Anna
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Follow-up: committee members suggested that the note on the TN page say something like "Spanish text within the brochure is available on braille page ..." That would help the reader find the information, such as it is, quickly.
Category 1 (contracted, with UEB modifiers) is the best for this Spanish, since there's only a small amount in an overall English context.
I don't think there's a good basis in any guidelines for moving the Spanish text, and it's unclear if moving it would make it more helpful. My advice would be to add a note on the TN page (or on the first page, if there's no TN page) saying something like "Spanish information available". I don't know if you can say much more than that, because the brochure doesn't even say where the Spanish information is! But I think a TN will be the simplest solution to this problem.
A book with occasional Spanish can be done entirely according to the rules of UEB. That means using contractions unless other rules apply; an accented letter within text that would otherwise be contracted means you cannot use the contraction. For example, in the word árbol the "ar" contraction cannot be used; on the other hand, the word caminar would be transcribed with the "in" contraction and the "ar" contraction.
"Occasional" or "incidental" foreign language text is not clearly defined in every case. For example, a novel could have a character that regularly says Spanish words, but it would be reasonable to do the whole thing in UEB. Books for foreign language learners or dual language texts are best done with UEB for the English and uncontracted Spanish braille for the Spanish (using UEB for punctuation, indicators, etc.). That's what I would do for a children's book that is in both languages; using different margins for English and Spanish text will help the reader understand the switch from one code to another.
There are no official guidelines, except the general rules of tables.
I recommend keeping the print format wherever possible; if the text doesn't fit in a braille table with Spanish text I will key the long pronouns. Since Spanish has abbreviated forms of usted/ustedes, I usually key "el/ella/usted" as "ud" and "ellos/ellas/ustedes" as "uds." (In other texts, the verb charts read "nosotros/nosotras" and "vosotros/vosotras" and may also need to be keyed.)
In terms of the table setup, I prefer to treat these as two columns but still align verbs within each column, adding guide dots where necessary. I would then use an underscore to represent a missing verb. A TN might be helpful to clarify, e.g. "An underscore represents a verb to be filled in." See attached for this example.
An alternative would be to do the chart as four columns, in which case a blank entry would be represented by guide dots across the width of the column. This format lacks a break between singular pronouns/verbs and plural pronouns/verbs, but that probably wouldn't prevent the reader from understanding it.
FYI (not that it really matters) this is a "conjugation" table ("declension" refers to the forms of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns; "conjugation" refers to verb forms)
Hi Julie, sorry for the delay. Yes, in language-learning materials, Spanish is brailled uncontracted and using Spanish symbols for the accented letters. For punctuation and indicators, BANA recommends using all UEB symbols, including for the inverted question and exclamation marks. Using all UEB punctuation prevents any confusion between the codes, such as between the Spanish question mark and the UEB subscript indicator, which use the same symbols.
The Provisional Guidance was less specific on this, but it has been replaced by "Guidelines for Braille Transcription of Languages Other Than English," which you can find on the BANA website. The new guidelines are more straightforward in recommending all UEB punctuation in texts at this level.
A modified letter is still a letter, but with a hyphen before or after (or both) it would be fine to italicize just the letter, or the letter-hyphen combination (as a word).
In a foreign language textbook where this type of thing will come up often, I think it makes the most sense to use the italicized word indicator and include the hyphen(s) in the italics. It's easier for you as a transcriber, and it's clear and consistent for the reader to have the italics come first in a symbols-sequence, to signal the language change.
So, in this case, "e-" "-v-" and "-a" would be brailled as: [italicized word indicator][e][-] / [italicized word indicator][-][v][-] / [italicized word indicator][-][a]
Thanks for the follow-up! That explains a lot. Romani is actually a separate language from Romanian. Romanian has similar roots to Italian and French, while Romani is related to languages spoken in India. Since Romani isn't a Word Braille Usage language, using the UEB accent symbols is absolutely the correct approach.
Ok, thanks for adding the picture. If this has definitively been identified as Romanian, I think that is the best way to deal with the symbols.
I have a suspicion that it's not actually Romanian. Google Translate's "detect language" feature labels it as Croatian, which would certainly fit with the symbols you've indicated. Does the song also have the comma-below letters or the accented vowels found in the Romanian alphabet (and not the Croatian alphabet)? If not I would be increasingly suspicious. Still, if the requestor says it's Romanian, treating it as Romanian is a very reasonable thing to do.
I'd be interested to see an image of the accented letter. It may be a symbol added as a pronunciation aid, a symbol previously but no longer in use, or potentially the song is in a dialect (although you'd probably see other alphabetical differences in that case). For any of those possibilities, the safest bet is to use the UEB modifier that matches, or use a transcriber-defined modifier if it doesn't match any of the symbols in UEB section 4.2.
Fred-
I think I understand what you're describing: something that acts like a page break but there's no page break command there to remove. I would check the formatting on the paragraphs above and below. It may just be that "keep together / keep with next" is checked for no reason. This has happened for me and I can't explain why it happens but the fix is easy.
Thanks Dorothy. That makes sense. In the combined volume, page 218 of the later TOC won't be included (because it applies to later volumes) - do I need a TN or is doing a combined page number on the next body page enough?
