Sacagawea and the French Canadians

Next week there'll be the 201st anniversary of the death of one of the most famous North American interpreters, Sacagawea (S). I prefer to celebrate people's birthdays rather than their death days, but in this case there's no choice: date of birth unknown. Even the date of her death is disputed but it's officially December 20, 1812. Wish I'd thought of it last year.

Sacagawea (aka Sakakawea or Sacajawea) earned her fame on several counts. First because she was that rarity: an interpreter who has made it into popular history and legend. She did it by her skills, bravery and hardiness. Secondly because she was a woman interpreter. And thirdly, but not least, because she was a Native American, one whose aid was invaluable to the nascent United States.

There's an ample literature about her, both written and audiovisual, both historical and semi-fictional, and including a long Wikipedia article. So this post will only touch on a few aspects that are insufficiently recognised.

First we have to know that the Lewis and Clark expedition  (LC), which S served, was a military mission that was sent out in 1804-1806 to look for a route through what is now the Western United States to the Pacific. It succeeded despite great hardships. S was a Soshone Indian woman who became multilingual if not as an infant then when she was very young, because she was captured when she was about 12 years old by Hidatsa raiders who spoke a different language. She accompanied her husband on the expedition.

S's husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, was a Professional Interpreter as well as an experienced frontiersman. He was taken on by LC from the start of the expedition because they were well aware that they would need interpreters to communicate with the tribes through whose territory they were to pass. S, on the other hand, became an interpreter by chance when LC discovered she spoke Shoshone and they knew they would need the help of Shoshone tribes. She had no training, but on the other hand we can surmise she was a Native Interpreter rather than a Natural one, since she had her husband as example and mentor. S wasn't paid for her work, but Toussaint was: $500 and some 500 acres of land. So we can regard them as a Professional Team.

They were professionals in yet another application of interpreting that hasn't been adequately studied, namely exploration and anthropology. It's a form of liaison interpreting. It typically involves little-known languages.

S couldn't speak English and therefore couldn't communicate directly with LC. But nor could Toussaint. It had to be done by relay interpreting, using François Labiche, another expedition member, who spoke French and English. Indeed double relay, since S probably spoke Hidatsa with Toussaint.

This brings us to the 'French connection' and the role of French Canadians in opening up the American west. Toussaint Charbonneau's name is unmistakeably French; Charbonneau is still a common family name in Quebec. S was far from being either Canadian or French. Yet her working association with Tousssaint incorporates her into the lineage of French Canadian interpreters. Another post on this blog has already provided a glimpse into the origin of the lineage in the 16th century. To find it, enter lafond in the Search box on the right. However, between the late 16th and early 19th centuries there had been a great shake-up in North America. French Canada and its commerce had been taken over by the British. The United States had been formed and had doubled its territory at one swoop by purchasing Louisiana. Nevertheless, through it all, French Canadians had retained a significant role on both sides of what was until our own days a very porous frontier. And so, although a few intrepid Brits like John Long had joined the French frontiersmen-interpreters in the push west and north-west (see References), the latter were still invaluable. Thus Toussaint wasn't the only Frenchman with LC. There was also François Labiche, already mentioned; Pierre Creusat, a good boatman and interpreter for Clark; Baptiste Dechamps, head waterman; the Drouillards, father and son; François La Birche, interpreter and boatman; Jean Baptiste Lajeunesse from St. Rose, Quebec; François Rivet, a Montrealer who later worked as interpreter for the Hudson's Bay Company; and so on. Notice that they were valued as 'boatmen' as much as for their interpreting. The French Canadians were famous for their skill at handling the large trading canoes and log rafts on the great rivers and lakes. Later in the century, some of them would even be sent up the Nile to help in the unsuccessful mission to rescue Gordon from Khartoum.

And so the members of the LC expedition were a motley corps of multilingual and multicultural adventurers. They spoke English, French and Hidatsu among themselves, Shoshone and other Native American languages with the peoples they fell in with. They included white Americans of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh descent; at least one Black American (Clark's manservant York); the French Canadians; Native Americans and persons of mixed race. All of them dependent for their survival, at several crucial stages of the journey, on the skills and personality of Sacagawea.

