We are two information specialists with long experience in diverse professional settings -universities, government and private enterprise-,and have each collaborated with numerous international projects over the years.
Tomàs, a Spaniard, is an admirer of the Anglo-American world -with some exceptions (obviously)-; and Alice, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA), is an admirer of Spain, where she has been living for over 20 years.
Tomàs was a teenage Esperantist, but as an adult he soon realized that the new world's lingua franca wouldn't be Catalan, his mother tongue; nor Spanish in which he studied at school and university; nor French that he learned at school (there was no other choice at the time); nor Portuguese that he learned while taking 2 years of courses at the Brazil Consulate in Barcelona; nor Italian that he speaks (poorly) thanks to his frequent trips to Italy... The new Esperanto is, for better or worse, English. Tomàs [selected in 1973 to be the first Spaniard to receive training in online database searching because of his knowledge of telecommunications and English :-) !] suffered the consequences of his poor fluency in English during early international meetings he attended and feels that he lost out on many opportunities because of it. Currently he worries about the low command of English of many of his colleagues.
Josep started to learn English in high school. He still has a long way to go. His interests have drifted over parakeet breeding, science fiction, linguistics, computers, libraries, urban cycling, among many others.
Elaine is an academic editor with an M.A. in Technical and Professional Writing and a Ph.D. in higher education policy and administration, married to the (Catalan) dean of a mid-sized university library in Minnesota (USA). She learned Spanish by osmosis when she moved to Barcelona and was trying to learn Catalan but everybody assumed that foreigners couldn't be serious about learning Catalan so they spoke to her in Spanish. Her best contribution to Q&J cannot be translated but will be appreciated by Romance polyglots and abhorred by the Real Academia and pastry chefs everywhere: In response to a question about substituting margarine for butter in baking, she replied emphatically, Sí, sí, lo hago muy subiendo" Nobody speaks Spanish to her anymore, so she agreed to review the Q&J team's interpretations of colloquial English to buttress her command of colloquial Spanish.
Alice learned Spanish in high school and her interest intensified during an exchange program to Argentina at age 16. At college (Penn State - BA; Simmons College - MLS) language converged with library science, leading subsequently to a position at the library of the Organization of American States and, later, to an invitation to spend 1 year as head of the North-American library in Barcelona. ("Who could refuse such an offer?" she muses, sipping a glass of wine while looking out over the Mediterranean, on the Costa Brava, 21 years later).
Alice is now a lecturer in the Library Science Faculty of the Universitat de Barcelona, and gives frequent talks and seminars throughout Spain on topics dealing with the evolution of libraries in the digital age.
