By Deepasri
Transcribed in July 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship. The speaker is Dr. Ana Isabel Reguillo Pelayo, Academic Head of Instituto Cervantes, New Delhi, at a Modlingua session on multilingualism.
And Ana Isabel will talk more about the initiatives of Instituto Cervantes in India and in general all over the world. To start with, may I request Dr. Ana Isabel to please take charge?
A life between languages
Buenas tardes, good afternoon. I cannot translate 'buenas tardes' in all the languages for everybody, so my apologies. My role here is double: on one side as a user, on another side as an educator, and mixing both of them it becomes what many of us are nowadays - expatriates, diplomats, translators, interpreters forever. So we'll start making a very short description about how translation and interpretation entered into my life.
As you should know, in Spain there are four languages: Castellano, Galician, Catalan, and Basque. The province where I was born was only with one language, Castellano. And that's the area of Don Quixote de la Mancha - one of the regions where Spanish is more deeply Castellano, more deeply rooted, and doesn't share with any other language. So I didn't have any feeling or any contact with any of the other languages, nor the feeling of frustration at that time of not being able to read nor to speak in the mother tongue.
Later I studied philology and I was teaching Spanish in Russia, Australia, the Philippines, and India. In none of these places was there a shared common mother tongue, Spanish, in the field of social interaction. And translation itself I started when I was living in Italy, or when I was trying to understand the meanings of beautiful Brazilian songs.
Global Nomads at home
Then I got married to a foreigner, so another culture, another language started into my life. And a product of that: we have children that nowadays are considered Global Nomads. So now part of them is Global Nomads who don't want to be Global Nomads. I have in the house the inborn interpreters and translators of languages and multi-cultures. They have the language of school, they have a language in the street, they have a language with the people who work for us, and they have a language for the mother and for the father.
Instituto Cervantes and translation
This is a job that I love because it allows me to move into different countries. Instituto Cervantes has seventy centers all over the world, and being in my position I have the privilege of designing courses to facilitate learning beyond the basic level. As the one we are offering here at the Instituto: we have translation and interpretation, we have culture, and language of the Galician language. But on the other hand, we are following an approach that is communicative, and the communicative approach doesn't follow translation. So how do you handle all this? With your help - with the help of experts who do the translation of books, who do the translation of manuals in both languages.
In this era of the internet, we are also working online, and Instituto Cervantes also has an engine for translators and workshops online in the Centre of Virtual Cervantes (CVC). So we can help the students offering courses here and continue their line with Spanish online - Spanish, Galician, Basque, Catalan, and translation into the main European languages.
Opportunities for Spanish translators in India
In India, they are getting to know how important the Spanish language is and how many opportunities of work are available if they reach a minimum level of Spanish. One will get a job only with B1 - a B1 level in the European framework of reference is the first level of the intermediate level; extremely low. All through our webpage and the bulletin board, there are continuous offers of work in translation, not only for companies or private enterprises in Spain but also from the 22 countries where Spanish is spoken, and the market is there.
Working with Modlingua
As we are seeing all of this, it drives naturally to our work together with Ravi Kumar and the translation world. We have been working together for two years already; this is the second year that we hold the conference on translation, and we are extremely happy. Thank you for coming. And as we are running out of time, I would just like to invite you tomorrow for a session on Hispanism that is going to be held after lunch. That will be the right venue to see the career opportunities that are in Spanish, the way that we as educators in the Instituto can help the profession of translators to get their real value in society, and also how to help the students handle all the stress, all the problems that are faced by every translator, in an easier manner. So thank you so much, and I will pass the work to the real experts.
