Back from Mexico (with Thoughts on Translation)

Greetings again. I’m back from Mexico. For the workshop there, I worked with an excellent translation team.

I gave the workshop in English, and the main slides were projected in both English and Spanish. Also, simultaneous translation into Spanish was available to attendees wanting it.

Similar slides had been translated into Spanish for the AuthorAID workshop in Nicaragua. Thus, we had a good starting point.

For the workshop in Mexico, I worked with a four-person translation team: Roberto Tuda Rivas, Sergio Lozano Rodríguez, Javier Alejandro Flores de la Rosa, and Liliana Guerrero Ramos. The first three team members had taken a summer course from me. Thus, they were familiar with much of what I would say.

Every evening, the team and I met to look at and discuss the English and Spanish slides for the next day. As we talked, the team revised some of the Spanish slides to convey more completely the intended meaning. (Hearing the discussions also helped me learn more Spanish.)

During my presentations, Tuda, who headed the translation team, provided simultanous translation into Spanish. I think that having discussed the slides helped in doing so.

Workshop attendees could ask questions in either Spanish or English. To help me understand questions in Spanish, Lozano provided simultaneous translation.

The workshop attendees seemed very pleased with the translations. I was very pleased too. And I became more aware of factors that can help a translation project succeed.

The Spanish-language slides from the workshop are now available in the AuthorAID Resource Library. Thank you, translators, for your great work!