ATA Slavic Languages Division

Annual Susana Greiss Lecture

The Annual Susana Greiss Lecture series was created to honor the founder and first administrator of the SLD - Susana Greiss. It has become one of the highlights of the annual ATA conference, drawing a large audience that includes many from outside our membership. View profiles of the lecture speakers and brief reviews of the lecture topics to date by clicking on the speaker's name below:

• Michele A. Berdy (2006, New Orleans)
• Svetolik Paul Djordjević (2005, Seattle)
• Paul Richardson (2004, Toronto)
• Genevra Gerhart (2003, Phoenix)
• Michael Henry Heim (2002, Atlanta)
• Patricia Newman (2001, Los Angeles)
• Lynn Visson (2000, Orlando)
• Kenneth Katzner (1999, St. Louis)
• Jonathan Brent (1998, Hilton Head)

Michele A. Berdy (2006, New Orleans) A US native, for over 25 years Michele A. Berdy has worked in Russia as an interpreter, consultant, and translator of numerous books, articles, short stories, and films. She is a contributing editor and columnist of The Moscow Times and has taught translation and intercultural communication in Moscow. She is the co-author of a Russian-English dictionary and a regular contributor to Mosty, a Russian journal on translation. Since 1996 she has managed and consulted on communications programs in Russia and the region, specializing in health promotion and human rights, and has produced television programming in the US and Russia. "Micky" Berdy was a marvelous addition to SLD festivities in New Orleans. Her lecture will be reviewed in the Spring 2007 SlavFile.

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Svetolik Paul Djordjević (2005, Seattle) Mr. Djordjević was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia. A holder of several undergraduate and graduate degrees, he has worked in a variety of countries as a language teacher, translator, and interpreter for close to 40 years. From 1981 through 2005 he was an in-house medical translator for French and the Slavic languages for the Social Security Administration. In addition to his full-time job, motivated by the desperate need for better medical references, he has pursued a second career as a lexicographer. The second edition of his French/English Dictionary of Medicine was published by Schreiber in 2004. He will soon publish two more medical dictionaries, an English–Serbian Medical Dictionary and a Croatian and Serbian–English Medical Dictionary, containing over 45,000 entries each. His talk focused on his own life, and how its circumstances led him to pursue lexicography. It also addressed the inadequacy of existing medical references (both monolingual and bilingual) and the finer points of dictionary compilation. (This talk is reviewed in the Winter 2006 issue of SlavFile.)

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Paul Richardson (2004, Toronto) Mr. Richardon is Publisher and Editorial Director of Russian Life magazine and president of Russian Information Services, a publishing company he founded in 1990. He is author of Russia Survival Guide: Business & Travel (six editions), as well as numerous articles on Russia published in Russian Life and elsewhere. He received a BA from Central College and an MA (Political Science) and Russian Area Studies Certificate from Indiana University. In 1989 and 1990, he ran one of the first successful Soviet-Western joint ventures. For the past 15 years, he has traveled to Russia frequently to oversee his company and to clean up the messes (i.e. “new business ventures”) it spawns. (This talk is reviewed in the Winter 2005 issue of SlavFile.)

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Genevra Gerhart (2003, Phoenix)  Ms. Gerhart is the author of The Russian's World:  Life and Language (3rd edition published in 2001 by Slavica, Bloomington, Indiana) and co-editor of The Russian Context: The Culture Behind the Language (Slavica, 2002). Both works are invaluable references for students of Russian language, history and culture, providing essential information about Russian realia and the context behind phrases and phenomena that are laden with meaning obvious to any native Russian speaker, but unfamiliar to foreigners. (This talk is reviewed in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue of SlavFile.)

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Michael Henry Heim (2002, Atlanta) Mr. Heim is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to scholarly works on a variety of areas of Eastern European literature, he has published literary translations from several languages, primarily Czech and Russian, including works by Kundera, Hrabel, Aksyonov, Chekhov, Ageyev and Sokolov. His most recent publication is the English translation of Gunter Grass's collection of short stories My Century.This talk is reviewed in the Spring 2003 issue of SlavFile.)

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Patricia Newman (2001, Los Angeles). Ms. Newman is past president of the ATA and editor of the 4th edition of Ludmilla Callaham's Russian-English Dictionary of Science and Technology. She spoke about her work on the dictionary and her experiences (good and bad) hiring and working with Russian-English interpreters and translators while on staff at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the largest purchasers of Russian language services in the United States. (This talk is reviewed in the Winter 2002 issue of SlavFile.)

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Lynn Visson (2000, Orlando). Ms. Visson is a UN interpreter and author of From Russian Into English and Wedded Strangers. Her talk addressed the trials and tribulations of UN interpreting, especially the challenges of dealing with complex cultural differences and politically charged nuance under split-second time pressure. She also described the organization of interpretation services at the UN and spoke specifically about linguistic-cultural differences between Americans and Russians. (You can read the review of Ms. Visson's book in the Spring 2002 issue of SlavFile.)

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Kenneth Katzner (1999, St. Louis). Mr. Katzner is the author of the English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary, published by John Wiley & Sons. In his talk, Mr. Katzner talked about the process through which his uniquely valuable dictionary was compiled and the nature and difficulties of lexicographic work.

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Jonathan Brent (1998, Hilton Head). Mr. Brent, who is Editorial Director of Yale University Press, talked about literary translation, specifically his press's literary translations from Slavic languages.

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