Chicago - Multilingual Connections

826CHI Staff Studies Spanish to Teambuild and Connect with Parents

December 10, 2012 By bridget

826CHI is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

Many of the students that attend 826CHI writing programs come from Spanish-speaking homes. Their parents are actively involved, but the language barrier between the staff and parents was becoming a frustration.

With only one or two people on staff speaking Spanish, 826CHI was not fully supporting its parent group. When a Spanish-speaker would call the office, many times the person who answered would be at a loss. “I’m sorry, the person who speaks Spanish isn’t here right now.”

Executive Director Barry Benson suggested that the 826CHI staff learn Spanish. Not only would staff be able to communicate with Spanish-speaking parents, they could create stronger relationships with each other through team building.

Benson set up Spanish classes with Multilingual Connections. 826CHI staff attend class for one hour per week at either the beginner or intermediate level.

At first, Benson thought that with everyone’s diverse schedules, choosing a good time for classes would be difficult, and interest would fade. To Benson’s delight the Spanish classes, which began last May, have a 100% participation rate. 826CHI staff find their Spanish instruction so important that they schedule around the class time. Even the board president attends classes!

Benson says every day is a success story, and is thrilled with the results. “It’s gone beyond being a smart investment. We’re improving morale and getting to know each other.”

Multilingual Connections classes always teach language within culture, and the 826CHI staff have plenty of student work to practice from. The group recently translated a complete “I Wish” story written by a fifth-grader. Here is a sample sentence:

“If I could do anything, I would go on a date with Justin Bieber. We would go to Golden Corral and we would talk about our deepest feelings and our hobbies.”

Not only did they learn useful vocabulary that their Spanish-speaking students might use, that sentence gave the class a chance to practice the conditional and subjunctive tenses!

826CHI recently received an award from the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago honoring their work with Spanish-speaking communities at Global Latino Fest in October. The language studies were part of that recognition.

What’s next for Spanish instruction at 826CHI? Benson would love to extend Spanish lessons to their dozen or so interns. Learning Spanish would not only boost their marketable skill set, it would be a way for the non-profit to reward them for their hard work.

We at Multilingual Connections would love our friends and fans to get involved with this cutting-edge group of writers and educators. 826CHI sports an innovative and lively volunteer program populated by creative individuals. “People who volunteer at 826CHI come here as much for the enjoyment as they do to give back,” says Benson. Volunteers can tutor after school, run workshops and field trips, and even just help in the office with administrative support.

Multilingual Connections applauds 826CHI for embracing the challenge of bilingualism in the workplace. We are so proud to share this success story!

If your workplace is looking for language instruction – in Spanish, English, or any of our 18+ languages, contact Multilingual Connections so we can begin designing a custom language learning curriculum for your business.

Filed Under: Chicago, Cultural competency, Spanish, Spanish in the Workplace, Workplace diversity

MAKE Literary Productions publishes its first bilingual (Spanish/English) magazine

November 4, 2012 By bridget

Chicago’s MAKE Literary Productions is a non-profit organization that promotes contemporary literary writing through their biannual print publication, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, by staging readings and integrative arts events, and by educating through public forums on literature and writing and publishing workshops.

In other words, MAKE is Chicago’s premier literary magazine, founded in 2004.

The October 2012 issue, #13 Exchange/Intercambio, marks the first time the magazine was published in English and Spanish.

The bilingual issue was launched with a series of events, including receptions with Spanish language authors, a discussion on the art of translation, and a co-release of the issue along with the latest issue of Chicago’s Revista Contratiempo, the premier Spanish-language cultural and literary publication in the Midwest.

Check out this great interview with editor Sarah Dodson, via Gaper’s Block.

Asked why MAKE decided to publish in Spanish, MAKE’s managing editor Sarah Dodson replied: “As we’ve gotten older we’ve been taking notice of authors who are writing outside the United States who aren’t being translated. Knowing people living outside the U.S., we thought it would be interesting to approach the writing from a literary magazine’s perspective. We wanted a challenge as far as getting new content and new understanding of the literature being produced, and in particular literary translations.”

Translating the magazine wasn’t as simple a process as Dodson thought it would be. At the time, she hadn’t realized translation would take as long as it did – effectively doubling the publishing time of the issue. But, good translation does take ample time. At Multilingual Connections, we remind our clients to leave enough time for translation of long documents!

