Last week, an important conference took place for the health care field — Quality Health for Culturally Diverse Populations. Attendees from around the globe were present, and participants in an international roundtable shared their experiences related to multilingual and multicultural patient populations in Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Israel, Japan, Qatar, Switzerland, and the United States. On [...]

Last week, Language Weaver projected a US$67.5 billion market for digital translation, enabled by advances in machine translation (MT). For the last few years, we have released an annual estimate of the market for outsourced translation, localization, and interpretation. For 2008, human-delivered translation activities will total a hefty US$14.25 billion (see our “Ranking of Top 25 [...]

Over the last few weeks, we’ve posted several entries about mainstream language issues. Some of these started on the front page of American newspapers. Then they followed  the usual route of the 24-hour news cycle, disappearing ever deeper in the paper as election, economic, weather, and sports news dominate the headlines.

Yesterday, a U.S. Congressman claimed that “cultural and language barriers” prevented him from paying taxes he owed on his beach house in the Dominican Republic. In a political season gone wild, this story made front-page news in New York City.