 We're in Tucson, Arizona at the University of Arizona on the 6th of December, 2012. This is Sonia Colina, who teaches, who works here as a professor of Spanish linguistics. I work up a faculty member in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Do you're not in translation? Per se, or officially. I'm officially a professor of Spanish linguistics, and I do translation as one of my second area, actually, because generally I'm a linguist, and I do phonetics, phonology, history of the Spanish language, and a few other things I have to do with linguistics. But another area is translation and translation studies, and I've taught a number of courses, translation here and in other places, too. But here, I've done a course on pedagogy of translation, a graduate level course. Because that's what you're known for in translation studies? Exactly, yeah. For my work on translation, teaching, and pedagogy. And I do a few other things in teaching. I mean, I've done that some undergraduate courses, having a deal with business translation, online translation, I taught medical translation. We also have come up with the assistance of a grant from IBO, the Arizona Board of Regents, so it's a state grant. We came up with a sequence of courses online, business, medical, legal. Okay. You're behind the planning of that? I'm behind the planning of that. They're pretty much all the sign, we're just taking care of some administrative issues and enrollment and online passwords and things like that, costs and a few other things. And the interesting part about that sequence that's connected to my work on pedagogy is that we're planning on offering it at two different levels. One of them is for people who want to learn how to translate. And another one is for people who are interested in how to teach it. So these people will be observant on how these courses work and at the same time taking an optional additional course that has to deal with pedagogy. So that's some of the recent work that I've been doing in terms of teaching. It just follows on. We know you threw your 2003 book on translation teaching. Translation teaching from research to the classroom. And that's one of the big areas that I work with. I'm very interested in getting all that we know through research, all the research findings out there. They're relevant. Some of them are specifically translation studies. Some others are not specifically translation studies and have to do with other areas. Translate in those into methodologies and the principle methodology of translation teaching. But then we can use to argue for or against different ways of teaching. That's the big thing for me in the United States. I don't think there's very much formal translator training, but there's very little actual research to connect with. And you seem to be doing that. Yes. That's what I'm interested in. Because I see that there is a big gap. We have a lot of research in translation studies. Some of it is more or less empirical. But then you look and see what people are doing in the classroom. And there is a huge gap. So how do we get the teachers to know all this stuff, to be able to use it? Obviously they're teachers. They're not researchers. So that doesn't mean some of them could be both. But they don't their obligation. Their duties are not to do the research, but to be able to use it and inform their teacher with the research. So that's what I'm interested in doing and seeing how we can cross that bridge or that gap. Another area that has to do with that that I'm very interested in is all the interactions and the interconnections that we could have in translation. Translation, in my opinion, that's what makes it very appealing to me, is that it's very easy to connect the practice with the theory with the teaching. I mean, and when I say it's very easy, it doesn't happen. Yeah. But that's because I do believe that the people have been in their own separate areas. So we've had the teachers who sometimes are professional, who sometimes are academics, and sometimes they're their teachers. And then we have the researchers. And again, here we have some connections that should not be very difficult to make, but people have not been invested in the time and effort you make in those connections. What we compare with other areas that I'm familiar with, like second language acquisition, like recently heritage language teaching, if we could follow the model of those areas in translation, I mean, that's something I'm very interested in and putting out there as a suggestion and then trying to contribute to myself because we look at those fields. And if they've done it in translation, we can do it even better because of the nature of the field. There is, there should be more of a connection between the practice and the theory to get informed practice and at the same time teach and there's informed by both the theory and the practice. In second language acquisition heritage language teaching, the practice part, well, is used in the language. But in our case, we have all the practitioners. We have all the people that are actually doing it out there that could really help with the teaching. And at the same time, the people who are doing all the research could inform that teaching. So those connections. Now, if we look again, I was talking about how we know we do SLA and second language acquisition and heritage language teaching, if you look at those models, what happens in those fields? Well, we have a community of researchers that study how people acquire second language or how learning a language that is heritage language, something that has been learned at home versus the classroom, how those people learn the languages, they study the theory, they study the the the research and the empirical aspects of it. And then the findings of that get transferred into certain types of methodologies. It could be better or worse, but people can argue on the basis of that research. And the teachers use them. So that's a model that's been out there is not perfect. There's always some people in the field that may not be as well informed as others. But I do believe that we can definitely do something like that with translation. And then if on top of that, we try to connect with the language community because obviously language competence and language proficiency is a big part of translation. Although for many years, we've tried to say, oh, you know, that's not part of it because the translator needs to know it needs to be a perfect bilingual. But the reality of it is that many people are not in many of the students we have in our classrooms are not also be important for us to try to get some of those students earlier in their careers, even if they're not perfectly bilingual to know about translation, understand how it works, and kind of develop that along the same lines that develop in the bilingualism. Sometimes I've come across students who are perfectly, I mean, they're perfectly bilingual, but when it comes to translation, you tell them to translate, just start doing things that you would never think that they do. I truly believe that's because they don't really understand translation via well, especially in this country that has a terminal lingual of the US, a terminal lingual tradition, right? Even when they know two languages, they don't quite