Languages open doors to opportunities

Hospitals are in constant need of interpreters to connect patients to doctors. The U.S. Department of Justice revealed in 2004 that the FBI had accumulated 120,000 hours of untranslated recordings potentially related to terrorism. Multinational corporations are looking to increase market share in China and other countries. With employers in the private and public sectors […]

[Online Exclusive]: New intensive language program offered

UCLA will offer a new intensive language program this summer that will use Los Angeles’ language-rich community in teaching students to speak, read and write. The program, “Language Intensives in L.A.,” will feature classes in seven tongues: Spanish, Arabic and Russian, along with Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia, Catalan, spoken around Barcelona in Spain, and Swahili […]

A life of languages

Michael Heim, professor of Slavic languages and literatures, took up French in 1956. It fulfilled a foreign language requirement at his Staten Island high school. Two years later, he began learning German. He studied Russian and Mandarin Chinese in college. Czech came next. Today Heim, a native speaker of only English, knows more than a […]