A few days ago, I was preparing the paperwork for the Wisconsin CEU (Continuing Education Units) Compliance form, and I realized that I do attend tons of workshops, in-person presentations, and virtual webinars. I have the privilege of being a NAJIT member, and as such,...
A friend of mine is certified as an interpreter in the courts of a dozen or so states. I was asking myself the other day, “Why not simply have a centralized system, in which your certification is valid in any one of the fifty states?”...
The Couch is a place to exchange ideas and brainstorm, not only for its contributors but also for our readers who engage in the ensuing discussions. Sometimes, even when everyone in the room has the best of intentions, role boundaries can get muddied, and then everyone...
Can we please standardize the name we use to refer to our profession and those who practice it? There are so many variations on a theme: legal interpreting, community interpreting, court interpreting, public-service interpreting, judicial interpreting, and of course, the one name adopted by our...
This post is on the topic of monotasking. That’s right, you read it correctly. Monotasking. What’s that, you ask? Well, it’s the opposite of multitasking. In other words, instead of doing a ton of things at once, you do one. Thing. At. A. Time. I first...
This is the war everyone hoped would never happen. And yet it has happened. Most of us had never paid attention to Ukraine, except perhaps when it came up during the testimony before Congress in 2019 regarding Marie Yovanovitch, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine....
I had my first business at the age of twenty. It was a furniture store a block away from the main plaza in downtown Celaya, Mexico. Business has been in my blood since I was born. My father was an entrepreneur and we, the sisters,...
“Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits recipients of federal financial assistance from discriminating based on national origin by, among other things, failing to provide meaningful access to individuals who are limited English proficient (LEP)” (lep.gov). In state courts, where Title VI...
Discoveries As I look back on what stays behind after this eventful 2021, I see the mistakes I have made and on the other hand the great choices as well. I would like to think that the latter outweigh the former, but a deep analysis is...
We are all in this together, but while we are all in the same sea, we are not all in the same boat. We know this pandemic has affected people differently, and everyone has experienced it in a different way. For most people, for instance,...