What translators can teach everyone about working from home during the Covid 19 pandemic

The Covid 19 pandemic took us all by surprise. We were not ready for the shutdown of our way of life as we knew it, for hunkering down at home, without the possibility of seeing friends and family, with our children home from school, our places of work closed, and even worse, asking us to work remotely. Fortunately, for me as a translator, some things remained the same. The main one: working from home. 

I’ve been a translator for over 15 years, and of those, only 4 were spent at an IT company, in-house, managing a Localization department. I was fresh out of college and with my recently-obtained ATA-certification, I was eager to show my bosses half-way across the world, in India, that they had made a good choice hiring me to spearhead translations in Uruguay. I had already been working remotely for translation companies, and I thought why not create the same system for them, hiring freelancers to work from home on a per-project basis? The company loved my idea, and so I became a project manager for a mix of remote and in-house translators. Not too bad for my first real job! Now fast forward to 2020. I’m still comfortably working from home, while a large part of the world is just now realizing that there is an alternative to endless commutes in traffic, which might work just as well for certain white-collar jobs. Now that is a discovery. 

Working from home, as much as it may seem daunting right now for those who are used to wearing something other than pajamas to work, has many benefits. As a disclaimer, I will also say that, if you are a working parent during the pandemic, and you not only have to work from home for the first time, but also do it while your kid (or kids) yell at each other while hanging from your neck, or dance to Let it Go full blast for the 12th time in a row (true story), you are my hero. It’s one thing to work from home, as in “go to a cafe and get a latte and a muffin while listening to some Fiona Apple” while the kids are in school, and then there’s Covid 19 working from home trying to drink yesterday’s cold coffee, in your pajamas (which you’ve worn for three days in a row because who has the time or energy to do laundry) . What’s happening right now is not normal and should not be used as a measure to rate how great working from home is. 

But, coming back to its benefits (during normal times), one of them is flexibility. Usually, you make your own hours. You decide when to work (unless you have meetings to attend to). That instantly makes working from home much more compatible with family life. You can pick up your kids from school, take them to activities, and even work in the lobby of your kid’s ballet lessons (done that!). Or, you can travel and work, which we will hopefully be able to do again once this is over. 

Another benefit of working from home, is that it saves you the commute. This not only has a positive impact on your ability to spend time with your family, but it has a more global impact: it decreases pollution, because the more people work from home, the less cars we have on the road. I have been increasingly conscious about the environment, trying to reduce our waste, recycle, minimize the use of plastic, make compost, and this added benefit is absolutely not lost on me. Everyone has heard how the pandemic has considerably decreased the world’s carbon emissions. Some of the world’s most polluted countries, such as China, have seen a drop in air pollution levels, and it is my hope that many, many people continue working remotely to further achieve carbon savings and decelerate global warming. We only have 10 years to do it!

Finally, working from home tends to naturally make us less prone to spending, either on clothes, food (but certainly not lattes!), just because we are home more and can fix things around the house or be more conscious about what we spend our money on. At least that’s what happens for me when I shop online. I shop around more to find better prices and compare. I know for some people it might be the opposite! But, overall, it can lead to better money management. 

It can also give you the possibility of being a freelancer, or adding another gig to your steady job, working for more than one company, which would, in turn, increase your earning potential.

I believe working from home may be the future for a lot of us, at least for the next couple of years, so we might as well enjoy it!  

Stay tuned for my next post on suggestions to make it easier to work at home with kids. And some delicious latte recipes!

Paola

Working at home with kids: 5 tips on how to make it easier for you and them

Working from home can be wonderful. You can choose your hours, make yourself endless snacks, choose your background music. Unless… cue a couple of kids with excess energy, no playmates and easily accessible parents due to a global pandemic. That, to me, spells disaster. 

Here are 5 tips on how to make it easier on you and them, and (hopefully) get some work done.

1. Start the day with connection. Dr. Laura Markham of the Aha! Parenting blog and Patty Wipfler of Hand in Hand Parenting, both explain that your child needs to feel connected to a parent or caregiver before they can play on their own. Patty Wipfler recommends preventive maintenance to fill a child’s connection cup, in the form of daily special time. You set a timer for 10, 15 or 20 minutes and tell the child you will play with her until the timer rings. During that time, the child takes the lead. You let them choose what to play. You follow along and connect fully, listening, observing and often playing the less powerful role, so that she feels in control during special time. When the timer rings, the child might have some big feelings. Acknowledge her feelings, empathize, and reassure her you will have more special time tomorrow. If necessary, listen to her feelings until she has finished offloading them. Oftentimes, he will feel lighter after a good cry and ready to play independently, which will give you precious time to do your work. If you continue doing this every day, you will find that there is less need to offload feelings, and connection alone before work will be enough to ease the child into indepedent play. 

