Your Gift to NCI Supports Students and the Immigrant Community
The National Center for Interpretation is committed to promoting intercultural communication and social justice for language minorities through cutting-edge research, training, and testing for interpreters and translators while advancing professionalism. We rely on the support of the community to fulfill our mission. A donation to our student support fund will allow aspiring interpreters, who otherwise would not have the means, to pursue the highest quality training in the interpreting profession.
Your gift will support the work of NCI including professional training and development for not-for-credit, non-traditional students, as well as Social Justice and Language Access, especially for less commonly taught languages, such as Chinese and Arabic. There is little training available for translators and interpreters in these languages, but speakers of Chinese, Arabic, and other minority languages need qualified interpreters for fair access to justice and quality health care. Many bilingual immigrants in these languages also need work, and the availability of training may increase access to professional opportunities for immigrants and refugees.
We give our sincerest thanks to all of our generous benefactors for their continued support. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation of any amount in support of increasing access to social justice for limited-English-speaking individuals across the country. To make a donation to any of these funds, please visit our donation processing page.
The Agnese Haury Tuition Award Fund
The University of Arizona National Center for Interpretation has been at the forefront of the field of specialized interpretation for three decades, and its pioneering success is due to the care, compassion, and commitment of Mrs. Agnese Haury, who was a champion of civil rights for limited- and non-English speakers. Mrs. Haury served as an advocate and benefactor for a remarkable number of the National Center projects over the years. It was because of her support that the National Center was able to develop its Summer Institute for Court Interpretation in 1983, which was renamed the Agnese Haury Institute for Court Interpretation in her honor in 1996.
The annual Agnese Haury Institute is the longest running intensive Spanish/English interpreter training program in the United States and is now nationally and internationally recognized as the premier professional interpreter training program in the country. It has become the country’s major repository for the theoretical and practical aspects of specialized interpretation, its cognitive underpinnings, its ethical parameters, its best practice, its assessment, and the policy that guides it.
Not content to offer only training, Mrs. Haury wanted to share the work of the Institute with the entire country and the world and to move the field from a struggling nascent position to one that had a documented history, a set of protocols and ethics, and a serious academic foundation. Therefore, she supported the training of trainers, to offer quality training in more places; and she supported the writing of Fundamentals of Court Interpretation, published in 1991, as well as the second edition, published in 2012.
Through her efforts, Mrs. Haury ensured that people who were aspiring and practicing interpreters could come to the Institute and improve their skills to pass certification tests, and provide the quality of service deserved by limited- and non-English speakers. She never lost her understanding that if people from other cultures and languages are to reap the benefits of American society they must be allowed to have true access to the principal cultural institutions. With access, these persons can fully participate in the legal system, get the health care they need, understand and assist with the education of their children, and obtain the social services that they require.
In short, Mrs. Haury understood what many people cannot comprehend—that true participation in a society means being able to fully communicate, and to understand and have their voices heard.