Harpur College Builds Bridges to Successful Futures

Yanitta Nazario was preparing to remove the nerve cord of a tobacco hornworm. Although nervous about doing the procedure alone, her research advisor, Dr. Steven Tammariello, Harpur College faculty in Biology, was confident she would perform flawlessly. Nazario is currently a student at Onondaga Community College and a member of the SUNY Upstate Bridges to the Baccalaureate Program, designed to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the field of biomedical science. On June 29, 2001, Bridges concluded their summer with a poster session, where each student displayed pictures and reports about their research projects for faculty, parents, and friends.

This year, Binghamton's Bridges program recruited 20 students from five community colleges across New York who are spending five weeks on campus during the summer, working on research projects with Harpur College science faculty. Funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, there are currently 73 Bridges to the Baccalaureate programs, involving 315 institutions and 1,331 students.

Sonia Mizell, from Monroe Community College, is one of the lucky 20. She is working with Dr. Lisa Savage, Harpur College faculty in Psychology, to study brain regions of rats affected by Alzheimer's disease. TheyÕre focusing on the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, and basal forebrain, which Mizell first found intimidating and later learned to enjoy. "The lab rats were first scary, then gruesome, then enlightening and educational. I have come a long way and made progress."

Bridges students get to know faculty, the campus and each other during their summer research period. "There's a networking that we love to see going on," said Don Blake, Bridges project director and Harpur College's associate dean for academic affairs. "We give the Bridges students extra exposure to the sciences and a four-year college campus. Students conduct research, which increases their motivation and commitment." Mizell agrees. "With the guidance I've received from Dr. Lisa Savage, I could do this again," she said.

Each student has a specific career goal in mind related to biomedical research. Nazario wants to be a pediatrician because she loves children. Mizell plans to study Social Work and become a chemical dependency counselor for adolescents. Kristin Mims, a student at Rockland Community College, wants to be a veterinarian. Robert Quispe, from Westchester Community College, wants to eventually go to medical school, but after first working in a science-related field.

Marika Fraser, also a student at Westchester Community College, values the laboratory experience she is gaining through Bridges. "It gives us an opportunity for hands-on research," she explained. "Usually graduate students get to do research, but we're doing it now." Students at community colleges typically do not pursue research because their schools might not have the laboratories, and faculty focus more on teaching.

Dr. Dennis McGee, Harpur College faculty in Biology, is supervising two Bridges students as they study the effect of transforming growth factor beta on the cytokine responses of lung-cancer cells. Dr. Tammariello is supervising the work of two students who are researching eukaryotic molecular genetics. One student is doing a forensic study of salamanders. He explained, "We are trying to decipher [DNA] within and between populations." The other student is studying the tobacco horn worm. "We're looking at an enzyme called Death Associated Lim-Only Protein and its role in neuronal apoptosis during nerve cord development."

After graduation from community college, Bridges students are encouraged to pursue baccalaureate degrees in a biomedical-related field. Harpur College is an excellent transfer choice because our faculty have published hundreds of scientific articles in refereed journals, and many have attained national and international recognition. Most importantly, they involve students in their research. Last year, nearly 25% or approximately 1,600 undergraduates registered for research credit, 6% of whom received undergraduate research grants from the college.

The students on campus this summer enjoy the faculty contact. "Bridges is great," said Nazario. "I really liked working with Dr. Tammariello. I've been exposed to a lot of different techniques in the lab." These techniques will likely give her an edge as she pursues her long-sought medical career in the future.

Harpur College Hosts Translators from Around the World

How do you communicate with someone who does not speak English? Translation is the single most important part of cross-cultural communication, allowing people of all languages to share their ideas. Translation studies is a rapidly expanding field, establishing methods of interpreting texts in their cultural context. Harpur College was one of the first schools in the entire world to start a translation research center, and remains at the forefront of the field to this day.

Distinguished Service Professor Marilyn Gaddis Rose founded the Translation Research and Instruction Program (TRIP) in 1971. Since its inception, TRIP has expanded to include a graduate certificate in translation, the Translation Referral Service, a nonprofit interlanguage service, several internationally renowned publications, and, since 1987, the Center for Research in Translation (CRIT), which administers all translation activities. TRIP has had a very active summer, inviting translation experts from around the world to speak at Harpur College.

Gaddis Rose felt that holding a variety of activities throughout Summer 2001 would keep our faculty and students informed of the latest trends in empirical translation research and promote Binghamton University to the international translation community.

