B&A Offers Unique Educational Opportunities to Aspiring Language Professionals

With the Michigan economy at a clearly low point, having an additional skill, such as speaking more than one language, is a clear advantage. This is especially true in Southeast Michigan where nearly 13% of the population speaks English “not very well”. Nevertheless, bilingualism alone does not qualify a person to be a medical or legal interpreter. Acquiring the essential skills for this profession takes training and practice.

As the understanding of the need for high-quality interpreter training grows, there is an obvious shortage of educational opportunities. Only a few schools in the entire U.S. offer legal and medical interpretation programs. None of them are located in the Midwest, and the variety of languages those programs offer doesn’t go far beyond Spanish.

Translation Agency Bromberg & Associates, in affiliation with the National Council of Interpreting in Health Care and the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, offers day-long educational sessions on Legal and Medical Interpretation to Michigan language professionals.

The first session of ’07 entitled Language Interpretation in Health Care took place on March 9 at Automation Alley Headquarters in Troy. Seven attendees were given an extensive presentation on the Medical Interpreter Code of Ethics and the National Standards of Practice, on the current state of the national medical interpreter certification examination, and interpreters’ performance requirements set by certification programs implemented in Washington and Oregon. Participants also practiced various consecutive interpretation and sight translation exercises pertaining to health care settings.

Anita Gluchowski, an interpreter between the Polish and English languages, said, “The seminar
helped me to understand the complexity and intricacy of competent medical interpretation, as well as the acute need for access to high quality language professionals in health care.”

Bromberg & Associates will be offering this seminar again on a regular basis, as well as other pertinent training seminars, including Note-taking in Consecutive Interpretation, The Michigan Court System Explained, Practicum in Conference Interpreting and Learning Techniques for Tape Transcription and Translation.

The training is open to all participants whether they work with Bromberg & Associates or not.