As the sole language provider in the city awarded this notable designation, and working together with other selected Emerging Business companies, we are privileged to build relationships for Game Day itself and for the future long beyond the game. 

Everyone in Indianapolis is excited and eagerly looking forward to February 5, 2012, and all the activities leading up to this world-class event in the two weeks preceding it. 

Eloquence will support its fellow businesses with language translation and interpretation work wherever we are needed.

When the world comes to Indianapolis, Indianapolis will be ready for the world!

But have you ever heard of the Pilcrow?  The Interrobang?  The Exclamation Comma or the Snark?  (Gotta love something called the Snark!)  No?  Check this out (click to enlarge the picture):

I’d be sad to see the apostrophe bite the dust.  I’m one of those people who goes crazy when I see punctuation used wrong.  But then, linguists are like that, aren’t they?

This author’s newest book,  The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, will either be a page turner for people who like punctuation or a sleeping pill for people who don’t.  I’m planning on being up all night reading.

Of course, we can graciously speculate that it’s probably because we don’t know what they’re saying that makes it sound so zip-zip-zip and that English must sound the same way to them, but guess what?  The answer really is far more interesting than that.

Researchers from the French Université de Lyon wondered, too, and they recently did a study to find out why.  You can read the details in the article, but in short they discovered that some languages are more “dense” than others, meaning that some languages say more in fewer syllables than others and don’t have to fit as much into the same time period as others to say the same thing.  So, while English is a relatively “dense” language and can be spoken at a little slower pace to impart meaning, Spanish, it turns out as one example, is less dense than English, and so it IS spoken faster to make up for it.  And the fastest spoken language of the 8 tested was the least dense of all, which was…..Japanese!

So, it isn’t your imagination running away with you when you hear another language and think, “Whoa there–not so fast!”  Everybody is trying to get their thoughts out in a similar period of time, and depending on the language you happen to speak, you may just  have to “giddy-up”!

Me?  I don’t like it at all.

I think cursive handwriting is part of the formative process of learning a language.  I’ve read that research has shown that the process of physically forming and connecting cursive letters actually enhances the cognitive language learning process.  It has to do with the brain’s analysis of the letters and sounds making up the word as the hand slowly forms the letters one by one.  It aids with spelling, which heavens knows, a lot of people can use the help with.

An article in the New York Times by Jennifer Lee describes how using a computer keyboard has all but destroyed many Chinese people’s ability to write Chinese characters.  They’ve plain forgotten them.  You can see the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20010201thursday.html .  Americans who use computers all the time forget how to spell properly, too — their spellcheck does it for them.  As a linguaphile, I know how untrustworthy spellcheck can be.  Just because you type a word doesn’t mean it’s the word you meant.  But if it’s in the dictionary–even if it’s the wrong word for the sentence–the spellcheck often accepts it. 

Lovely.

I like a keyboard as much as anyone else.  It’s fast, and it’s simple.  But I’d rather get a handwritten thank you note any day than a tweet.

I’m old fashioned.  I believe we owe it to our kids to keep them in touch with a pencil or pen and teach them the detailed care of creating cursive letters to heighten their language learning.  In my opinion, taking the easy way out by teaching strictly keyboarding at the expense of cursive writing is asking for trouble. Indiana doesn’t get it.   This decision isn’t doing our kids any favor. It’s just going to make them language poorer.

A response arrived that knocked me over.  It was from a self-proclaimed medical doctor from a country that shall remain nameless and who was so full of himself I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to work with him in person or from afar  The letter was over the top.  It was chock full of hyperbole like “One of the best translators you’ll ever meet in your life”,  “No need to mention how great I am”,  “I am very clever and helpful”, or “I won’t talk very much about the championships I got”.  Really?

The more a person demands the attention of others to how superior he is, the lower his own self-esteem.  Such insufferable know-it-alls rarely make good team members.

One hallmark of a good translator  is humility.  It’s the acknowlegement that he doesn’t know it all, the insatiable interest to learn new things and the openness to self-improvement.  Mr. Full-of-Himself didn’t get my job.  Eloquence chooses to work with fine, thoughtful, serious linguists whose focus is on the customer, not on themselves. Working for excellence for the sake of the product, not for the glory. That’s the real secret to success.

If I were an Arabic translator with government clearance right now, I’d be jumping on the government’s doorstep to get a piece of the action.  Not only would it be guaranteed work, it would be national-defense-quality important work.  Can you imagine the responsibility for getting the translation precisely right on that job?  You certainly don’t want to mess up that baby!

It’s good to see that foreign languages are still making headlines–even though it took ten years and a scumbag like Osama bin Laden to make the need for Arabic translation the next big thing.

According to the most newly released information, one in six Americans is now Hispanic.  Hispanics account for more than half the nation’s growth between 2000 and 2010, jumping to over 50 million people.  They are all over the continental U.S.  While before they were mostly concentrated on the coasts in the larger cities, now they live in the most unlikely places, including small towns, of the U.S. heartland and elsewhere.  Seven states would have lost population were it not for the Hispanic community in this last decade.

What this means is that this country, which up to very recent years was primarily a black-white nation, is now heavily populated by growing ethnic communities, such as Hispanic and Asian, for example, everywhere, which cannot be ignored.

Americans have long felt alienated from the rest of the world, separated as we are by two oceans from Europe and Asia, and with one of our two adjoining nations speaking English like us, we’ve felt pretty smug about not having to deal with the “foreign influence” and gotten pretty upset when told that we had to accomodate to other languages and cultures. 

