Wednesday, August 04, 2010
2nd International Seminar on Reading in the University in Aguascalientes
We have just arrived in Aguascalientes from Mexico City (all of 50 minutes in a plane), where we will be presenting a couple of keynotes related to reading in the university and catching up with some old friends, as well as making some new ones.
It's been a blur since we left Cape Breton within 5 minutes of completing a week's teaching there last Friday. We drove from North Sydney (Cape Breton) to Maryland in time to make a friend's birthday party on Saturday night. Back to Montclair on Sunday to pack and immediately on to an airport hotel for the early fight to Mexico City on Monday. The flight down was good, although exhaustion was the order of the day. Yesterday was 14 hours of solid work producing the best translations into Spanish as we could manage of the material for our visual presentation. We have written the papers in English, but there is no simultaneous translation. So we'll be doing the best we can on our feet during the presentations, thinking in English and turning it into the best sense we can in our respective versions of Spanish. It'll be practice, practice, practice, between now and the keynotes.
There's a launch of the Spanish translation of New Literacies tomorrow evening. One of the conference presenters, Daniel, says he has read the book in both English and Spanish and said the translation is superb. The book was published conjointly by a Spanish publishing house and Spain's Ministry of Education, so there was obviously some funding available for translation. That's nice. It might actually have come out making more sense in Spanish than in English.
Meanwhile, we have checked in to "home" for the next 4 days, and all of a sudden the nerves about having to present in Spanish and the trials of generating the papers in the midst of summer madness seem less significant.
