International Effectiveness

If there was a way to give zero stars. This business has no customer service and the manager (or what ever title she gives her self) Martha is rude and treats the employees horribly. While on the phone I kept hearing her or someone else constantly saying negative remarks and degrading the lady on the phone. If they micro manage like that no wonder why they provide horrible service. All I wanted was a translator for a private party in SF and they never showed up when I called IEC they said there was no record of my request but they still charged me! What bull. Time to call the better business bureau

Terrible customer service on the phone. Completely messed up on following clear, simple instructions for a sensitive cultural issue. Almost left me without an interpreter at the last minute. The interpreter who came was OK — but just OK. We have since found a much better one.
Then they billed us twice!
Stay away. Stay far away.

Unilocal, can you come up with a way to give zero stars please?
This place is a joke. False advertisement to the core. People on the phone are so rude, and if they put rude people like that on the line for your first point of contact I do not even want to know what going into their office would be like. I smell a total scam. I asked what Hospitals in Oakland they provide Medical Interpreters for and the lady, Martha Martinez, started freaking out and telling me she cannot give me that information. Then I asked what cities in the Bay Area they have active Interpreters in and she freaked out again and told me she cannot give me that information. She told me if I wanted to know that I had to come into the office. Shady. At this point, I went with my gut feeling and told her this was not the place for me and she basically verbally abused me.
Crazy people and an extremely shady company.
Do not give them your time of day.

1 star is way too much to give! Do not work for these people!!! Everything said in other reviews are true and even worse! If you scroll down, there are more reviews hiding and they are all true!!! I’m not exaggerating!!! Don’t do!!! The things going on in that office are insane!!! BE CAREFUL!!! You’re better off working at McDonald’s!!! Run!!! They are in Marin!!! That’s the main office!!! Please don’t do it! They took more than 7 months from many of us’s lives! Some had kids, had to leave them with someone and pay while making no money! Some drove so far to get there and after all that plus a test that we past, they never gave us a certificate!!! Martha yelled at everyone and mentally abused all of us! She was like Hitler! No one said anything because we worked so hard everyday for that certificate and never got it! The way this women spoke to us was degrading and disgusting! Probably illegal, but since it wasn’t a job, she knew we had nothing on her!!! Not one person at that office is happy! Most have ran out of there! Any positive reviews you see is from them! Just sad, we all put some much on the line for the training. She has such an authority complex, it’s disturbing! there is so much more to say, but I think this is enough to let whomever is thinking to work for them to think long and hard about it!

I strongly agree with everything the other reviewer wrote about this organization. I went through their training and obtained my certificate but they are so unprofessional and ghetto. Martha, the manager, who has a big chip on her shoulder for whatever reason, will talk down to you like you would not believe. She talks to the trainees as if they are children. She would wag her finger at you and yell out things like, «We’ll drop you!» as if this training is a once in a life time opportunity. I remember thinking to myself how pathetic she looked, while watching her doing rubber necking and talking ghetto. Here she is acting this way only because in this little office she is somebody when she’s nobody anywhere else. She talks to you about dressing up professionally and then she shows up at work looking like a hobo with clothes that I suspect she bought from a Goodwill store. And then there is Marcela, the trainer. Now she is something else altogether. She tries to pass herself as some highly educated person and talks about a lot of things that she picked up from a few classes she took in city college (yes people, city college). She actually trains you on genetics and talks as if she is an expert. Her knowledge on the subject is basically what she picked up from taking a class in SF city college. What I found amuzing was that she seemed really proud of the fact that she was taking those courses at SF city college. She made it sound like SF city college is the best school in the whole world. I guess it’s because where she came from that IS a big accomplishment? I was lucky to get my certificate but others in my class were not so lucky. They pulled the Chinese trainees out of the training and made them start taking calls without proper training. I found out later that they never got to finish the training because of it. I work for a healthcare insurance company that utilizes this agency for interpreting service and already made recommendations to the member service department to use other agencies than IEC. Stay away from this place. Not worth it.

