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).

Susana Roca-Smith, Spanish Special Interest Group Coordinator, reports that SpanSIG and the Interpretation SIG have set dates for their respective meetings in 2008. Unless otherwise announced, all meetings will be held at the Austin History Center, 10:15am-12:00pm., on the following dates:

SpanSIG
Feb. 9
May 10
Sept. 13
Dec. 6
ISIG
April 12
June 14
August 9
Oct. 11

The next AATIA Literary Special Interest Group will meet Saturday, January 12, from 2 to 4 p.m. Traci Andrighetti will present an excerpt from Rossana Campo’s The American Actor for review. Contact LitSIG Coordinator Marian Schwartz for directions. By way of introduction, Andrighetti had this to say:

This excerpt is from the latter pages of Rossana Campo’s The American Actor, a novel about an Italian journalist who decides to spend the holidays in New York hunting down an American actor with whom she had a one-night stand following the opening of his latest film in Paris, where she lives and works.

At this point in the story, our protagonist is in the process of discovering that the actor, Steve Rothman, with whom she is by now completely infatuated, is less like his character in the recent love story he has made and more like his characters in the gratuitously violent films “Dangerous Men” and “Bloody Brothers.”

Incidentally, the “storm” she refers to in the opening sentence of the excerpt has to do with the first sign she has seen of Steve’s dark side the previous evening.

Rossana Campo, born in Genoa to Neapolitan parents in 1963, writes novels, short stories, and theater. Her writing, recognized as part of an innovative literary style known as “New Fiction,” incorporates youth jargon and irony in the depiction of issues affecting the lives of women and has earned Campo recognition in Italy and abroad. She was a finalist in 1994 for the Premio nazionale di narrativa Bergamo and again this year for the Premio Ricercare. In 1999 her first novel, In principio erano le mutande (Feltrinelli, 1992), was made into a film directed by Anna Negri, for which Campo co-wrote the screenplay. In addition, several of her novels have been translated into Spanish, German and French, and one of her short stories has appeared in English.

Despite the paucity of her work in English translation, Campo’s fiction is often the subject of study in universities in both the United States and Great Britain. Because her work is closely related to the American postmodernist culture of quotation and parody, I believe that Campo would enjoy a wide audience in the United States. Unfortunately, not all of the university presses I have approached agree with me.