Peruvian Geography Translation Project

We met as a group today to touch base on how things were going, to submit our first sections, to ask questions, and to assign the next chapters to be translated. In the end, we cleared up a number of uncertainties and (hopefully) streamlined the process. Here is a list of some of the things we tackled in our meeting: We created a OneDrive folder in which we can submit our unreviewed translations and where Dr. Fernandez and Dr. Torres can save revised copies as well as the approved final translations.  I created a spreadsheet and shared it with my fellow translators to use as a glossary for common words/phrases and to note indigenous words that do not translate easily. Many of these are names for various plants, and we plan to contact colleagues at PUCP for the scientific names.  We overwhelmingly agreed to use the Oxford comma throughout. After a long discussion of Pulgar Vidal's abundant use of semicolons and how to work around them in standard English writing conventio...

To keep organized, I came up with a table system as well as a way to color code my uncertainties. In the far left column is the original Spanish text. The middle column holds my rough translations. I've found that the first time through I'll just try to get it all into English and then I will go back through each section and adjust where necessary so that it makes a little more sense. The column on the right (currently blank) is where my translating partner can make notes and suggestions. Once that's done, I plan to take the rough translation and suggestions and rework it into an actual, readable paragraph or caption. If I have questions or uncertainties, I will ask our professors for clarification using our common document , email, or during our meetings. Example of table system/color coding  after  the first translation pass As to the color-coding, words in red indicate that I am uncertain about vocabulary or word choice. Green words indicate that I have left th...

I decided to start with my assigned section for Las Siete Canastas Alimentarias because it included a lot of photo captions, which seemed like a good place to start since they're short. It wasn't long before I found my first stumbling block (and one that continues to cause confusion): food names. Some of these have easy English translations (maíz --> corn), some have translations that might suffice, but they're not well known in their English terms (tumbo --> banana passion fruit), and some don't have a translation at all (chuño --> some sort of a freeze-dried potato?). One such word that I came across was chicharrón , which is pork, and is something I personally haven't heard of or tried (bottom left photo). WordReference defines it as pork scratching or pork crackling, which both sounded rather odd to me as translations. After the first pass through I decided I would keep it as chicharrón when I handed it off to Brye to read through since it turns out...

For my first blog post, I figured that I would explain the background of this translation project before I begin to post about my individual work on the translations. Who: Three faculty members from the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire from the Geography, Latin American Studies, and Education Departments and five students (including myself). Links to the other students' blogs can be found on the sidebar menu to the left on the homepage of this blog. Perhaps the most important "who" is Javier Pulgar Vidal, without whom we wouldn't have a book to translate. What: We seek to translate Javier Pulgar Vidal's book on Peruvian geography, Geografía del Perú: las ocho regiones naturales, from Spanish   into English. We are starting with two short chapters on the eight human groups and the seven food regions of Peru. Where: This answer comes in a few parts. We are doing our work in Eau Claire, but the book is all about Peruvian geography and was written in...