Creative Translation for Real-World Contexts: English ↔ Spanish

Reviewed by Arnaldo Robles-Reyes, Associate Professor, Northern Essex Community College on 6/8/24

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

The book covers all the areas for a beginning class that wants to start diving into the world of translation. It is laid out in simple ways for everyone to understand, making it ideal for a high school level, or higher. The down fall lies in the absence of a glossary. It would have been great to have all the phrases/vocabulary presented in one place for easy referencing.

Content Accuracy rating: 3

The whole book is error free and very accurate when conveying the information. The author provides lots of explanations and equivalent translations in addition to exercises to practice the translations. Unfortunately, students are not able to assess their accuracy of the translations because not all the exercises have answers. It would have been nice to include them in the back of the ebook. Furthermore, there are some grammar suggestions that are not officially recognized by the Real Academia Española.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

The translation tools mentioned are described with a tone of inferiority, when in reality, they can be just as useful to aid the translator/interpreter side-by-side. For example, “… Google Translate and other automatic translation…. do not speak or read Spanish or English”; but in fact they do as part of making technology more accessible.

Clarity rating: 5

Very easy and pleasing to read. To change things up, there are a lot of videos and links to venture out of the ebook and into your smartphone, tablet or computer.

Consistency rating: 5

There is a positive and encouraging emphasis to motivate students throughout the book. The author touches topics at the surface level, without getting too technical and provided additional resources for those that wish to learn more outside the boundaries of the ebook.

Modularity rating: 4

The ebook uses headings and subheadings very well to divide paragraphs and information. There are also colors used, but at times can cause a distraction. For example, one highlighted area can be orange and the next, blue. This can be resolved by including a visual chart at the beginning, under “How to use this book”, indicating what each color represents and sticking to it throughout the ebook.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The topics are organized very well, similar to the way prestigious translation programs organize their content. For example, the ebook starts off emphasizing that translation will always require an output that does not sound like a translation. Furthermore, idiomatic expressions are given as models, which emphasizes cannot be translated literally from one language to the next, but rather have to interpreted to capture the idea.

Interface rating: 3

Navigating through the ebook is great in regard to the text itself, but the layout feels awkward. There are a lot of blank spaces left within paragraphs and they’re not consistent. One paragraph might be followed by a double spaced paragraph and other times 3/4 of the page is left blank. The titles and subtitle’ sizes sometimes are too big, and change size throughout the ebook; not to mention the double/ single spacing between lines is unpredictable.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

It is clear the ebook has been proofread very well.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

This ebook is very appropriate for teens and adults. Not offensive images or content is found.

Comments

The author has done a great job at including lots of content variety, such as false cognates, preposition differences between English/Spanish, and registers.