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Cookbooks–a translator’s best friend
Maybe I just tend to translate books full of food, even elaborate meals (the Virgin’s Jubilee breakfast in La Virgen Pipona/The Potbellied Virgin being a favorite example) but I have found, mostly by chance, that international cookbooks provide a wealth of information for the translator. Plenty of ingredients–herbs, spices, cuts of meat–have straightforward parallels across…
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Drawing a Face on the Balloon
My son brought a balloon home from school with him this week, bright yellow. He played punching bag with it, he made obnoxious noises with it, he bounced it against the ceiling and retrieved it again. The first night, he drew a face on it. Last night, he added hair. My bedtime reading last night…
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Teachable moments: vosotros and thou
Every spring, the U. of Oregon hosts some 1500 high school language students and their teachers for Foreign Languages and International Studies Day (FLIS). They attend performances and short workshops on folksongs, food, poetry, jokes, family life, handy vocabulary for getting lost, for not getting lost. . . the list goes on (on the UO…
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Time and Place: Past/Present/Spring/Fall
I’ll be teaching in Rosario in the fall. I always say “fall” when I announce this plan, though it will be spring in Argentina. It is almost impossible for me to think of October as anything other than autumn–I can imagine the month with different weather than that of Oregon or Michigan, but it’s hard…
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Dances with Corn
Language learners, asked point blank what a word means–or worse, challenged, even gently, on a definition–will exhibit a reflexive twitch of doubt. Maybe it doesn’t mean what I think it does. Plenty of words have regionally specific connotations. Plenty of definitions become mangled beyond recognition. My daughter and her friend share a recorder lesson. One…