About

The website communitytranslationresources.org was created as part of the research project “Empowering Communities through Translation: The Case of the Newcomers’ Guide to Edmonton” conducted by a team of scholars at the University of Alberta in collaboration with the City of Edmonton.

Intended for local and regional community translators as well as public sector employees, this website provides not only a wealth of translation resources and tools in a variety of languages (Amharic, Arabic, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Russian, Somali, Spanish, and Ukrainian), but also links to workshops, forums, trainings and contact details of translation service providers. The purpose is to to assist community translators in their work, to encourage interactions between translators, and to facilitate the use of community translation services by administrators.

Research Team Members

Odile Cisneros is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. With Richard Young, she coauthored Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater (Scarecrow Press, 2011), and coedited Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos with A.S. Bessa (Northwestern UP, 2007). She has translated the work of Régis Bonvicino, Haroldo de Campos, and Jaroslav Seifert, among others. Prof. Cisneros specializes in Latin American and contemporary Brazilian poetry, ecocriticism, and translation theory and practice. With Sathya Rao and Ann De León (University of Alberta) and Charlene Ball (City of Edmonton), she leads a SSHRC-funded project on community translation. She is editor in chief of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos.

Dr. Sathya Rao is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta where he teaches French and Translation. He is the (co-)author of Philosophies et non-philosophie de la traduction. Essai de tradu-fiction (2015); Michel Tremblay: traducteur et adaptateur. Essai en trois temps (2017) and L’Ouest raconté par Magali Michelet (2019). He has (co-)authored more than 50 articles and book chapters on contemporary philosophy, translation studies and francophone literature. More recently, he spearheaded the development of Le Francopass, a web application designed to encourage users to practice French outside the classroom. He is the founder and co-editor of Alternative francophone, and creator of the Canadian Minority Media Database.  

Ann De León (PhD, The Johns Hopkins University) is Associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta where she teaches courses in Spanish, Latin American studies, Translation and Nahuatl. Her research interests have focused on the study of colonial and 19th-century Mexican literary and visual cultural productions, projects of cross-cultural translation, Indigenous pictorial documents (codices) and the “Aztec” language (Nahuatl). More recently she has been working on a collaborative SSHRC-funded project on community translation practices in Edmonton with Dr. Odile Cisneros and Dr. Sathya Rao (University of Alberta) and Charlene Ball (City of Edmonton).

Charlene Ball served as Multicultural Liaison with the Social Development Branch of the City of Edmonton. She has an M.A in Intercultural Relations from the Intercultural Communication Institute (Portland, OR) & the University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA). She was the Project Manager for the translation into seven additional languages of the Newcomers’ Guide to Edmonton (2016) and is the City of Edmonton partner in a SSHRC-funded research project on community translation. Charlene has extensive experience coordinating and facilitating international educational youth exchange programs and working with newcomers to Canada, as well as Indigenous communities.

Acknowledgements

The website communitytranslationresources.org gratefully acknowledges the generous support of:

  • City of Edmonton
  • SSHRC – The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
  • The University of Alberta
  • Mitacs

Many thanks also to the student researchers and postdoctoral fellows who have helped in developing the website:

  • Ana Juana Vicente Foster
  • Hyunjin (Amy) Kim
  • Chui Yin Ng
  • Yuliia (Julia) Deviatko

The research team likewise would like to express their deep appreciation to all undergraduate students in MLCS 300 who contributed research on specific translation resources:

  • Sebastián Andres Ubillus Salazar
  • Bobbie Montgomery
  • Padgett Hiew
  • Oksana Maszczak

And our deepest gratitude to all the community translators and administrators who have given us precious feedback, advice, and suggestions for the construction of the website all along.

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