The Edwin C. Gentzler Translation Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which provides translation and interpretation services, is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year.
The Center is not a department or a major – it’s a business that, through a small team of project managers, works with freelance translators, students, and its in-house staff to complete projects in translation (which involves the written word) and interpretation (which involves the spoken word).
“What sets us apart is, we’re willing to take the time to find the right solution,” said senior project manager Shawn Lindholm. “It’s not just, take the document, do it, and give it back. We have that human element.”
Their work includes (or has included), among many other things, translating academic books, children’s books, training manuals, museum exhibition texts, international birth certificates, texts for tattoos, and dialogue for the show “Madam Secretary.”
The Center also provides interpreters for settings like courtrooms and doctors’ offices, and they offer workshops to train bilingual educators to use their language skills in schools. This November, they’ll be starting a Translated Book Club to promote translated works in the community.
The Center itself sits on two floors of the Herter Hall Annex. Outside its two-room office on the first floor is a cart of translated books and books about translation itself (dotted, at this time of year, with an assortment of apples from Park Hill Orchard).
In the basement, near the Center’s study spaces, is a blue wall with “welcome” written in various languages.
“This is actually a really hard project to do,” Dr. Regina Galasso, director of the Center, said. “People just think, ‘Yeah, we’ll put up a welcome sign in multiple languages,’ right? But they don’t realize that you need to make sure, in every language, that you’re saying ‘welcome’ in a way that’s culturally appropriate, so there’s a lot of research actually behind each of these.”
Some languages – for example, Japanese – have different forms of address for different social circumstances, including talking to a much older or younger person or when in a formal or informal setting. It’s something the Center’s staff (who collectively speak about a dozen languages between them) are keenly aware of and find especially meaningful given the popularity of Google Translate and other artificial intelligence programs, which are not always accurate. The Center’s website references a story of a teacher who wanted to tell a student’s mother that her son had failed a class. What the teacher wrote, thanks to a web translation, was “Tu hijo ha fallecido”: “Your son has died.”
“There’s a lot of focus on translation as a product, and [the idea that] if we can get AI to create these products that we think are acceptable, we don’t need to study this anymore; we don’t need to hire humans,” Galasso said. “But when you do that, you lose all that’s gained in the process of translation, and when you lose all that’s gained in the process of translation, that’s a huge loss. Everything becomes generic, and ways of thinking critically, creatively, sensitively, are all lost.”
When the Gazette visited on a recent Thursday afternoon, a group of graduate students from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan Studies department had gathered in the Center’s basement conference room, in front of a wall of book covers written by UMass faculty, as a few other students took part in Korean tutoring in a nearby hallway space. Students who work with the Center can take part in translation projects for pay.
“Thanks to them being part of a department and being able to speak and write and read these languages with more students and with professors, it helps their language stay sharp,” Galasso said.
The Center also sponsors translation- and interpretation-related events, including a Catalan translation contest in April and the New England Translators Association’s annual conference, where they give out pins that say “Interpreter” and “I Translate.”
“That’s a key word, ‘sponsor,’” Galasso said. “We sponsor a lot of these kinds of activities that help people become aware of translation and also play with translation. It’s not just this service, like, ‘Here’s my document, you translate it for me,’ or ‘I need an interpreter for a meeting, bring someone over.’ It shows that translation can be a way of thinking and can be an activity.”
In fact, the Center recently celebrated International Translation Day on Tuesday, Sept. 30, for which they put a table outside with translated books, posters, and mugs, and they hosted a reception for graduate student Bo Kim’s art exhibit “Memory and Hybridity in Diasporic Space.” It wasn’t a big celebration, but, arguably, it didn’t need to be. As Galasso put it: “We’re celebrating translation all the time.”
For more information about the Gentzler Translation Center, visit umass.edu/translation-center.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.