Greetings, Translation Center Community and Friends Near and Far! Welcome to Translation Times! I hope this newsletter finds everyone healthy and hopeful that better days are ahead.
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e started assembling this newsletter in the summer of 2020 and wished to release it at the start of the fall semester. However, the constant flow of shifts associated with the pandemic slowed that plan down. But here it is! Some of you will know that this is not the first newsletter the Translation Center has ever published. In our archives, we found volume 1, issue one, published in December 1996. It was called Translation Center News. In 1999, the publication had another name Translation Times. Reports were also published in addition to newsletters. Some of these documents from the archives are on our website. We’ll continue to use Translation Times as the title. This current issue covers 2018-2020. Following what was done in the past, Translation Times includes news from the Translation Center--projects we work on and activities we sponsor--and on scholarly and educational activities related to translation initiated by members of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the nearby collegesAmherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith. The last time we tried to count, we identified over 70 faculty members affiliated with our five campuses who either translate literary or scholarly texts or publish about translation phenomena. (Please see the “People” section on the Translation Center’s website. If there’s an update we need to make, please let us know!) An article "Bridging the Gaps of Language," that was published in a local newspaper in May 1979 announces the opening of the "new UMass Translation Center" and calls our
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DIRECTOR’S
NOTE
university and colleges “a harbor filled with multilingual persons.” Four decades later, it still is! Although we look out for translation-related activities on our campuses and in the area and many of you send us updates, there are certainly things we miss, so, please, let us know about them. Apologies for the many events and activities we missed including here! Translation Times relies on contributions from our community members. Look out for a call for contributions from the Translation Center at the end of the spring semester for the 2020-2021 newsletter. If you have content you’d like to share before then, please send it to Aitor Bouso Gavín, our graduate student assistant. I thank Aitor for collecting the content for and putting together this current issue. I also thank our undergraduate student assistant, Vitor Silva, for helping him. Their example shows that students continue to be an important part of the work of the Translation Center. I thank the students who contributed pieces to this newsletter and the faculty members who responded to our call or accepted our invitation to contribute to this newsletter.
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