understand what's going on. If we got them earlier to understand about translation, to understand what they need to know and where they are, you know, along that continuum, I think that would help. So that's another area that I'm very interested in. And if, yeah. Well, come back to the rest. Sonya, I want to know how you got here. You're coming from a linguistic background there. Okay, go back to your 20s. You're starting doctoral research. You're looking for a topic. What country are you in? Well, before, well, I was here. You're not from the United States? No, I'm not from the United States. I'm from Spain. And that's where I got my BA, or then, you know, Belief in Fiatura in Spain in English. Then I came in English in Santiago de Compostela. Yeah. So then I came to the United States in 87. So to do a master's degree in applied linguistics. Once I did that, my interest even then was I wanted to do translation. So after that, I was in my mid 20s, actually, after I finished that degree, then I was in Binghamton. Binghamton University working with Marilyn Rose. Well, that's literary translation. Exactly. I was, yeah, I was accepted into the PAT program, comparative literature and translation studies, because I wanted to do translation. Okay, with my MA, that wasn't possible in linguistics. So I said, okay, I want to do translation. So when I got there, you know, I really wanted to do translation. But comparative literature was not quite what I wanted to do for a PhD. I somewhat myself more of a linguist. So I still wanted to do translation. There were not too many options in this country back then. Now we have a number of PhDs in Kent State. We have Binghamton too as a PhD in translation studies back then and have. So then what I decided to do was that I was just going to get my MA in translation studies, get my education in translation, and then go get a PhD in linguistics and hopefully be able to combine the two of them. So then what I did is I got my MA in comparative literature and translation studies, got the graduate certificates that Binghamton had then in translation, the different combinations, you know, literary translation and scientific and literary, English, Spanish, English and all those things. I don't know if they still have those, but anyway, that's what, you know, I did back then. And then I got my PhD in Spanish linguistics, trying to then Illinois, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, trying to use some of what I was learning, some of my linguistics courses. A lot of them really have to do with my interest in pedagogy and translation and trying to compare with second language acquisition because I did a number of courses having to do with second language acquisition and methodology and how to teach a language. So of course my thinking was, oh, we can do the same thing with translation. So I was trying to apply that, all of that, discourse analysis and a number of other courses that had to do with linguistics in general, but I was doing my pride just in my interest role in translation. Okay, so in this, you've had an academic, a straight academic career in the United States? Well, not really. I mean mostly, but I, yes, yes. When I was, in addition to all the freelance and that everyone does, I had some time off in between my MA in Binghamton when I finished the MA in translation studies, no, actually in competitive literature, with a constant track in translation studies, that's what they call it then. I got a job, it's a full-time in-house translator with Xerox in upstate New York. So I did that for a year, working with Cistern, with post-edit and coding and scientific, yeah. So I did that right before going into my PhD and then of course I continued doing freelancing. Every, throughout my career, throughout my education and also the jobs that I've had, I've always tried to combine linguistics with translation. So there's always been departments that were not interested in translation per se, but that they could use it and sometimes they were not interested in it. They didn't know that they were, so I had to do the convincing and I always managed to get a course here and there. When I was a PhD student in Illinois, I started the first course that they had in translation. The course had been in the books forever, but they never had anyone to teach it because they were not going to go higher someone in translation to do that at that time 15 years ago. So I said, well, I can do this. I have this background. I've worked as a translator, so I can do that. So I did that. One final question. There's not a lot of translation research in Illinois, but it seems, the question is, are you working with people in Canada and Europe? Do you feel you're a part of a wider community or is there specifically American community here, an academic community? There's a clear academic community in this country. I mean, we have a TISA. There's EST in Europe, but we have a TISA here and there's a in Canada, but obviously a TISA if you're involved and being vice president, being also part of the the scientific committee every other year with a TISA, looking at what people, the types of abstracts that they submit. So there is a scientific committee community in the United States. It's much smaller and much younger than it is in Europe. Also, what happens is in the United States, there are a lot of people who are doing translation related research that don't know too much about translation. Translation is the field or is that TISA? So we do have to do a lot of publicity and advertising and say, hey, you know, we're here. You know, this is completely relevant to what you're doing. You're not entirely aware that we're there, but it is important. We find a lot of, not a lot. You know, we find people that come somewhat in a similar way to the field that I did even much more recently than I did because they're doing work in translation, but they may have PhDs in applied linguistics and SLAT. Obviously, also in comparative literature and all kinds of related, not all kinds of, but some related degrees in literary studies. That's much more the tradition in the United States. But we find, for instance, we have a language acquisition and teaching program here that has graduated a number of people that are doing work in translation translation studies, you know, Holly Jacobson, who's a graduate of SLAT program here is doing that kind of work. After her, I think her PhD is 2002, we've had a number of them. This program is not a PhD in translation studies and obviously the majority of their graduates do apply linguistics to second language acquisition. But some of the graduates who came with an interest in translation because some of them had a maize from translation schools and other places, those people have developed their research in that area. Why? Because they're given the research tools that they need and then they apply it to translation. Okay. So, yeah. So, Sonia, I hope this video gets people interested in TCEN translation studies in the United States. And this kind of work and, you know, I'll be happy to anyone who's interested in this type of work, you know, that has to do with second language acquisition with translation studies. I work with translation quality too. Please feel free to get in touch with me. Thank you very much. Thank you.