Sudaquia by train

Abstract

The following report tells of my experience as an intern at the publishing house Sudaquia Editores in New York City during the months of April, May, June and July of the year 2013. Sudaquia Editores is a publishing house founded in 2012 by two Venezuelan people who wanted to establish, in the most multicultural city of the world, a company that could put the best Latin American literature of this time on the shelves of any bookstore in New York and the rest of the United States. The idea of the founding of Sudaquia begins with the discovery that there was a severe lack of books in Spanish in a city where the Latin American population is the largest foreign population and where the Spanish language is the second most spoken language after English. After a lot of profound thinking about what I wanted to do in my internship and already having the advantage of a place to stay without paying for bed and board, I started to look for publishing houses where I could work with literary translation. After some research I found Sudaquia as a new publishing company founded by two Venezuelans, an aspect that attracted my attention even more. So I wrote to them and after they evaluated my application they accepted me as a temporary employee. During my stay as an intern at Sudaquia, my work was basically the work of an editor and literary translator. However, due to the fact that Sudaquia is a very small company with only 3 persons, we all had to collaborate and do the same things. At the beginning, my work consisted in reading and evaluating manuscripts to see if Sudaquia could publish them or not. I was in charge also of the social media, managing the Twitter and Facebook pages pertaining to Sudaquia, and scheduling publications at the beginning of every week. After some time, my work narrowed down to translation, starting with two small translations from Spanish into English for the web page and for the company catalogue respectively. After that, my most important work was the translation from English into Spanish of the novel “Take Me With You” by Carlos Frías. The first part of this Internship Report gives a description of the Sudaquia Editores publishing house, its history and development and the way it works. Then, this segment of the Report is followed by a description of the nature of the internship and the tasks that were assigned to me during the time that I worked with them. The second part of this report is an allegory of a train journey with the various stations at which the train pauses representing the high points of my personal and professional learning during my internship at Sudaquia. Dividing each segment into stations, this reflective essay recounts my experience from a critical, rational and personal point of view. The salient stopover on my train trip is the importance of my work as a literary translator and how I made use of my research work “Comparison of English and Spanish poetics in literature - Research into the basic problems of literary translation” which I completed during my last semester with Professor Beattie. Next comes my cultural essay where I explain in a metaphoric way the cultural diversity in New York City, making a comparison of the city’s multilingual aspects with translation and literature to support my idea of how New York serves as an example for humanity, demonstrating how we can all live together in the same space, despite our differences. And finally, in the last part of my report I conclude with an account of my learning experience during this internship in terms of my personal and professional life. At the end I include my recommendations for the School of Modern Languages and for Sudaquia Editores.