References

• Sacajawea. Wikipedia, 2013. Click here.
• Lewis and Clark Expedition. Wikipedia, 2013. Click here.
• Jone Johnson Lewis. Sacagawea (Sacajawea): guide to the west. About.com, 2005. The article is here.
• A Roster of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. JTR's Colorful Families, 1965. The list is here.
• John Long. Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, describing the Manners and Customs of the North American Indians; with an account of the posts situated on the River Saint Laurence, Lake Ontario, &c. To which is added, A Vocabulary of the Chippeway Language. Names of Furs and Skins in English and French. A List of Words in Iroquois, Mohegan, Shawanee, and Esquimeaux Tongues, and a table showing the Analogy between the Algonkin and Chippeway Languages. London: Printed for the Author; and sold by Robson, Bond-Street; Debrett, Piccadilly... 1791. 295 p. Antiquarian booksellers ask several thousand dollars for the first edition, but there are modern reprints.

Image
Commemorative postage stamp. As a portrait it's highly fanciful, since no known picture of her from life has survived.

Should Children Be Translators?

The last post, the one about The Guardian newspaper award to the Young Interpreter (YI) scheme in the UK, brought me some correspondence from experts on legal interpreting in the UK and Holland. They're concerned about whether children ought to be entrusted with translating in a public institution like a school. There's a danger they may be made privy to information they shouldn't have, for example. More generally, they're being given responsibilities – towards the school, other children, parents, et al. – that shouldn't be laid on them at their age. I know from conversations with Claudia Angelelli  (see References) that this is a concern in the United States as well; to the extent that some people consider child language brokering a form of exploitation and therefore oppose teaching children to translate.

I have my views, but I'm neither a parent nor an educator nor an expert on educational ethics. So I turned for an opinion to Astrid Gouwy, the coordinator of the YI scheme. Here's her reply.

"You are right, there is a danger of over-enthusiasm which sometimes can come from certain misconceptions around interpreting as not everyone realises the complexity of the task. The role of Young Interpreters is not to replace professional interpreters in interpreting for situations you mentioned – including PTA meetings. The role of Young Interpreters is to provide peer support to new arrivals in the early stages of learning English so that they feel welcome in their new school. The guidance pack gives examples of how Young Interpreters can help – for example to show a new arrival around the school, or to play a game with them at break times. In addition, the role play situations which are used during the training depict typical situations where Young Interpreters could help – for example what to do if you see a new arrival on their own. Finally, whilst language is an asset for the role and can be used to welcome others, Young Interpreters don’t have to be bilingual or share the same language as their buddy to make them feel happy in their new setting. Effectively, many Young Interpreters won’t ever get to ‘interpret’ in the sense that most people attach to the term. However, they will use a range of strategies learnt in their training to communicate with their buddies and make them feel included e.g. through use of pictures, body language etc. They will also use their many qualities – in fact, one Young Interpreter was telling me the other day that the most important thing about the role was to be caring and kind.

"I understand concerns from professional interpreters over the use of children as interpreters but I hope the above clarification of the role of Young Interpreter will reassure them. The new edition which will be out very soon will give further guidance to practitioners in charge of developing the scheme in their schools. This will comprise dos and don’ts of Young Interpreters’ role and more on safeguarding."

To this, though it really needs no further comment, I'll append my own simple list of contexts in which I consider – with the reservation mentioned earlier – that translating by children should be scrupulously avoided unless no other translator is obtainable.

A. Legal. Those that might have legal implications or repercussions. For instance, a serious dispute between a parent and a school; or an injury to a child that might lead to a claim; or an accusation of sexual assault.

B. Medical. Any serious medical problem. The danger in medical interpretation comes not only from conveying wrong information but also from omissions. Unlike Expert Interpreters, Natural Interpreters are not constrained to reproduce everything they hear. Expert Interpreters must struggle to do so; but if Natural Interpreters can't understand or can't reproduce something, they just skip it and carry on.

C. Emotional. Something that might cause the interpreter stress, eg having to convey bad news about someone in the family.

One of the aforementioned correspondents mentioned a PTA meeting that proposed to use YI but dropped the idea. Sometimes it might be a matter of age. Events like PTA meetings require some knowledge of the school system, of its terminology and of the stakeholders. Perhaps 14 years old would be a viable minimum. I think I knew enough by that age.

References
For more information about YI, click here.

Claudia V. Angelelli (San Diego State University). Expanding the abilities of bilingual youngsters: can translation and interpreting help? In M. J. Blasco Mayor and M. A. Jimenez Ivers (eds.), Interpreting Naturally: a Tribute to Brian Harris, Berne, Lang, 2011, pp. 103-120.