2. If possible, avoid screens. Don’t get me wrong, even though we follow the Waldorf approach, which advocates for very little screentime, I use it strategically. But turning the TV on first thing in the morning is a recipe for disaster. It makes children moody and disconnected, and you later need to do much more repair work to get them playing independently. 

3. Make a special activity box for when you have to attend a meeting or do focused work. Fill the box with little things that you can either get new every couple of days, or rotate them often. Some ideas can be: coloring books and new crayons, sticker books, small puzzles, blocks, nature elements, such as sticks, pinecones and rocks, felt balls in different sizes, etc. The elements will vary according to the age of the children.

4. Wrap small presents and hide them around the house. This will work wonders for the under 7 crowd. You can even play hot/cold while sitting on your computer, if you can multitask a bit. 

5. If your kids are like mine, when all else fails, bring out the play dough and some fun molds. Today, my 2 year old and my 5 year old played for over an hour mostly without my help. Other ideas might be kinetic sand, modelling clay, modelling beeswax, or scissors, paper and glue, if they’re old enough. 

I hope you try some of these suggestions. Whatever you do, extend yourself and your child some grace. These are special times and they need empathy and understanding. Maybe you need to do more work after they are in bed, or adjust your expectations a bit. It’s important to return yourself to calm and breathe. They are little for only a short time and this too shall pass. 

The art of quarantine

Maybe 2 or 3 months into quarantine, self-isolation, or whichever mode of distancing one has been forced to acquire, it probably seems there is nothing new out there to help keep ourselves busy through the dull days. When this all began, I spent a great deal of time scouring through the Internet to get the latest news on the virus and its whereabouts. Then, just as things intensified and we all turned to the great indoors for shelter, I found myself trying to secure a good supply of activities and reads to keep the family entertained. I wish I could say “at pretty much the same rate as I filled up the pantry”, but I wouldn’t be totally honest—it actually took our family a while to get up to speed with the online grocery shopping thing so that we would never run out of supplies. But that’s a fun story for another time.

For those of us with an inclination for the arts, we may have found that some of the first activities to go with the big—and pretty much global—shutdown, were museum visits, art openings, screenings and other cultural events—oh how I miss those museum cappuccino breaks! Fortunately, we live in a day and age where nearly everything can be found online, and even more so these days. As an example, over the course of these past few months, every now and then someone would let me know that this or that museum or magazine had their collections or volumes available for download at no cost. I won’t lie and say I’ve had the time or the energy to check them out, but it’s uplifting to see that, for a change, cultural institutions or companies have been willing to forego their earnings for the greater good.

Now, I know it’s all too easy to get lost in the sea of information. I probably spend as much time trying to figure out what’s worth checking out, than actually going with one option and making the most out of what it has to offer. So I’ve decided to make a list of my favorite art related sites out there right now to help us get some much needed inspiration these days. While some help you hone your design skills, at least one of them touches on the art world’s response to the worldwide pandemic and others are simply all-time personal favorites.

1.       DO IT

Do it is a collaborative project conceived in 1993 by art curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. They invite artists to create instructions for people to make or perform on their own, rather than offer a viewable work of art. The evolution of the project, Do it Around the World, has been launched in partnership with the Serpentine Galleries and makes use of social media and digital platforms to bring artists’ instructions to a wider audience.

2.       James Turrel

James Turrel’s work is especially meaningful to me. Back in 2016, I was amazed by his Meeting at MoMA PS1, one in a series of Skyspaces that can be found around the world. And although it is nearly impossible for a website to replace the experience of being face to face with a work of art, this one gives you a good glimpse into the artist’s universe of light. Roden Crater, Turrel’s largest-scale project, is set to become a naked-eye astronomical observatory in the tradition of other man-made structures the likes of Newgrange in Ireland and Abu Simbel in Egypt (if and when it manages to gather the funding it needs). In any case, it sounds simply astounding.

