By This article was edited to correct a misspelled name in the featured photo caption at 7:26 p.m. on March 28.
The Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies received a $10 million gift from Mario Giannini to establish a master’s degree in translation and interpreting.
“It’s a pretty momentous gift,” Donato Center Director, Italian and French professor and the center’s namesake, Clorinda Donato said. “The donor has stuck with us and has really been excited about all the things that we’ve done.”
She said the $10 million donation will largely go towards student scholarships but will also provide infrastructure, support, licenses, and software to keep the center up to date.
“The students are super excited because $10 million is a lot of money, so people stood up and noticed,” Donato said. “It does speak to the fact that there is something unique going on here.”
She said both the donor and the university have recognized the progress the center has made.
She recalls it took many years to get the piece of the building where the Donato Center is located. So it has taken a lot of groundwork to prepare for the future of the center and program.
“There aren’t many Translation Studies programs in the United States, even in California where the industry is currently booming,” Ana Gabriela Gonzalez Meade, lecturer of audiovisual translation and localization in Translation Studies, said.
She said catering to the current needs of audiovisual content is necessary to have an additional set of skills that only a postgraduate program can provide.
“We need U.S. linguists to become certified translators, who know how to do the job whether they want to do the translation for subbing or dubbing, there’s a lot of work,” Meade said.
The Translation and Interpreting Masters of Arts degree at Long Beach State would be the first of its kind in the CSU system and will be joining few programs in the state.
“I think it’s really relevant for a California-based university to offer a master’s program for translation,” Gonzalez said.
The program will also provide students with practical, hands-on experience so the transition from school to interpreting or translation work is smoother.
“A lot of students don’t know that being a translator or being an interpreter is an actual career path,” Manuel Romero, Donato Center associate director and Translation Studies lecturer, said.
He said the master’s degree is going to be 36 units, over five semesters with exposure to more topics than the Translation Studies Certificate, and through the electives of the program, students will be able to specialize a bit more. A student can choose the translation or interpreting track.
“When you are able to advertise a degree program that has quality, uniqueness and scholarships, it’s very attractive,” Donato said.
According to Romero, at the master’s degree level, there will be between 10-15 scholarships, both full scholarships and partial scholarships.
“We’ll have to wait and see how many applications we get and we’ll have to make the decision whether we want to help as many people as possible or have a selection process,” Romero said.
Lahoucine Boumahdy, a Fulbright scholar and PhD student in the field of audiovisual translation, said being part of the center and its different expertise helped him tremendously.
“To me, being here, it was life-changing I know that’s a sentence people say a lot but I mean it,” Boumahdy said. “I came here and got to work at the Donato Center and under the supervision of Ana, being able to get that perspective and help need for the PhD, especially on the theoretical grounds was important.”
He said they have all different expertise that will give anyone visiting the opportunity to do research in any field they want and how diversity is so important in bringing the program to becoming as vibrant as it is.
The Master of Arts degree program in translation and interpreting will be established by fall 2026.
“Hopefully, we’re going to be building the generation of scholars who will be the professors of this discipline in other U.S. universities which there is a need for,” Donato said.
Editor’s note: Updated headline to correct the ten to 10 per AP Style at 7:27 p.m. on March 28
