Leticia Molinero

Leticia Molinero has been a professional translator for over four decades. Born in Argentina, she earned an M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. After moving to the United States, she studied communication and financial analysis at NYU. As a translator, she became interested in the challenges posed by communicating in Spanish to widely heterogeneous Hispanic audiences. She edited a bilingual translation journal, Apuntes, for 11 years and collaborated with Glosas, the Translation Committee Newsletter of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE by its Spanish acronym) for 20 years, until June 2014.

Ms. Molinero has lectured on translation issues in the United States and abroad and has promoted the need to standardize the formal use of the Spanish language in the USA in areas of communication and information. As a correspondent member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE), she collaborated in the development and review of the Spanish language Style Guide and several Glossaries available on the multilingual section of DigitalGov.gov. These glossaries are used by U.S. government website writers, editors, and translators. DigitalGov.gov is run by the General Services Administration (GSA).

As a Full Member of ANLE, she spearheaded the notion that formal U.S.-Spanish is mainly a product of translation. Ms. Molinero also promoted the creation of a collaborative agreement between the federal government and ANLE, in which she is named the working liaison between the two organizations. Subsequently, she became co-chair of the GSA-ANLE Committee. This committee was responsible for standardizing the translations into Spanish of the A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies and providing answers to language-related queries from several agencies. As chair of the Committee for the Standardization of US-Spanish, she set up a task force to retrieve words that, in the US-Spanish public discourse, acquire meanings different from their traditional Spanish meanings. The Committee agreed to identify these words as estadounidismos.

Recognizing the need of undertaking evidence-based research to identify plain language for U.S. Hispanics, Ms. Molinero invited a select group of language experts to found the Research Institute of United States Spanish (RIUSS), which was officially incorporated in New York State in April 2015.