on the instant interpreting app and reads the discharge instructions into the speaker. After a few moments, voice recognition software begins to speak in Arabic, relaying the instructions after having been machine translated by the app. When the interpreter arrives, the patient has already been discharged and the nurse is busy with another patient.

Does this scenario concern you? Excite you with its possibilities? Or a bit of both? Like it or not, our workplaces are being irrevocably changed by the technology transforming our daily life.

If you are interested in not only learning how technology is impacting the interpreting workplace, but in contributing to what our profession can do to shape its impact, don't miss the 3^rd North American Summit on Interpreting on June 15-16, 2012, in Monterey, California.

Highly-acclaimed technology thought leader Scott Klososky will kick off the Summit with his keynote plenary: The Digital Revolution and Multilingual Communications – A New Paradigm. His speech will be followed by a hands-on panel exploring case studies on Integrating New Technologies into the Interpreting Workplace. Speakers David Frankel, the CEO of ZipDix, Cristiano Mazzei, the Director of Translation and Interpreting at Century College, and Melinda Paras, Director of Paras and Associates and founder of the Health Care Interpreting Network (HCIN), will share examples of ground-breaking uses of technology in remote interpreting and e-participation in multilingual meetings, online training models, and networking public hospitals via video medical interpreting. Finally, Becca Bryant, Technology Developer at Williams Sound, will moderate the Professional Identity Workgroup Session on Technology, Toward a Working Technology Partnership for the Interpreting Profession. Summit attendees will have the chance to share their own vision for best practices for the proper use of technology in the interpreting field.

Complete details can be found at www.interpretamerica.net/summit. Early bird rates, student and teacher discounts, and poster presentation submissions all still apply! Register now!

Translation and Interpreting: Separate Professions or One and the Same?

InterpretAmerica Co-Presidents Katharine Allen and Barry S. Olsen are guest bloggers for the NAJIT blog this week. They address recent developments impacting whether or not interpreting and translation will be considered separate professions or a single trade, including a pending Supreme Court decision related to this question. 

Don't miss this important post at http://najit.org/blog/!

Then check out the new links added to our Publications page for related case documents. www.interpretamerica.net/publications

INTERPRETING: Full Speed Ahead!

INTERPRETING: Full Speed Ahead

Blazing a Trail Toward National Unity

InterpretAmerica is proud to announce the publication of the white paper Interpreting: Full SpeedAhead, Blazing a Trail Toward National Unity, which provides an overview of results from five workgroups held at the 2nd North American Summit on Interpreting.  The report can be downloaded, free of charge, by going to www.interpretamerica.net/publications.

If there is one thing that interpreters are known for, it’s talking, in multiple languages, simultaneously or consecutively. We are the voice of others on a daily basis. And when interpreters come together, we talk. We talk about the intricacies of language and meaning. We talk about what we love and hate about our profession. We talk of how things should be better. And we talk about how something needs to be done about it.

Well, as the old Latin saying goes, Verba volant, scripta manent (Spoken words fly away. Written words remain). Unless they are written down our good intentions as a profession will simply fade away. Identifying problems is easy. Hammering out workable solutions, well, that's an entirely different story. 

On June 17-18, 2011, having experienced many of the problems and challenges facing the interpreting profession first hand, some 150 interpreters, language service providers, technology providers, association presidents, educators, trainers and researchers, divided into five workgroups at the 2^nd North American Summit on Interpreting to find inspiration among colleagues and to look for solutions. By so doing, they took another step toward greater recognition of our profession by the general public and a more organized industry. 

For years, conversations about all that is wrong with interpreting have dominated interpreters’ discussions. This year the tenor of those discussions changed. Excellent ideas, emerging consensus, and visionary thoughts emerged during the workgroups. And we knew that unless they were recorded, disseminated and acted upon, these great ideas and strokes of inspiration would be fleeting, ephemeral. They would be lost to the future, literally wasted because they weren’t written down so they could be referenced, discussed, developed and even disputed. Thanks to the efforts of a superb crew of workgroup moderators, writers and editors, those great ideas and inspiration did not go to waste. The result of all this effort is now available and provides a summary and snapshots of the five Professional Identity Workgroups held at the 2^nd North American Summit on Interpreting in Washington, DC. 

