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This article was originally written in 2017 by Gio Lester © ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yes, I have lived a sheltered life. At least where languages are concerned. I have always circulated within groups whose languages I understand. As a result, I have no idea what it must feel like...

22 February, 2019 /

- By Gio Lester © 2016 Living in Miami, Florida, a bilingual city for sure, one thing we notice is that every other attorney speaks another language. Most of them have studied Spanish or their families are from one of the myriad Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, or...

14 December, 2018 /

It is Tuesday. Usually that would mean I could sleep in a bit, but today it means I’m waking up at 6:45 to check my phone and…yes. Class has been confirmed for 7:30 this morning because during our normal class time, our professor will be...

07 December, 2018 /

This post was originally published in February 2015. But its subject matter is timeless. We hope you enjoy it. Thank goodness for words like “judge”. Juez just rolls off the tongue so nicely. I can say it in French with no problem at all, and assuming...

16 November, 2018 /

Leslie Tabarez is a State Court Certified Interpreter in Pennsylvania. In this guest post from 2016, she reminded us that the truth can be hard to swalow. - By Leslie Tabarez © 2016 The phone rang. I picked it up. They needed me down at the courthouse...

08 June, 2018 /

Kathleen Shelly penned this for The NAJIT Observer in 2012. It remains just as relevant today. Please enjoy. - By Kathleen Shelly © 2012 A couple of weeks ago I was driving home from an interpreting assignment listening to NPR radio, as is my custom. The program...

18 August, 2017 /

This article was written on June 27, 2014. Enjoy! I generally start my day with a cup of coffee.  By no means am I a morning person, and there is nothing like that freshly brewed first cup to get my day started.  I wouldn’t consider myself...

21 July, 2017 /

- by Janis Palma © It’s what we all work for. It’s where we expect to be someday: retired… with a pension. For many of us, it’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. True, some pots are bigger than others, and...

14 July, 2017 /
This article by Janis Palma was first published two years ago, almost to the date. It is a good reminder of the importance of proper terminology and the traps we face in our work - both translators and interpreters!
©Janis Palma- 2014
Beware of false friends! I don’t mean the people, I mean the words. 
One of the first impulses a young interpreter must overcome is the use of words that may, at first glance, seem to be equivalent terms and concepts in two languages... but are not. Taking that direct path from similarly-sounding words in our source and target languages is not always wrong, but part of being a good interpreter is knowing exactly when to take this path and when not to. In the rapid pace of judiciary interpreting, our brains may lean heavily towards cognates in source and target languages. Cognates are words with a common origin or etymology. True cognates, like “library” and “librería” in Spanish or “livraria” in Portuguese, with a common Latin root -- liber -- may come to have new and different meanings with usage and the passage of time. In this example “library” is a place where books are kept for people to read or borrow, whereas “librería” or “livraria” is a place where books are sold. So although they may be true cognates, these words have become false friends, or faux amis.
16 June, 2017 /
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