Navigating the University of Oregon campus can be a tricky task, especially for first-time visitors and students. Add in a language barrier, and this already difficult situation becomes harder. While most campus visitors could refer to one of UO’s maps, Spanish-speaking visitors cannot, as the UO maps are only available in English, at least for now.
After learning about this barrier, a group of UO students and faculty have been working to translate two campus maps into Spanish and create a more accessible environment for the Latinx community.
Bronwen Maxson, a UO librarian, first came across the idea after attending a Community Engagement Committee meeting as a part of the Dreamers Working Group. During the meeting, members discussed different barriers to the Latinx community on campus.
“We were talking about some of the barriers that come up that prevent people from visiting campus, one of which is transportation,” Maxson said. “How to park, how to pay for parking, where to park, where to get off the bus, where different campus buildings are.”
This is when the translation project began. Maxson said she didn’t want to personally translate the maps since she would only be representing one variety of Spanish. She wanted it to reflect the many varieties of Spanish in the community, which is why she thought students would be the best to take on this project.
“Students already have so much knowledge and so much to offer,” Maxson said. “And I wanted to really put this project in their hands.”
That’s why Maxson reached out to the Spanish Heritage program to collaborate on the project. UO Spanish instructor Heather Quarles said she was excited to join the project with her Spanish 228 class.
“This is a class that Spanish Heritage learners program makes an effort to try to get out of the classroom with projects as much as possible and connect with local communities,” Quarles said, which is why she thought this translation project would be a great fit.
Starting spring term, students involved in the project learned the process of translation and how it related to the map, Quarles said. She and Maxson then pulled out the most important words and phrases from over 500 words on the campus map and assigned each student about 18 terms. From there, the students turned to multiple sources to understand what the best translation would be, many receiving help from their families.
“Many of them ended up working with their parents, which was part of the project that was a really wonderful opportunity,” Quarles said. “Students made observations of how their own language varied from their parents, or how personal stories that came out of their parents related to language and mapping and different things.”
Karla Diaz, one of the students in Quarles’ class, said she worked closely with her parents to translate her terms.
“We really had to think about how we would translate them,” Diaz said. “There were proper names of buildings that could be translated into Spanish, but then it was going to be a whole different building.”
The students also worked closely with each other, which Diaz said she appreciated.
“We were all from different backgrounds, so some of us might have been first-generation, some of us might have been born here, some of us may be born in Guatemala or Mexico or Puerto Rico,” Diaz said. “And I thought it was just cool to share our different languages, the way we say different things.”
One of the biggest challenges of this project was finding the most appropriate Spanish term for each word. Some words had simple equivalents, Quarles said, but others produced a debate.
Students struggled particularly with translating the Duck Store, she said, debating whether or not to translate “duck” and “store,” or to leave it “la Duck Store” or “el Duck Store.” The students eventually agreed on “la Duck Store,” Quarles said.
Maxson also acknowledged the challenge of keeping the integrity of each word during the translation process. She said that the group reached out to communities on campus, including the Black Cultural Center and the Many Nations Longhouse, to ensure a correct translation.
“You want to capture the meaning and the essence of the space, and what it means for the people who use it for that community,” Maxson said. “And so we had a couple of those personal contacts that really helped us get it right.”
Both Maxson and Quarles said they hope these maps inspire more UO groups to find ways to improve the campus’ accessibility.
“I would love it if folks who work in other languages like the idea and consider doing something similar because obviously Spanish is not the only community language other than English,” Quarles said. “We have many, many community languages, and many of them have programs on campus as well.”