International Effectiveness Center Health Care Interpreter Training Program is a travesty. I was flabbergasted at the blatant unprofessionalism of the Health Care Interpreter Trainer. She is nothing less than a callous brute.
The health care interpreter trainer claims to have been a Medical Doctor in her country of origin (3^rd world) as a teenager. Yet she did not know the difference between antitussives and decongestants. She claimed they were the same medication and the terms could be used interchangeably. WRONG. An antitussive is an agent that relieves or prevents cough. A decongestant is an agent that tends to reduce congestion or swelling, such as of the nasal mucosa. She also did not know the difference between a sprain and strain injury. She stated that a sprain was stretching of the soft tissue and that a strain was twisting injury. In actuality, a sprain is a joint injury in which some of the fibers of a supporting ligament are ruptured but the continuity of the ligament remains intact. A strain is an overstretching or overexertion of some part of the musculature. There are more examples, but you get the picture, right? THIS IS YOUR HEALTH CARE INTERPRETER FOR YOU, PRETTY SCARY.
The health care interpreter trainer was verbally abusive, yelling and using profanity while addressing trainees when something displeased her. She regularly glared maliciously at trainees. During one of her maniacal rants, a pen flew right towards me during one of the training exercises. I did not see it coming because I was reading. She then would cover her butt, go to the owner and office manager and report that the trainees were yelling at her. This was a complete lie. Per another IEC employee, there have been multiple complaints about her. Nothing has been done.
The health care interpreter trainer dressed in unprofessional and provocative clothing which included low-​cut blouses, short skirts, and skintight pants which delineated her private parts, leaving nothing to the imagination, but we were required to dress professionally.
One thing I found particularly amusing was that the health care interpreter trainer only spoke Spanish but trained others as health care interpreters which spoke languages she did not understand. Is this effective training? I think not. I overheard a couple of trainees stating that when they did not know the interpretation of a word in their native language that they would substitute the word with profanity towards The health care interpreter trainer. I thought this was hilarious. The health care interpreter trainer had no clue.
IEC Health Care Interpreter Training is a complete waste of time and money. We need to stop this abusive behavior. I spent approximately $ 1,000 in gas, bridge toll fees, food, and other «materials». This training is a total scam.
The health care interpreter trainer works at health care facilities and government facilities all over the Bay Area. I will ensure that IEC not be used at any of the facilities I am employed or affiliated with. I hope you all follow suit. IEC exploits people. Case in point, Health Care Interpreters are paid $ 20.00 an hour as an independent contractor while they make more than double that (see below). It’s not too difficult to see that they are only interested in the BOTTOM LINE ($) and could care less about humanity.
They post on Craigslist every couple of months for Health Care Interpreter Training Program. Do not fall for it. WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!
The office manager is also very unprofessional and verbally abusive.
* If you needed a Hmong interpreter for 15 minutes and the interpreter lived 15 miles away. You would pay two hour minimum and travel time for a grand total of $ 270. The independent contractor or interpreter would get $ 20 for this job. Why do we allow this? Just because there is a law that mandates certain entities to provide interpreting services for their clients does not give private organizations the right to exploit us!!! This is one of the reasons why health care costs are so expensive.
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Interpreter Rates for 2010 – 2011
Language Per Hour
Spanish $ 60
Cantonese
Mandarin
Russian
Toisan
Tagalog
Vietnamese,
$ 70
Burmese, Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Mien, Mongolian, Thai
$ 120
Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu
$ 90
All others
$ 120 to $ 150

Minimum Two hour minimum
Mileage: Attempts will be made to assign a translator who lives within 10 miles of the assignment. When this is feasible, no travel will be charged. When this is not feasible, an additional $ 30 per hour would be charged for travel time, plus 48 cents per mile. Most of the time there is no charge for travel.