Uvalde committee releases Spanish translation of report on school shooting
The special Texas House committee tasked with investigating the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde released online a Spanish translation of its preliminary report on the incident Friday, five days after the English-language version was made public.
Hard copies will be distributed to victims' families Monday, said Matt Crow, spokesman for committee Chairman Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock.
The official publication of the translation comes two days after the American-Statesman produced a translation of the report, taking special care to ensure it is culturally competent and sensitive to word usage by Mexican and Central American communities.
News leaders decided to embark on a round-the-clock effort to translate the report after Eva Guzman, a member of the committee, initially said it would take two weeks to translate it.
The Statesman also printed 10,000 copies of the translation. Editors and reporters distributed stacks of copies Thursday to 28 locations in Uvalde and to community leaders. The online and print translations are available free of charge.
The report details “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by every level of law enforcement at the scene and by school employees before the shooting. It was the result of interviews with dozens of witnesses and a review of footage from the crime scene and audio recordings of 911 calls from the school.
More:Special Texas House investigative committee releases Uvalde school shooting report
At a Sunday news conference after release of the report and an edited video of the delayed law enforcement response, Burrows said “it is only appropriate” for the report to be translated into Spanish.
The majority of Uvalde residents are Latino, and half of the county's residents age 5 or older speak a language other than English at home.
“Simply put, we ran out of time to have the report carefully translated prior to meeting with families," Guzman, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, said in a statement Friday. "I have personally reviewed the official translation of the report to ensure it is accurate and reflective of our committee’s findings."
More:Uvalde families deserve the Texas House Committee report in Spanish. Here it is.
Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso and a member of the committee, said that the translation service hired by the committee indicated that the work normally would take two weeks but that the company agreed to expedite its work.
Hours after the Statesman published the translation, Moody tweeted, "As soon as we knew a professional translation wouldn’t be possible by our planned 7/17 trip to Uvalde, we conferred w/local authorities who were coordinating w/the Uvalde families & were told they wanted the English version of the report released w/out delay. We honored that.”
He said the final version of the report was finished after 5 p.m. Friday, “literally minutes before the absolute deadline to have it printed.”
The English version of the report also is publicly available on the Texas House website.
Spanish version:
English version:
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: House committee releases Spanish translation of report on Uvalde school shooting
