Home
Webmail
Sakura
Flickr
About meComputers don’t do this yet
The New York Times has a piece on the interpreting industry that’s worth a look: “Some Words About Interpreting.” It’s refreshing to see an article that isn’t breathlessly relaying the latest press release from some tech company promising a breakthrough in machine translation, and actually talking about the fact that multilingual people are in demand and making money.
It’s also interesting to see the info on the size of the telephone interpreting business. These companies have thousands of workers on the books. The president of one services firm says “his interpreters help police officers and other emergency workers deliver an average of 10 babies a day.” That’s a lot of “Breathe! Breathe!” in different tongues.
There was also a bit that I found interesting as a teacher of translation to students who pay quite a bit of money for their classes:
[Language Learning Enterprise founder Kathleen Diamond] seemed to be coasting in early adulthood along a predictable middle-class path, marrying, having two children and holding down intermittent teaching jobs.
Then, the proverbial light bulb went off. In 1979, Berlitz offered her $4.25 an hour to teach French to students who were paying $25 each for the lesson. Assuming a class of 10 students, well, you do the math.
“It was that huge gap that set off something in me,” she said.
I’m making considerably more than $4.25 an hour there, but it’s something to keep in mind for the future.
-
Flickr photos
www.flickr.com 
More of Durf's photos
Comments are closed for this entry.