Young Interpreters Wins Guardian Award

Several posts in the course of this fast disappearing year have been devoted to the Young Interpreters. It’s the movement started and developed in the UK by Hampshire County Council's Ethnic Minority and Traveller Achievement Service (Emtas) and coordinated by Astrid Gouwy and her team. Participating schools at all levels set up programmes to encourage bilingual pupils to interpret for their peers and give them some basic training. To find the posts, enter emtas in the Search box on the right.

Now comes great news. The scheme has been named winner of the Grassroots Excellence category in this year's The Guardian newspaper’s Public Services Awards and overall winner of the Awards. A richly deserved recognition!

The Guardian citation says this:

“A scheme that makes a vital impact on a pressing social issue, yet costs almost nothing, sounds too good to be true. But that is the beauty of the young interpreter programme developed in schools in Hampshire.

“By giving children the role of supporting others whose first language is not English, the groundbreaking scheme is promoting successful integration of migrant youngsters, accelerating their learning and helping the young interpreters become accustomed to responsibility.

“The initiative has been praised by school inspectors and is being picked up by schools elsewhere in the UK and overseas…

“Presenting the award, David Brindle, the Guardian's public services editor, said: ‘Like so many of the best ideas, the Hampshire Young Interpreter Scheme is so stunningly simple that you wonder why it has not been done before. It has negligible costs, yet is fantastically popular with both the children who act as young interpreters and those they befriend, making them welcome and helping them adapt to their new surroundings and language. It is making a priceless contribution to social cohesion.’

“The idea is that training pupils already fluent in English to act as interpreters, will take the pressure off the council's interpretation service and help new arrivals – who often speak no English at all – to settle into their new schools and learn the language at the same time.

"’Our school has got 27 different languages and, with the best will in the world, there's not the money to fund that with bilingual resources,’ says Fairfields [primary school]’s deputy head, Vicky Hopkins. ‘We were looking for a way to support these children using what we already had available.’

"We had a lot of children who had already been through the experience of being a new arrival in our school. They were now advanced bilingual learners; they're very proud of where they come from, and of being able to speak other languages."

Young Interpreters goes some way towards implementing Jill Karlik’s suggestion in the last post, based on her observation of three-year-old language brokers in Africa, that interpreter training for bilingual children should start very young.

 

References
Hannah Fearn. Overall and grassroots excellence winner: Hampshire county council. The Guardian Online, 13 November 2013. For the full article, click here.

Astrid Gouwy’s address is Astrid.Gouwy@hants.gov.uk.

Recent Articles from The Linguist

Miranda Moore

This blog has several times recommended and quoted from The Linguist, the bi-monthly magazine of the UK Chartered Institute of Linguists. Under its vivacious and highly competent editor, Miranda Moore, who often does her own fieldwork and has a keen eye for graphics, it contains many articles that are of interest for us here. The latest issue, October-November 2013, is no exception. And now that there’s an electronic edition (see References), it’s easily accessible.

A recent article I particularly enjoyed was ‘Let’s get physical’ by Rekha Narula, in which she looks at the challenging physical environment for interpreters working like her in the UK health service. It’s true to life. But Rekha is a Professional Expert, and so further discussion of her modus operandi would be beyond the scope of this blog.

Nataly Kelly too is a Professional Expert, but her article (see References) does fall within our scope because it’s about a hot topic in non-professional translation, crowdsourcing, and most crowdsourcing contributors are Advanced Native Translators but not qualified Experts. (For more about it on this blog, enter crowdsourcing in the Search box on the right.) Part of the article is given over to persuading the Professional Experts that community translation (as she calls it) isn’t a threat to them: “Community translation: friend, foe or no big deal.” But what interests me most are the measures she describes for checking and revising the contributions. Translation crowdsourcing has already developed beyond ‘anything goes’.

 

“The freelance [professional] translator community became enraged when, in 2007, Facebook began using members of its community to translate its platform into other languages. The complaints primarily consisted of exclamations such as… ‘They can’t ensure quality if they use the unwashed masses.’… Facebook came up with its own [software] solution, [a free app] which allowed its huge community to cast votes for the best translations. [If you want a glimpse of the Facebook app, click here.]
"This enabled the company to ensure that a single translator was not deciding how millions of people would say ‘write on your wall’ in their native language. Instead, the community of users had a say in how they wanted to see phrases translated… the majority decides which translation it likes best... The sheer number of volunteers is a safeguard to quality but smaller communities can struggle to find sufficient numbers, and that can mean that the translation is never launched… Many community managers will not trust a translation if it hasn’t been reviewed by several volunteers.”

