05/19/08 Crossing the Language Barrier

Crossing the Language Barrier. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. When you work side by side with someone you tend to take language for granted. If you need something, you simply ask for it and the person understands. But especially in agriculture where there is a large contingent of non-English speakers, getting that simple point across can be difficult and frustrating. Mireille Chahine, Assistant Professor-Extension Dairy Specialist, University of Idaho in Twin Falls has been working to bridge that gap in the dairy industry with a bi-lingual dairy manual. CHAHINE: The reason for it is that the majority of the workers at least in the Idaho area speak Spanish as their first language while the majority of managers speak English so we do hear that there is a language gap and a communication problem that occurs between the two groups and we're trying to bridge this gap. She says they are trying to produce some extension training manuals in both Spanish and in English. CHAHINE: It is available right now in print and by next month it will be available on the DAIReXNET website. This is the cooperative extensions national webpage and its www.extension.org/dairy+cattle. And this is a new webpage which the University of Idaho contributes and so it has information in both English and Spanish and we're going to be posting this manual up on this website. Just as there are many different English dialects and variations on word usage, so it is with Spanish and this can sometimes cause problems in translation. Think about it this way; do you think of dinner as the evening meal or lunch? What about supper? Chahine says they were quite aware of those kinds of issues. CHAHINE: People are pretty smart in figuring out the context of a certain word and what I did is I have a scientist visiting from Bolivia. He's a vet and we made sure had several people from different countries read it to make sure that it would be clear and that there are no dialects. In addition to the language issue, there was the subject matter. CHAHINE: The challenge was, more than the Spanish language is to really keep it science based while at the same time simple so people from a variety of education backgrounds can understand the information. The manual, while being produced in Idaho about their dairy industry is will be available to anyone who would like to read it and Chahine encourages people in the dairy industry around the world to visit the website. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.