Interpretation and Cultural Ambassadors

---

HMC Connections provides interpretation services connect you accurately and confidentially to your clients. Our Interpreters and Cultural Ambassadors work with clients in a variety of situations , including assessments, consultations, intakes and meetings and can provide interpretation in any style (whisper, simultaneous, consecutive).

We also offer training on working with interpreters so your staff can get the most out of their meetings for those who are often working with interpreters this is a worthwhile course.

HMC Connections provides interpretation services in 130 languages and dialects including;

Albanian	Farsi	Laos	Somali
Amharic	Filipino	Lingala	Spanish
Arabic (21 Arabic Dialects)	French	Lithuanian	Swahili
Armenian	German	Luganda	Swedish
Aroma	Greek	Macedonia	Tagalog
Assyrian	Gujarati	Malayalam	Tamil
Azerbaijani	Haitian	Maltese	Thai
Bengali	Hebrew	Mandarin	Thailand
Bulgarian	Hindi	Pashto	Turkish
Cambodian	Hungarian	Patua	Turkmen
Cantonese	Indonesian	Polish	Twi
Chaldean	Italian	Portuguese	Ukrainian
Chichewa	Jamaican	Punjabi	Urdu
Chinese	Japanese	Romanian	Vietnamese
Croatian	Kikongo	Russian	Yoruba
Czech	Korean	Serbian	And more
Dari	Krio	Sinhalese
Dutch	Kurdish	Slovak

All of our Interpreters must have at least 100 hours of training and pass the standardized entrance test (CILISAT) approved by Citizenship and Immigration Canada*. We also provide in house training to review our interpretation policies, best practices, and confidentiality requirements. Many of our Interpreters have also completed 100 hours of recognized, specialized interpreter training including medical and court terminology a cultural ambassador training.

Cultural Ambassadors

If the barrier to communication is more than language, HMC Connections also provides Cultural Ambassadors. These Ambassadors are fully trained interpreters who receive additional training on how to communicate cultural information. This is helpful when your staff may not understand the context of the clients culture and it is the culture clash that is having an effect on the relationship. A Cultural Ambassador can communicate the importance and significance of religion and religious practice, of family or cultural traditions, or of common beliefs and practices of the person requiring interpretation. HMC Connections has had significant success with Cultural Ambassadors being used by teachers and administrators in the school boards. Communication must start from a common understanding of context.

*CILISAT is not available for all languages and dialects. All Interpreters who can be CILISAT certified are, for those languages where there is no test available only the 100 hours of training are required.

For more information please contact:

Connections Dispatcher
hmcit@hmcconnections.com
905-842-2486 ext 256

Hanadi Al Masri
Director of Social Enterprises
hal-masri@hmcconnections.com