A couple of months ago, I was echoing a publication by colleagues and myself that had just come out, and I posted it on Twitter. I often do it, especially if the publication is open access, to complete the cycle of diffusion and dissemination. I think it might get someone to read it and, as well as find out about some of the things we do in “the ivory tower”, give us feedback or make a comment.
The funny thing is that, like many of my publications over the last year, this publication is written in English, but mired of people on Twitter are VERY Spanish-speaking, so one of my colleagues from Argentina asked me, “Linda, where can we access the article in Spanish?”… and that got me thinking, the truth is… I don’t write the article in Spanish and then translate it; there is no article in Spanish… but I “care” that I think that what is in that article can be useful for teachers and colleagues who don’t speak English (in the same way that I am convinced that reading in other languages – whatever the mother tongue – is a splendid intellectual privilege)…. and I thought “I could run it through some automatic translation tool – like DEEP-L or Google – which nowadays work particularly well between Spanish and English”, but of course, to make that effort you have to be interested in the article… and how are you going to know if you are interested in the summary is only in English. You have only seen the title, which is also in English…?
At that moment, I had an idea, probably Instagram reels could be used for this, and I started a “project” that has been active since then, and I hope it will continue… at least as long as it continues to be of interest. The idea is to make a REEL (90 seconds) in which we summarise, in Spanish, one of the articles we have published in English. We also leave on Instagram as a post the documentation and QR codes to access the publication in question. Here you have the first one I did.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
With a few days difference, I publish the summary also on LinkedIn and on my Youtube channel, where I have already started a list where you can find all the ones I have done so far:
I sincerely hope that the initiative may encourage teachers or colleagues who are resistant to English to read some of the articles, even if it is in an automatically translated version…
At some point, someone asked me if I would do it the other way round (make a video paper in English of my articles in Spanish) …. … I wish someone had asked for them in English; I would surely consider it… I think there is a lot to do to decolonise discourses and lot to do to open our heads to other languages. … and although things are already starting to be done (I highly recommend reading this editorial in Learning Media & Technology “Reading internationally: if citing is a political practice, who are we reading and who are we citing?” and reflecting on what it means) I think that for the moment I will only do them in Spanish.
Attention, I’m wearing a filter; I intend to do them when I have time and sometimes I don’t feel good-looking enough for a video, so long live Instagram filters! 😉