Patricia Barba Avila

Question and Answer

• What is your name?
  • Patricia Barba Avila
• Where do you live?
  • Mexico
• What made you decide to become a translator or interpreter?
  • Because I love the opportunity to get in contact with other idiosyncrasies and ways to see the world. This is what translation offers to us and it is exciting!
    Translation also provides us with the opportunity to enrich our knowledge in so many fields! I absolutely love it and that is why I translate with passion and a high sense of commitment, always bearing in mind that we must convey to the readers exactly what the author intended just by not translating literally but, instead, fully understanding the meaning and then use the right terminology.
• List one strength that you think sets you apart from your colleagues.
  • Passion for what I do and a sense of pride about doing it to the full satisfaction of author and readers
• Name the one thing that you most enjoy in your translating or interpreting career.
  • The opportunity to further my knowledge of other facts and idiosyncrasies
• We all have worked on those not-so-perfect assignments. Write about one such assignment that was not ideal and what you learned from it.
  • A text on industrial norms and specifications...I decided to visit the production line in order to understand the text and translate it into an easily comprehensible reading.
• If you could go back in time to when you were just starting out as a translator or interpreter, what advice would you give to your younger self?
  • To widen my current knowledge on the different fields, to be able to understand the intent and, possibly, the feeling and state of mind of the author.
• Name one resource – such as a phone app, CAT tool, website, and so forth – that you find especially helpful in your translating or interpreting work.
  • Webster's English-Spanish Dictionary
• What's the best book you've read this year?
  • Escape from Freedom

If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom, a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time, and a book that is as timely now as when first published in 1941. Few books have thrown such light upon the forces that shape modern society or penetrated so deeply into the causes of authoritarian systems. If the rise of democracy set some people free, at the same time it gave birth to a society in which the individual feels alienated and dehumanized. Using the insights of psychoanalysis as probing agents, Fromm's work analyzes the illness of contemporary civilization as witnessed by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule