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Webmasterita.
Coordinator (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Basque, Greek, Rumanaian),
Spanish
language Senior web site translator
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| About
10 or 12 years ago, my children were already attending school and, after
being a very busy mom, I had long hours for myself. Surfing on the net,
I found a French site dedicated to a rare disease (http://www.loiseaubleu.org/index.php)
which affects mainly children. The site asked for translators into several
languages, and I joined them to translate the whole site into Spanish,
my mother tongue. To teach me how to find the text among the html code,
the webmaster sent me a brief “course” of html encoding, which was
my first contact with this subject. |
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| When
I finished, I had already discovered my passion for translating and for
computers, so I kept on searching for volunteer assignments. I translated
a site about Afghan Women (http://afghanwomensmission.org/sp/),
and then I met Phil Bartle and the Community Empowerment
site. The site is huge, and it took me several years to complete. During
this time, Dr. Phil was a wonderful help. |
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| In
the web, I found amazing resources for translators: dictionaries, glossaries
and free software. Maybe the best was CatsCradle,
a free editor intended to translate web pages. As I know this software
very well, I often coach other volunteers in its use. |
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| Since
then, and always keeping in contact with Community Empowerment to deal
with the Spanish mail and the updates, I’ve translated or collaborated
in translations for several sites, including:
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Apart
from Community Empowerment, I currently work as a volunteer with:
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| All
those sites belong to non-profit organisations, devoted to development,
human rights or culture. As a mother, my time and schedule is tight: the
internet brings me the chance to help other persons who might not have
the same opportunities my children do, and at the same time, allows me
to look after my family. I can devote 4-6 hours a day to my work with those
sites, but this is not an effort: I really love every minute I spend on
them. |
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| I
would like to think my translations have reached and helped thousand of
persons. I don’t know that, but I do know Spanish is a widely used language,
and I hope my work has encouraged some of the people who speak Spanish
all over the world to take their future into their own hands. |
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| I
have no degrees, I’m not a professional translator or computing expert,
I just speak French and English, apart from my native Spanish, and I’ve
learned how to deal with computers mainly from the webmasters I’ve worked
with. Probably, my best assets are intuition and a remarkable capacity
to find answers and resources on the Internet. I think my experience has
encouraged other potential volunteers, as they saw they don’t need to
be a graduate to do a good job. The most important thing is to be committed,
reliable and devoted to what you are doing. |
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| For
me, my work as volunteer has been mostly about learning: learning how to
translate and a little about computers, of course. But the best this activity
has taught me is that there are wonderful persons in the world who care
about people, who are patient, sweet and kind, and especially, I’ve learned
about humility and love, about people who give everything, even if all
they have is only their time. |
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| If
I had to give my advice to a potential volunteer I’d say, “Do it! Persevere
and don’t let them down, because you’ll get from them much more than
you are giving. But don’t dare to think a volunteer work doesn’t deserve
all your skills. You must give your best.” |
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| Notes
by Phil:
Lourdes was born in Huesca (Spain).
She studied chemistry at the university. She was a co-owner of an
interior design firm. She studied computing for two years, then moved
to Brussels, where she learned French at the Centre of Languages at the
University of Louvain. |
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| She
is a mother of two children who keep her busy. Some ironing has some
sort of a spell on her, and calls in a mysterious language for her attention.
Every day, however, she finds time and energy to donate to translating
web pages for non profit organisations. For our site alone, she has translted
over 200 documents, almost the whole set of documents for the site, and
coordinated other Spanish translators. |
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| She
also provides technical advice and encouragement to other translators.
She has taught herself some graphics editing and makes many graphics files
for the site. |
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| She
coordinates volunteers translating other languages, including Portuguese,
Greek, Catalan and Basque. With all her other contributions to the site,
she is now Webmasterita. |
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| A
few of her pet peeves about some Spanish writing can be seen at "Errores." |
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| Her
close association with this web site over several years, discussing many
of the concepts that sometimes need to be explained while en route between
English and Spanish, has resulted in her having an in depth understanding
of the community empowerment methodology. Because of that, she also
handles most of the inquiries by Spanish readers of the site. |
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| Thanks
to Lourdes Sada for her assistance in making this a more useful and interesting
web site. |
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