¿Comprende Hidráulica y Neumática en Español?

My eighth-grade Spanish teacher, Mrs. Keck, would’ve been proud that I remembered some Spanish after all these years. Actually, I cheated with the headline a little because I went to a couple online translation pages to check my work. (And for the record, the headline reads, “Do you understand hydraulics and pneumatics in Spanish?”)

So why ask if you know fluid power in Spanish? Well, if Spanish isn’t your native language, you probably know or work with people whose native language is Spanish. But what does that have to do with fluid power?

All of us are probably aware of the need for fluid-power education and training in our industry. It seems as though an awful lot of people working in the field would like to improve the knowledge of fluid-power technology—whether its reading schematics, knowing the best practices for preparing and installing components, learning how to effectively troubleshoot systems, and how to work safely around fluid-power systems.

Fluid power isn’t taught in most schools, so it’s usually up to individuals to learn about the technology on their own. But it can be a real problem finding the information you need, because no single, all-encompassing source of fluid-power information exists—not even hydraulicspneumatics.com.

Most of these issues, of course, are addressed in training and certification from the Fluid Power Society. Although none of the material is written in Spanish, Donna Pollander, executive director of IFPS, says that the IFPS executive board is aware of the need and has begun investigating its feasibility.

This brings me to Ricardo J. Solórzano, founder and general manager of EEM Technologies Corp., Miami. Ricardo contacted me a few months ago and mentioned that he has read Hydraulics & Pneumatics for years and how informative he finds our website. EEM serves customers in Central America, the Caribbean, and northern parts of South America. Like most people in the industry, Ricardo knows his customers could benefit from expanding their knowledge of fluid power. However, his customers have the additional challenge of needing to learn about fluid power in Spanish.

So Ricardo and I worked out a way for him to translate some of the most popular content on the H&P website into Spanish. As result, I am proud to announce that Ricardo’s blog, “H&P en tu idioma!”, now appears on our home page. Ricardo has entered seven blogs as of this writing, and we should have dozens by the end of the year—equivalent to what you’d find in a small book.

Unfortunately, my Spanish is not good enough to translate the title of Ricardo’s blog into Spanish, but he tells me it means “H&P in your language.” So feel free to spread the word. I’m sure your Spanish-speaking colleagues in fluid power will appreciate it.

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