Skip to main content

Seventh Annual Translate-a-thon

The Seventh Annual Translate-a-thon will take place on March 28th 2025! Please scroll down for the draft schedule, subject to minor adjustments.

Self-register on the Canvas site, where we will post all the materials to be translated!

All scheduled events take place at The Rutgers University Language Center, 1 Spring Street (New Brunswick, NJ). Some projects and workshops can also be joined virtually, via Canvas.

Please check the schedule in table format: Translate-a-thon2025

Note: The Emmy Hennings workshop has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. If you’re looking for a German/English project, head to the ROHA workshop or translate a poem of your choice for our website!

10 AM: Registration and light breakfast in 4th Floor Lobby. Registration will remain open throughout the day.
10 AM – 4:30 pm: Work ongoing on the following virtual and hybrid projects in Room 402, 403, and hybrid. If participating virtually, self-register for the Translate-a-thon Canvas site to access materials and links:
    • Language Bank and other Community Projects
      • Highland Park Recorder Society materials (Coordinator: Ms. Donna Messer; multiple languages, hybrid)
      • Honors College welcome e-mail (Coordinator: Dean Krista Klein; Spanish/English, virtual)
      • El Huerto Urbano gardening fact sheets (Coordinator: Prof. Claudia Urdanivia, Spanish/English, virtual)
      • Make a Wish Foundation (Coordinator: Prof. Laura Ramirez; English/Arab/Spanish, hybrid)
      • Hyacinth Foundation (Coordinator: Prof. Laura Ramirez; English/Haitian Creole/Spanish, hybrid)
      • Circle of Care outreach materials (Coordinator: Paulina Dutton; Bengali/Arabic/English, hybrid)
      • MEND Hunger Relief Network (Coordinator: Keily Hayes; Spanish/Haitian Creole/English, hybrid)
    • Local menus (Coordinator: Prof. Jackie Loeb; multiple languages, hybrid)
    • Russian & Polish poetry translation (Coordinator: Prof. Chloë Kitzinger; Russian/Polish/English, hybrid)
    • Video captioning (Coordinators: Prof. Nicole Houser & Ms. Carolina Moratti, Spanish/English, virtual)
11 AM – 12 PM: Workshop on subtitling with AI tools, Room 402 and hybrid (Prof. Miguel Jimenez; all languages). If participating virtually, self-register for the Translate-a-thon Canvas site to access the link!

11 AM – 1 PM: Frayed Nerves: A Workshop on the Avant-Garde, online (Prof. Karen Bishop; Spanish and other languages). Self-register for the Translate-a-thon Canvas site to access the link!

  • Join professor and poet Karen Elizabeth Bishop for a fun, informal, online workshop on translating sense, style, and soundwork in avant-garde poetry. We’ll translate work from contemporary experimental Spanish poet Lucía Boscà, and talk over techniques for what to do with literature that goes in many directions all at once, how to be okay with decisions that will drive you crazy, and how to settle on a final draft that won’t settle.
12 PM: Lunch for all registrants in 4th Floor Lobby. Lunch will be available through the early afternoon.
12:30-4:30 PM: Rutgers Oral History Archives, brochures and other materials, Room 402 and hybrid (Coordinator: ROHA Director Jeongeun Park; multiple languages). If participating virtually, self-register for the Translate-a-thon Canvas site to access the materials and link!
Prof. Park will be giving a brief introduction to the Rutgers Oral History Archive at 12:30 pm. All participants in the project are warmly encouraged to attend!
Priority languages include: Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Korean, Portuguese, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Haitian, French, Urdu, Telugu.
12:30-2:30 pm, Korean-English Translation ROHA workshop, Room 402. (Coordinators: Jeongeun Park, Seungmin Lee, and Prof. Young-mee Cho; Korean/English, in person)
1-2 PM: Workshop, “The Language Broker’s Toolkit: LLMs’ use in translation,” online  (Prof. Stephanie Rodriguez; all languages).
  • This workshop explores the experiences and strategies of language brokers—individuals who provide informal translation support to family members or friends—and examines the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Participants will learn prompt engineering techniques tailored for handling various documents across different risk levels, linguistic varieties, and cultural contexts. We will also address the ethical dimensions of AI-assisted language brokering.
1-4:30 PM: CoLAB Arts essay translation project, Room 309 and hybrid (Coordinators: Profs. Dan Swern, John Keller, & Yeimy Castillo; Spanish/English). If participating virtually, self-register for the Translate-a-thon Canvas site to access the materials and link!
4:30 PM: Dessert and raffle for all participants and closing reflections in 4th Floor Lobby