Community Interpreting as Language Justice with Roberto Tijerina

Queer, Latino, first-generation child of immigrants and community activist, Roberto Tijerina was the 2024 CTGL Resident to lead the Summit on Community-Based Interpreting. The summit brought together interpreters from across the State who work with multilingual families. Tijerina spoke about language justice and community interpretation. 

Growing up in the Borderlands 

Tijerina's work centers around language justice. His way to tackle his work and activism around language justice is grounded on the tradition of popular education. Roberto started learning about language justice when he interpreted for his parents as a child. “I had to translate for my mom during the OB/GYN visit and I had to translate for my dad when the mechanic was making racist comments,” he said. It was later, during the first decade of the 2000s, when Roberto transformed these early experiences with language justice into his activist work at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. “We needed to organize with these newly migrated workers from Mexico, in a region that has predominantly worked with Black communities,” Tijerina said. During these years, Roberto developed the Language Justice curriculum to work with community interpreters. 

Iowa Intersections Project

The Iowa Intersections project was created in the Center for Language and Culture Learning at the University of Iowa with the goal of interviewing Iowans whose voices are often underrepresented and unheard. Through sharing and uplifting these voices, we seek to showcase the cultural and linguistic diversity in the Iowa City area and to create pathways for cultural connections and belonging.

The project started in 2021, through a collaboration between Claire Frances, the Director of the Center for Language and Culture Learning (CLCL), and Bryan Flavin, a graduate student in the Masters in Literary Translation program and an intern with UNESCO City of Literature. The first story collection took place in a Kirkwood Community College ESL program, with adult students who had recently immigrated to Iowa City. Volunteers helped to collect stories, film the storytellers, transcribe and translate.

That same semester, the Intersections project traveled to the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama, to collect testimonials about their language preservation efforts. Subsequently the project accumulated various stories, from a collection of international students’ experiences of living through war to an after-school project in a neighborhood center after school program with children of Sudanese immigrants. The output from these initiatives strengthened the goals of Iowa Intersections to build an accessible collection of real world and local language samples to be used in language classes.

Throughout the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters, graduate students involved in Iowa Intersections worked on interviewing local international grocery store owners in Iowa City and Coralville and collecting their videos on a (forthcoming) digital map. The goal of the project is to highlight the value of these businesses to the local communities and provide a greater picture of diversity of the area to newcomers.

Over the years, Intersections teams have presented on campus, at the Iowa City Book Festival, in online language conferences, as a keynote at the International Association of Language Learning and Technology and most recently at the fourth annual Language OER Conference at University of Kansas. This project’s database is indeed an open education resource, and we’ve recently begun collaborating with Arabic faculty to use principles of backwards design to create level-appropriate, comprehensible input, tied to authentic content. The scope of Iowa Intersections' productions changes as new people join each year, all the while contributing to the same story hub. 

Second Annual Translate-a-thon hosted by Translate Iowa Project

On April 5^th and 6^th in Phillip Hall's CLCL, the Translate Iowa Project (TIP) hosted its second annual Translate-a-thon. TIP members and other translators from the community came together for language games, food, and for conducting free translations for the community. They translated documents from English into French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Their translations included financial forms for Habitat for Humanity, simple recipes for Table to Table, and kids' geology activities for a student's community outreach project. For artistically inclined translators, there were also prose and poetry works written by fellow TIP members to translate into other languages. 

Translators actively collaborated and reviewed each other's work, not only making this vital service more accessible to the community, but also giving student translators valuable experience. Translators discussed everything from learning new words, working around translating long organization names into another language, and grappling with cultural differences in how recipes are traditionally structured in different languages—for example, ​while English recipes often use the imperative for verbs, other languages may use infinitive or passive conjugations! Discoveries like this grew the translators, pushing them to explore grammar and vocabulary that they may not often encounter within a university classroom setting. 

As this is only the second year of the event and Iowa City has such a vibrant multilingual community, the Translate Iowa Project hopes to continue growing the Translate-a-thon. They hope to involve more languages, more translators, and even more local organizations—stay tuned for the third annual Translate-a-thon in 2025!

Students participating in the 2024 Translate-a-thon.

"In the Classroom" with Bela Shayevich

Bela Shayevich is a visual artist, writer, translator from the Russian, and a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

This semester, I had the pleasure and honor of teaching a translation and oral history course called "Heritage Narratives" for the first time. I envisioned this course as a translation practicum in which students work on a semester-long oral project. I originally conceived of it as a way to engage students in translation projects that are not necessarily literary, or not exclusively so. Instead, I wanted them to use translation to form and solidify connections to communities of language speakers and to each other.

In order to do this, my students were asked to study the theory and techniques of oral history, learning how to conduct interviews and considering the ethics around these conversations. Then, we spent the semester reading oral history and oral history adjacent texts from around the world and talking about all the different forms and approaches this practice can take.

Favorite texts included Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon, her account of interviewing one of the last living survivors of the Middle Passage; Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch, about a horse trainer in Iowa; and Victoria Lomasko's collection of graphic reportage called Other Russias. Texts like this were integral in our discussions of our roles as participants and observers, how we contextualize our interlocutors' stories, what we keep in and what we keep out. We continued these conversations as we turned to essays in translation theory, Gayatri Spivak's "The Politics of Translation" and Don Mee Choi's "Translation is a Mode = Translation is a Neo-Colonial Mode." As much as the intimacy and excitement of our previous class discussions brought us together, struggling through the nitty gritty of the theory really cemented our relationships with each other.

I am so grateful for my students' patience, excitement and curiosity in making this class even more inspiring than I'd dreamed of. Because of how much we read, and how, alongside it all, we were sharing our own stories, and connecting our projects to everything we read, we have ourselves formed a tight knit little community of translators and historians. My students' resulting projects are all so exciting, ranging from a hybrid translation of a novel interwoven with an interview to a YouTube video project about language acquisition. They have really gone deep into a diverse set of larger political, historical, and aesthetic questions and come out with projects that only resemble each other in the amount of investment, care, and creativity that was put into each of them. I could not be more proud of them.