Sometimes businesses try to save translation time by not translating all of their documents. MAKE magazine didn’t edit their issue down at all; they translated all their stories (whether from English to Spanish, or from Spanish to English) for issue #13 Exchange/Intercambio.

You can pre-order MAKE magazine’s bilingual issue here.

Multilingual Connections can handle your business’ unique translation needs. We translate Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese into English and vice versa. Don’t see your target language in that list? Just contact us, and we can accommodate your special translation project.

Filed Under: Chicago, Spanish

Latino Population Growth in Chicago

May 22, 2012 By bridget

We’re fascinated by this report from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), Regional Snapshot: Latinos in our Region, which explains why we need to pay attention to the growth of the Latino population in Chicago. If you don’t have a few hours to pour through the details, here are some highlights:

Latinos are expected to make up most of the region’s population growth between now and 2040.
In 1970, one of every 20 residents was Latino, but today one of every five people in the region is of Latino origin.
Between 1970 and 1990, the region’s overall population would have declined if not for the growth in Latinos.
The Latino population in the region is expected to increase from 1.4 million in 2000 to 3.5 million in 2040, at which point more than 30 percent of the region’s residents will be Latino.
More Latinos now live in suburban areas than in Chicago.
The number of linguistically isolated Spanish-speaking children (that is, households where no adults speak English fluently) increased more significantly in the suburbs, by over 47 percent, and decreased slightly in the city of Chicago.
Only 11 percent of Latinos in the region in 2006 had college degrees, compared to 18 percent for African-Americans, 41 percent for White residents, and 61 percent for Asians.

The importance of increasing the education level of Latinos is imperative to the overall growth and stability of our region. If Latinos are the fastest-growing population, their earning potential – which CMAP proves is based on education level – can make or break our local economy.

We need to better equip our Latino neighbors, both adults and children. Proper language instruction, workplace translations and improved cultural competence by all Chicagoans is not just a nice gesture to this fast-growing population, it is a requirement to sustaining our population numbers and our economic competitiveness.

Filed Under: Chicago, Cultural competency, Economics, Education, Latino, Research, Spanish

Multilingual Milwaukee Avenue

May 18, 2012 By bridget

A storefront on Milwaukee Avenue near Belmont Avenue contains Spanish, Polish and English.

A drive up Milwaukee Avenue (or should we say a bike ride along the avenue’s seven-mile bike lane) from its downtown origin at Kinzie to the northwesternmost reaches of Chicago is a tour of the city’s rich linguistic history.

The Chicago History Museum calls immigration Chicago’s “hallmark characteristic,” and Milwaukee Avenue remains a loose but living timeline of settlement, particularly Polish and Latino, but also German, Russian, Jewish and Korean.

The biggest influx of Polish immigrants came to Chicago between 1850 and 1950, due to political turmoil including the Second World War. The triangular intersection of Milwaukee Avenue at Ashland and Division streets became known as Polish Downtown, and swaths of the Avenue are still home to recent immigrants and the descendants of those original settlers.

A little later in history, Latino settlers took residence along Milwaukee Avenue heading north. By 1929 Chicago was known to emigrating Mexicans as the largest colonial outpost outside the Southwest (NIU.edu). Because the area surrounding Milwaukee Avenue north of downtown, known as Jefferson Township, remained unincorporated until 1889, it may have seemed a natural fit for new settlers, and Latino immigrants followed suit. Nowadays, could anyone visit Logan Square without overhearing conversations in Spanish between multiple generations?

The present linguistic and cultural lines are not so clear cut, but it seems that as immigrants poured into Chicago, they settled along Milwaukee Avenue starting in the industrious downtown and then heading northwest as populations grew. Milwaukee Avenue could be Chicago’s longest multilingual street, where storefront signs in Polish, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Lithuanian and Korean contain no English translation, and even monolingual English speakers know that zimne piwo means “cold beer” in Polish.

While so many other Chicago avenues and boulevards have transformed into the streetscapes of Anymetropolis, USA, Milwaukee Avenue has retained the characteristics and the languages of its scores of settlers. The avenue has a cultural staying power – perhaps those immigrants were onto something when they developed neighborhoods of their families and compatriots. Over the years, the residents and their cultures have blended and relocated and spread to such an extent that the City could rededicate the street as Multilingual Avenue.

A storefront on Milwaukee Avenue near Belmont Avenue contains Spanish, Polish and English.

