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QUALIFIED translators and interpreters are needed across the United States. The Los Angeles Times reports that Los Angeles and Orange County courts alone could use thirty-five additional Spanish-language interpreters every day. The situation is very much the same throughout California. Every county is clamoring for more Spanish-language court interpreters. A representative of the Judicial Council of California interviewed in the Times article states that “the need for Spanish-language court interpreters in the state will double in the next ten years” (Ferrell and Hotz 16). The council has launched a vigorous recruitment program in an effort to alleviate the severe shortages faced by the courts.
The situation in the medical sector is even more alarming. The Journal of the American Medical Association reports an endemic and acute shortage of competent medical interpreters in hospitals and medical offices throughout the United States (Woloshin et al.) Because the physician-patient relationship is built on communication, inadequate communication often has disastrous consequences from the standpoint of treatment and professional ethics. The AMA report lists the following recurrent language-related problems: misdiagnosis; greater dependency on diagnostic tests; failure to order necessary tests; unnecessary tests, which can be expensive, inconvenient, and may result in false-positive results; loss of important cross-cultural information; impaired patient education and misunderstanding of instructions; and avoidance of necessary visits as well as of routine care. The result, in other words, can be poor compliance, inappropriate follow-up, and patient dissatisfaction. The article also raises serious ethical concerns: all too often informed consent ends up not being really informed; medical histories are incomplete and inaccurate; there are fewer physician-patient shared decisions, creating a situation that violates the patient’s autonomy; and access to care, both acute and preventive, is curtailed. The last is identified specifically in the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a form of discrimination.
Two recent articles point out the extent to which patients’ language rights, meaning civil rights, are derailed in medical environments. In “Worlds and Words Apart,” Jane E. Allen writes of patients being given injections without explanations. She records an interview with Thomas Perez, director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, in which Perez describes “a South Carolina hospital’s practice of denying epidural anesthesia during childbirth to patients who could not speak English. Doctors there said that if there were complications, the women wouldn’t be able to communicate” (51). An article by Joseph Betancourt and Elizabeth A. Jacobs entitled “Language Barriers to Informed Consent and Confidentiality: The Impact on Women’s Health” in the Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association discusses how language barriers have a direct effect on the delivery of health care, especially for women. The article is full of disturbing instances: “At the beginning of the year I had this woman who spoke Arabic, and I wanted to do a few things, including a mammogram, pelvic exam, and Pap smear. This was hard to do given that her young son was the interpreter . . . so we didn’t do it” (295).
The Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services published a notice of policy guidance to clarify the responsibilities of providers of health and social services who receive federal financial assistance from Health and Human Services and to assist them in fulfilling these responsibilities to limited-English-proficient persons in order to avoid discriminating against them. The guidance provided in the notice “does not impose any new requirements but reiterates long-standing Title VI principles [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] that OCR has been enforcing for over 30 years” (“Policy Guidance”). The statement puts health providers on notice that enforcement will be pursued with more diligence in the future. It starts by identifying who should not provide medical translation and interpretation, specifically minor children and people without formal training and no obligation to observe confidentiality.
Besides the need in courts and the medical sector, interpreters and translators are also urgently needed as consultants and in management in the film and television industry (e.g., for captions, subtitles, and dubbing; with simultaneous interpretation of news; in advertising); state agencies (Department of Social Services, Workers Compensation, Department of Motor Vehicles, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Agricultural Labor Relations Board, etc.); the meetings and hospitality industry; school districts; museums, think tanks, and manufacturing; law firms; police departments; and the military and intelligence sectors.
In 1999 California State University, Long Beach, in cooperation with the National Foreign Language Center at Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Applied Linguistics, organized a National Conference on Heritage Languages in the United States. The field of translation and interpretation was well represented at the conference. Officials from the FBI, the CIA, and a variety of other state and federal agencies, as well as the media and the private sector, emphasized the pressing need in their fields for qualified interpreters. In his keynote address, Justice Cruz Reynoso, professor at the School of Law of the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the time vice-chair of President Clinton’s Commission on Civil Rights, stressed that American business must learn to make better use of the wealth of heritage languages available if it is to become more competitive in international markets. Reynoso stressed that United States companies, following the European model, should develop translation and interpretation departments, which would help them secure contracts in the highly competitive international market.
Interpreters earn a good income, especially when compared with entry-level salaries for PhDs in English and foreign languages in academe. The average income for a translator and interpreter in the Los Angeles area falls typically between $60,000 and $90,000 a year. Some translators and interpreters who have launched successful agencies command considerably higher incomes.1
There are currently a handful of MA programs in translation and interpretation, a few certificate programs, and a scattering of courses that lead to neither certification nor degree. The United States appears to have the embarrassing distinction of being the only major industrialized country in the world not to offer a BA (or its equivalent) in translation and interpretation. Because interpreters, especially in the courts and in the medical sector, deal often with situations involving life and death or possible loss of freedom and constitutional rights, standards of competency have to be set very high. Training to achieve a high level of competency in translation and interpretation should start as early as possible; it takes a long time.
