Pharmacies Agree to Provide Prescription Data in Many Languages

Posted On April 23, 2009By TranspanishIn Latinos, Spanish Language/  1 Comment

In a deal that underscores the challenges and obligations of doing business in polyglot New York State, five major chains that sell prescription drugs have agreed to provide customers with information about them in the customers’ primary languages, the office of Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Tuesday.

The agreements stem from a lengthy investigation by Mr. Cuomo’s office that found that pharmacies across the state, in violation of the law and at great risk to customers, routinely failed to provide information about medication in a language their immigrant customers could understand, officials said.

“The need to understand prescription information can literally be a matter of life and death,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. For those New Yorkers who do not speak English as a first language, he said, “this agreement will ensure they have the medical information needed to protect their health and well-being and that of their families.”

State law requires that pharmacists personally provide to patients spoken and written information about the dosage, purpose and side effects of prescription drugs, officials said. The law also prohibits pharmacies from discriminating against non-English speakers.

Complying with the law has become an increasing challenge for pharmacies in a state where the foreign-born population has grown to 4.1 million, or 21.3 percent of the total population in 2007, up from 3.8 million in 2000, or about 20.1 percent of the total population then.

According to census data, about 3 in 10 residents of New York State, and about half of the residents of New York City, speak a language other than English at home. There are an estimated 170 languages spoken in the state.

The agreement announced Tuesday involves Wal-Mart; Target; A.&P., which operates Pathmark, Super Fresh, and Food Emporium among other stores; Costco; and Duane Reade, the largest pharmacy chain in New York City.

Under the agreement, the retailers will equip their dispensaries with telephones that will connect customers with off-site interpreters working for language-service contractors. Some stores plan to provide dual handsets to allow pharmacists and customers to confer jointly with the interpreters, Mylan L. Denerstein, executive deputy attorney general for social justice, said at a news conference in Brooklyn announcing the agreement.

Ms. Denerstein said that customers at the five companies’ pharmacies will have access to interpreting services in more than 150 languages.

In addition, the retailers have agreed to provide written information about the medication they sell in five of the main foreign languages spoken in New York: Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, and French.

Ms. Denerstein said the agreement was “a major undertaking” for the stores.

In a statement, Duane Reade said, “We applaud the attorney general’s efforts to upgrade prescription-translation services,” and noted that the company currently provides language translation services in 13 languages as well as telephone interpreting for more than 170 languages.

Last November, under pressure from Mr. Cuomo’s office, two other major pharmacy chains, CVS and Rite Aid, reached similar agreements.

The investigation began with a complaint filed in 2007 by a group of immigrant-advocates’ organizations, led by Make the Road New York, which works primarily with Latino immigrants in New York City.

“Over the past two decades, New York has undergone a major demographic shift,” the group’s co-executive director, Andrew Friedman, said at the news conference. “Literally millions of New Yorkers are in the process of learning English.”

While the state and New York City have tried to adjust to the increasing linguistic demands by providing services in an increasing array of languages, he said, “most New York State pharmacies have been lagging far behind.”

In an interview, Mr. Friedman said that the initial complaint to Mr. Cuomo’s office involved more than 20 customers who claimed they had not been able to communicate with pharmacists and could not read the written material provided to them. Most of the customers were Spanish speakers, he said.

One woman, he recalled, had been giving her child a medication by mouth, “and her kid kept throwing up.” She turned to Make The Road, which determined that the medicine was a topical drug. “We figured that if pharmacies were doing this badly in Spanish, they were doing significantly worse with other languages,” he said.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/nyregion/22translate.html?ref=nyregion

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Spanish-English Translations: Business Errors to Avoid

Posted On April 16, 2009By TranspanishIn Tips for Translators/  No Comments

Transpanish’s April 1st post focused on things that novices to the craft of English-Spanish translations should avoid.  This weeks post will focus on the business side of freelance translating.  Novice Spanish translators may be eager to please their first few clients, and that makes sense.  But beware of being so eager to please that you end up exhausted with very little return or making mistakes that could potentially turn clients off from being repeat buyers.

To avoid this, keep the following in mind:

1. This is a business!  As a freelance translator, you are first and foremost a business person.  Your translation services are what you sell, but you also need sound business practices to survive and thrive.  Consider taking a course in running a freelance business at your local college or adult education center.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate with your translation buyers.  Don’t stalk them and update them on every miniscule bit of progress you make, but do keep in touch with them.  Ask them clarifying questions and remind them that their answers help you provide them with a superlative end product.  If it’s a large project and the deadline is far off, don’t just disappear.  It’s good relationship building to check in occasionally, even if it’s just to say that you’re making progress.

