Today, I’ll tell you about the smallest job we’ve ever done.
Our longtime client Ethnicity Matters is a multicultural ad agency. Normally we provide them with transcreation and voiceover production in various immigrant languages.
This time they asked us for something completely different. Their client the Real Canadian Superstore is giving its multilingual staff badges that say, “You can speak to me in…” (In Brampton and Surrey it might be Punjabi and Hindi; in Markham and Richmond, Mandarin or Cantonese.)
But this request wasn’t for an immigrant language. It was for the nłeʔkepmxcín, the language of the Nlaka’pamux Nation, whose traditional territory is between Vancouver and Kamloops, BC.
There are about 1000 speakers of nłeʔkepmxcín, of whom only about 150 are “first speakers.” (Thanks, residential schools.😠) But members of the Nlaka’pamux Nation are working tirelessly to revitalize the language and teach it to their community.
So, we got on the phone to the Citxw Nlaka’pamux Assembly, and now we know how to say “hello, you can speak to me in nłeʔkepmxcín”:
hén̓łeʔ kʷ hécu nes nłeʔkepmxcínm
And by the way, we also do voiceover production in Indigenous languages: Inuktitut, Anishninaabemowin (Ojibwe), Mi’kmaq, Dene, various dialects of Cree, and many others.
