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Delavan man builds bridge over language barrier

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Photo by Bill Olmsted

Interpreter Claudia Lizarralde listens intently to a woman's answer in Spanish to a question during a recent medical appointment.

DELAVAN — When times are tough, it's a hard sell to get businesses or governmental agencies to pay for an expensive service.

Saul Arteaga thinks interpretation and translation services, while expensive, save money in the long run.

More important, they protect his clients' health and well-being.

"Providers must view interpretation as a tool to communicate effectively," Arteaga said.

Without high-quality interpretation, doctors could make incorrect diagnoses or social workers could make decisions that are detrimental to a client's well-being, he said.

Arteaga in 2002 founded Southern Wisconsin Interpreting and Translation Services, 110 S. Third St., Delavan. Today, the company has three offices, including one in Wausau and Rockford, Ill., and provides telephone and face-to-face translation and interpretation services for dozens of languages in two states.

On Monday, Arteaga, 39, of Clinton won a Martin Luther King Jr. award from Gateway Technical College, Kenosha, for his work as an advocate for high-quality, certified translation and interpretation services.

Linguistic leaps

When Arteaga and his wife founded SWITS, it was in a run-down office on Walworth Avenue in downtown Delavan.

In the beginning, they mostly interpreted American Sign Language and Spanish, Arteaga said. Their biggest clients were Aurora Health Care and Walworth County Health and Human Services.

The next step was Milwaukee in 2003, when Arteaga was forced to develop a roster of interpreters.

"Back in those days, there was a big demand for Russian interpretation," Arteaga said.

Today, SWITS workers interpret and translate dozens of languages in many courtrooms and doctors offices.

Signs of change

Arteaga knows what it's like to struggle with the English language. He is a native of Lima, Peru, and moved to Woodstock, Ill., in 1989.

That tends to make clients comfortable with him, Arteaga said. And it helps him be a better interpretation teacher, he said.

"What was special of me teaching interpretation is I'm an immigrant. I learned English as a second language. Then I worked very hard to achieve the level that is required to become an efficient interpreter. People and participants would relate to that."

On the flip side, native English speakers who are providing the interpretation service such as doctors or court officials might be more comfortable with Sarah Tapia, a native English speaker. She is a certified interpreter who works for SWITS.

"We both have the same challenges, just kind of on the opposite ends of the spectrum," Tapia said.

Service improvements

While interpreters are not advocates for clients, Arteaga himself works as an advocate for quality interpretation services. That's part of the reason Gateway Technical College awarded him the Martin Luther King Jr. award, according to a news release.

Since 2003, Arteaga has served on a Wisconsin Supreme Court committee to improve court interpretation. He also serves as translation committee chairman for Mano a Mano, an organization that improves the quality of trilingual interpreters.

That's a service that might be needed by Spanish speaking parents who have a deaf child, for example. Arteaga is in the process of learning American Sign Language so he can better connect with his interpretation staff who provide that service.

SWITS interpreters volunteer their services for Marquette University's free weekly legal clinic.

In his career, Arteaga has seen resistance and bias against interpretation services. He also has seen people willing to accept change and make improvement, he said.

"It has been a mixed response," Arteaga said. "Mixed feelings for the provider. At the end, most of them have realized that interpreting is important."

Interpretation details

-- Service providers such as courts or hospitals are required to provide interpretation services when needed. Costs for the service in Rock County, as an example, start at $30 per hour, Clerk of Courts Eldred Mielke said.

The county pays for mileage. Some interpreters cost upwards of $60 per hour, Mielke said.

The county budgets about $45,000 per year for interpretation services, he said.

-- While American Sign Language and Spanish often are requested, speakers of some less common languages are making their way into Wisconsin, said Saul Arteaga, owner of Southern Wisconsin Interpreting and Translation Services, Delavan.

Some of the languages Arteaga and his staff are excited to interpret are Burmese and some distinct African languages such as Bantu, Mandingo and Fulani.

-- Interpreters are allowed to do only one thing: render one spoken language into another. They are not allowed in most cases to break in to offer definitions or words, Arteaga said.

For example, in a courtroom situation, a client might not be familiar with the word "custody," even in his or her own language. An interpreter is not allowed to change the "language register," or formality of the conversation, in order to help a client understand.

-- No one has yet passed the Wisconsin court's certification test for Hmong interpreters, even though Hmong is the third-most commonly used language in the state, Arteaga said.