gram, also a B.A. major, grew into a full four semester course package. This included two Intensive Writing courses: Translation I and II English -> Spanish and two Interpreting courses which covered Sight Translation, Consecutive-Bidirectional and Simultaneous Interpreting, both into English and into Spanish. Topics included the legal, medical, and social services fields. Some special independent study courses were also offered as Translation courses in the combination French-English by this author. Although T-I courses were aimed at undergraduate students, quite a few graduates of Spanish and native speakers of other languages took such courses to improve their knowledge and skills in combining and relating their native language or the lingua franca—English in most cases—and their first or second foreign language. A certificate used to be issued if the student passed all T-I courses with a grade of B or higher (it had been C before 2001) and translation-interpreting activities were encouraged and performed in both directions, that is, from English into Spanish or another foreign language and vice versa.

       During the period of time mentioned above, this program also benefited from the fact that the professor in charge of the T-I program had ample experience as a conference interpreter, as a translator and is also a Certified Federal Court Interpreter and has a background that includes degrees in two non-US universities, both of which had excellent T-I programs2. The combination of teaching methods, foreign language specialization, and theoretical and practical knowledge of both translation and interpretation enabled the UNE program to offer a mosaic of training exercises aimed at meeting the actual needs of our present-day society and its markets. Until the time the professor in charge of T-I at UNE left, classes in both T-I courses and in many other related Spanish courses (Intermediate and Advanced Spanish, Advanced Grammar and Composition, etc.) saw their ranks swell significantly. From a handful of aspiring translators and interpreters in courses before 2001, classes more than doubled and even tripled in number.

       The T-I program, likewise, constituted an appeal for quite a few "bilinguals" and the very few "ambilinguals" (Catford, 1965)3 that lived, studied and worked in Nebraska and other states. This very fact posed new challenges and set new demands for said program. In it, an important component emerged: an exercise manual comprising various types of linguistic, cultural and T-I activities, many of them appearing for the first time in materials related to T-I training. This manual harmonically combined the need for translating-interpreting real-life short and medium-size texts with the use of contemporary, up-to-date longer texts in practically all fields of human endeavor, even with the inclusion of short literary excerpts during the advanced stage of Translation II.

An Exercise Manual with a New Outlook on Exercises: Expansion and Semantic Groups; Code Switching; Spanglish; Cultural and General; Vulgarities; Business and Ads; Lexical and Grammatical Comparisons; Generic Texts.

       Part of the professor's above-mentioned background and expertise found its way into a special manual for the training of translators and interpreters, first published in 2003, then twice in 2004 and again in 2005. This manual is already in use in several colleges and universities, and private companies and training specialists in the U.S. and abroad have shown their interest in it (González, 2003, 2004, 2005).

       Among its many types of exercises, the Manual offers, perhaps for the first time together in a textbook, some of the following:

       • Expansion and Semantic Groups: A type of exercise in which the trainee needs to first define, then amplify an idea expressed in a given language in that same language; offer possible contextual synonyms, relate the idea/term/expression to others in similar contexts, then proceed to translate the original idea into another language. This type of exercise also refers to hyponyms and hyperonyms or hipónimos and hiperónimos (Baker, 2001 and López & Minett, 2001). The objective of this type of exercise is to broaden the translator-interpreter's perspectives, expand his active and passive vocabulary and contribute to a solid mastery of both languages in contact.

       Examples:

       Boxeo -> pugilismo -> narices chatas, árbitro, cuadrilátero, la campana, KO, TKO -> Boxing, ring, referee, bell, knockout, technical KO, etc.

       El árbol -> la ceiba, la palma, el pino, el abedul, el s

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