We're back with another exciting Spring workshop, which promises to be both practical and collaborative.

Our Spring event this year will be practical and collaborative. Translation difficulties both from Spanish to English and English to Spanish will feature highly throughout the day.

The morning will kick off with workshop sessions led by Helen Oclee-Brown, in which we’ll tackle tricky terms from a variety of text types. Working in groups, we’ll look at snippets in English and Spanish and use our hive mind to craft clever solutions that sidestep all-too-common translation traps. This is a quick-fire, collaborative exercise, so get ready to roll up your sleeves and share your work. Think creative wordsmiths go speed-networking.

Our afternoon session will be an interactive session by Emma Goldsmith on “Fiendish False Friends”. Emma will guide us through a set of false friends, cognates and collocates, while sharing corpus mining tips on concordance, word frequency and usage. Join her at the wordface to test yourself with an online quiz, virtual flashcards and pen-and-paper exercises in small groups. You’re welcome to bring along your own treacherous friends, too.

We will round off the afternoon with two translation slams. You can volunteer to take part in the Spanish to English or English to Spanish, or moderate either battle.

The current programme stands as follows:

09:30-09:50 Welcome talk and outline of the day's activities

09:50-10:50 Emma's talk and workshop on false friends

10:50-11:45 Helen’s workshop on tricky translations

11:45-12:05 Break

12:05-12:50 Translation slam between Kevin Booth and Philippa Hammond (Spanish to English), hosted by Lisa Agostini

12:55-13:40 Translation slam between Miguel Ortiz and Carolina Casado Parras (English to Spanish), hosted by Myriam Garcia-Bernabe

These timings are subject to change, but the day will count as 4 hours of CPD.

Speakers

Emma Goldsmith MITI (left) is a Spanish to English medical translator with a background in nursing. She moved to Spain in 1987 and works constantly on retaining and improving her native English while immersed in Spanish language and culture. She currently serves as membership chair on MET Council. Emma can be found at Goldsmith Translations.

Helen Oclee-Brown MITI (right) is a French and Spanish to English translator who works in corporate communications and learning and development. She currently serves as promotion chair on MET Council and is also a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster. Helen can be contacted via her website.