3. Be realistic about what you can complete.  Don’t jump at the chance to take on a project if the terms seem unrealistic.  If the buyer wants 10,000 words translated in a day, be honest that this is not realistic.  Rather than taking on a project that’s too large and then renegotiating the terms after, only agree to projects you know you can accomplish.  As you start out, you may have a learning curve about your output which could cause some sleepless nights but as you go you should start determining what you can really do.

4. Get the project terms in writing.  How many rewrites and adjustments are you willing to make before tacking on extra fees?  Do both you and the buyer understand the terms of payment?  Sort this out beforehand and set the terms down in writing before starting a Spanish translation project.

These four tips should get you started as you think about how to manage your freelance translation business and apply whether you freelance after a day job or want to translate full time.  Being prepared will have the dual benefit of protecting yourself and keeping translation buyers happy.

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Without Columbus, Spanish wouldn’t be a global language

Posted On April 8, 2009By TranspanishIn Spanish Language/  No Comments

Santiago, Apr 3, 2009 (EFE via COMTEX) — If not for the discovery of America, Spanish today would be just another European language ranking 27th worldwide in terms of number of speakers, just ahead of Ukrainian, according to the director of the Chilean Academy of Language.
“But in addition to the huge number of speakers (in the) Americas, (the Spanish language’s cultural influence) is rising as a force,” Alfredo Matus said Friday during the presentation of the first two volumes of the study “El Valor Economico del Español: una empresa multinacional” (The Economic Value of Spanish: A Multinational Enterprise).

Matus referred to the 5th International Congress of the Spanish Language, which will be held in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso next March to coincide with bicentennial independence celebrations in Chile and several other Latin American countries and will have the slogan “The Americas in the Spanish Language.” “This is not just another congress about Spanish in the Americas.

There’s a 180-degree shift: the Americas in the Spanish language,” said Matus, who noted that in his study he maintains that “Spanish is a language of the Americas and it is here where it’s future is being played out.” The study was presented at the Americas hall of Chile’s National Library in a ceremony also attended by that institution’s director, Ana Tironi; and the president of the Chilean subsidiary of Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica, Emilio Gilolmo.

The three-volume project is sponsored by the Telefonica Foundation in collaboration with the Spanish government’s Cervantes Institute and the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies, a private Spanish foundation.

The first two books of the study – “Atlas of the Spanish Language in the World” and “Economics of Spanish: An Introduction” – reflect Spanish’s status as the world’s No. 2 language in terms of international communication over the next decade and one that could surpass English in terms of number of speakers.

The study notes that a total of roughly 438 million people speak Spanish worldwide, including native speakers and those who use the language with varying degrees of competency as a second language.

Over the past eight years, the number of people who speak Spanish has grown by 9.8 percent, the second-largest increase – after Arabic – among the six official languages of the United Nations.

The study predicts that Spanish will continue to be one of the five most widely spoken languages in the world in 2050. EFE mf/mc

Source: http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2009/04/03/4105561.htm

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Spanish-English Translations: Pitfalls to Avoid

Posted On April 1, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Tips for Translators/  3 Comments

As with any field, newbies at freelance translation will make mistakes. But being aware of possible mistakes and correcting those errors is a part of any freelance translator’s journey from novice to expert. This list of tips will focus on errors of content and the nuts and bolts of translation work, not on the freelance business side of the equation.

  • Know your audience.Or in translator lingo, don’t forget about localization. If you translate from English to Spanish, is your audience Spanish? Mexican? South American? While you may be Argentine, if your main audience is from Central America, the translated message may be misconstrued or garbled because of differences in word usage. If you work from Spanish to English, will the translated document be used in Australia or the U.S.?

  • Translate content, not each word. Truthfully, if you translate each word without regard for the grammatical and syntactical conventions of the target language, you should not be translating. Spanish to English and English translations require a sophisticated knowledge of both languages. Leave word-for-word translations to those beginning the study of a language or online machine translators, not a paid freelance translator.

  • Be consistent throughout your translated document.While both English and Spanish are rich with different vocabulary words that mean similar things, don’t forgo consistency of terminology throughout a document. This is especially true in technical translations, as the language is very specific.If you translate documents with high word counts or different documents with similar content, consider using translation memory software. This will save you time over the course of the project as well as lend consistency throughout.

  • Only translate into your native language.If your native language is Spanish and your second language English, only translate into Spanish.While your English may be impeccable, there is no substitute for a native English speaker’s translation and vice versa.

  • Invite constructive criticism and feedback from your translation mentor. Your mentor can offer you invaluable insight that will allow you to grow as a Spanish to English or English to Spanish translator. Being open to their perspective and advice will enrich your translation work and facilitate your journey from novice to seasoned translator.
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