A translation mix up in Sweden

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A bit of a light hearted story coming out of the municipality of Helsingborg in Sweden. This story demonstrates just how translation services could go badly wrong due to the vast complexities of languages. Now let me set the scene for you, you just arrive in a new country, an environment completely alien to you, the buildings are different, the weather is different, the people are different and you don’t speak a word of the language so communication is hard to come by. Well this is the predicament that newly arrived Romanian immigrants to Sweden were facing.

Now you would think that if you were in the position of the Romanian migrants, you would like to establish some form of contact when you need to speak to the Swedish authorities or health care staff and this is exactly what the Helsingborg council tried to do in order to cater to the migrants. They did this by providing translators and interpreters but there was one huge error. According to Helsingborg’s newspaper ‘Dagblad’ the translators and interpreters provided spoke a completely different language to that of the Romanians. Instead of offering Romanian translation services they had mistakenly chose Romany translators, an Indo-Aryan language which is known as a ‘gipsy’ language whereas Romanian has its roots in Latin.

The difference between the two languages was highlighted by an expert Romanian linguist, Lucian Bagiu who explained “Romanians don’t understand Romany any more than a Swede does, you could say that there are more similarities between Romanian and Swedish than between those two languages and Romany.”

It is understandable how the mix up could have come about, through the similarities of the names of the languages. One of the Romanian immigrants commented saying that they “did not understand anything, not a word” before the actual Romanian translators were brought in. Although Per Pehrsson, a Helsingborg official explained that there were no problems faced in communicating with the Romanians regardless of the mix up, he stated “We haven’t had any problem communicating with these people with the assistance of the interpreters we have.”

What are your thoughts on this?

A Major shakeup in Baseball and how translations has helped

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Big news coming from the world of sport today involving one of America’s favourite pastimes baseball. All 30 teams of the Major League Baseball (MLB) are now being required to employ an all year round full time translator for their players from Latin American countries. This new proposal has been championed by current New York Yankees player Carlos Beltran, who himself hails from Puerto Rico wanted to see the implementation of these translation fast!

The translation and interpreters will be partially supplemented by the MLB with $65,000 given to each team to help with costs. The money will come from the penalties incurred by the teams that had preceded the international signing bonus limit, according to documents acquired by The New York Times and ESPN.

It comes after an incident which took place in April 2014 when Beltran’s teammate, New York Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda’s game was cut short as he was ejected for having pine tar on his neck as it helps the pitcher manipulate the flight of the ball. Once the game was over Pineda was grilled by the press but due to his limited English he was not able to communicate properly. Beltran was unhappy with this event, as he said at the time “It’s a problem, of course, because he can’t express himself the way he wants to.”

Beltran wants fast transaltions

Pineda (Left) and Beltran (Right)

Beltran had pushed and with the aid of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) the new policy has been introduced by the MLB.

Translators and interpreters have long been offered by MLB to Japanese and Asian players but has not been the same for the Latin American Spanish speaking players who make up nearly 25 percent of the MLB roster. It makes sense for these services to be offered pre and post games to help the Spanish speaking players communicate with the press as there are far more from Hispanics than there are Asians in the league.

“I am very happy about this, this is MLB we have a large Spanish-speaking contingent of players and coaches, and we need to be as professional as possible in everything we do.” Beltran told the Times after the decision had been agreed.

What are your thoughts on this?

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/sports/2016/01/14/no-longer-lost-in-translation-mlb-now-requires-translators-for-latino/

How a courageous deafblind woman became a Lawyer

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When you think of someone who is deaf you probably think how challenging it is for them to communicate with people who cannot use sign language and can only communicate through the use of some type of translation service. When you think of someone who is blind you may well think unless they have someone that can describe what is in front of them they will not be able to have a full understanding of what is in front of them as opposed to someone with good eyesight. Now when you think of someone who is deaf and blind can you imagine they would someday graduate from one of the most prestigious and competitive law schools in the world, even more become a lawyer and be recognised by the president of the United States? Well this is exactly what an inspiring lady called Haben Girma has achieved.

To understand Habenn Girma’s story you first need to understand the term deafblindness. It is a condition where a person has little to no sight and little to no hearing. Different types of deafblindness exist and people affected by this use different tools/technology to communicate, for example someone who is born deaf and later in life develops blindness are most likely to use communication methods such as interpreting services including sign language interpreters. Other deafblindness forms of communication include braille equipment such as telebraille and graphic braille. With the continued advancement in technology for the deafblind Habenn manages to communicate effectively with the use of a digital braille device.

Haben was born in the US after her mother moved from Eritrea as a refugee with her brother who is also deafblind. Haben graduated from college in 2010 after studying a BA in Sociology/Anthropology. She then went on to study at the sought after Harvard Law School where she became the first deafblind student to graduate from the institution. Haben is now an attorney for the disabilities rights advocated in Berkeley California representing people with mobility disabilities and “Representing the National Federation of the Blind in an action seeking to render Scribd’s reading subscription service accessible”. Outside her work as an attorney Haben often attends speaking events as a guest speaker and has presented keynote speaches for Google and also delivered a TED speech at the TEDxBaltimore 2014. Haben is a keen surfer and was recently featured in the Washington post.