Currently, there are 13 certified languages in California and a very extensive list of officially approved languages and dialects by the court in which testing is not available. Every two years, all court interpreters are required to complete 30 hours of continuing education.

Court Certified Interpreters: The 13 languages certified by the Judicial Council under Government Code §27293 are: American Sign Language, Arabic, Eastern Armenian, Western Armenian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese. 

Court Registered Interpreters: Interpreters of spoken languages for which there is no state examination are referred as "Registered Interpreters of Non-designated Languages".

Here at ATS our Court Interpreters are required to carry a Judicial Council Badge that displays a current photo, the interpreter official identification number, and the expiration date. Interpreters must be in good standing with the Judicial Council of California.

A Valencia company has translated the Tower of Babel into an exciting and growing business.

In fact, when you need to translate Hungarian, Tagalog, Punjabi or any of the estimated 150 languages and thousands of dialects worldwide, America Translating Services has someone on staff who can help.

ATS provides experienced and state-certified interpreters and translators to meet virtually any need – legal and medical fields, conferences, seminars, meetings and guided tours of foreign delegations.

With technology expanding into so many areas of commerce and society, it has long been a suspicion that translating would enter the computer age.  In many ways, it has.  Today, many translations are produced and designed with the help of computers.

But long before the advent of the World Wide Web, there have been scores of computer programs that have claimed to perform the actual act of language translation.  But beware!  Such programs can yield some very embarrassing results. We tried to use popular Internet translation tool to translate the sentence “It is raining cats and dogs” and the sentence translated to read that cats and dogs are falling from the sky.

Perhaps the most common question we receive at America Translating Services is: What is the difference between translating and interpreting?  For those who are still wondering, translating involves converting a written text into another language, while interpreting involves facilitating oral communications between people of different languages.  

Many agencies will service one of the two fields, but rarely do they provide both translating and interpreting.  At ATS, we have managed to do both, and do them successfully.  This is due to the business of language. 

This article represents one in many of a series about women entrepreneurs, with a focus on the challenges they have faced and the story of their accomplishments.  This month’s feature is about Rosa Aucar Steventon, owner of America Translating Services (ATS), located in the Valencia Industrial Center.

Having immigrating from Cuba 27 years ago, Rosa originally pursued a career in real state while working full-time for a local medical group and as a part-time interpreter for physicians in Valencia.  However, it didn’t take long for her to realize the tremendous local and global need for such services, especially in the Los Angeles area and throughout California.