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Webmasterita.
CSS Specialist, Coordinator (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Basque, Greek,
Romanian),
Spanish
language, Senior web site translator
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.Profile.
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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, 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 thousands 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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..Tribute
| 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 translated 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, Romanian, Greek, Catalan and Basque.
With all her other contributions to the site, she is now Webmasterita.
Currently she is engaged in converting the pages on the site to a CSS format,
which looks cleaner and more easy to read than the old format, and makes
it easier to prepare translations for uploading. |
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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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