Conference by Dr. Nelson López Rojas

Hi everyone! Welcome to another entry and an unusual one this time😵

Last week we were celebrating Translator and Interpreter's Week and there were so many different and very interesting activities like special guests and workshops and very interesting conferences! Also, I had the opportunity to participate as an interpreter and practice my skills, it was a new experience and I got to learn a lot of new things and live a day in the life of an interpreter and I loved it💖

Unfortunately, on Thursday I was not able to listen to the class of my classmates from groups 5 & 6 as I was not only listening to Dr. Nelson López conference but I was interpreting as well! It was nice to get to know more about him and have him share his knowledge once again as he was one of our professors on past courses, I really enjoyed participating in the conference and seeing it from a different perspective.

A lot of what he talked about was not that new for me, I felt as if I was once again in one of his lectures regarding introduction to translation. I really liked how he made a lot of the students participate and write down questions and talk to each other and discuss the topic, it was really interactive. He talked about the process of translating one of his greatest translations, Tales of Clay by Salarrué, which is characterized by a lot of very specific words from El Salvador and specially from the countryside, he mentioned that in order to translate it into English he first had to translate it into standard Spanish and decode what the author meant with every specific word. 

Since I was interpreting the conference, I had a bit of a hard time when he started quoting some parts of the book and specifically the ones that also gave him a hard time when translating. I didn't know how I should interpret those phrases and I could feel my brain getting more and more tired😂

Fortunately, I had my booth mate Nathaly, she was my interpreting partner for the whole day throughout all three conferences, the conference by Dr. Nelson was the last one for that day and we were already a bit tired but we managed to get through it in a successful way by taking turns from 15 to 20 minutes so each of us had an appropiate period of time to rest and keep going. As always, I really enjoyed working with Nathaly💗.

I enjoyed all of the conferences and specially Dr. Nelson's conference I think was a very important one since freshmen students need to understand that translating goes beyond words, you are conveying a message, a meaning, it is not just about translating "Hola" to "Hello" and I think Dr. Nelson expressed that in a really good way, he is a very experienced translator and I really thank him for his time and for sharing a bit of his knowledge with us.

And to top off the Translator and Interpreter's Week, we took a picture with teacher Orlando to commemorate a very special week for all of us, I am really glad I was able to experience something like this before graduating, we didn't have any activities of this kind in previous years and it felt nice to be celebrated and appreciated and listen to the experiences of professional translators and interpreters and listen to their advices as well.

Thank you for reading another one of my entries and stay tuned for the next one where I will be talking about the experience of teaching my own class! Bye-bye👋