So, now they are ready to be studied, debated and improved upon. What will become of these recommendations? That depends entirely upon us, individually as interpreters and collectively as a profession and industry. One thing is certain; interpreting will continue to be a vital service in the 21st century, as cultures and languages come in contact in a way never before seen in human history.

We now turn our attention to preparations for the 3rd North American Summit on Interpreting to take place in Monterey, California on June 15-16.2012. This year's theme is 21st Century Interpreting: Staying Relevant in a TransformingWorld. In addition to top-notch speakers and sessions, the workgroup format will be back. We plan to leverage the momentum gained during the 2nd Summit workgroups into concrete gains for our field. We welcome your feedback on the white paper and invite you to view the full program for the 3rd Summit here.

Barry Slaughter Olsen & Katharine Allen   

InterpretAmerica Participates in Supreme Court Amicus Brief

InterpretAmerica is proud to announce that Co-President Barry Olsen has contributed to an amicus curiae brief for a case currently before Supreme Court. The case, Kouichi Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd., is one of vital importance to both the translation and interpreting industries. The Court, in short, is being asked to determine whether there is a difference between translation and interpreting as professions. If you want to receive a copy of the brief, send us an email at info@interpretamerica.net and we will send you the PDF file. 


In our mission to help raise the profile of interpreting, nothing could be more important than helping clarify for the highest court in the land the distinct professional practices and skills sets required to practice translation and interpreting.

The National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators has also supplied an amicus brief for this crucial issue. Their brief can be viewed at: http://www.najit.org/documents/amicusbrief.pdf

Take a moment to review these important documents and spread the word about this historic case for our industry currently in front of the Supreme Court.

Deadline for Submission of Proposals for 2012 NAJIT Conference Extended to October 15, 2011

The National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT) Call for Papers for its 2012 annual conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been extended to October 15, 2011. Submissions on any topic relevant to interpreting are welcome. Download submission form here or visit www.najit.org.

2nd Summit on Interpreting Keynote Address: Technology Trends and the Interpreting Marketplace

The 2^nd North American Summit on Interpreting took place on June 17-18, 2011, in Washington, DC. Nataly Kelly, the chief research officer at Common Sense Advisory, spoke to a standing-room-only crowd on “Technology Trends and the Interpreting Marketplace.”

Many interpreters, industry representatives, and professional association leaders were in attendance. Several attendees traveled from as far away as Canada, Europe, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil for the Summit. However many more were unable to attend for a host of reasons. But thanks to MediaVision USA, the Premier Technology Sponsor for the 2^nd Summit, we were able to record Nataly’s keynote address, which we offer here in its entirety. (Just click on the video above.) The slides of the presentation will be available soon for download as well.

So, if you had hoped to make it to the Summit but didn’t, couldn’t make it because of cost or distance, or simply had no intention of attending but are now curious, we invite you to sit back and open your eyes and mind to the possibilities of what interpreting can become in the 21^st century if we embrace and shape the technologies that are being used to provide interpreting services. Please share your thoughts with us after you watch the keynote address.

The 2nd Summit wasn't all technology. Five workgroups met on the second day to discuss topics vital to the future of interpreting: professional associations, education and training, certification and credentialing, legal and advocacy, and technology. All of the groups took careful notes of their discussions, which will be condensed into a white paper that will be published later this summer.

Thanks to everyone who attended the 2nd Summit and to all those who followed us on Twitter (@InterpAmerica) and Facebook (InterpretAmerica). The Summit on Interpreting will move to the West Coast next year. Mark your calendars now and join us in Monterey, California, on June 15-16, 2012.