Most people can agree that it is important to communicate with Spanish-speaking audiences β residents, shoppers, customers, patients, voters, and so on. The demographics of California and the United States make that abundantly clear, but how do you do it? How do you effectively communicate with Spanish-speaking audiences?
Too often, this is entrusted to employees of organizations who have a Spanish surname, assuming that since they routinely speak Spanish with friends and family, that they must also know how to write and professionally communicate in Spanish.
Organizations often put their employees in the uncomfortable position of being Latino and speaking Spanish but having to admit or hide that they may not have the formal grammatical, writing, and rhetorical training to translate or communicate in Spanish. Those organizations are sometimes asking their accountant to fix their plumbing, and the results can be embarrassing β jumbled translations in Spanglish that do the very opposite of demonstrating respect for the language and the very population that an organization is attempting to reach.
It is the same case with English: the number of people who speak English far outnumber the number of professionals who are educated, trained, and skilled in grammar and the art of communications in English. Professional Spanish-language communications begin with proper respect for the Spanish language and the audiences that choose to receive their news and information in Spanish, even if they might speak and understand English. It begins with excellent grammar that respects the language of its audience, the kind that takes more than a few years in high school and a minor in college to develop.
Professional Spanish-language communications requires finding ways of cleverly communicating key concepts that if translated literally are literally lost in translation. Online translation software is of little help here and is not to be trusted.
