Interpreters

No one can read our thoughts, for now, but some scientists believe they can at least figure out in what language we do our thinking. Before we utter a single word, experts can determine our mother tongue and our level of proficiency in other languages by analyzing brain activity as we read, scientists working with Italy's National Research Council say. For more than a year, a team of scientists experimented on 15 interpreters, revealing what they...

Argentine immigrant Marta Marquez had always dreamed of becoming a teacher, while her son, Alex, had his heart set on becoming a business executive. So when the enterprising mother of four and her son started a language-translation and interpreting service in 1984, they counted themselves lucky to land 15 customers a month and ring up $10,000 in sales the first year. But much to their surprise, Iberia Language Services Inc.

Damian Brown whips his head left and right in a struggle to see what the other students are doing in his management information systems class at Cal State Northridge. Professor Glen Gray tells the class members to insert their computer disks and tries to make sure everyone is following along. "Any other access questions?" he asks. Brown, who is deaf, furiously scribbles a question on a piece of notebook paper, but Gray doesn't see him. "Well, let's mosey along then."

Could the theater artist of 2012 really be … Samuel Beckett? Well, the 1969 Nobel Prize winner had stiff competition this year from Anton Chekhov, dead for more than a hundred years but more alive than ever onstage. Chekhov's early play "Ivanov" received a sensational Bart DeLorenzo production at the Odyssey Theatre in April, and I caught "Uncle Vanya" twice last summer in New York, once at Soho Rep with a cast of offbeat luminaries directed by Sam Gold and once at New York City Center in a Sydney Theatre Company production starring the preternaturally luminous Cate Blanchett.

Spurred on by a growing number of immigrants who say they are unable to talk to their doctors, farm worker advocates have launched a statewide campaign to break down language barriers and boost the number of interpreters in hospitals and other health-care facilities. The effort is aimed largely at people who are fluent in neither English nor Spanish, a population that includes recent arrivals from Southeast Asia and a rising number of Mexican immigrants who speak indigenous Indian languages.

The international phone line connecting a downtown Los Angeles courtroom to a cellphone 1,500 miles away in Texcoco, Mexico, was repeatedly disconnected and difficult to hear at times. But on that line hung the constitutional rights of Candido Ortiz, accused of drunkenly stabbing a man with a broken beer bottle and charged with attempted murder. Ortiz, 20, spoke only a variant of Mixe, a language used by about 7,000 people in the mountains of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

When he heard the snap of a speeding baseball crashing into Hiroki Kuroda's skull, his knees buckled on the dugout steps. Once he recovered, he sprinted to the mound, kneeling near the Dodgers pitcher, who lay in a heap. "Hiroki, turn over," said the interpreter, a former Spanish teacher named Kenji Nimura who was born in Japan and raised in Los Angeles. For two seasons he has been the pitcher's steady hand, a linguistic link between America and Japan. "Hiroki, do you feel nauseous?"

The temptation to lampoon them is delicious. If only the immediate future of the world did not rest on every word that passes the lips of U.N. interpreters. If you can stay awake long enough, simultaneous interpretation can sound comical, like a badly dubbed movie played out in that iconic 38-story building that looks like it's about to fall into the East River. Every day their droning voices overlap a low whir of debate in the Security Council chamber. But they remain faceless.

I commend The Times and reporter John Chandler for a solid piece of reporting about the shortage of funds to hire interpreters for deaf and hard-of-hearing students at Cal State Northridge. Even though we have supplemented this service with more than $150,000 in recent weeks and exempted this area from cuts that other departments will experience because of the state's fiscal problems, we are still faced with a dilemma: Do we use these funds to hire more interpreters, to meet the students' bona-fide need for more service, or do we pay the interpreters we have more money to meet their reasonable expectation for greater compensation?

The courtroom came to order with barely a murmur, despite 80 prospective jurors, four Peruvian defendants and their Spanish language interpreters, six attorneys and other court personnel. Jampacked as the San Fernando Superior Court chamber was last week, observers could hear easily as Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth A. Loveman questioned a prospective juror on the pronunciation of her name. Not so a month ago when the multi-defendant trial began.