Another Great Week

This has been another tremendous week for the project, with stories pouring in and all kinds of great support! Here are a few updates:

• Special thanks to Amparo Alvarez of The Wellness Community of Greater Miami for helping to spread the word throughout Florida and the rest of the nation! I've noticed several more hits on the website from Florida-based locations as a result of her efforts!
• The program was also featured in the New Routes electronic newsletter, and on the project website, located here.
• A radio show in a Western state has expressed an interest in featuring the From Our Lips project on an upcoming program. More to come on that soon!
• The sample story, titled, "The Right Answer", shared here and on the project site, will be featured in an upcoming issue of a newsletter for University of Massachusetts Medical School.
  

On the Radio

Regarding yesterday's broadcast on Washington Post Radio, a genius friend who wrote some dynamo code to set up automatic/remote recording of radio programs did us the favor of recording the program. Thank you, Frank!

Now you can download the audio file from our project website here.

I was proud to serve in the interview as a steward for our profession, and to give some much-deserved recognition to the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT) as well.

As indicated in the original Washington Post article, several NAJIT members helped out with this story by providing feedback and locating Vai interpreters. Also worth reading in relation to this story is the NAJIT position paper on preparing interpreters in languages of limited diffusion, especially helpful for court clerks and administrators who are facing an increased demand for interpreters for less common languages.

Manic Monday - Part 3

To round out the Monday Madness...

I just finished a live segment as a guest on "From the Headlines" on Washington Post Radio with anchors Hillary Howard, an Emmy-winning reporter, and Bob Kur, who has been a substitute anchor on Today, NBC News at Sunrise, as well as a moderator and panelist on Meet The Press. My participation in the segment was with relation to the recent article that ran in Sunday's paper.

Hillary and Bob were kind enough to mention the full title of the book, "From Our Lips to Your Ears: How Interpreters Are Changing the World", several times during the brief (6-minute-long) segment.

As is commonplace with live segments, there was not nearly enough time to share everything that one would like to share, but I did manage to convey a couple of key points, including the fact that being an interpreter requires a lot more than just being able to speak two languages. Also, I was able to point to the 2000 U.S. Census data, which shows that Montgomery County has a large number of individuals who speak languages other than English at home (about 31% of the total population), and that there are more than 5,000 speakers of West African languages in the county.

You can download the audio file here.