In 1998 the California Court Interpreters Association, one of the two main professional translation and interpretation associations in the country; California State University, Long Beach; and the Judicial Council of California formed a study group charged with reviewing translation and interpretation programs in the United States, South America, Western Europe, and East Asia with an eye to developing a BA suited to meet current translation and interpretation needs in the United States. After eighteen months, the nation’s embarrassing distinction has become a thing of the past. It is expected that the BA in translation and interpretation will be approved by the chancellor of the California State Universities System by 15 August, so that the BA can be offered starting in the fall of the 2001–02 academic year. California State, Long Beach will be the first university in the United States to offer a BA in translation and interpretation.
The program will afford students in both English and Spanish an opportunity to develop and perfect their linguistic skills and cultural knowledge to pursue a career in the field of translation and interpretation. The areas covered by the BA in translation and interpretation will include technical vocabulary (legal, medical, business, industrial, drugs, fingerprints, firearms, etc.), written translation, research methodology (including the identification and use of primary and secondary sources), sight translation, and consecutive and simultaneous interpretation.
The program will consist of seven specialized courses and three additional courses in linguistics, civilization, and literature, for a total of thirty upper-division units. There are seven core courses:
The three additional courses in linguistics, literature and culture can be selected from the following four: Introduction to Literary Analysis, Introduction to Spanish Linguistics, Latin American Civilization, and Contrastive Analysis of Spanish and English.
In a related project, the Long Beach Unified School District, the Judicial Council of California, and the California Court Interpreters Association from the Long Beach Schools-to-Careers Consortium formed a partnership in 1999 to allow twenty-five students from high schools a chance to take an introductory course in translation and interpretation as a part of the Young Scholars Program at the university. The students received one hundred dollars’ worth of tapes and books at the start of the course. These younger students in general did as well as the university students in the class. In an exit assessment questionnaire given to the students, many stated they intended to apply to the university and opt for a BA in translation and interpretation. The need to make students aware of the option of a career in translation and interpretation as early as high school and to start their training as soon as possible was well served by the Schools-to-Careers Consortium. At a meeting of the Judicial Council of California Court Interpreters Advisory Panel, five of the high school students told the panel why they decided to become translators and interpreters after taking the Introduction to Translation and Interpretation class. The students made their presentations with poise and clarity, and did their very nervous professor (the author of this article), faced with this intimidating group of judges, interpreters, and administrators, proud indeed. Judge Lance Ito, the chair of the panel, later commented at the same meeting that the presentation by the five students was “the highlight of [his] seven years as chair of the Judicial Council of California Court Interpreters Advisory Panel” (qtd. in Burris).
The translation and interpretation profession, as represented by its two main associations, the California Court Interpretation Association and the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT), has greeted the news of the BA program at California State, Long Beach, with enthusiasm. The California association devoted a special issue of its quarterly publication, the Polyglot, entirely to the new BA. It also held its yearly conference on the Long Beach campus in October 1999, calling the conference, in honor of the new program, “Success is a Matter of Degree.” The new BA was also discussed at length at the NAJIT 2000 conference in connection with two current projects: a national certification examination for translators-interpreters and a new, strictly scholarly, peer review journal in translation and interpretation studies (see “B.A.”).
The BA at California State, Long Beach, the NAJIT certification examination and projected scholarly publication, the yearly conference, and increasing coverage in the press suggest that translation and interpretation may be coming of age in the United States. Language departments should assume the responsibility of training highly competent translators-interpreters to fill a pressing need in a profession where they can feel important and useful and in which they will be well paid.
“B.A. in Translation and Interpretation at Cal. State Long Beach: A Historic Event.” Proteus 8.3–4 (1999): 23–24.
Betancourt, Joseph, and Elizabeth A. Jacobs. “Language Barriers to Informed Consent and Confidentiality: The Impact on Women’s Health.” Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association 55.5 (2000): 294–95.
Burris, Susan. “BA Program Students Introduced at JCIAP Meeting.” Polyglot 30.4 (2000): 6.
CCIA, the Judicial Council of California and the Bachelor’s Degree in Translation and Interpretation at the California State University, Long Beach—A Historic Event. Spec. issue of Polyglot 29.3.5 (1999).
Ferrell, David, and Robert Lee Hotz. “Islands of the Mind: How Language Shapes our World.” Los Angeles Times 23 Jan. 2000: A1+.
“Policy Guidance on the Title VI Prohibition against National Origin Discrimination As It Affects Persons with Limited English Proficiency.” Office of Civil Rights. 29 Aug. 2000. 22 Oct. 2001 www.hhs.gov/ocr/lep/guidancecover.html.
Woloshin, Steven, Nina A. Bickell, Lisa M. Schwartz, Francesca Gany, and Gilbert H. Welch. “Language Barriers in Medicine in the United States.” Journal of the American Medical Association 273 (1995): 724–28.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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