3.       Method of Action

Method of Action has created a series of tools conceived to help you master specific design-related notions such as nodes in a Bezier curve or the idea of kerning (if you’re not familiar with the term, that’s the separation between letters in any given text). Although perhaps more design than art-related, it will surely sharpen your perception and add to your art appreciation skills. Be sure to try the color matching game, it’s quite addictive.

4.       How Art Movements Tried to Make Sense of the World in the Wake of the 1918 Flu Pandemic

This essay from Time magazine by Anna Purna Kambhampaty addresses a lot of the things that have been on my mind since the pandemic began with regards to the role of art in situations like the one we’re experiencing. How did artists respond to previous pandemics? Did anything substantial come out? This might give you a clue as to where art might be headed afterwards, in case you were wondering.

5.       The Broad’s family workshops at home

I looked around for family activities museums were offering in lieu of their onsite events and activities, and came across a series of videos posted by The Broad museum in LA. They teach kids how artists go about their creations by inviting them to do something of their own. I especially loved the video on how to make a tapestry like El Anatsui’s. Hope you check it out and enjoy it as much as we did!

Carolina

Language Justice

Some days ago, I was waiting for an online conversation between an artist and a curator to start on Zoom. When the moderator started to speak in Spanish and then repeated what she had just said in English, I thought it was a lucky thing interpreting would be available for this event: that way, if I was interrupted by my 2-year old daughter, perhaps I could catch the replay in the second language. So, having found an activity for her to do while I focused on my screen with some semblance of peace, an expression I had never heard before immediately piqued my curiosity: language justice. I did think it was quite strange that the speaker would devote so much time to explaining how the event would take place in terms of language, especially in these times where differences, whether cultural or otherwise, seem to go unacknowledged at best, and, at worst, spark blatant violence. Here, first would come the non-dominant language (or languages). Then, English, which, as it’s probably not hard to imagine, usually takes on the dominant role.

This is how I came to know that language justice is a veritable movement that advocates for social justice through the use of language. To make this happen, it relies on three key aspects. For one, it proposes that everyone should have the right to speak in the language that they are most comfortable with. Secondly, it implies the ability to create fully multilingual spaces, rather than simply provide interpretation for those who don’t speak the dominant language. Lastly, language justice acknowledges that, while language can certainly foster connection, it can also touch on sensitive issues that it can ultimately help resolve. Conceived to be applied in situations that may reunite people from very different cultures and backgrounds (such as a City Council meeting where many attendants are probably immigrants from a variety of countries), language justice has a vision of equality at its core. It is based on the premise that traditional interpreting (regardless of the mode of interpreting, whether simultaneous or consecutive) can potentially make an entire group of people feel left out, even discriminated—for example, by being the only ones having to wear headsets if they want to keep up with the discussion (in simultaneous interpreting), or by interrupting the flow of the meeting to have their questions translated into the main language (in consecutive mode).

The cultural competency groups that offer a language justice-based approach usually provide support to community events where having everyone’s voice heard is a priority. To do so, headsets for all attendants are necessary, as well as a transmitter for the interpreter. But a truly multilingual event needs to be conceived as such from the get-go: the setup of the space must take into account the location of the audience and speakers so that no one feels like they’re in the background, and time must be devoted to make sure that the interpreting equipment functions properly. Also, any written material that may be distributed among the participants should be available in all the languages that will be spoken at the event. But there is such a normalization of the existence of non-dominant languages in most contexts that it’s easy to overlook the many elements at play in ensuring that everyone involved can express themselves freely, as opposed to feeling constrained by their mother tongue.

When we regard language as a tool for empowerment, we give value to our culture and our individuality, which in turn fosters growth. When we realize that interpreting is for all of us who are unable to understand all the languages that may be present in a conversation, we begin to appreciate our differences and value each person’s contributions on equal terms. When we, as translators and interpreters, do our jobs right, we make way for the nuances in language to shine through: we are able to recreate jokes and convey the beliefs and personality of all those who come together to share their individual perspective and personal experiences. In this day and age, fostering solidarity, understanding and acceptance sounds like a great way to fight the intolerance it’s hard to believe is still among us.

Carolina

Resources:

http://antenaantena.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/langjust_eng.pdf

https://www.coloradotrust.org/content/story/what-language-justice

https://nesfp.org/sites/default/files/resources/language_justice_toolkit.pdf