Since the beginning TTP has presented me with a language barrier. My Spanish is conversational at best but I tend to understand a lot more than I can speak. In some sense I started preparing to travel to Nicaragua in January of 2009 when I traveled to Guatemala to take a 2-week Spanish intensive. Before I went buildOn requested that while I was in Nicaragua I hire a translator to accompany me so that I would not monopolize the program translators. My plan had been to only use buildOn’s translators for straight on interviews but I agreed to hire the translator despite the strain it put on my budget. On my first day in Nicaragua I met Javiera, we lived together for 2 weeks with our host family, slept in the same bed and were together for almost 24 hours a day. We grew quite close and I found her to be valuable in many more ways than I anticipated entering this project.
While in Nicaragua Javiera would joke that I didn’t even need her. I could generally understand what people told me during interviews and in my own conversations. However, having a translator I discovered became of great benefit to me when it came to speaking and translating my ideas into something that the people in the community could understand. While I can speak some Spanish, my grammar is rather awful and there are dialectic nuances within Nicaraguan Spanish that I do not know. Javiera was able to help me navigate that space.
When I returned to the States to edit the documentary I used only the recordings of translations on the tape and relied mostly on my own Spanish to edit down interviews, etc. I made an agreement with a friend who agreed to write up subtitles for me which has given me concrete translations from a Spanish speaker.
However, as I edit the piece I often find that the in-country translators tended to simplify the words of the community members. I listen to the community members speak and find power in the words and phrases they choose to repeat and the way that they repeat them, however, when our translators repeated the sentiments in English for the team they tended to leave out those repetitions and miss the intonations of the speakers. Additionally, while conducting interviews with my translator I found that she would often not translate sentences when she thought that they were not responding to the question in the way that I wanted them to.
As I move into final cuts I am left with one problem. How do I translate? My intention from the beginning is that the entire piece should be bi-lingual. There is no need in my mind to have a Spanish version and an English version. Additionally, the community in which I shot the documentary has many residents who are illiterate. My preference is that the entire piece should have spoken translations for all of the English and preferably the Spanish as well, because it is certainly unfair to assume literacy in the US as well. The piece I feel should be accessible to as many people as possible, when education and literacy present such a huge barrier to understanding “academic” concepts I do not want to continue this problem of academic/educational elitism.
And yet as I struggle to complete the piece I run into the technicalities of using that many double translations. To have everything spoken in both languages could potentially almost double the length of the piece, and I fear that it will not be able to sustain the increased length. Writing this reminds me why I want to, and need to continue to translate and make the piece accessible, and yet how do I make this all work?
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I think that the simplification of the spoken language by the translator is extremely common no matter what language the original speaker speaks (science for instance) and the best intentions of the translator. By having recordings of your interviews, you have the luxury of being able to hear the interviewees months after the conversation. I question the need to make the piece equally accessible to both English and Spanish speakers. Ultimately this piece comes from your heart. If the emotion of the spanish speaker is important, it may be more important than an exact translation of their words. Let yourself use Spanish when you feel/think it is important and use English when you think/feel it is important. Don't worry about equal access, maybe one will need to be bilingual to have the best access, which would make sense for a piece focusing on the cross-cultural interactions of English and Spanish speakers. Even with great translations, we have a way to go before we understand each others cultures.
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