A noteworthy implication of this procedure is that, for better or worse, not only the translating but also the assessment of the translations is done by non-Experts. It becomes communal, distributed and democratised.  But even if the translators are not Expert Translators, they may well be subject-matter savvy and they have a passion for language.  The same can be said of the Wikipedia translators whom Julie McDonough has been studying (enter mcdonough in the Search box), though they make their revisions without special software.

 The third article that struck my attention did so because it adds first-hand information to a topic that has already appeared several times on this blog, namely church interpreters in Africa. It’s by Jill Karlik of Leeds University, who studied them in The Gambia. In a post a long time ago, I told how impressed I was by the dramatic manner  of a church interpreter in Cameroon (enter buea in the Search box).  So it struck a chord when I read the following:

“Some of the younger generation…  gain recognition as competent interpreters within the frame of church events. I found they meet end-user expectations by a highly communicative and lively manner…  It occurred to me that their skills deserved wider recognition.”

Most important, though, are her comments on the development that they have been through.

“In this multilingual milieu, all the interpreters in my study had grown up interpreting since childhood, serving the function of ‘community interpreters’. I observed children as young as three [my emphasis] acting as interpreters for visiting cousins.”

In the centennial year of the publication of Ronjat’s Le développpement du langage chez un enfant bilingue (enter ronjat in the Search box), it’s good to have this empirical confirmation of the young age at which bilingual children can start to translate communicatively.

Finally, along this line of thinking, she raises a question that deserves discussion and action:

“…whether there might be some way of helping young ‘natural’ interpreters benefit from appropriate training at an early age, at a time when they are most receptive to developing their cognitive skills.”

  

References                                                               

The Linguist. Edited by Miranda Moore. London: Chartered Institute of Linguists, bi-monthly. The paper edition is available from the CIoL (www.iol.org.uk) at GBP 41 a year plus postage. The electronic edition is free here, but the references below are to the print edition.

Rekha Narula. Let’s get physical. The Linguist, vol. 52, no. 5, pp. 12-13, 2013.

Nataly Kelly. Power of the crowd. The Linguist, vol. 52, no. 5, pp. 14-15, 2013

Jill Karlik. A Christian Interpretation. The Linguist, vol. 52, no. 5, pp. 18-19, 2013.

 

 

 

 

NPIT2 Deadline

Just received:

"The deadline for abstract submission for the Second International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation has been extended until Sunday, November 10."

For the Call for Papers, enter NPIT2 in the Search box on the right.

I hope this doesn't mean what it would seem to mean, namely that there aren't yet enough papers for NPIT2. After the resounding, hopeful, innovative success of NPIT1 - which would be confirmed by anyone who participated - there ought to be stacks of them.

Naive and Not So Naive Readers

 This is the continuation of the previous post, which please read first.

Before leaving the Expert Readers, there's one kind that I probably wouldn't have listed, because the texts that they read are so different, if it weren't that there's an in-depth study of how they think by a well-known German translatologist, Hans Krings. Krings is best known for his use of think-aloud protocols (TAP) in translation studies (see References). His book is about the readers and revisers of raw machine translation output, called post-editors. His fundamental assumption is that the post-editors must themselves be translators, because only experienced translators can judge the accuracy of a translation. McElhany and Vasconcellos, quoted in the Krings book, have this to say about them:

 

"The translator is the one best able to pick up errors in the machine translation (e.g., misparsed or unparsable ambiguities), he has a fund of knowledge about the cross-language transfer of concepts, and he has technical resources at his disposal which he knows how to use in the event of doubts... An inexperienced translator to say nothing of the non-translator is apt to waste precious time unnecessarily reworking passages or trying to deal with a problem whose solution would be obvious to a seasoned professional."