Filed Under: Chicago, Latino Culture

Chicago still represents an ever-changing melting pot

July 6, 2010 By admin

While Chicago is no longer #1 in foreign language speakers, it’s still known as one of the country’s biggest melting pots. In fact, only one-third of Cook County residents speak only English. Nationwide, a new census report (data from 1980-2007) shows that the number of residents over 5 years old who speak a language other than English has more than doubled, equaling 20% of the population.

Chicago has seen an interesting linguistic shift due to a change in immigration patterns. While Spanish is still on the rise, many “old world” European languages like Yiddish and Italian are declining.

There was a time when Chicago didn’t have to be content with place- or show-honors in America’s linguistic derby. Its neighborhoods, the commerce association’s 1909 “Guide Book” said, “were really little cities within the metropolis, each speaking its only language, clinging to its hereditary customs, and in large part governing itself.”

For decades around the dawn of the 20th century, Chicago’s factories drew more immigrants from rural regions of Eastern and Southern Europe than any other U.S. city. Now, notes geographer Irving Cutler, Europeans looking for work don’t need to go overseas.

“With the European Union, they can move within the continent from where the jobs aren’t to where they are,” said Cutler, author of “Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent.”

That translates into the linguistic shift, notes Paral. In the 1920s, when the federal government imposed strict immigration quotas, 27 percent of Chicagoans were foreign-born. By 1970 that number had fallen to less than 10 percent, even as the great influx of Spanish speakers from Latin America was beginning.

Chicago still has more Polish speakers than any other city in the U.S., and comes in 2nd, 3rd or 4th in many other languages: “Arabic (4th), German (2nd), Greek (2nd), Gujarati (2nd), Hindi (3rd), Hungarian (4th), Italian (3rd), Korean (4th), Russian (3rd), Serbo-Croatian (2nd), Spanish (4th) and Urdu (2nd).”

Read the Chicago Tribune’s full report on its local language phenomenon here.

Want to improve your language skills? Visit Multilingual Chicago, offering private tutoring, conversation courses, and classes just for kids. It’s real language, for real life.

Filed Under: Chicago, Demographics, Immigration in the US

Historically Cantonese Chinatown sees shift to Mandarin

June 28, 2010 By admin

Chicago’s Chinatown is the 3rd largest in the United States, and is currently undergoing a linguistic and cultural shift from Cantonese to Mandarin. The People’s Republic of China standardized Mandarin as the national language in 1955, and now, many more immigrants are familiar with the language.

Immigrants from the northern part of China who speak Mandarin are deciding to settle outside of the traditionally Cantonese Chinatown, distancing the two Chinese communities.

“It’s the cultural background, in addition to the language problem, that makes people prefer one community over another,” [Susan] Ng-Harroun [executive director of the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce] said.

While the two language groups do interact at times within the community, such as for Chinese New Year celebrations, the limitations in conversational skills, coupled with different traditions, has led to more segregation than unity.

“The different dialects do reflect some cultural differences,” [David] Wu said. “The Chinese churches, restaurants and businesses outside of Chinatown are all Mandarin communities.”

Business owners see that Mandarin speakers won’t shop at Cantonese establishments. However, little by little, the signage in Chinatown is incorporating more simplified Chinese script, which Mandarin speakers typically read.

Read a full report of the shifting languages in Chinatown in this Medill article. Check out the article’s example of changing signage.

Filed Under: Chicago, Demographics, Immigration in the US

Koreans and Hispanics in Chicago learn to co-exist

June 2, 2010 By admin

Many Korean immigrants have recently found themselves in the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center taking classes in—what else?—Spanish. People like Sue Choe, who owns a laundromat in Koreatown, see many reasons to learn the language that many of her customers speak.

Aware of an ugly history between Korean-Americans and African-Americans–one that erupted into violence in some cities in the 1990s–Korean business owners are trying to soothe mutual suspicions with Spanish-speaking workers and customers. The effort is mostly born of an increasingly interdependent employer-employee relationship.

It is just one of the ways in which new waves of immigration and intermigration between neighborhoods is fast changing the city, mixing new combinations of ethnic groups together and forcing them to search for ways to coexist as so many previous generations of immigrants did.

Beginning a community dialogue is important, especially recalling the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles. It’s also important because Koreans and Hispanics don’t just live in the same communities, they work together too. Hispanics have become the primary labor pool for Korean business owners, and cultural differences have erupted in the workplace.

Latino workers, many earning less than the minimum wage, complain that their Korean bosses neglect to pay overtime and are often callous about days off or job-related injuries.

