Week IX: 07/25/2022 - 07/29/2022
During my ninth week at IFES, I continued to edit and improve case summaries that I have either drafted or received. I also escalated my comparative research on remunerations in various countries by reading laws in English and Spanish. Furthermore, I began to format some IFES report documents written in French.
Editing case summaries over several rounds has made me realize the difficulty in gathering the right information from a case. Every country has its unique way of writing opinions, and that makes editing rather difficult. If the opinion is not originally written in English, editing becomes more difficult because the English translations do not always provide the words that are necessary to determining certain aspects of the fact pattern or ruling. One can only hope that translation technologies will improve in the next few years.
On the comparative research front, I intensified my research in remuneration across a few countries. I have made significant progress in gathering the necessary laws especially for laws from anglophone countries. However, to perform research on one country in this comparison, I had to look up laws in Spanish. At first, I did not know whether I retained enough Spanish because I took Spanish classes for six years in middle school and high school. Thankfully, it appears that I was able to remember enough words and conjugations to write down the necessary laws. Even though my formal training in Spanish ended several years ago, I am relieved to know that I was able to make progress on this research.
Finally, whenever I needed a change of pace from the first two projects, I began to format some reports that were written in French. Thankfully, I did not have to read any French to format the reports. However, considering some of democracy's greatest challenges comes from francophone countries, I believe that it is very important that more materials are produced in French. However, if francophone countries go the way of Rwanda and Vietnam, perhaps a day can come when this type of work is not as necessary.
electionjudgments.org/en/