Daniel O’Neil, Country Director

Binational meeting in Elias Piña, Dominican Republic

The biggest stumbling block to cross-border collaboration on the Haitian-Dominican border is language. We’ve tried every technique to facilitate cross-border meetings:

1. Handpicking participants to ensure a common language (normally Spanish, but sometimes English): This makes for easy meetings, but normally eliminates key people that should participate but don’t have the language skills.
2. Having bilingual participants translate for the mono-lingual participants: This allows us to invite a broader group of people, but makes it hard for the mono-lingual participants to join in.
3. Having a bilingual participant translate each presentation as it is given alternating with the speaker: This is inexpensive and allows for everyone’s participation, but it makes for long, slow meetings as everything has to be repeated.
4. Paying for simultaneous translation using microphones and headsets: This is magic. Anyone can talk and everyone is understood. However, it costs close to $US 1,000/day–a bit pricey for a binational meeting of ranchers.

I am therefore thrilled at the work that Otto, a graduate student in Puerto Rico is doing to make available bilingual dictionaries for free. The first volume is an English/Kreyol dictionary and is available here: Diksyone Otto. He is currently developing a Spanish/Kreyol in the same format as the English/Kreyol dictionary as well as pronunciation guides for each.

Great job Otto! We will link to each new version as it comes out.

Share this Post

Hide Sites