Let's go now to the opposite end of the spectrum of competence: the Naive Translation Reader (NTR). NTRs know nothing about translation; they haven't been taught anything, and they're probably monolingual. Even if they're bilingual, they're not so in the languages of the translation they're reading. They may even be unaware that what they're reading is a translation. I had no idea the legends and adventure books I was reading as a child - from the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to the travels of Marco Polo and Sven Hedin - were written by foreigners in another language or adapted from translations of them. The blog has commented earlier on people who think the Bible was composed in their own language (enter rednecks in the Search box). That kind of  mistake is encouraged by the publishers who still don't mention that the publication is a translation or don't name the translator. NTRs are therefore obliged to read translations as original writings in the receptor language and to judge them by the literary and stylistic canons of that language. It can lead to serious misconceptions, for instance that The Arabian Nights, because of the way it was bowdlerised by 18th and 19th century English and French translators, is a collection of stories for children. But for the NTRs, ignorance is bliss.

Between the NTRs and the Expert Readers there's an Intermediate class. Let's call its members ITRs. They're a mixed bag but they have some characteristics in common. They know translations exist and what they are. They may be able to tell a translation when they read one, notably by conceptual features or because it contains segments of translationese, i.e., hangovers from the vocabulary and phraseology of the source language. For instance, when I was at this stage at school, I constantly wondered why so many sentences in the King James Bible began with And when we were being instructed in our English class not to do so. I realised it wasn't a native English text.
 

ITR's are often interested in translations only for extraneous reasons. Take the case of the publisher's readers whose job it is to select among manuscripts submitted to them for publication. The translations that come to them are declared as such. But their selection criterion won't be the quality of the translation. They read translations with an eye to whether the work will sell to their employer's market.

The authors of reviews of new publications often fall into this category. For example, an article appeared recently in the New York Times Review of Books purporting to review four English translations of contemporary foreign literature. The title of the article is 'Chronicle: fiction in translation'. So the reporter was certainly aware of translation; what's more the names of the translators are given. However, while there's a description of each story there's not a single word about the translations. In one case it's clear that the original language was Chinese; in the other three cases we're left to our own devices to work out  what it was. The reviewer certainly didn't know all the languages. And that's The New York Times.

Finally, before this post becomes too long, there are the readers, voluntary or captive, of the masses of translation that are produced as official documents or announcements by governments or by law. Often the original and the translation of such texts are displayed side by side. If the translation is well done, it takes an ETR to detect which is the original. ITRs know one of them is a translation because the law (as in Canada) dictates that government documents must be translated, but no more than that. The page layout conventions help too.

And so on.

As a reader of this blog, you're probably an ETR or at least an ITR. But let's not underplay the NTRs. They're the ones who are mainly responsible for Professional Translators lacking recognition and appreciation. Yet without them, the market for translation would be much smaller.                                                                        

 

References

Silvia Bernardini. Think-aloud protocols in translation research: achievements, limits, future prospects. Click here.

Hans P. Krings. Repairing Texts: Empirical Investigations of Machine Translation Post-Editing Processes. Translated from the German Texte reparieren by Geoffrey S. Koby, Gregory M. Shreve, Katja Mischerikow, Sarah Litzer (another collaborative translation!). Kent OH and London: Kent State University Press, 2001. 633 p.

Sven Hedin. From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People. Translated from the Swedish Från pol till pol by an unnamed translator.. London: Macmillan, 1912. The Project Gutenburg e-book edition is available here. "This remains the single most exciting adventure travel book written in the early twentieth century." (Amazon). There's a Wikipedia article on Sven Hedin.

Alison McCulloch. Chronicle: fiction in translation. New York Times Sunday Book Review, 1 September 2013.The article is here.

Expert Translation Readers

N.B. Translations and translators refer in this post to written translating. Interpreting is another story.

I’ve been away in San Ildefonso. Never heard of it? I sympathise. Nor had I until recently, but see the Footnote below.

For reading on the trip, I took a famous Spanish novel by Valencian author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and one of its two English translations).[1] Why take the translation when I can read the Spanish? It’s because I enjoy reading a translation along with its original and comparing them. I take pleasure where the translator has found a satisfactory solution to a problem or doubt, something I wouldn’t have thought of myself. Even when he or she stumbles, the ’mistake’ can give a flash of insight into how the translator’s mind was working. In the case of this translation, I noticed that such errors were usually due to the translator not knowing at first hand the area in which the story and the characters are placed. Call this way of reading professional perversiont. But I’m not alone. I saw this yesterday from an Irish newspaper:[2]

I recently attended a translation slam. Two literary translators were given the same text (a smidgen of Proust) to work on. We voyeurs in the audience were supplied with the original and the translators’ versions. A riveting discussion followed about translation choices.

