I received the January issue of The National Notary, published by the National Notary Association.  In it (on page 24) is an article about opportunities for notaries who know a foreign language.

I agree that knowing a foreign language can be a benefit.  I've even submitted a few articles on this subject in my ActiveRain blog.  Although the article in The National Notary has some merits, there are several things that I have to take issue with.

It mentions the difficulties of learning dialects. For example, Chinese.  It states: "Even to many Chinese, these dialects can be as alien as a foreign language."  If the language is difficult for Chinese, it will surely be a formidable task for English-speaking notaries trying to learn the language.

Some of what is involved in foreign language documents is irrelevant.  For example, no matter what language a document is written in, the notarial certificate should be in English.  At least that's the notary law in Colorado.

So what is a notary to do, who wants to learn a foreign language well enough to conduct notary business in that language?  My suggestion would be to structure your language learning around the types of situations that you will find yourself in.

I taught German for 20 years at the university level.  During that time I was often asked to teach special courses in German.  The people in these courses weren't interested in being able to read Goethe's Faust, and they had no intentions of studying at a German university.  For example, I taught an in-house German course for engineers at United Technologies.  They would occasionally travel to Germany to visit the BMW plant.  Their needs were specific.  So I designed a German course that focused on those needs.  There was a specific type of vocabulary and phrases that they would need to know.  It was the same when I taught a German for Travelers course. What situations will these people find themselves in, and how will they need to deal with them?

As I was reading the article in The National Notary, I couldn't help thinking that the same would apply to notaries who wanted to learn a foreign language.  There would be a basic vocabulary that notaries would want to have, and there would be phrases that they would want to learn. 

I'll give you an example.  Here are a couple of phrases that a notary would want to know if they were learning German:

As you can imagine, you don't need to sit through months and months of language classes.  You can separate the wheat from the chaff by learning just what you consider essential to your work as a notary.  You can do this through self-study. If you like, you can employ the aid of a native speaker to help you with understanding the spoken word, and for help with being able to speak the language. You wouldn't need to know that German has 3 different genders, 4 different cases, and a lot of other things that drive people crazy about the German language.  Learn just what you need to know to conduct business as a notary.

 

This will take some imagination on your part.  You want to anticipate what situations you will find yourself in, and how you will respond to them.  What questions might be asked of you?  How do you say that in German? Or Spanish? Or whatever language you have decided to learn.

 

 

 

Fluency in a foreign language is nice to have.  But there is more to learning a foreign language than having a mastery of it.  There is a practical use for it.

Viel Glück! (Good luck)

See also:

Should notary signing agents learn foreign languages?

Is there a need for multilingual notaries?