Telephone Interpreting Book

Exciting news!

Today it was announced that my book, Telephone Interpreting: A Comprehensive Guide to the Profession, will be published through Language Line Services. Click here to read the full press release.

While this book is entirely separate from the From Our Lips to Your Ears project, many readers have written me as a result of stumbling across information online about the telephone interpreting book. So, it seemed important to share this update here as well.

For more than a year now, I've received your emails asking me how you could obtain a copy of the telephone interpreting book. Up until now, I was unable to let you know when the publication might actually reach you, and could only thank you for your continued patience.

Now, I am able to reassure you that, thanks to Language Line Services, my book will finally reach the public and help others learn more about telephone interpreting.

As many of you know, telephone interpreters worldwide comprise a large part of our family of interpreters. They serve an important purpose in ensuring the delivery of all kinds of services that are provided via telephone in a variety of fields, including insurance, 911/emergency calls, finance, telecommunications, health care, social services and more. As such, their work can be extremely difficult, yet vital to both the lives of individuals and the functioning of society.

The publication of this book will expand the knowledge base for researchers, consumers and language professionals alike, hopefully enabling greater levels of quality to be reached through telephone interpreting.

The book will be published in the course of the next few months, and more updates will be shared through both my and the publisher's websites.

Thanks again to all of you for your patience - now that the wait is nearly over, the book will soon be out there, helping the world, just like the very interpreters who inspired it to begin with.

Interpreter Training Resources

A big word of thanks to the folks at Interpreter Training Resources, a wonderful site with resources for conference interpreters and their trainers.

The From Our Lips to Your Ears site has been linked to the front page for a while, and it has generated a large number of visitors to the site.

While the site is mainly for conference interpreting, there is an excellent section on Note-Taking that should benefit interpreters in nearly any setting.

Definitely a resource worth bookmarking!

Language Loss

Today, Columbus Day, as we imagine what the linguistic landscape of the Americas was like prior to massive colonization, it seems of particular importance to share this message from the Center for Endangered Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

The world’s languages are dying out

In the United States, 165 Native American languages are still spoken.

• 74 almost extinct (handful of elderly speakers) (45%)
• 58 with fewer than 1,000 speakers (35%)
• 25 with 1,000-10,000 speakers (15%)
• 8 with 10,000+ speakers (5%)
  

The largest Native American language is:

Navajo 148,530 speakers

(just for comparison:)

Danish 194,000 speakers in this country
Tagalog 377,000 speakers in this country
Hungarian 447,497 speakers in this country

In the world, approximately 6,000 languages are spoken...
...of which only about 600 are confidently expected to survive this century.

Interpreters, read more fascinating information on language loss by visiting the Center for Endangered Languages. If you or a colleague speak an indigenous language fluently and are interested in a master's program for contributing to the field of linguistics with regard to an indigenous language, please click here to learn more.

Translation Studies Forum

Thanks to Konstantin Tovstiadi at the University of Oklahoma for sharing information about the project on the forum for Translation Studies, a wonderful site with all sorts of current information for interpreters and translators.

The site is a joint web location for the European Society of Translation Studies, the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA) and the Canadian Association of Translation Studies.

Traduction technique, interprétariat et coaching en anglais

I was very pleased to see a kind blog post from an interpreter in Brittany regarding the From Our Lips to Your Ears project. This blog, called Traduction technique, interprétariat et coaching en anglais, looked like it might be of great interest to many French interpreters and translators who visit this site, so I am sharing it here.