In turn Korean owners, at times unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, see ingratitude and disloyalty in their employees’ complaints. They argue that their up-from-the-ground businesses are a team effort that also has the owners working long hours.

Disputes have hurt both sides. Learning to understand the cultures around you (and their languages) is a great start. Read the full Chicago Tribune article about this issue here.

Want to learn the languages spoken in your neighborhood? Visit MultilingualChicago.com to learn about language classes and workshops in your area!

Filed Under: Business, Chicago, Cultural competency, Demographics, Education, Employment, Immigrant workforce, Spanish in the Workplace, Workplace diversity

Poor prescription translations have dangerous results

May 13, 2010 By admin

Chicago Tribune Instructions from your doctor can be confusing enough without adding a language barrier into the equation. So it’s not surprising that bad translations of prescription instructions can lead to dangerous results. What is surprising is that of the prescription companies that provide translations, many use machine-generated translations which only have a 50% accuracy rate.

“It’s something I experience in practice every day,” said Dr. Alejandro Clavier, who works at Esperanza Health Center in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood on the Southwest Side.

He gave an example of an anemic patient who showed no signs of improved iron levels after taking prescribed supplements. Clavier discovered the patient had been taking only one drop of the supplements instead of the amount that Clavier had prescribed. The patient had received confusing prescription instructions from the pharmacy.

Often misspellings or “Spanglish” in prescriptions can cause confusion, like “poca” (little) instead of “boca,” or “once a day” being misinterpreted as the Spanish “once” which means “eleven.”

Carmen Velasquez, director of the Alivio Medical Center in Pilsen where the majority of patients speak Spanish, believes a machine translation as substitute for a human being is an inappropriate solution.

“It’s health care. If you have the responsibility of human life, you better well know what you are doing and saying,” Velasquez said.

To read the full Chicago Tribune article, click here.

Filed Under: Chicago, Health, Safety, Translation

WLS rocks the Midwest Police & Security Expo

March 11, 2010 By admin

Click here to watch WLS’s founder and president Jill Bishop eloquently explain our language and cultural training services at the Midwest Security & Police Conference/Expo. (Once you’re on the page, click on the video icon.)

Some talking points:

Hispanics make up around 15% of the U.S. population, and that number will triple by 2050. Is your organization prepared for the linguistic and cultural challenges?

In our “Spanish for Law Enforcement” trainings, WLS doesn’t focus on that grammar you learned back in 9th grade and have forgotten since. You’ll learn industry-specific terminology that you can use instantly on the job. We’ll help you anticipate challenges and find the appropriate solutions.

WLS offers onsite, customized trainings and workshops to help employers (from police departements to restaurants) prepare their employees for any linguistic or cultural situation that may come up in their industry.

As Jill says, “It’s all about the expressions you need to do your job better.”

Filed Under: Chicago, Cultural competency, Immigration in the US, Workplace diversity

Survey of Chicago restaurants finds widespread segregation in staff

March 9, 2010 By admin

A labor group surveyed restaurants in Chicago and found significant segregation between front-of-house workers (waiters, hosts) and back-of-house staff (busboys, dishwashers). The study “found that nearly 80 percent of whites work in the front, nearly two-thirds of Latinos in the back.”

To those of us who have worked in the restaurant business this doesn’t seem like news at all – the discrimination is all too prevalent. Common all over Chicago’s pubs and steakhouses, we see that “taking the order or seating the clients is the girl next door or a suave older man, most likely white, while a cadre of young Mexican men construct the meal behind the scenes.”

Taking the issue to task, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Chicago teamed with the Working Hands Legal Clinic to file a federal lawsuit against one Andersonville eatery, claiming that the establishment mistreated its kitchen staff. McCormick and Schmicks’ chain just settled a $1.1 claim from black employees who said they weren’t considered for hosts and servers.

But in the restaurants’ defense, aren’t they hiring based on a special skill set required for that position, not based on race? For example, knowledge of food and wine pairings or simply communicating a food order in English.

I would argue that while restaurants don’t always discriminate blatantly, they rarely train or promote their current back-of-house staff. Wouldn’t a restaurant get better long-term results from a staffer with a long employment history at the restaurant, happy to be promoted, than a new hire? Busboy to server would be the perfect transition, for example.

To read the full report in the Chicago Tribune, click here.

Filed Under: Business, Chicago, Employment, Immigrant workforce, Workplace diversity