infundibulum

I ran across an article from last year on something called a “language bank”: Volunteer translators break down barriers

It describes a program at the Seattle Red Cross that brings together translators for over 75 languages. They help with all kinds of needs that immigrants run into:

The bank and its volunteers negotiate with apartment managers, communicate with citizenship and immigration services, decipher cable bills, and even assist in emergency situations such as residential fires; it all adds up to about 4,000 cases a year.

I was unsurprised to find, after a little digging, that there’s a similar program in my own Montgomery County, Maryland: the Montgomery County, MD - Language Bank.

Cool!

I’ve done a tiny bit of interpreting and also some translation before, and lemme tell ya, it’s hard work. To do it under the kind of pressure that I’m sure these programs run into must be at least, uh, stressful.

The administrators and translations at these language banks deserve a lot of appreciation.

It seems like the only language policy stories you’ll ever read in big media in the States is about the English only movement. But language banks are also concrete reminders of the fact that the US is actually an incredibly multilingual society, probably one of the most multilingual societies in the world.

We should be proud of that.