Have you ever used an interpreting agency or hired an individual interpreter for your language needs? Have you placed your request and received an answer: “Let me check the interpreter’s/my schedule?” Have you ever wondered why that is? How come interpreters are not always available when an agency or client needs them? It’s because the majority of linguists work as independent contractors, servicing multiple clients and at least a handful of agencies. The majority of agencies, and even state and federal courthouses, don’t hire full-time interpreters and translators. Some larger entities will have a few full-time employees, mostly Spanish interpreters,…

India, with a population of 1.353 billion people, is linguistically diverse with hundreds of languages and 22 scheduled (official) languages. And over 2.6 million people born in India are currently residing in the US! So what are some of the most common Indian languages that you are likely to encounter when working with a client from India? With 322 million native speakers and 270 million second languages speakers, Hindi is also the most spoken Indian language in the US with more than 863,00 speakers (as of 2016). Our Hindi interpreters are keeping busy, especially since many of them speak multiple…

Did you know that only 43% of Indians are native Hindi speakers? With over 1.35 billion people comes great diversity, including linguistic diversity. Which is probably why India has identified 270 languages with more than 10,000 speakers according to their 2011 census. But 96.7% of India’s population speaks one of its 22 scheduled (official) languages natively. What are these languages? Here are the top 10 most spoken languages in India Other languages include Assamese: 15 million speakers Maithili: 13.5 million speakers Santhali: 7.3 million speakers Tamil: 6.9 million speakers Kashmiri: 6.8 million speakers Nepali: 2.9 million speakers Sindhi: 2.7 million…

A discussion about face-to-face (F2F) interpreting being far superior to remote interpretation has been echoing in the industry for years. And we agreed. In our previous blog post we made it clear, nothing compares to F2F interactions. Referencing a 2010 study we asserted that face-to-face services were significantly better than remote options such as telephone and video. But that’s 10 years ago! Over that time technology has improved drastically. Is it still better that your interpreter be in the same room? Especially in a busy environment where it would be difficult to capture everything that is going on at once with…