Hola todos,
A moment ago, I finished writing my first real paper since I have been here. As in, more than one page typed about what it's like being an international student. How many pages you ask? 5!! And it took me.. about 5 hours (including breaks). So, an hour a page basically. Isn't that so sorry? In the U.S. in school I could write a 5 page paper in 2 hours. Tops. I didn't think it would be much worse writing it in Spanish, I mean if I know the material it shouldn't matter. Right? Wrong! It'd say a good hour of that was using Google Translate and racking my brain for useful knowledge.
Now, the way I have described it thus far, you are probably thinking that I am writing a paper on mechanical engineering. I am actually writing the paper on the way historical and evolutionary processes have affected the art of Latin America. This means, technology and mass media. Because I am not opinioned enough on this topic, let alone in Spanish, I decided to just agree with the author... with whatever he was saying. He thought that these advancements were bad and had a bad effect on the world. Well, I figured a perfect example would be, telenovelas. I know some, if not all, of you have seen a part of a telenovela on Univision (the one and only with the world famous, ¡Sabado Gigante! (Gigantic Saturday)) where the woman wearing too much make-up is yelling at, or kissing someone, most likely both being followed by a slap. Anyway, these shows are not the best acting and do not portray the Latin Americans in the best light. I mean, there is always a man discovering he has a secret child. I went on to write about this and how, because of these telenovelas, people are going to begin to think that it is completely normal to have a secret child here in Latin America.
That was what I wrote my paper on. And looking at this description right now, it doesn't seem to horribly difficult, but, 5 pages about the problem with telenovelas and mass media of today? I could probably say that I could have been doing better, more interesting things instead of this essay.
Interested in finding out more about why telenovelas are an absolutely horrible influence on today's culture? Tune in on Univision or Telemundo on channels 8 and 12, respectively. (With regular cable)
Sounds interesting, Anna! Really, to figure out the issue, find your position and then do all the translation to write it all out would take me 1 day per page instead of 1 hour. I imagine you'd need to do cross referencing, etc. to be sure you were getting your point across the way you hope. Sounds pretty interesting to me and I like the resulting influence on culture you mention. It seems pretty plausible.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like they are the Spanish soap operas?
Now, I hope you are doing things more fun.
AH