What is happening within RIUSS

We understand that not posting frequent news about what we are doing at RIUSS is not the best way to retain members. However, we remind our members, friends and readers that all the work we do for RIUSS is still as volunteers while we hold other jobs, and that we are constantly working on various areas of interest that promise to bring research projects to fruition.

It requires a great deal of time to manage the many complex tasks involved in garnering the support needed. At this stage, most RIUSS research projects aim at providing evidence-based plain language information for public administration communications. Often, this level of communications crosses the public-private frontier, as is the case of healthcare–a priority area of potential research on which RIUSS has been working consistently.

As part of our preliminary work we are identifying existing tools for measuring reading comprehension, and determining how to modify them so that the diverse US Spanish-speaking population is properly represented—something that is easier said than done. We are also designing our own specific surveys  in order to provide a transition from consensus-based terminology to evidence-based terminology. These surveys, which are embedded in each RIUSS research project, have no precedent.

Consensus-based terminology is what we may expect from a specific corpus, reflecting what has been published through translation–i.e. translation products that have been agreed upon by translation companies and their clients, generally following standard language vocabularies.  As we have seen many times, however, a linguistically correct translation may not achieve effective communication with LEP Spanish-speakers in the United States. As our readers know, RIUSS was created to bridge this communication gap.

In this issue you will also find new announcements, such as the creation of a Scientific Committee, the addition of content from the now extinct Hablamos Juntos website to our Resources section, and the launching of RIUSS Journal—we decided to publish a proper newsletter with short notices and articles, and a proper journal with in depth articles. We trust that our members will agree with this decision.