2011

A Very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year to Everyone, and especially to my 78 supportive Followers.

So 2010 is gone, not just another year but another decade. Incredible!

The translation event from which I gained most insight in 2010 was my own experience, and that of my wife, as non-professional, non-expert, medical Native Interpreter-Advocates for the case of dementia at Cullera. To find the posts about that, enter cullera in the Search box in the right-hand column. I say "Interpreter-Advocates" because it's been impossible to separate the interpreting function from the role of interceders with doctors and social services for the stricken Englishman and his wife. And the work continues. Next Friday we'll both be at the hospital when the man is examined by a Spanish-speaking neurologist. Both of us, because though I speak better Spanish than my wife, she's the more persistent advocate.

Meanwhile I still translate and certify – but this professionally – official documents for Spanish doctors who are going for specialist internships in Canada. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is very demanding: they once sent back a translation of mine because of an ambiguity. But I can understand that they have to protect their clientele and themselves from incompetence and even fraud.

Rest assured that in 2011 this blog will continue to proclaim, as it did on January 1, 2010, that:

Irrespective of language, place, time, type, training, age, circumstances and language proficiency; insofar as bilingualism is universal, so too

************* TRANSLATING IS UNIVERSAL *************


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