Translation Station at the CutOut Fest

This past week I started volunteering with a festival called CutOut Fest at their pretty office in the city center. I met the founders, Bianca and Miguel, through a mutual friend at a bar last week, emailed them on Friday and started on Monday. The festival was created to fill the giant gap for animated film and art here in the Americas. Apparently, there are very few festivals of this kind and many animation artists must travel to Europe to show their work. The festival is in its fifth year and the staff is seriously dedicated, organized and motivated. I met with the Head of Programming, Daniella, when I first arrived and she gave me the run down on the huge need they have for English translation. The artists come from across the world so CutOut wants to ensure that the information is understood by the widest audience possible.

I started by translating a brochure needed to attract British businesses to the festival. CutOut has partnered with an organization called This is GREAT to attract creative talent from the United Kingdom. It took me about two hours to  write the first draft of the translation and by the end, I was so fried, I could barely even speak English, let alone Spanish! A funny thing about translating is that you start to forget how to say things in your own language. I can spend many minutes on four word phrases, wracking my brain to remember how we normally say "debuted at number one on YouTube" ( I had to ask myself, "is it 'debuted as or at?'"). I spent 30 minutes trying to translate the tagline for a music video contest. Given, it was a weirdo artsy farsty musiciany phrase that started with "hear with your eyes", but 30 minutes nonetheless. A few of my friends who are innocently on gchat while I'm at CutOut Fest have fallen victim to my messages asking them "does this sound normal to you?" with various different translated sentences to follow.

I'm really happy I found this gig. It's really challenging in a fun way and I think it'll ultimately help my Spanish as well. Plus, I've never felt like as much of an expert as I do as the sole native English speaker in an office full of Mexicans. Not to mention, I want to be BFF with all the people there, hip creative types in their cool boots and wearing pretty lipsticks. And there's a cute dog that comes in everyday, too.