Community Interpreters Gather in Washington, D.C.—Community Interpreters Unite!
By Cecilia Castillo Ayometzi—Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs
On Saturday, April 11th, 2009, a group of community interpreters came together to participate in a breakfast and luncheon meeting at the Josephine Butler Parks Center. In spite of the rain, and the early beginning of the meeting, over a hundred community interpreters, took part in different sessions, shared valuable experiences, professional challenges, and provided insightful feedback on the current needs of this relatively new profession. The Executive Office of the Mayor, Office on Latino Affairs (OLA), in coordination with the Multicultural Community Service (MCS), organized this first meeting in order to create a new forum where trained community interpreters, and those interested in being trained as community interpreters, can come together to acquire new skills, learn from field practitioners, and share information, while creating a sense of membership, and establishing a new professional network.
The sessions covered an array of topics of interest to the different participants. Two general information sessions on “Community Interpretation as a Profession,” and a session on the “Language Access Law” in DC were intended to provide a general background on the need for trained community interpreters within the climate of equal access that the Language Access Act of 2004 has provided in the District of Columbia. Two additional sessions on “How interpreters can raise awareness of their interpretation skills,” and “Creating new opportunities for professional development,” were intended to bring together an interested group of interpreters to promote and organize into a professional community. Simultaneous to these two last sessions, a workshop on “Note taking for Spanish interpreters” was provided for those interpreters with advanced training to better improve their note-taking skills. The training sessions ended with a “Lunch Working Session,” where participants learned about legal interpretation, differences in court and non-court interpreting practices, and heard about case study data on how to avoid mental fatigue and improve one’s overall interpretation skills.
Attendance at the event was impressive, and the participants were eager to continue this endeavor in the future. Of all participants, 36% indicated that they have taken community interpreting training, while 64% were interested in being trained. Although most of the participants were already working within a Spanish/English language combination (67% of the total participants), there was also a diversity of other languages represented as well. One could walk the hallways of the Center and hear bits and pieces of sentences spoken in Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Punjabi, Spanish, and Vietnamese.