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By Lincoln Timberlake, Enloe High School

Photo by Lincoln Timberlake

“OK, so you’re kinda just using me to translate your Spanish?”

Marcos Vazquiz-Hernandez, a recent graduate of Enloe High School, vocalizes in a text message, a common frustration among translators in North Carolina. He spent 4 years as a translator for the school’s online newspaper, ‘Eagles Eye’.

According to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s Hispanic population is now greater than 1 million people. This significant gain in Hispanic population has led to an increased interest and need for news organizations to translate their information into Spanish.

In Durham, just over 38% of Riverside High School students are Hispanic. Bryan Christopher, an adviser at Riverside High School, expressed the need for student translators.

“It’s a part of how you meet the needs of your audience,” he said “For us, you know, about a third of our students speak a language other than English at home, mostly Spanish. And so we felt it would be the most effective way for us to communicate information to our entire student body by offering some of it.”

Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, with its demographic consisting of just 9% Hispanic-speaking students rely on student translators. Vazquiz, who was a member of the small population of bilingual speakers at Enloe, said he felt the burden of needing to translate.

“Sometimes when translating, it would be really pressuring in many ways,” Vazquiz remarks. “I would be the only person who could speak Spanish and that can make my translating skills drop instantly due to the immense amount of pressure and how in the moment it is.”

The challenges of translation reach far past conversation; it involves navigating compound rules and structures unique to each language.

“Every language has its own defined structure with its own agreed-upon rules”, Christopher said “The individualism and complexity of its structure directly correlate to why translation is so difficult. A simple sentence can be interpreted in a multitude of ways depending on what language is being spoken.”

The difficulty of switching between specific dialects boast a significant challenge for translators in North Carolina, like Vazquiz.

“When it comes to translating a document for my parents, for example, it can be pressuring because sometimes I can’t find the words to other words. It’s also the fact that it’s something important that I’m translating; if I mess up, I could confuse the person who I’m translating for.”

Christopher’s team strives for accuracy.

“Not every word has a direct translation,” He said. “If I have a student whose family is from Mexico they would translate in a very different way than if a student’s family is from El Salvador, right, or Peruvian or Colombian would — here are so many different dialects of Spanish that would translate an English sentence in different ways. We’d navigate that as well.”

Despite common challenges, Vaquiz said the experience was positive for him, and was glad for the families and students he was able to help.

“Translating has been fun and in my situation it has improved my spanish and translating skills, and I’d definitely recommend it to any person that may know spanish but isn’t confident in their skills, it builds confidence in my Spanish speaking skills.”