Discussion: Summer homework -- a little help, please

Anyone fluent in Spanish? My daughter has to write a What-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation essay en Espanol, and we are wondering if there is a Spanish word for orienteering. The organization in Spain is Federación Española de Orientación. But to a one-lingual person like me, that sounds like the "Spanish Federation of Orientation." So, is orientacion synonymous with orienteering, or is "orienteering" used freely in the Spanish vocabulary? Or, maybe there's yet another word that should be used. (I see "orientadora" used at the Federation web site, but I'm guessing that that's an orienteer.)

Not fluent but close enough - Yes, 'orientación' is used for orienteering. In Spanish, 'the sport of orienteering' would be 'el deporte de la orientación'. In general, when referring to orienteering, you'd use 'la orientación'.

Very helpful, thank you so much.

(This is Katie on my dad's account:)

As a follow up, if I wanted to use the phrase "I orienteered", is there a word for that, or should I, for instance, just use the prederite of "ir" and then say "la orientación". Or is there a better phrase?

Unfortunately "I orienteered" isn't something that easily translates into Spanish. I would probably say something like "participé en una competencia d'orientación" or perhaps "participé en una carrera d'orientación" to make it clear that it's a race.
¡Buena suerte!

I'm probably not the best to answer this... but I would say something like, "participé en una carrera de orientación". There's no verb "to orienteer", as far as I can tell, so you'd have to specify what you were doing - participated in a race or a training, for instance. It's like 'the sport of soccer', where you can't say, 'I soccered'. Though it would be kind of fun to say that.

The "beauty" of english - want a new verb? Just take a noun and add a pronoun. e.g. "I podiumed when I orienteered today".

The orienteering association in Paraguay used to have an excellent page listing all map symbols in Spanish. Does anybody know if it still exists? I used to bring this page up when I taught orienteering to school groups that had Hispanic students with poor English skills, but its been at least a couple years since I used it. I tried linking from IOF and it appears that Paraguay is no longer an IOF member. I tried a couple google searches but couldn't get a hit either. (Katie, I will look to see if I have a printout, but I remember that the one I had cut off one edge, so I'd always just bring the page up on a screen when I was teaching)

A suggestion to David and Katie: go to www.orienteering.org (International Orienteering Fed). Click on "IOF" at the upper left and you'll get a world map and list of federations. Look for links to any of the Spanish speaking federations and you should find some pages that will help with orienteering-specific terminology.

Here is one for Argentina: http://www.adorargentina.org.ar/ You should be able to find others (Spain, other Sputh American countries) on your own.

This intro to orienteering (pdf) has all kinds of useful terms.