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These interactions can include medical questionnaires — a series of detailed medical questions that look for very specific information about the patient’s condition and medical history. Remote medical interpreters don’t always have a full picture of the patient’s medical history. Interpreters should avoid redirecting the patient to answer in a specific format (e.g., yes or no), and should also avoid asking the patient to stay on subject if they decide to go off topic or provide redundant information. The goal of medical questionnaires is to gather important medical information in order to inform a patient’s treatment.

In a study of SaaS (software-as-a-service) users, when a company provided support in a customer’s native language, 70% of respondents stated that this made them more loyal to the brand. Multilingual support can remove the language barriers between your employees and customers, allowing your employees to confidently perform their job and your customers to feel valued and heard. If you work in a sector that receives federal funds (healthcare, government, legal, law enforcement, education, or health insurance sectors, for example), you may be legally required to provide language services to people who don’t speak English and to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. state’s requirements don’t apply to you regarding language access to non-English-proficient individuals, you may still be required to provide auxiliary aids or service to people who are deaf or hard of hearing under the effective communication provision of the ADA.

But, like a lot of other businesses, for CLI, it was also a year of opportunity, more industry visibility, and plenty of reasons to look forward to the future. Our growth is on par with what we expected if there wasn’t a pandemic, and it’s given us a way to look at things differently that will allow us to continue to progress and be recognized as one of the industry leaders. We’ve done a lot of interviews, and everyone wants to talk about language access during the pandemic under the larger umbrella of the health disparities minority populations face. It’s given us a platform like never before where we can really talk about the importance and the need for funding and the need for acknowledging interpreters, translators, and language service providers as a knowledge-based, professional industry.

Black ASL, or BASL for short, dates back to the 1860s when the first schools for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing populations opened in the U. S. Schools were segregated in the South, so Black and white students learned their own distinct versions of ASL. Even today, a language barrier can exist between Deaf communities, and a lack of diverse sign language interpreters negatively affects Black Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. But recently some Black ASL signers and organizations, such as The Language and Life Project, have been creating informative videos to help raise awareness of this unique dialect and its cultural significance to Black communities. I took to sign language quickly and spent all of my time with Deaf coworkers outside of work, going to silent dinners, traveling to events, and subsequently co-parenting a CODA (a child of deaf adult).