I was quite interested to hear my friend Linda talk about her experiences working as a pharmacy technician at a local Rite Aid store. She had learned a bit of Spanish back in high school (she took two years of Spanish) but then shortly after graduating from high school she moved to Maine, where nobody spoke Spanish. People either spoke English or Canadian-French where she lived for twenty-nine years.
When she moved back to Virginia, she started working at Rite Aid, and found that a lot of customers were Hispanic, and did not speak English at all. She tried to brush up on her high-school Spanish, but it had been over thirty years, and although she managed to help most of the customers, there were a few times when she had to call the store’s translation company and put the customer on the telephone to facilitate the communication that was important.
When she was taking pharmacy technician classes, she learned that the second-most popular language spoken in the city where the classes were being held was Farsi! Clearly, the need for translation services will continue to grow for many decades to come.
