Need a translator to help you get your place in line for a vaccine? Press 1 for English. Press 2 for Portuguese

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Information remains a powerful weapon, even more, in the circumstances around the world these days.

Google cancels April Fools

Google has dropped the idea to play the April Fool’s Day prank consecutively the second time. The company doesn’t want to indulge in a pranks plan. Instead, it is committed to focusing to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the second time the organisation decided to stop celebrating April Fools, the first was in April 2020. This decision was taken by Google Inc because of its global reach and so, it is trying to be sensitive with the international audience. Many people and organisations in India have also decided to cancel April Fools Day 2021 to spread awareness of the seriousness related to it.

April Fool’s Day is an annual convention of playing pranks and revealing them by uttering “April Fool!” at the people who were subjected to the prank. Interestingly, it not only an occasion for individuals. Some big companies including tech firms have played April Fool’s Day pranks. They try to create hoaxes by making stories around over-optimistic concepts. Some brands make fake announcements about launching a product or a service that will exist only in future.

Here are the pranks played by big tech companies on April Fool’s Day 2021.

Press 1 for English or press 2 for Spanish

Approximately 5.3 million U.S. households have limited English proficiency, according to the U.S. Census 2019 American Community Survey. And, it found, nearly 68 million people speak a language other than English at home.

In late February, a week after Virginia launched a centralized website and call center for covid-19 vaccine preregistration, Zowee Aquino - a community health manager at NAKASEC Virginia, a nonprofit that works with Asian Americans across the state - alerted the state to a glitch that could prove fatal for non-English speakers trying to secure a shot.

Callers who requested an interpreter on its new 1-877-VAX-IN-VA hotline would be put on hold briefly and then patched through. Then the line would automatically hang up on them.

It was a startling discovery for Aquino, and her colleagues at NAKASEC. The glitch was a "direct barrier to access," she wrote to senior state officials, "and must be addressed immediately."

But that wasn't the only problem. Only two languages were offered when callers dialed in — "press 1 for English" or "press 2 for Spanish." But Virginia is home to speakers of many other languages — Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Mongolian, Amharic and dozens more — who would need the help of translators to get their place in line for a vaccine.

How much I appreciate medical interpreters

Doctors and nurses work frequently and closely with medical interpreters. In 2019, the total number of interactions involving interpreters at Stanford's adult hospital was close to 80,000, according to Johanna Parker, a medical Spanish interpreter and lead interpreter for education and training at Stanford. 

"We act as message clarifiers," she told, "and in this role, we alert the provider to the fact that there could be a linguistic or cultural misunderstanding, allowing the provider to explain."

Patient care involves an incredible amount of information exchange. Clear and effective communication is critical for everything from making plans with attending physicians during morning rounds to updating patients and families about their surgeries and imaging results. 

In addition to breaking down technical medical terms, interpreters convey doctors' and nurses' stated and implicit meanings to patients and families, making sure that nothing gets lost in translation. They also serve as a bridge, ensuring that health care providers understand the questions, concerns and desires of patients and their loved ones.

Email celebrates its 50th birthday this year

Email celebrates its 50th birthday this year and has been ubiquitous in the office for a couple of decades. Yet it is hard to think of a workplace practice that causes more aggravation.

The solution to email overload is to make clear decisions, quickly. That does not and should not mean instant replies, but it should mean that the email no longer festers in the inbox. A sharp organisation will find better ways to handle its core activities than reverting to email. 

A hundred emails a day is a lot if you leave half of them sitting in your inbox. Keep that up and in a month you’ll have 1,500. Give it a year and you’ll be begging to be allowed to declare email bankruptcy, post the keys through the letterbox and walk away.

533 million Facebook accounts leaked online for free

Personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts has reportedly leaked online for free, according to security researcher Alon Gal. Insider said it verified several of the leaked records.

“The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India,” according to Insider. “It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.”

If that 533 million number might sound familiar to you, that’s because this information is apparently from the same dataset that people could pay for portions of using a Telegram bot, which Motherboard reported on in January. Now, though, it appears that those who want to get their hands on the data won’t have to pay anything at all.

Clubhouse faces its biggest challenges yet, however

Clubhouse had an incredible year in one most of us would rather forget. The live audio app launched during a pandemic; gained more than 10 million downloads for an invite-only, iOS-only app; and succeeded to the point that most every social platform wants to copy it. 

The company now faces its biggest challenges yet, however. For one, the pandemic is waning, and people might be more interested in real-life socializing instead of conversations facilitated through their phone. Anyone advertising their backyard as the next great Clubhouse competitor has a point. But for the people who do end up wanting to talk to each other online, they’ll soon have a lot more places to do so. In case you haven’t kept up: Twitter, Facebook (reportedly), LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify, Mark Cuban, and Slack have all launched or are working on their own attempts at social audio — the space is about to get busy.

Last but not least

An article recommended by Mário Júnior, CEO of AP | PORTUGAL Tech Language Solutions >> Collaboration is key to developing new ideas, and scaling those solutions up is essential for making good progress in any field. This week, Earth Optimism 2021, a global summit hosted online until 4 April by Cambridge Conservation Initiative, has been showcasing conservation innovations to help wildlife and nature.

This text was not written by a native English speaker, but by a language lover. However, all our language services are always provided by native speakers.