In celebration of this year’s International Translation Day, the Translation Department of Mexico’s Universidad Intercontinental (UIC) held its annual conference where entrepreneurs, academics, and key players in the language industry shared their experience and visions for the future of our field with our students. This time around, among our esteemed guests were an interpreter from the South African embassy in Mexico, the CEO of a dubbing studio based in Mexico City, and a renowned legal translator.
Guillermo Prior Ortiz kicked off the event by sharing anecdotes and important tips gathered from his several years of experience as an interpreter, not only at the South African embassy – his diplomatic duties – but also for media outlets and at sporting events. Our students were very interested in finding out how he managed to position himself to have such a stellar career. Then Carlos Sánchez Vega, CEO of Caaliope Dubbing & Distribution, gave a tour of the brand-new studio that his company built in recent years to compete with other well-known companies in Latin America and Spain. With slick decor inspired by sci-fi movies and shows, the Caaliope studio offers all the tools needed for providing the most important audiovisual language services (such as dubbing and subtitling) associated with streaming media and other forms of digital content.
To close the event, Mauricio Rebolledo del Castillo gave a talk to our students addressing the myriad complexities of legal translation, trying to debunk the false notion that specialised translation relies only on the competent handling of niche terminology. Of course, there is so much more that goes into mastering a specialised branch of translation, and Mauricio’s talk helped our attendees gain some important insight into the process.
Another milestone worth mentioning here is the signing of a collaboration agreement between our institution and Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) in San Miguel de Allende. By establishing this partnership, UIC and UNAM aim to strengthen collaboration between their undergraduate translation programmes by facilitating academic exchange, nurturing joint research efforts, and holding forums and conferences in which relevant figures from the field can gather to share their most important findings and pose new questions and challenges for their peers.
Isidro Portillo, UIC