Spanish punctuation in educatioinal materials

[Julie Sumwalt]

Hi,

When transcribing Spanish-learning educational materials for English speakers, like a worksheet, we do not use contractions for the Spanish and we do use special symbols for accented letters, such as dots 12456 for n-tilde, correct? What about question marks and inverted punctuation? UEB and Provisional Guidance seem to be saying different things, though Provisional Guidance refers us to UEB. Please help me understand.

Julie

[Julie Sumwalt]

Oops, I meant "educational materials".

Julie

[Anna]

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The Provisional Guidance was less specific on this, but it has been replaced by "Guidelines for Braille Transcription of Languages Other Than English," which you can find on the BANA website.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.

[Julie Sumwalt]

Whew! It sounds like I transcribed correctly. That makes sense now--no confusion with UEB subscript indicator. Thank you!

Julie

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