That world of isolation is dead.

Nowadays, if a business or government entity wants to make contact with all the members of its community, it can no longer ignore the fact that a vast majority of the faces out there are not necessarily native English speakers or members of the good old boy membership.  When the census says that barely three decades from now non-Hispanic whites will be a minority, any company worth its salt had better sit up and take notice.  Foreign languages are going to have to become part of the focus in outreach, advertising and public relations of any organization planning to stay in front of the public market. To think otherwise is to ignore the onrushing future, bury one’s head in the sand and nail one’s feet to the floor. 

We’re here to help you get on board the language train.  Don’t get left behind and become a statistic.

This afternoon I heard from this company for the first time since last fall.  They say they have a new system, a “Five-Star Rating System”, and they want to “negotiate” my rates so I can be “competitive” with the other providers in my area.  (Red flag!)

First the caller started with my certifications.  She needs proof, she said, that I have a company certification.  (I certainly do–I’m a Certified Woman’s Business Enterprise with the State of Indiana AND the City of Indianapolis, as well as a trained Spanish-English medical interpreter. What do they do with independent providers who aren’t a company??) Okay, so no problem there.

Then we got into the rates.  “I see you charge $XX with a 2-hour minimum,” she said.  I concurred.  “In order to be a competitively ranked Five-Star provider, we’d like to negotiate a payment with you of $YY.”  I was stunned.  She was offering me less than two-thirds of my current rate, which is already more than fair for this area.  I said no dice.  I could see this was going downhill.

Next she brought up the mileage.  As it was, they had only been paying $0.45/mile despite the Federal rate being $0.51/mile and gas now pushing $4.00/gallon.  This lady then had the nerve to ask me to “negotiate” a gas rate of  just $0.30/mile.  That was  unbelievable. I said an emphatic no to that one, too. 

Finally, she told me they now pay a flat rate for No Shows that is basically just a one-hour rate (nowhere near enough to compensate for the expended (read, wasted) time to drive there, cool your heels until you find out no one came and go back to the office) and NO mileage rate to compensate for your gas.  I politely declined again.  We were three for three.

Where is it written that it’s okay to devalue medical interpreting to the point that rates are ”negotiated” down to nothing while when pocketing the difference the agency greedily fattens its bottom line?  It’s disgraceful and unprofessional, especially with that old canard ”cheap pay will make you a Five-Star competitive provider”.  Baloney!  Do you tell a doctor to drop his rates to be  a “five-star competitor”?

Professional work deserves professional pay.  Foreign language provision deserves the respect of any other highly skilled talent.  Don’t show up on this doorstep to wheedle down the pay rates in order to make us think it’s ”competitive”!  Quality is worth the price, and you get what you pay for.

That company should be ashamed of itself.  And as for all those “Five-Star providers” it’s ostensibly sending out?   I feel sorry for their patients.

Poetry is such a nuanced, linguistically sensitive subject.  The words, meter and rhyme are chosen by the poet only after deep and lengthy ponderance of the myriad choices available in the writer’s language.  Words create worlds.  The choice of a word, with its flow of vowels and consonants, sounds soft or strong, rhythms graceful or powerful, contribute totally to the overall effect of the finished line, stanza, work.  A finely crafted poem creates a world in which the reader momentarily lives.  Blessings to the poet who makes something out of nothing through the sensitive use of language.

It saddens me to think that someone believes a machine can equal this richness.  Approximate it, maybe.  Equal it, I don’t think so.  We humans have such hubris.  In our headlong rush to prove we can reinvent life, we fail to see that some things are simply beautiful in the simplicity of their being.  Poetry, whether you love it, like it or ignore it, is one of human beings’ loveliest creations.  Why must we tinker with the human capability to produce beauty by giving it to a machine? 

I’m sorry.  Call me old fashioned.  Call me sentimental.  I think that giving the translation of poetry to a machine and thinking it can spit out an equivalent to the original piece of art is a disappointing, misguided idea.

 Ugh–how pathetic!   Unfortunately, it’s mostly true (what an insular bunch this country is), but take heart, oh souls, there may be some change afoot.  At least, if he has anything to say about it, there could be.

His article is about how Mandarin Chinese is the cool language to teach American kids these days and how many of this country’s citizens are rushing headlong into trying to learn it.  Yes, Kristof says, Chinese is really the language to know for the future, and China will be a force to be reckoned with, but if Americans want to learn a foreign language that is immediate and practical, they’d better learn Spanish.  Hooray!  I love Spanish!

 Kristof argues that the Hispanic population of the U.S. is growing exponentially and within forty years will become nearly 1/3 of the residents here.  That combined with the interesting speculation that as Americans vacation and retire, more and more of them will be enticed to go to Latin America (think, Costa Rica, not just Mexico) where the healthcare, climate and living are easy–and cheaper–and that business opportunities will inevitably involve our neighbors to the south.  All this leads him to say that all America’s kids should learn Spanish–beginning in elementary school–period. 

He notes that anyway, Chinese takes four times as long to learn as Spanish does (it’s not just character driven but is grammatically remote from anything Western Europe has even dreamed of) and tonal based, to boot, so it makes sense to get us all on the Span-wagon before we jump off into the China sea.

Not coincidentally, guess which two languages have been in the most demand at Eloquence lately?  Yup, you got ‘em–those two.

Any time anybody is gung-ho about teaching Americans a foreign language, man, am I on that team.  As his article title says, “Primero hay que aprender [el] español.  Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen.” — First  learn Spanish.  Then study Chinese.  

¡Adelante!