Rosa Rabádan

TRIP’s summer activities started on May 30, 2001 with a presentation by Professor Rosa Rabádan from Spain’s Universidad de León. Rabádan discussed censorship on translation activity in Spain during the reign of Franco and its consequences for current translation development. Rabádan and her researchers built up a list of English — Spanish source and translated materials, noting the regulations concerning the application of censorship.

Rabádan said many popular English texts never reached Spanish readers, although censors were much stricter on native writers than foreign ones. Franco-era censorship changed texts, movies, and books to the point where it no longer resembled the original work.

Rabádan and her researchers made several discoveries: Censorship was never an established law, just an unspoken set of guidelines. To protect the Spanish public from "extremes," translators avoided all references to sex, violence, and cursing. Spain had a list of authors banned by the Roman Catholic church, who censored on the basis of the author, regardless of what he or she wrote. Each province had its own censors and some were more lenient than the others.

Mona Baker

Professor Mona Baker, from the University of Manchester visited Harpur College on May 5, 2001. A native of Egypt, Baker has lived in England for 20 years. She is the founding editor of The Translator: Studies in International Communication, and the general editor of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998), for which she collaborated with Gaddis Rose, one of the seven consulting editors. Baker’s book In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (1992) has been reprinted six times and is a standard textbook worldwide.

Baker said she was delighted to speak at Binghamton University, calling the school "one of the shining lights in the field of translation" because it was among the first to have translation as an academic program. She spoke about developing materials for translation research communities, such as Harpur College’s own CRIT.

Baker and her researchers have developed "Corpus Linguistics," a software that can analyze text to find out if individual translators have their own styles. Her translation English corpus consists of 7 million works of contemporary English translations, broken down into four types of text: fiction, biography, news, and in-flight magazines. Corpus Linguistics has "headers" which explain the translator, title, sponsor, date, translation process, and original author. The software displays text patterns, which may be unique to each translator. Baker’s corpus has works by the same translator of different authors and different languages. The software indicates whether translators use the same expressions repeatedly.

Baker and her researchers chose texts translated by native English speakers (to avoid a language barrier) after 1985, all full texts, and an equal representation of male and female translators, and an equal representation among source languages.

Baker and her researchers discovered that two translations of the same text are never the same. Just as researchers have different perspectives and explanations on the same material, translators are no different.

On June 13 — 14, 2001, Harpur College hosted a translation studies mini-conference, "The Voice of Experience." On June 13, a recital of literary translation took place, featuring:

Carole L. Glickfield, instructor of fiction writing at the University of Washington, presented her first novel, Swimming Toward the Ocean (2001), which is peppered with Yiddish, and translated inconspicuously so the reader can easily follow.

Alexis Levitin

Alexis Levitin, professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh, has published translations in close to 200 literary magazines, 25 anthologies, and 14 books (7 of them collections of poems by Eugénio de Andrade, Portugal's foremost living poet). He read several of his translations of Andrade.

On June 14^th, several translation scholars presented their experiences. All speakers discussed their translation of a work of literature and how they conveyed the subtleties of the source text’s language, such as ow they translated slang, if factual errors should be translated, and when words should remain in their original language.

"The task of translation is endless," summarized Rizo-Patron.

Carrol Coates, professor of French and Comparative Literature, presented "Holy Week in the Bordello: J.S. Alexis’s L’Espace d’un Cillement."

Frances Barraclough	Eileen Rizo-Patron	Deborah Folaron

Frances Barraclough, a tutorial instructor in the Higher Education Opportunity Program at Ithaca College, spoke about her translation of "The Challenges of the Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below" by Jose Maria Arguedas. She has translated numerous words of Arguedas.

Eileen Rizo-Patron, a doctoral student in Comparative Literature presented "The Working Character of Reverie: Reflections on translating Bachelard’s Earth and Reveries of Will. She emphasized the importance of echoing the original translation in a re-translation project.

Deborah Folaron, Ph.D. ’99, instructor of translation at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, member of Eriksen Translations, and Program Director of the New York Circle of Translators, gave a very relevant speech titled "The Shifting Space of the Translator Today: Toggling Between Imagined and Real Communities." Folaron explored the ethical ramifications of real-time distance learning.

German-born Oliver French M.D., a psychiatrist at SUNY Upstate Medical Center, is a translator of medical textbooks. His presentation "When the Facts Don’t Match" discussed the potentially lethal consequences in medical translation when the source text contains errors.

For the remainder of the summer and throughout the fall semester, CRIT will integrate contributions of visiting research associates into its core curriculum. "Translation studies is always in ferment," observed Gaddis Rose. "This is partly because it is an interdiscipline providing data and insights that advance other disciplines while building a corpus of its own." Harpur College is proud to be a key player in such an important, worldwide pursuit.

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