[…] Being bilingual, as Portal is, is a gift, a talent, a resource that New Mexico is rich in, she says.

So Portal created Valley Community Interpreters, or Intérpretes Communitarios del Valle, a grass-roots effort in Albuquerque to train bilingual students to become interpreters in a number of fields.

“It’s a very fast-growing industry, and yet there was really no one here training interpreters,” Portal said. “Our goal is to build and train a bilingual workforce in New Mexico that can work in the industry to help others communicate with society in general.”

The interpreter profession is expected to grow by 46 percent in the next 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s not surprising, considering that more than 300 languages are spoken in the country and more than 25.2 million people are “limited English-speaking,” 75 percent of whom say their native language is Spanish, according to U.S. Census figures. More.

See: Albuquerque Journal

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