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For more than a decade, business schools around the country have been preaching about demographic and ethnographic changes in our country. In order to keep up with the rest of the world, even interpreters and translators need to do their parts in order to understand the growing diversity of the workplace. As an example, it was recently mentioned by a co-worker that people in our very own office need to understand the differences between the words Latino and Hispanic. If you are guessing about the difference, it rests in the fact that the term Hispanic is less encompassing than the term Latino. But strangely enough, when given a choice as to what they would like to be classified there was almost no difference between those preferring one or the other. Despite the overall findings, a breakdown of the results found that that preferences actually were quite different based on where a respondent lived. To illustrate, people who answered the survey in CA and New England tended to like the term Latino. Respondents in Texas and the South preferred to be termed Hispanic. While differences in opinions exist between the word Latino and Hispanic, there are others who just want to be referred to as the country that they came from.

As a lover of history and culture and as a Kansas City Translation Companies professional, I enjoy reading about the Hispanic culture and was amazed to find that the word Hispanic is over a thousand years old. What I find startling is that the term Latino was introduced in the Nixon or Ford administration while the terms Hispanic was introduced several thousand years ago. It’s no mystery that they word Hispanic actually was introduced during the 1970′s as a clean word that would refer to the people from central America that spoke Spanish. The Census Bureau used Hispanic on a small number of its long census forms that year. But ten years later, it became standard government terminology when it was incorporated on all forms.

I recently asked a group of Saint Louis Translation Agencies workers about their preferences and they decided that they felt most comfortable with the choice of Hispanic. What it boils down to is the materialization of a multifaceted, multilingual market that has developed new opportunities for business and companies involved in trade. We can’t dismiss the notion that these huge trade deals combined with migration on a global level have been major contributors. But while these new worldly ways take shape and change our very existence, we need to agree that the term Hispanic is most correct in formal settings. Primarily for this reason, we have chosen to use Hispanic over Latino to cover the business considerations for this growing population group within the North America.

So as you begin your day tomorrow, we encourage you to think about the demographic changes that are influencing North America and think about what you will do to embrace it. As recently as 1990, the U.S. Census believed that Hispanics would not overtake African Americans to become the nation’s largest minority until 2020. But it was a real shocker to everyone when the 2002 numbers came out and showed that Hispanics already outnumbered African americans. Researchers later determined that the United States could now be classified as the fastest growing population of Spanish speaking people. One Seattle Translator worker recalls how the headlines read, “Hispanics have edged past blacks as the nation’s largest minority group.”

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