Translators Without Borders

Thanks Mellie for telling the class about Translators Without Borders. Note that you can subscribe to volunteer as a translator and that they will assess your skills to see if you are suitable.

Holiday Fun

Next week most of you are going to start a well deserved break form your studies. If you happen to be bored at home (hopefully that won't be the case!) there is plenty you can do to still keep improving your English skills:

• This blog is a great way to learn English idioms: Rolls off the Tongue
• Splendid Speaking has got idiomatic expressions and oral presentations for your listening and speaking skills
• The Interpreting Links on the right have many useful ways of practising your listening and /or interpreting skills
• Let's Talk ( interviews with fluent speakers) has interviews related to the topics encountered in community interpreting
• DET has a page full of Education related texts in Korean, Chinese, Spanish and English
• UN Radio has many interesting programs on a wide range of topics  
• Translators, check this fantastic post on localisation by The Cyclist Translator!

Interpreting & Subtitltles: 60-second lectures

Visit the previous post on interpreting and 60-second lectures, Is It Wrong To Punish Prisoners? and do the worksheet on in:
Now you can listen to the lecture on the video below. This time:

• Take notes as a consecutive note-taking excercise
• Pause after each sentence for interpreting practice
• Try to write subtitles (caption) in your Target Language. There is a caption option, but nobody has done it yet. Be the first!

lectos, what are they?

Read this informative post @bootheando on sociolinguistic varieties in Spanish, called lectos. Both interpreters and translators must render this linguistic information when  when doing their interpreting/translating job.

The video below comes from Argentina and explains lectos in a very simple way.

Los Lectos - Conectar Igualdad -  Videos

Whistleblowers: Sibel Edmonds

Image "warning"

Thanks to Bootheando, once again, this time for the publication of a post on Sibel Edmonds, an FBI language specialist (Persian, Turkish, English and Azerbaijan), with a BA in criminal justice and psychology, MA in public policy and international commerce and founder and director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC).

Read this interview in the Armenian Weekly Online conducted in English. Translate it into Spanish and check your translation against this one by Martin: Entrevista exclusiva con Sibel Edmonds.

Mistranslations

By natalia & gabriel

 
Reading Bootheando about  the imminent closure* of Westminster University Interpreting course , one of the best in the world, I came across this great resource for Translation: Exploring Translation. The first exercises are about the differences between interpreting and translating and machine translation. They include video clips to comment

Check the Spanish examples. They are great to get you thinking about  comparative grammar/structure and literal translating errors. It will help you too with translation commentary.

*Visit the facebook page set for comments and support

TED Talks: Don't Insist on English

Patricia Ryan gives a thought provoking talk on the wide spread of English and how this could be affecting the spreading of ideas form other languages.

You can change the subtitles to Korean, Spanish, Chinese and many other languages. Great to test your interpreting (and translating) skills.