Welcome to the 12th episode of the French Language Division’s Continuing Education Series. In today’s episode, Marie-Christine Gingras joins Angela Benoit to discuss a list of mots délaissés: words that translators don’t always think to use in their work.

Marie-Christine holds a B.A. in English and Intercultural Studies (Professional Writing, Literature and Translation) from the University of Sherbrooke and has been a language professional since 2008. An OTTIAQ-certified translator, she works from English into French and from French into English. She has translated a wide variety of materials—everything from content marketing for an industrial equipment manufacturer to scientific reports on bison and rabbit farms—but specializes in corporate communications.

Marie-Christine constantly challenges herself and her fellow translators to do away with translationese and mimic actual writing in the target language. She teaches a class for translator training school Magistrad (Yes You Can: Surviving Poorly Written English Source Texts), posts translation advice on Twitter (@TraductionsMCG), and was an instructor at the 2017 Translate in Quebec City conference. She lives and works in beautiful Quebec City.

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By Gabriela Nunes

As a Brazilian translator and interpreter (my working languages are Brazilian Portuguese, English and French), one of my career goals was to attend an ATA Conference. Finally, in 2017, I had the pleasure of going to the ATA 58^th Annual Conference in Washington, DC—and the meeting was an amazing event for the reasons that I list below. One of them was totally unexpected.

First, as I aimed to establish contact with new clients, the job fair represented an awesome opportunity to be in touch with them. Being a good student, I did my homework, having my résumés prepared in advance and my business cards attached to them. As a result, today I am working with some of those agencies that I met in the fair.

Going to the ATA 58^th Annual Conference was also important to meet new and old colleagues (even those from other language pairs). For this, I used every opportunity to connect with other attendees and exchange business cards: breakfast, lunchtime, elevator, salsa and yoga classes, sessions, etc. I also went to the dinner of two Divisions to which I belong, the Portuguese Language Division and the French Language Division. On both occasions, I met wonderful people with whom I exchanged professional experiences and have been in touch since then.

Needless to say, being in Washington, one of the most influential capitals in the world, was also an opportunity not to be missed by me as a former international affairs student. So, I also enjoyed the tourism aspect of the event. I visited the main memorials of the city, government buildings and, of course, its malls and surrounding outlets.

In short, the ATA Conference was worth all the energy I invested into it: visa procedures, redesigning my business card, updating my résumé, finding nice roommates for the conference (which I did!) and rescheduling my projects. Incidentally, telling my regular clients that I would be unavailable during that week because of the ATA Meeting impressed them and reinforced my commitment to professionalism and continuous quest for excellency in my work. What a good surprise!

I recommend to every translator and interpreter working with English to attend at least once an ATA Conference. It does open our minds as professionals and does put us in contact with amazing people and insightful ideas. So, let’s start 2018 with plans for New Orleans. I hope to see you there!

Gabriela Nunes is a Brazilian translator and interpreter. Having lived in the United States, France, Switzerland, and Brazil, she works with Brazilian Portuguese, French, and English. Her fields of expertise are international relations, medical, and technology.

By Michele Rosen

Now that I’ve attended my second ATA conference, I can see annual attendance will influence my career as a freelance translator. Each year, I’ve gone to the conference with a set of questions about the profession and the industry, and, so far, I’ve come out with enough partial answers and new questions to drive my professional development throughout the following year, until the next conference, when I expect the cycle to repeat.

Surrendering to the flow of information coming from the conference was easier this time around. In 2016, just six months after deciding to embark on a new career as a freelance translator, I went into the San Francisco conference with basic but important questions about how to set my rates and whether I needed to add a second language pair. I came home from that conference with copious notes and pointers to books, blogs, podcasts, and papers that helped me to find the answers.

For example, as a beginning freelance translator, I feared that translators who work in less-common and more-difficult-to-learn languages than French were somehow more valuable, and therefore more likely to be in demand and more highly paid, than translators in a common language pair like French and English. Initially, seeing all of the (more experienced) French-to-English translators at the conference, I started to fear, as I heard one Spanish translator say, that “everyone can translate French.”

However, as I began to explore the fountain of information I had collected at the conference, I began to see that, as Corinne McKay has noted, every language pair has its pros and cons. In a blog post entitled “Which Language is Best,” McKay explained that, in her view, French and German are appealing for U.S.-based translators “because there’s a good balance between work volume and rates, and because U.S.-based translators have some financial advantages” over European translators. At the same time, while there is a critical need for Middle Eastern and Asian languages, she cautioned that, “for some of these language combinations, there is a lot of competition from translators who are not native speakers of English but who translate into English anyway, even if they shouldn’t.” This information made it easier for me to decide to shelve my tentative (and frankly unrealistic) plans to become fluent in Japanese.

As I prepared to attend the conference in 2017, the previous conference served as a milestone that let me see how much I had learned since then. With a conference and a year of freelancing under my belt, I certainly didn’t qualify as a newbie anymore, but I didn’t feel quite ready to be a buddy. That said, I knew the conference would provide the opportunity to ask new questions about what it means to be a translator and to continue to figure out what kind of translator I want to be.

These questions led me to attend T&I Advocacy Day, at which such questions moved from the theoretical to the practical. The event, organized by the ATA in partnership with the Joint National Committee for Languages, was intended to introduce ATA members to public advocacy for issues important to the profession. The organizers scheduled meetings for attendees with Congressional staffers and asked us to focus on three topics: wage rate estimates for translators and interpreters from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), language services procurement policies, and best practices for machine translation.

During the strategy session with the Maryland delegation, we discussed how to explain to Congressional staffers why the BLS should change the way it estimates hourly rates for translators and interpreters. A major point of contention is that the BLS only surveys translators with full-time permanent positions to determine the median hourly rate for translators and interpreters ($22.17/hour in 2016). In pointing out how reductive this single rate is, Evelyna Radoslavova argued convincingly that it’s difficult to generalize about translators and interpreters because we all deal with different language pairs and subject matters.

While I agreed with Radoslavova that it was important to make this point to the staffers, we also agreed that the diversity in the profession makes it difficult to craft a more precise description of the profession than the one currently used by the government, which states that translators and interpreters “convert information from one language into another language.” This definition is clearly vague and incomplete, but it isn’t easy to come up with a more precise definition that won’t exclude some translators.

While this difficulty poses a challenge for language industry policy advocates, it also creates the opportunity for each translator and interpreter to define the profession for ourselves. I expect to be contemplating this scary and exciting idea for the next several months, until I have another chance to immerse myself in the impressive breadth and depth of the ATA annual conference.

Michele Rosen is a freelance translator and editor. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, two dogs, and two cats.