The American Folklife center is pleased to announce the Spanish-language version of the 4th edition of Folklife and Fieldwork! A team of us here at AFC and beyond have been working hard to make our field manual even more useful by translating it into some of the world’s most widely spoken languages. We passed a significant milestone today, when the first shipment of the Spanish translation, La tradición popular y la investigación de campo, arrived at our offices on Capitol Hill. We can’t wait to get it into the hands of Spanish-speaking ethnographers so they can field-test it!
On behalf of the AFC team, which includes John Fenn, the head of our Research and Programs section; Betsy Peterson, our director; contributors Nancy Groce, Maggie Kruesi, and Guha Shankar; me, as co-author and editor of the book; and especially my late co-author, Peter Bartis, we want to thank principal translator Juan Manuel Pérez of the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, Carlos J. Olave and the rest of the Hispanic Division staff, Olivia Cadaval of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and everyone else who helped make this real.
The next step will be to place a pdf of the book online, which should happen in the next few weeks depending on the Library of Congress web team’s schedule. And before too long, we’ll have news on a translation into another widely-spoken language as well!
For now, you can read about the history of Folklife and Fieldwork at this blog post, and you can download the English-language version here. And as always, you can get free copies of either Folklife and Fieldwork or La tradición popular y la investigación de campo, just by writing to us at [email protected] and requesting them!