EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

DATE: March 28-30 (5-10 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday)

EVENT: Organizers invite all who speak more than one language to participate in the University of Michigan Translate-a-thon. The event allows students, faculty, staff and community members to translate material for nonprofits and other organizations that don’t have budgets for such services but have audiences that need information in other languages.

Volunteers will translate for Ann Arbor Meals on Wheels, Ann Arbor Visitors Bureau, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Washtenaw County, SafeHouse, Rudolf Steiner Health Center, Holocaust Memorial Center, 350.org, Taring Padi, Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, Michigan departments of Environmental Quality and Community Health, U-M’s Bentley Historical Library, U-M Medical School’s Open.Michigan and Department of Family Medicine, and U-M Art, Architecture and Engineering Library.

“People in the nonprofit community have been very receptive because they have so many people they need to reach,” said Julie Evershed, director of the U-M Language Resource Center.

Inma Aleixos Borras, a second-year Fulbright Scholar who is earning a degree in archives and records management through the U-M School of Information, participated in the event last year and said the discussions were lively and fun.

“We were laughing and teasing one another about the differences in our translations,” said Borras, noting her Spanish comes from an upbringing in Spain while the others on her team had learned a version that was influenced by neighboring Mexico. “If there were three different countries, you could have three different forms of verbs.”

A showcase will be held Sunday that will include a drawing for an iPad, a Kindle, three $50 gift certificates or tickets for the Michigan Theatre. Each participant will receive a Translate-a-thon t-shirt.

PLACE: Language Resource Center, 1500 North Quad, 105 S. State St., Ann Arbor

SPONSORS: U-M Department of Comparative Literature and Language Resource Center, with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Global and Engaged Education, and the MCubed program.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION: www.lrc.lsa.umich.edu/translate-a-thon