It led me to the reflection that different readers of translations have different interests, different levels of expertise. The theorists have paid scant attention to the diversity of readership. As regards expertise, there are those who have training and are perhaps themselves translators. Them we may class as the Expert Readers. We can assume they are able to read both languages. I would add that they ought to be able not only to detect divergences from the originals intuitively but be capable of explaining why they consider them to be such. Many of them are actually paid to read translations and to critique them. They are the Professional Expert Readers. There are more of them than one might think, since they include the following.

Colleagues of Professional Translators who read one another’s drafts and suggest improvements.

The senior revisers and editors of junior translators. For them too, the aim is to improve quality. Most large translation bureaux have them. Indeed there are now European and Canadian norms for commercial bureaux that stipulate revision.[3]

The teachers of translation who must read and criticise their students’ work. Since there are hundreds of postsecondary translation programmes and courses throughout the world – I keep a file of them – we can guesstimate that there are several thousand teachers. One particularity of their work is that they are often called on to quantify quality by assigning a numerical grade. To this group we may append the examiners who assess translations for degrees and professional qualifications.

The writers of reviews, at least for professional and academic publications. The reviewers in the popular press are a different kettle of fish; they are often non-experts who are capable of writing a page about the text but only one line about the translation.

Lawyers and para-jurists who vet translations for their legal validity and consistency. Since the legislation, regulations and other information issued by the European Union must be translated into all the languages of the EU and be applicable in all its countries without interminable haggling over the meaning of the texts, there are plenty of such multilingual legal experts in Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. I come up against them myself in the translating I do for Spanish applicants to a Canadian college of physicians and surgeons. The smallest discrepancy, for example in the title of a university course amongst a list of 50 courses, leads to the whole translation being returned to me for correction. So I’m aware there’s somebody in an office in Canada who's being paid to read my translations with a magnifying glass and who, for legal reasons, insists that they be “as literal as possible.”[4]

The Re-translators, that is to say the translators who translate a previous translation. Such re-translations are common. For example, Blasco Ibáñez, already mentioned above, published the most popular Spanish version of The Thousand and One Nights.[5] As he didn’t know Arabic, he translated it from a French translation. Re-translators have to perform a more careful and complete reading of the primary translation than most readers would give it.

So the reader should appear as a variable in any model of the translation process.

To be continued.

References
[1] Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, 1867-1928. Cañas y barro. Translated as Reeds and Mud by Lester Beberfall, BA, MA, PhD (Professor of Spanish, Wisconsin State University). Boston: Branden Press, 1966. 194 p. The original can be found in any good Spanish bookshop; the translation is available through Amazon.
[2] Doireann Ni Bhriain. Word for word: losing out on access to translations. The Irish Times, 12 October 2013. The article is here.
[3] Canadian General Standards Board. CAN/CGSB-131.10-2008, Translation Services. Gatineau: CGSB, 2008. "Where possible, CAN/CGSB-131.10-2008 has been harmonized with the European Standard EN 15038, Translation Services." Downloadable for a fee from this site.
[4] Medical Council of Canada. Translation Requirements. Ottawa, 2013. Available here.
[5] El libro de las mil noches y una noche (The Thousand and One Nights). Direct literal translation from Arabic by Dr J. C. Mardrus. Spanish version by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Valencia: Prometeo, c1916.
[6] José Luis Sancho and Juan Ramón Aparicio. Guide: Real Sitio de La Granja de San Ildefonso and Riofrío. (Reales Sitios de España series). Translated by Mervyn Samuel, Laura Suffield and Nigel Williams. Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 2013. 97 p. Richly illustrated. Available from Amazon.
Notice, in view of the immediately preceding post, that the San Ildefonso item is a collaborative translation.

Footnote
San Ildefonso is a small town on the northern slope of the Guadarrama mountains about 100 km north of Madrid and 10 km south of Segovia. The Spanish monarchs of the 18th century turned it into a refreshing summer hill-station retreat from the heat and bustle of Madrid. They endowed it with two Baroque palaces, extensive formal gardens with sculptured fountains in French style, and the Royal Glassworks, all now excellently conserved.[6] In addition it has good hotels and restaurants. Little visited by foreign tourists but recommended as a side trip for visitors to Madrid or Segovia.