Translation as a Process

I am beginning this blog as a tool to document the journey that one takes to convert a text from one language, culture, readership, and goal set to another language, another culture, another readership, and another set of goals.  The text I am converting, along with a team of fellow student translators and our three professors on this project, is published in Spanish. It is a stable geography text of the Peruvian landscape and people, written and read by citizens of Peru. We aim to convert it into English for the use of students at our Wisconsin university and perhaps others, if we succeed in winning the author's approval of our work.

So far there have been many challenges, from target style, to word choice, use of accents, gender generalizations, to the overall impression that a geography text takes when communicating the pronoun "we" instead of "they."The lessons I am learning, and will continue to encounter as I continue on this project, will undoubtedly better my understanding of the complex way in which the world communicates, and will hopefully equip me to aid in bettering that communication between cultures and the lands that are part of them.