In the past decade, Spanish speakers have flocked to small towns. But translator Casey Poe said many people don’t seem to notice.
“They are almost like ghosts,” he said.
A Knoxville, Tenn. native, Poe said he didn’t know a word of Spanish until his sophomore year of college. Three-and-a-half years later, he is starting a translation business, Accurate Translation Services.
Poe spoke in Spanish to the Spanish Business Club Friday afternoon in Davies Theatre about the growth of the Hispanic population in rural areas and small towns in the United States.
“It’s because there’s a huge demand for work,” he said, adding that manufacturing jobs in those areas can offer non-English speakers higher wages than they often make elsewhere.
Since March, Poe has been working as a translator at Ashley Furniture in Arcadia. Of the company’s 6,000 employees, he said, about 800 are Hispanic, including about 80 percent of the store’s second-shift workers.
“It’s interesting because people will come from far, far away,” he said. “If you’re earning six (dollars an hour) in California, you’ll come to Wisconsin to earn twice as much.”
As a translator, Poe said, he interviewed and trained Spanish-speaking employees and helped them communicate with management.
“The difficulty of all that is that I can’t solve everyone’s problems, and that’s what I want to do,” he said.
Poe said staying with families while studying in Costa Rica and Spain helped him pick up the Spanish language very quickly.
The Spanish language in the United States is constantly adapting, he said, describing workers from Mexico as “interrupted immigrants” because they often travel frequently between the United States and Mexico, adopting English words like “ride,” “lock” and “application” into their lexicon along the way.
Junior Spanish and nursing major Inn-Ah Park said that presentations like this one help her pick up the language.
“There are so many people who can’t speak in English and also who are sick,” she said, “so I want to work for those who need more and better care in the clinical setting.”
Senior Jesse Kunes, the Spanish Business Club’s vice president, said the club is growing quickly but is still in its infancy, only in its second year as a student organization.
“It’s an awesome career builder; it’s an awesome resume builder,” Kunes said.