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.

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.