Abstract:

Bullying and violence in the school environment are currently a matter of social interest in numerous countries; in some, such as Mexico, it has even become a reason for national concern to such an extent that the educational authorities have had to intervene (Muñoz Abúndez, 2008). For this reason, in the framework of an international cooperation project in which the Department of Translation and Interpretation of the University of Granada has taken part, the Centre of Initiatives for Cooperation in Development, at said university, and the National Institute of Translators and Interpreters of Mexico decided to deal with school bullying from an intercultural viewpoint; the receiving population were the Mayan language speakers in the state of Yucatan, in Mexico (Iglesias, Tercedor and Faber, 2011).

This project followed a line started in a previous project involving international cooperation between these institutions, setting out to make the indigenous population of Mexico aware of matters of a social nature, such as family harmony or the importance of maintaining correct eating habits; with this aim, bilingual teaching materials were created, in Spanish and in the Mayan language (as these are the two languages used in the target population), which were distributed in schools and health centres of the region. Since in the course of that initial project the people responsible knew that there were no audiovisual products in the Mayan language, they decided to create part of the materials in audiovisual format, with audio and subtitles in Spanish and in the Mayan language. This made it possible to reach the Mayan-speaking populations of Yucatan, particularly the school age population, in an innovative manner in accordance with the General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, enacted by Mexican Government, in 2003, whereby the rights both of individuals and of collectives in the populations, which have any of the 62 indigenous languages spoken in the country as their mother tongue. Furthermore, this initiative made it possible to benefit from the possibilities of the audiovisual format as a means of conveying educational values in an intercultural environment and the possibilities afforded by subtitles as a linguistic support element to reinforce the learning and assimilation of languages (Danan, 2004). In view of the favourable results obtained, it was decided to apply the same methodology to the project described in this work, “Informative and formative materials in the Mayan language for a healthy co-existence among children”; this project set out to make the Mayan speaking population aware of bullying at school in order to stimulate those who suffer from it to report it.

References:
[1] Danan, Martine. Captioning and Subtitling: Undervalued Language Learning Strategies. Meta: Translator’s Journal, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2004, p. 67-77.
[2] Iglesias, Ximena; Tercedor, Maribel; Faber, Pamela (2011). Procuración de justicia y acceso a la salud por parte de la población indígena en México: retos y metodología de un proyecto de cooperación. Congreso Internacional sobre Política Lingüística, Mérida, Yucatán.
[3] Muñoz Abúndez, Gustavo (2008). Violencia escolar en México y en otros países. Comparaciones a partir de los resultados del Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación. Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa, vol. 13, núm 39.

Keywords:

International cooperation, school bulling, Mayan language.