We are pleased to announce our newly elected PLD officers:
Administrator: Barbara Mendes
Assistant Administrator: Melissa Harkin
Their term will begin at the PLD Annual Meeting, scheduled to be held on Saturday, October 26, 12:30 pm – 1:00 pm during ATA’s 60th Annual Conference (October 23-26, 2019) at the Palm Springs Convention Center in Palm Springs, California.
Barbara Mendes is an English > Brazilian Portuguese translator from Rio de Janeiro and has over 13 years of experience providing high-quality service in translation, transcreation, localization, and LQA. At university, she studied English and Portuguese but decided to specialize in translation. She is currently working towards a Master’s in Translation Studies from Universidade de Lisboa, in Portugal. Barbara spends half of the year in Brazil and the other half in Portugal, besides attending several translation conferences around the globe. Barbara served as the PLD Hospitality and Events Coordinator before being elected as the PLD Administrator.
As the PLD Administrator, I would like to continue the work that has been done over the past administrations by trying to intensify online presence (as this administration has been doing), encouraging members to be more active both online and offline and encourage networking and new endeavors within our community throughout the year.
Melissa Harkin works in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and specializes in journalistic, legal, energy, and sustainable development content. She has a Bachelor’s Degree of Laws, MBA in Strategic Management, Certificate in Translation and Subtitling, Certificate in English for Journalism, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization, and a Specialization in Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation. From 1997 to 2011, she worked part-time as a translator while dedicating herself to her original legal background. In January 2012, Melissa decided to dedicate herself full-time to translations and has since been providing her services to several national and international development banks, major international NGOs, national governments, and multinational companies. She is a member of the American Translators Association (ATA), Brazilian Translators Association (Abrates), New England Translators Association (NETA), Society for Technical Communication (STC), and a former administrator of the New York Circle of Translators (NYCT) — a chapter of the ATA. Melissa served as the PLD Blog Editor before being elected as the PLD Assistant Administrator.
As the PLD Assistant Administrator, I would like to support the administrator to make the Portuguese Language Division the go-to place for questions and information about the translating to and from the Portuguese Language, strengthen the dialog between division members and encourage the use of our website and social media accounts as a forum for the whole division and beyond, identify relevant presenters with exciting topics for a PLD slate of conference presentations, and help division members who are starting in the profession with useful and reliable information. Ultimately, I would like to connect to all PLD members and expand the relevance of the division through their input and participation.
Join us in wishing Barbara and Melissa the best of luck and much success during their administration.
Last but not least, we owe our current Administrator, Rafa Lombardino, a big, fat, thank you. Rafa has served the PLD with the utmost grace, leadership, and engagement. The fact that two members of her administration have decided to step-up and lead our division in the next term is a real demonstration of her success, ethics, and direction.
Rafa Lombardino was born in Santos, São Paulo, and has been living in California since 2002. She started her career in 1997 and today runs Word Awareness, a small network of professional translators. Certified by the ATA (EN>PT, PT>EN) and by the University of California San Diego Extension (ES>EN), Rafa acts as the Content Curator of the literary translation blog eWordNews and is the founder of Contemporary Brazilian Short Stories, a website that promotes Brazilian authors in English. In 2014, she wrote “Tools and Technology in Translation,” a book inspired by the class she has been teaching at UCSD Extension since 2010.
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