LifeAfterDx--Diabetes Uncensored

A internet journal from one of the first T1 Diabetics to use continuous glucose monitoring. Copyright 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016

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Location: New Mexico, United States

Hi! I’m William “Lee” Dubois (called either Wil or Lee, depending what part of the internet you’re on). I’m a diabetes columnist and the author of four books about diabetes that have collectively won 16 national and international book awards. (Hey, if you can’t brag about yourself on your own blog, where can you??) I have the great good fortune to pen the edgy Dear Abby-style advice column every Saturday at Diabetes Mine; write the Diabetes Simplified column for dLife; and am one of the ShareCare diabetes experts. My work also appears in Diabetic Living and Diabetes Self-Management magazines. In addition to writing, I’ve spent the last half-dozen years running the diabetes education program for a rural non-profit clinic in the mountains of New Mexico. Don’t worry, I’ll get some rest after the cure. LifeAfterDx is my personal home base, where I get to say what and how I feel about diabetes and… you know… life, free from the red pens of editors (all of whom I adore, of course!).

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

OK, Spanish speaking Kindle lovers (if there are any of you): I’m proud to announce that Domar al Tigre: Tu primer año con Diabetes is now for the first time ever, a Kindle book!

And it’s premiering for only 99 cents. That’s only eleven and a half Mexican Pesos according to Google.

For those of you who don’t know the story, despite all my Argentinean Facebook friends (Hola, all of you!); I don’t actually speak Spanish. Well not much anyway, my wife is Hispanic, so I do know all the bad words. Not that she ever loses her temper with me, or anything like that.

Naturally, working in the mountains of New Mexico, a lot of my patients speak Spanish. Thankfully, most also speak English. But, some of the elderly only speak Spanish, as do what we call “visitors.” The less compassionate might call them illegal immigrants. But I’m able to function with translators and wild gestures.

Anyway, about… Oh… I don’t remember… a few months after my wee book for folks just dx’d with type-2 diabetes, Taming the Tiger, came out my director of nursing said, “wow, I wish we could have that little Tiger book of yours in Spanish.”

(Picture a light bulb appearing above my head.)

Well, one thing lead to another and we got a Centers for Disease Control grant to do just that.

And I got to tell you, it scared the shit out of me.

Think about it. Would you be comfortable having your words translated into a language you don’t speak, read, write, or understand very well?

Anyway, long story short… Oh screw that. I’ll just tell you the whole story. As it turns out, there is no Spanish language. Folks in Spain and folks in Mexico don’t speak the same language at all. Oh and the Spanish in Central American is different from either of those. As is what the folks in Puerto Rico are speaking. And here? Hah! The folks in New Mexico don’t speak Spanish at all. They speak 15th Century Calistian.

Where, or where, is the Advil when you need it?

In the end, Trusted Translations, Inc., in Mexico City, professionally translated the English manuscript to “U.S. Standard” Spanish. Then the fun began. At the time we had five Spanish speaking staff members at the clinic. Three were “native” New Mexicans and two were Mexican. We also had a wonderful blonde-haired, blue-eyed gringa medical student who’s bachelor’s degree was in Spanish language.

All of them read Trusted’s manuscript and commented.

The glue who held this project together is a woman named Ariel Hubbard-Cordero, who I can’t say enough wonderful things about. She’s a bi-lingual New Mexico native social worker married to a Costa Rican. Oh yeah, and her little daughter is a T-1 and my youngest patient. Ariel was able to combine the team’s various comments, changes, ideas, etc., into a body of work; and patiently explained to me the various shades of grey of in word choices between the two tongues. She also had a flexible and functional understanding of the various dialects of Spanish.

Under her patient care I went from fearful, to confident, that the experience of the Spanish reader will be much the same as the experience of the English reader. After all, diabetes itself is a universal experience that makes us all one family, regardless of the tongue we speak.

In the over the two years since the project was completed, many local and south-of-the border folks have told me how much they like it. Recently, corresponding with a T-3 father of one of our little sisters in Spain (who got Domar off of Tu-diabetes), I learned that from the Spanish point of view in Spain, “the translation is excellent.” Wow. That made my day. To think that we created a work that spanned the globe of Spanish speaking people and worked for all of them is…. is… well, crap. I don’t have the words in any language to describe how I feel about that.

Anyway, at the time, there was not enough funding for a e-Book version, so it only existed on paper. A while back a PDF version was made as part of the free Tiger project which you can get here.

But it was never made into a Kindle. Not commercially viable and all of that. But advances in software for stupid people (read that as things I can use) has changed the face of e-Book publishing. So, yeah, I was able to spend a mere 2,000 frustrating hours to convert the damn thing into a Kindle. I hope to sell two, as that would double the Amazon sales of the paper version. Amazon sold exactly one copy. Ever.

Anyway, if my mission was to get rich, I’d be working on Wall Street, not Diabetes Way.

If one person benefits, my time was well spent.

So anyway. Domar on Kindle. Today.

Oh, right, the link is here.

6 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Your story-telling always makes me smile. And...I used to live in New Mexico. I had a difficult time understanding/communicating with the Spanish Speaking Only patient population...I never hear any Spanish up here in Vermont...this is French Speaking territory.

Great job Wil!

5:25 PM  
Blogger meanderings said...

Just sent the English PDF to my cousin who is PD - pre-diabetes - and freaking. Hope it will calm her somewhat.

5:45 PM  
Anonymous Sysy said...

AWESOME!!! I know so many people who only speak Spanish (I'm Hispanic, married a Hispanic, and so we know tons of folks) And I'm going to make them aware of this because the info is so desperately needed! Thank you for being so generous. Maybe I should review it :D

12:33 PM  
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