As Luciana Ramos wrote in an article on the new spelling and the role of Spanish translators, in our routine as professional translators, we are faced with new challenges every day!
Here is a short extract of this paper:
…
As a basic rule, if you want to succeed as a guardian you must first arm yourself
with a shield… DOUBT. If you doubt, you research, you learn, you doubt again and double check, and you can then discuss about it and enrich yourself from others’ viewpoints and eventually make a choice. As translators we are decision-makers, and our decisions forge the language that millions of people will use or repeat. We should ponder on our own language, become aware of its expressive capabilities, the linguistic structures that compound it, and of the enormous wealth its unity and variety can accumulate. Recently, the Real Academia Española has released the latest versions of the grammar and orthography rules, called in Spanish “Nueva gramática de la lengua española” and “Ortografía de la lengua española”, respectively. In such resources, the translator will not only find the norm (ruling all the Spanish speakers, irrespective of their geographicallocation) but also reference to variations or traits related to certain communities, times or social spectra. For the sake of language semantics, doubt should always lead you to the dictionary.
As a basic rule, if you want to succeed as a guardian you must first arm yourself
with a shield… DOUBT. If you doubt, you research, you learn, you doubt again and double check, and you can then discuss about it and enrich yourself from others’ viewpoints and eventually make a choice. As translators we are decision-makers, and our decisions forge the language that millions of people will use or repeat. We should ponder on our own language, become aware of its expressive capabilities, the linguistic structures that compound it, and of the enormous wealth its unity and variety can accumulate. Recently, the Real Academia Española has released the latest versions of the grammar and orthography rules, called in Spanish “Nueva gramática de la lengua española” and “Ortografía de la lengua española”, respectively. In such resources, the translator will not only find the norm (ruling all the Spanish speakers, irrespective of their geographicallocation) but also reference to variations or traits related to certain communities, times or social spectra. For the sake of language semantics, doubt should always lead you to the dictionary.
Read the whole article below or in the June 2011 isssue of Multilingual
