Amanda Barrios presented for three students this week at Farmington Bay YouthCenter. Coming from Guatemala, Amanda described her ceaseless efforts to find and pursue education – especially her English language skills.
After discovering translation work through volunteering, she was able to foster those skills and develop a career around them. She would eventually find a specialty at the University of Utah, helping Spanish speakers navigate the jargon of academic research and medicine.
Amanda led an activity to show the students how a translator might study the skill – by shadowing speech (English to English) and seeing if they were able to listen and speak simultaneously. The students – two of them native Spanish speakers themselves – shared their own background stories with Amanda, excited to talk about the difficulties of maintaining bilingual families in immigrant homes. Amanda encouraged the students to cultivate their language skills and use them to advance and empower their own communities.
Amanda gave the below example to show the importance of context in disseminating language and information!
