How do The Dalles families who speak only Spanish get information on vital services from local public agencies? More or less imperfectly, it seems, especially when it comes to written text.
……
To arrive at the translations, she says the PUD worked with a Spanish teacher at the high school, then incorporated modifications based on comments from their janitor’s wife.
The school district, on the other hand, relies heavily on bilingual employees, including two elementary school principals, for its frequent bilingual communications.
“We need to be sensitive to our Spanish-speaking population,” says Dry Hollow Elementary principal Greg Bigelow, who does most of the translating for his school and, together with Chenowith Elementary principal Matt Ihle, quite a bit for the district office as well.
Bigelow, who has a degree in Spanish, which he originally learned working with Hispanics in high school and then perfected on a Spanish-speaking church mission to Chicago, says he considers it “really critical” to try to reach all parents of schoolchildren.
He explains that there’s someone at every school — be it an administrator, teacher or assistant — who can do translation. The high school also recently contracted out a translation of its handbook and prospectus, according to vice principal Nick Nelson.
Wasco Sherman Public Health faces a daily need for translation services, according to Maria Pena, a bilingual community health worker. The agency has a contractor for written translation, provides all its paperwork in Spanish and has nine bilingual staff members and a nurse practitioner who can provide on-site attention or interpreting.
Molly Rogers, director of the Wasco County Department of Youth Services, says she is fortunate to have even one bilingual, bicultural secretary, who serves people “multiple times a week” in Spanish over the phone.
Her department also contracts with a couple of local interpreters and tries to recruit bilingual probation officers, something she finds “very difficult” due to the scarcity of candidates and the competition for them.
Trudy Townsend, who administers the Wasco County Commission on Children and Families as part of Youth Services, says her agency has done everything from buy materials in both languages, to hire out translations, to rely on bilingual staff from partner agencies for help.
“We truly believe translation needs to be professionally done by someone who is qualified to do it, but we generally don’t have the money to do it that way,” Townsend explained.
……
Northern Wasco County Parks and Recreation District faces an equally infrequent need to translate, says administrative secretary Jennifer Botts. In the few instances when she has had to, Botts, who does not speak Spanish or have the luxury of a bilingual co-worker, has resorted to computer translation, imperfect as she knows it is.
“If there’s a need, I’ll do everything I can, and hopefully we’ll just work together to get the closest translation possible,” Botts said.
And yet, as Vazquez’s comments indicate, the closest translation possible seems to be an elusive thing in The Dalles.
A cursory survey of documents provided in Spanish by various agencies turned up many riddled with errors, from misspellings and grammar problems to literal renderings bordering on the incomprehensible.
Silvia Huszar, a Colombian native who lives in White Salmon and teaches Spanish at Columbia Gorge Community College, has seen her share of bad translations as well.
Huszar, who does translation free of charge “for fun and to help people out,” thinks computer translation is a major culprit. “It’s crazy,” she says of the text that results.
Another problem, she says, is that many people here speak “Spanglish,” a mix of English and Spanish that causes them to say things like “pushar el carro” (push the car) that don’t exist in Spanish. Before she came here, Huszar says, she never heard an application referred to as an “aplicacion,” but only by the proper term “solicitud.”
Huszar thinks that written translation should be done by native speakers who have lived in a Spanish-speaking country and studied at the university level. Inaccurate translations or those using “Spanglish” only add to the distortion of the language, she says.
