En vivo y en directo: Sisters translate North Carolina coronavirus briefings into Spanish
When the governor takes the podium to deliver a coronavirus update, two sisters simultaneously close the door on a closet-sized technology room elsewhere in the Department of Public Safety, their monitors and microphones sharing space with racks of state servers.
When Gov. Roy Cooper speaks, they speak as well. And for Spanish-speaking North Carolinians, it’s the voices of Jackie and Yasmin Metivier they hear, not the governor. As Cooper and other officials talk, they simultaneously interpret those words into Spanish on a separate live stream hosted by the Department of Public Safety, for the first time in North Carolina.
“We’ve been here 30 years, give or take, and it’s great to finally be providing service to the Spanish-speaking community,” said Yasmin (pronounced Jasmin) Metivier. “(Hurricane) Florence, it was bad. There was absolutely nothing in Spanish.”
The two are professional translators and interpreters with their own thriving business, and have been since shortly after moving to North Carolina from Mexico in 1986, working for everyone from Gov. Jim Hunt to Dix Hospital to Lenovo. The state approached them in October about adding a Spanish-language option to emergency briefings.
“I definitely do think there is an incredible value to having the government addresses translated,” said Moisés Serrano, the political director for El Pueblo, a Latino advocacy organization in Raleigh.
“Unfortunately right now, even though there’s a lot of information being shared, I still don’t see that the immigrant community views the (DPS) website as a place to go for the addresses,” Serrano said. “That’s where I could see an area of improvement. I wish the DHHS (Department of Health and Human Services) would have either a dedicated Spanish-language website or a centralized location for the information.”
Two brains are better than one
Cooper’s sign-language interpreters, Monica McGee and Lee Williamson, became celebrities in their own right during Hurricane Florence and subsequent disasters — including this one — but the Metvier sisters are known only by their voices.
Which is how they ended up in their “IT closet” on Thursday, interpreting as Health and Human Services Secretary Mandy Cohen, Director of Emergency Management Mike Sprayberry and others gave the latest COVID-19 update. They alternate with each speaker, but it’s really always a joint effort, which is how they typically operate.
Metivier is their married name. Both of them: they married brothers. They’re the kind of siblings who habitually finish each other’s sentences, which in this line of work can be a tremendous advantage, especially during a Q&A when they’re working entirely on the fly.
“Whatever’s in her brain,” Jackie starts out.
“She knows!” Yasmin interjects.
“It’s very similar to what’s in my brain,” Jackie continues.
“She knows!” Yasmin says again.
“Because as we’re interpreting simultaneously, if I stumble on a word, she looks it up or she tells me what it is,” Jackie finished. “Two brains are better than one.”
Their maiden name is Wurts, which is a story in itself, and how they came to speak English and live here. Their grandfather emigrated to Mexico from Rifle, Colo., married a Mexican woman and raised a family in the state of Puebla. As schoolchildren, the Metivier sisters and their three other siblings would each be sent back to Colorado for a year to live with family and learn English.
Now, being bilingual is a full-time job. Their company, Bilingual Communications, does live interpretation, translation and voiceovers for a wide range of clients from state and local governments to Fortune 500 companies to small businesses with Spanish-speaking workforces.
They started with Nortel, after it bought a Mexican phone company, reading manuals to learn the terminology in the pre-internet age. At one point, they had their mother send them a Spanish sewing machine manual so they could learn the right terms to do training videos for a textile company.
A way to give back
Garner-based Hamlin Companies has been using the Metiviers to simultaneously translate safety and benefit briefings for more than 20 years for a roofing workforce that’s almost half Spanish-speaking. With those workers listening on earpieces, they get the same information at the same time as their English-speaking colleagues.
“Especially things like insurance or benefits, it’s really important to them to understand and it makes our meetings flow very well,” vice president Katherine Anne Hamlin said. “Our employees trust them very much. If they have a question they know they can say it in Spanish to Jackie or Yasmin, and it will get answered.”
Jackie majored in communications and Yasmin in marketing, but their training has been almost entirely on the job, especially for something as important as public communications in a crisis.
“Everything we’ve done in the past 25 years has really prepared us to do this job, because these types of press conferences require knowledge of medical terms, legal terms, banking, government, policy,” Jackie Metivier said. “Over the years, we’ve interpreted for IBM and Lenovo, that’s IT. Medical conferences for swine flu, jock itch, you name it. We’ve been doing an annual conference for a client that helps farmworkers. So in those conferences we’re talking health, pesticides, immigration issues. And we do a lot of interpreting for the administrative office of the courts.”
“It’s a way to give back,” Yasmin said. “I feel like we’re doing something for the community. We feel like we’re essential workers, even though we may not wear a stethoscope or a uniform.”
This story was originally published April 3, 2020 at 6:15 AM with the headline "En vivo y en directo: Sisters translate North Carolina coronavirus briefings into Spanish."
