Join AATIA’s Interpreters Special Interest Group for an update on healthcare interpreting this Saturday, June 14, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the International Center of Austin (201 East 2nd St). Find out about the recent NCIHC General Meeting and national certification efforts.

Street parking is available and parking meters are free.

Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.
— Goethe, 1827.

This belief that international literature plays a vital role in book culture is one that is shared by all the publishers and booksellers involved in Reading the World, a celebration of literature in translation to be held at BookPeople on Friday, June 6.

Noted Russian translator Marian Schwartz will moderate the hour-long program, which begins at 7 p.m. and will consist of three parts:

1. Liliana Valenzuela reading from her translation from English into Spanish: Cristina Garcia, A Handbook to Luck/Las Caras de la Suerte

2. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey reading from her translation from Portuguese: Teeth Under the Sun by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Dalkey Archive P, 2007).

3. Michele McKay Aynesworth presenting Beacons, the literary journal of the American Translators Association, with readings by the following: Liliana Valenzuela, Tony Beckwith, and Rob Cogswell and his translator, Horacio Peña.

This event is hosted by the Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association. 

Nora Comstock will speak at the next SpanSIG meeting. She is the Executive Director of Las Comadres, an informal internet-based group that meets monthly in many US cities to build connections and community with other Latinas.

The meeting will be held at the Austin History Center, 9th & Guadalupe, 10:15-12 noon, on Saturday, May 10. Don’t forget the member meeting at 1:00 p.m. the same day, same place.

Due to the conflict with the Old Pecan Street festival and the related parking problems downtown, the LitSIG meeting this coming Saturday, May 3, from 2 to 4 p.m. will be held at the home of Marian Schwartz.

Liliana Valenzuela will coordinate a discussion of the April issue of Poetry magazine, which is devoted to translation.  Last we heard, Liliana had two copies left; contact her to obtain a copy and the prospectus for the discussion.

Spanish translator, writer and editor Xosé Castro played to a sold-out house at last Saturday’s workshop. As Marta Blumenthal writes in her review (below), who would have thought that a six-hour workshop on grammar could have been so witty and so thoroughly entertaining? Marta was the driving force behind this workshop and its main organizer. On behalf of all of us who had the pleasure of participating in the workshop: ¡Gracias, Marta!

Castro serves up grammar feast:
a review by Marta Blumenthal

Who would’ve thunk that a six-hour grammar workshop could be useful and enjoyable at the same time? Spiced with humor and wit, the “English-Spanish Contrastive Grammar Workshop” taught by Xosé Castro was a toothsome grammar feast.

On April 5th, fifty-one eager-to-learn translators from the four corners of Texas and beyond met at the International Center of Austin, the new AATIA office site, for the first workshop at this venue.

Sponsored by AATIA’s Spanish Special Interest Group (SpanSIG), the workshop covered translation from Romance languages, sociologic issues, market trends, neologisms, politically correct language, and symmetry between source text and translation: how to produce the same understanding, reaction and emotion conveyed in the original text.

Xosé encouraged the participants to practice the healthy exercise of re-thinking in Spanish to achieve natural-sounding translations. Ask yourself, he suggested, “How would my mother say it?”

Drawing from real life examples, Xosé covered lexicon, idiomatic expressions, syntactic structures, spelling, and taboos. He reminded participants to be aware of false cognates; to translate concepts, not words; and, in some cases, just to translate (terms such as “display,” for example, which translators of computer documentation and ad copy may tend to leave in English, assuming that everyone will understand what a display is).

Xosé has been a freelance translator since 1989. He resides in Madrid and works with clients who translate for Spanish-speakers in the US and Latin America, as well as Spain. This experience has afforded him the opportunity to grapple with the linguistic challenges that confront many of us every day in our work

Participants left eager to continue exploring the topics discussed during the day and willing to come back to more workshops.

AATIA members are encouraged to communicate with Laura Vlasman, AATIA Workshop Coordinator, or Maurine McLean, AATIA Director of Professional Development, if they have suggestions for future workshop topics and presenters.

Only a few places remain in the English-Spanish contrastive grammar workshop, to be presented by Xosé Castro on April 5th. If you’ve been intending to register, but haven’t done so, don’t delay! Contact Laura Vlasman to find out whether there is still room in the workshop.

AATIA’s Spanish Special Interest Group (SpanSIG) will host a workshop on English-Spanish contrastive grammar in Austin on Saturday, April 5, 2008. The day-long workshop will focus on compared grammar structures, discursive elements, phrasing and wording, direct and indirect speech, idioms, false cognates, and the “transcreation” (translation + creation) methodology for identifying these foreign elements and adapting them to the target language.

Although the workshop is aimed mainly at translators of English to Spanish, translators of Spanish to English will benefit from the discussion of contrastive grammar and “transcreation” methodology.

The presenter, Xosé Castro, is an English > Spanish technical translator and localization specialist based in Madrid, Spain, whose work also includes writing, dubbing, and subtitling for television and film. He has taught translation courses and seminars for T&I programs in Spain and has spoken at numerous international workshops and conferences on a variety of translation topics, including software and website localization, movie script translation, writing in neutral Spanish, and proofreading. Among many other distinctions, he is the creator of the online help for the CD-ROM version of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary).

The workshop will be held at the International Center of Austin. Participants who are ATA-certified will be eligible to earn six continuing education points. Registration for the workshop will begin in early March.

Patricia Bown from McElroy Translations will explore the Spanish translation market at the Spanish Special Interest Group meeting at 10:15 a.m. on Saturday, February 9, at the Austin History Center.

She will address the changing needs that the Spanish translation market faces and how to prepare for it as a Spanish translator (areas of specialty that are in high demand in Spanish translation, qualifications agencies seek when hiring translators, and types of translations requests they get).