In July, I was lucky enough to attend the BCLT summer school 2025, at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, as part of the Spanish/Guaraní workshop strand. We were a cohort of 12 translators from all over the world – attendees in our group alone had travelled from as far afield as the US, Norway and Germany, as well as some slightly less glamorous locations like Birmingham (that was me!).

Guided by workshop leaders Cecilia Rossi and Juana Adcock, we spent the week translating poems from a recent collection by the revered Paraguayan poet Susy Delgado: Tatinangue. So far so simple, you might think – with 14 of you working on it, surely the whole anthology was done, dusted and sent off to a publisher within the first couple of days? Well. A) clearly you’ve never met a translator before (we spent an entire morning debating the inclusion of the word “of” in one poem), and B) there was a slight hitch: the poems in Tatinangue are written in a mixture of Spanish and the indigenous language of Paraguay (and many other parts of Latin America), Guaraní.

I will admit to coming into the workshop feeling like I might have a slight advantage, having spent my year abroad in Paraguay, although that was 20 years ago now and any Guaraní words I might have picked up at the time have rusted away through lack of use, so I’m not sure who I thought I was kidding. Luckily though, my non-existent Paraguay expertise wasn’t called for, as we had a genuine Paraguayan in the group, Iliana, who works as a translator into both Spanish and Guaraní.

Iliana’s linguistic and cultural knowledge was invaluable, as she was able to give us instant advice on aspects of the Guaraní cosmovision that might have taken us hours to find through online research. Her lived experience of growing up in Paraguay and speaking both Guaraní and Spanish provided us with an insight into the context of these poems that might otherwise have been missing.

Another highlight was the ability to speak with Susy Delgado herself, via the miracle of Teams. While she wasn’t always able to enlighten us on the exact provenance of specific words (“the words choose themselves”, was her assertion), talking to Susy about her life and influences offered us a sense of the meaning behind the poems, allowing us to then turn our minds to rendering this meaning in English. Not to mention the honour of being able to meet and ask questions of such an esteemed writer – Susy is a multi-award winning poet, author and translator with more than 30 published works to her name, and that’s not including her translations.

Collaborative translation is something that has always interested me, and to a certain extent I think translation is always a collaborative process, as it’s rare that I get through a paragraph of translation without asking for someone’s opinion on a specific choice of word or phrase, or appealing to someone else’s expertise on a particular subject. Working together with 13 other translators was a new experience, however, and although in some ways the many and varying opinions slowed down the process (see the aforementioned “of” debate), what that meant was that every word received the careful consideration it deserved. Because while I might consult a friend on a word I’m unsure about when translating alone, there will be 100 others that I’m quite certain of myself on. Cut to a room full of other translators, however, and I soon found that actually a word that had one very clear connotation for me, meant something completely different to someone else.

Ceci and Juana had carefully picked each of the participants because of a special interest or experience in indigenous language or culture, and – together with Ceci’s own work on the ethics of translating work from specific, complex contexts and Juana’s on the translation of indigenous languages – this made for a fascinating, in-depth exploration of the intricacies of translating these poems, looking not just at the words themselves, but their cultural and linguistic context, and the ethical considerations of translating them into English which, like Spanish, is a colonial language.

I found the whole process incredibly inspiring, and have even come home and amended my PhD project proposal as a result (more on this later!), to include more collaboration with the author as well as with target readers. And the good news is that the summer school workshops were just the first part of a larger project on the translation of indigenous literature, so watch this space for more.