Lingo24 Company Blog

I guess that everybody is proud of their own language, after all, languages contain millennia of a people’s history, culture and identity; it may come as no surprise then that the Welsh Nationalist Party Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Labour Party, are currently at loggerheads over the future status of the Welsh language.

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As one experiences more and more of the world, it becomes apparent that situations are often never very clear cut: in the words of a famous Monkees song there are ‘only shades of grey’.

Well so it seems in The Republic of Ireland where Joan Clarke, a deaf mother is bringing a landmark legal case against The Galway County Registrar, The Courts Service of Ireland and the Attorney General for breach of her human rights under the Human Rights Act 2003; this alleged breach relates to her being discriminated against for being deaf.

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Languages and the provision of language translation services can mean different things to different groups of people; for the recipients of such services, they can mean the difference between isolation and participation; they can provide a social lifeline and they can mean the difference between interacting within society’s official framework…or not. For the providers of such services they can mean an opportunity to extend their reach to additional clients or service users; they might mean an extra and burdensome responsibility…but now it seems failure to do so in the USA can mean litigation and an expectation of punitive compensatory payments.

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I’m sure that many older readers will well remember episodes of the children’s programs ‘Skippy the bush kangaroo’ and ‘Lassie’. In the midst of some dire situation, Lassie or Skippy would trot or hop over to their respective owners to impart some form of vitally important information and thus save the day. I well remember the occasions when Skippy would hop up to ‘Ranger Hammond’ and make some clicking noises, only for Ranger Hammond to declare to his companions “I think Skippy’s trying to tell us something!”

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Languages evolve. This is an incontrovertible fact and we have only to look back as little as 100 years to see the way that all languages have changed and if we were to go back even further, these changes would be even more apparent. Generally, these changes can be attributed to two factors; additions from outside sources and general evolutionary changes from within; but should we accept these changes as part of the natural evolution of a language, or should we fight to keep a language in stasis? Well this thorny issue has been occupying our French cousins’ attentions across the channel…or should I say ‘La Manche’.

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Now we’ve all been there haven’t we? We arrive at work (or start work at home), we grab that first cup of coffee in the morning and then either have a quick whinge to ourselves or to our colleagues about our workload before settling down to the days labours. Well next time, before we start complaining, maybe we should thank our lucky stars that we’re not part of the 200 or so strong linguistic department that works permanently at the EU.

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Now many of us think that we sometimes have a hard time at work…perhaps the coffee machine has run out of coffee, perhaps we can’t get the days off that we wanted or perhaps we got a bit of a paper cut yesterday that still smarts a little. Well during those times when we are a little down, perhaps we should spare a thought for the civilian interpreters that work with the US Army all over Iraq…they work in what has been recognised as one of the deadliest civilian jobs in the world.

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In many peoples opinion, it is not very often that the EU do very much that is worthwhile nor that is in anybody’s particular interest; I have, however, managed to find one example of an initiative that is actually a great idea and very worthwhile to the future of the translation services industry.

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As ‘firsts’ go, they are almost always important landmarks of achievement and contribute greatly to human understanding and endeavour; take some classic examples from the past; The first printing press, the first instance of powered flight and the first English dictionary. This last achievement, of course, marked the beginnings of the standardisation of the English language and saw the beginning of the end of quaint and ‘olde’ spellings commonly found before the dictionary’s advent.

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As all of us can imagine, being deaf presents a vast range of problems, but the two highest ranking of these are safety considerations and social interaction issues. Unbelievably until now, many deaf people have had to rely heavily upon family members to translate as best as they can for them during such situations as interviews and appointments etc.

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