Growing up in a borderland—living in Mexico and attending Catholic school in El Paso, Texas—Guadalupe Valdés had a lot of explaining to do. “My grandmother spoke no English, and the Irish nuns across the border spoke no Spanish, so I interpreted for the family,” she recalls.
Now, the education professor studies other young interpreters—bilingual, predominantly Latino children of immigrants in the Bay Area. In a book to be published next year, Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: The Case of Young Interpreters of Immigrant Background (Erlbaum), she argues that schools should identify many such youngsters as gifted in interpretation abilities. Moreover, she asserts, schools should design courses to improve these students’ bilingual skills and perhaps put them on a path for careers in interpreting or translating.
“The interpreting process is considered a tremendously complex problem-solving activity,” Valdés says. “People who have memory, who are analytic and who can cope with novelty are intelligent, according to a number of theories of intelligence. And here’s a real-life activity that seems to display these particular gifts.”
Valdés recently devised a simulated interpretation task for 25 high school volunteers. The students were asked to pretend they had been accused of stealing from a teacher’s purse. Valdés and her graduate students played the roles of concerned Spanish-speaking mother and strict English-speaking principal, challenging the high schoolers with tricky vocabulary, heated accusations and name-calling.
“We included some pretty aggressive remarks in the test, and we found that typically the kids would mitigate the language,” she says. “That told us that the students were particularly diplomatic and were making decisions and reading the world in ways in which they thought their parents might not be reading it.”
Valdés also talked with parents to find out why they chose one child over another to interpret. “Some mothers would say things like, ‘She’s the one who notices everything,’ or, ‘She listens carefully.’ We got some wonderful responses.”
Working with several graduate students, Valdés has developed a curriculum for young interpreters, and she’s seeking funding to implement it in local schools. “I’m less interested in their being declared gifted than I am in there being programs that will speak to the particular ability of these students,” she says. “They’re brokering between two worlds, heading off misunderstandings that go way beyond language.”
