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Vol/53 No/1 2014 FEBRUARY/MARCH The Linguist 31 INSTITUTE MATTERS NS & SOCIETIES May LINCOLNSHIRE SOCIETY AGM, TALK & LUNCH Saturday 10 May Wig & Mitre, Lincoln, Midday-4pm The AGM will be followed by lunch and a talk on 'Translation and Desktop Publishing: Problems and pitfalls, tips and tricks'. Translator and typesetter Chris Thompson will look at the entire process, including design, fitting text to the space available, choosing appropriate fonts, corporate design guidelines, non-Latin scripts and real-life examples of when it all goes wrong. Chris has a particular interest in the complex scripts of the Middle East and India, and previously worked as a project manager for a multilingual publishing company. To attend, email candia@chezhillier. freeserve.co.uk by 3 May. For venue details, see March listing. June ANGLOPHONER TAG 20-22 June Potsdam For details, email setarling@t-online.de. INTERPRETING DIVISION AGM & SEMINARS Saturday 7 June London Keynote seminars on 'New Technologies in Interpreting'. LINC GER ID Remembering Jara MARTIN PENNOCK REPORTS ON A CAMBRIDGE SOCIETY CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF VÍCTOR JARA Despite a few hitches – including signs labelled as the 'Society of Translators', much to the ire of our interpreter members – the Cambridge Society enjoyed a special multimedia event devoted to the words and music of Víctor Jara. This unique triple bill of drama, speech and song considered the impact of the Chilean poet and singer/songwriter, who was brutally tortured and murdered in the aftermath of the ousting of the Allende government in 1973. As an opener, I showed a film of scenes from my play Hands of Hope, which had been performed earlier in 2013. The drama centres around a character based on Jara, and I described how the language and life of the singer had influenced my work. I was particularly inspired by accounts of his poor childhood and by the last words he wrote and sang, which were smuggled out of the stadium in Santiago where he died. In a fascinating presentation, Hazel Marsh, of the University of East Anglia (UEA), argued that Jara was much more than a folk or 'protest' singer. She showed, through samples of his work both in Spanish and in translation, how he pioneered a new attitude towards the composition and performance of song. We learnt how he built on foundations established by earlier singer-songwriters, such as Violeta Parra, to change the way folk traditions were used and understood in Latin America. As a finale, Leslie Ray performed three of Jara's songs on guitar, and we ended in a style that Jara might have appreciated: singing along to 'Las Casitas del Barrio Alto', his adaptation of 'Little Boxes'. On Da Vinci's terms ANDREA WIELER GOODBRAND AND COLLEAGUES WERE INSPIRED BY MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY AT A RECENT EXHIBITION A cold autumn morning in Edinburgh, and linguists from all over the country came together to visit the 'Leonardo Da Vinci: The mechanics of man' exhibition at the Queen's Gallery in Edinburgh. This Translating Division event – part of the Translator's Arms series – was attended by speakers of Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Spanish. After a quick introduction, we headed for the exhibition with our pens and notebooks. Cynthia Stephens, the event organiser, had given us the task of jotting down any new vocabulary we came across. And there were plenty of new words, including 'erector spinal muscles', 'atherosclerosis' and 'sternocleidomastoid'. We discussed these over lunch with the help of Andrew Hutton's Pocket Medical Terminology and the equally useful Oxford Handbook for the Foundation Programme by Tim Raine et al. Apart from some useful terminology, the exhibition gave us a unique insight into the engineering understanding of the human body that Da Vinci possessed. The detail with which his drawings were completed is fascinating and humbling at the same time. To spend the morning with other language professionals in such an inspiring environment was a great start to the weekend. 'M URAL VICTOR JARA', 3/12/09 VIA WIKIPEDIA (CC BY-SA 3.0)