I’m happy to announce that our two invited distinguished speakers have been approved by headquarters and will be coming to share their expertise with us in New York City in October. The first speaker is Markus Meisl from SAP in Walldorf. Markus will be holding a pre-conference seminar entitled: SAP: An Overview of the Company and its Software (with a special focus on software translation and terminology).
The abstract reads:
Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, SAP is the world’s largest business software company serving approximately 82,000 customers in over 120 countries. This seminar will provide a general overview of the company’s products and services, offer demos of selected software products, and focus in particular on how SAP’s software and related products are translated. A particular emphasis will be placed on terminology work (English/German) as well as SAPterm, SAP’s own terminology database. Reference materials and handouts will be provided to participants.
Markus will also hold a 90-minute session on Thursday entitled: The World of SAP: Software and Translation. This presentation will be geared towards the needs of translators and provide a general overview of SAP’s software and related products, their structure and their implementation and/or integration within other products. A demonstration of software functionality and explanation of the organization behind these efforts, SAP Language Services, will complete the presentation. Again reference materials and handouts will be provided.
Markus Meisl is the manager of Corporate Translation and Coordination German/English within SAP Language Services, the software company’s central translation group. This group comprises a central coordination team overseeing all inhouse German/English translation activities, a team of vendor managers working with external translators, and 10 German and English translators who focus on texts provided by the corporate communications, legal and HR departments. After joining SAP in 1998, he worked in knowledge management and product management before taking on his current role in 2007.
Our second invited distinguished speaker is Jane Fu from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst located in New York City. Jane will present one session on Thursday entitled: The Bologna Process and What It Means for Translating European Education Documents and Credentials.
Her abstract reads:
Bold and broad are two words that describe the Bologna Process and the recent changes in German/European higher education. Its actual mission is not that far from the original ‘Magna Charta Universitatum’ on which the first university in Europe was founded. This presentation hopes to answer the who, what, where, when, how of the Bologna Process with regards to Germany to provide a better understanding for the translation of education documents, credentials, etc., from the view of a person working from within the German higher education system. It will also delve into the world of job titles and their counterparts.
Jane Fu is the senior Information Officer for DAAD New York, a foreign branch office of the German public agency for international exchange in higher education, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service). She has been with them since 2000 and is responsible for international study and scholarship advising, publications, guest lectureship programs, and information technologies. She holds a BS from Eastern Michigan University and spent a year abroad at the University of Salzburg in Austria during her undergraduate studies. Prior to joining DAAD she worked as an arts administrator, grant writer, and magazine editor.