Happy Hispanic Heritage Month!
We are right in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15th to October 15th. These 31 days are meant to celebrate the rich cultural heritage of the U.S.’s largest linguistic and ethnic minority. The month-long homage to the contributions that Hispanics (those who trace their roots to Spanish-speaking countries) appropriately begins […]
Serving the Latino Community: Health Care Translations
Many people experience anxiety when dealing with health care and medical situations, and this is especially true when English isn’t the first language of patients and their families. Treatment plans and other health-related documents can be filled with medical jargon that seems foreign even to native English speakers. As the population of Spanish-speakers continues to […]
Certifying Spanish Language Proficiency
If you take a look at job postings, you’ll see that speaking Spanish is a huge asset to many companies and organizations. In fact, companies hiring for certain positions will require that applicants be bilingual English/Spanish speakers. But if you are a non-native speaker of Spanish, how do you prove that you speak the language? […]
Bilingual Education in the U.S.
If your goal is to become fluent in another language, many times total immersion is the best practice. However, this is not the case for young recent immigrants in public schools because they also must become proficient in the subject matter of instruction. This is where bilingual education comes in. Bilingual education and its alternatives […]
Spanglish in the United States
There’s language as it appears in grammar books and there’s language as it’s truly spoken every day. The way that bilingual Spanish and English speakers in the United States combine the two languages is a perfect example of this phenomenon. In every day vernacular, people use the term Spanglish to describe the mixing of the […]
Spanish-Language Statistics
If you live in the United States, you’re probably no longer surprised to overhear Spanish being spoken. But just how widespread is the Spanish language in the world today? Over 250 million people speak Spanish as their first language and if we include those who speak Spanish as their second language, the total number of […]
Spanish 101 or How Not to Embarrass Yourself Immediately
Anyone who has successfully learned a second language as an adult will tell you that it’s not easy, but the more risks you take, the more rewarding the results will be. Rather than looking at the Spanish language as a minefield of potential mistakes, look at it as a journey during which you will explore […]
Voting en Español: The U.S. Presidential Race
With an estimated population of 44.3 million as of July 2006, Hispanics are the nation’s largest ethnic minority in the U.S. It’s no wonder that the three main presidential hopefuls (McCain, Obama, and Clinton until just recently) spend a lot of time and money courting this powerful demographic. The political realm is always convoluted and […]
Learning Spanish Online
The best method for learning Spanish is total immersion in the language. However, you might not have the time or the money to take an extended learning holiday to ramp up your Spanish skills. And while there are some excellent software programs and sets of CDs that you can purchase, the Internet has a fantastic […]
Targeting different Spanish-Speaking Audiences Through Translation
Last month, Transpanish posted an article about using Neutral Spanish to reach the widest possible Spanish-speaking audience. Those who translate documents into neutral or standard Spanish strive to remove any vocabulary or markers that would identify the text with a specific region where Spanish is spoken. Using neutral Spanish is useful when your document will […]
