Slavic Languages Division (American Translators Association)
The last episode of the SLD Podcast’s “Business Matters” season welcomes the new SLD Administrator Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya and Assistant Administrator Steven McGrath. Outgoing co-hosts Veronika and Ekaterina chat with them about the future of the division and the podcast, and look ahead to ATA60.
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Head over to the SlavFile page to check out the latest issue of the SLD newsletter! This issue includes lots of useful information on the upcoming ATA conference in Palm Springs, including an interview with this year’s Greiss speaker, highlights of sessions that might be of interest, the annual meeting agenda, and information on the newcomers’ lunch and SLD dinner. There is also a generous helping of the usual SlavFile fare: translator lives in review, linguistic humor, idioms and cultural references, answers to newcomer questions, and more!
Thursday, October 24
12:30 PM
Grand Central Palm Springs
160 La Plaza, Palm Springs, CA
Check out the latest episode of the SLD podcast, featuring Dagmar and Judy Jenner! Ekaterina and Veronika talk to them about the changing professional landscape in translation and interpreting, thinking like a customer, overcoming impostor syndrome, and making marketing your services easier.
Dagmar Jenner is an experienced German, Spanish, French, and English translator. She is accredited as a conference interpreter by the European Union. She has an advanced degree in French from the University of Salzburg and a master’s degree in conference interpreting from the University of Vienna. She is an expert on the German orthography reform. She runs the European side of Twin Translations, while her twin sister Judy Jenner is in charge of business in the U.S. She is the President of the Austrian Interpreters’ and Translators’ Association UNIVERSITAS Austria. She teaches interpreting at the University of Vienna. She is also the co-author of The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation.
Judy Jenner, MBA is a Spanish and German translator and copywriter, federally certified Spanish court interpreter, conference interpreter, and award-winning small business owner based in Las Vegas, NV. She is a voting member of the American Translators Association (ATA) and the past president of the Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association (NITA). She now chairs NITA’s professional development committee. Judy is a master-level court-certified Spanish interpreter and a court-registered German interpreter in Nevada and serves on the advisory board of the Spanish/English translation certificate at the University of California-San Diego Extension, where she also teaches in the online translation program. Judy is also a certified California court interpreter (Spanish). In addition, Judy serves as one of the spokespersons of the American Translators Association.
Together, Dagmar and Judy run their boutique translation and interpreting business “Twin Translations”: www.twintranslations.com/
The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation: www.amazon.com/The-Entrepreneuri…1392425098&sr=8-1
Judy and Dagmar Jenner’s blog “Translation Times”: translationtimes.blogspot.com/
Be sure to subscribe to the SLD podcast so you never miss an episode!
Photo credit: DVTA
On September 14 I gave up my Saturday to network and learn at a one-day conference organized by my local ATA chapter, the Delaware Valley Translators Association (DVTA). The event, formally the 4th Annual East Coast Interpreters and Translators Summit, was hosted at Widener University Delaware Law School, which is a convenient 25-minute drive for me. This was a lovely, local, bite-size chunk of professional development that left me energized, inspired, and excited to keep working on my skills and my business.
For the two two-hour slots where there were several talks to choose from, I chose the translation-related sessions. Reflecting the DVTA’s membership, most of the sessions focused on interpreting, so there was one translation session for each slot. The first session, led by DVTA President Dorothy Evans, was titled “What Does It Mean to Be a Successful Translator?” and was the most inspiring session for me. While the context and the examples all referred back to our shared experience as freelance translators, the themes of determining your own definition of success, setting reasonable goals, and making incremental changes apply broadly to self-employment and life in general. Plus, it was encouraging to hear a more established translator talk with candor and humor about the same struggles I’ve been running into.
The second session was one on diplomatic translation by Joe Mazza, the head of the translation division at the U.S. State Department’s Office of Language Services. His presence speaks to the fact that attendees at the summit hailed from up and down the Northeast Corridor, offering more networking opportunities than other DVTA events. While I’ve seen Joe speak at other events and chatted with him multiple times at ATA conferences, this time around he had a longer session (two hours instead of his usual one) and there were contractors that work with his office in the audience, in a relatively informal setting where they were able to share their experiences to complement his presentation. This time something clicked—maybe the fact that I finally have the five years’ experience Joe had stipulated the very first time I talked to him—and, with the encouragement of one of the contractors, I got the ball rolling on applying to work for the State Department.
Two other sessions were held for all attendees at once: the keynote and a closing session by a local accountant. The keynote speaker, Holly Mikkelson, gave a somewhat lyrical meditation on considering the human side of interpreting, keeping in mind the ways in which real lives are affected, and remaining compassionate rather than clinical. (Of course, much the same can be said of translation, even if we don’t see the humans affected face to face.) The closing session was a demo of QuickBooks that unfortunately ran into some technical difficulties (when each keypress registers twice, $120 very quickly becomes $112,200), but still sparked useful conversations and convinced me to take the plunge after doing my accounting by hand and Excel for over three years.
All in all, this summit had the energizing effect of an ATA conference on a smaller scale. I came away with workable steps to take moving forward, not to mention 5 CEUs. I would encourage everyone to check if they have an ATA chapter nearby and see if they organize a local conference or summit. It’s well worth a Saturday!
Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya is a Russian>English (ATA-certified) and French>English legal and financial translator based in the Philadelphia area. She holds a Master’s in Translation from Kent State University.
Are there topics that you enjoy working with but can be emotionally draining? For me, palliative care is one example. I love working on translations that can help promote understanding of palliative care among Russian patients and the general public, as well as the development of palliative care in Russia, but it can be hard to look past the suffering and pain behind the text, especially if it is about pediatric palliative care.
I was glad to discover that ATA offers a webinar on this subject. “Linguistic Challenges in Palliative Care” by Jessica Goldhirsch can be found in ATA’s Webinars On Demand. Jessica Goldhirsch, LCSW, MSW, MPH is a licensed clinical social worker with the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Institute’s inpatient adult palliative care consult service. She teaches staff interpreters and clinical staff how to work together effectively, and her background and experience really show.
Ms. Goldhirsch talks about the role of palliative care in the healthcare system and different stages of palliative care (hospice care is just one of them). She breaks down commonly used terminology, lists the most common misconceptions, and describes typical challenges. She stresses that the interpreter/translator must be an integral part of the palliative care team, backs it up with examples, and gives advice on how to become a member of this team. Most importantly, Ms. Goldhirsch explains how crucial it is to understand the patient’s cultural norms, beliefs, and traditions, and encourages interpreters and translators to be cultural meditators and coaches for the palliative care team.
I found this webinar both highly informative and really empowering. It didn’t make palliative care less of a difficult subject, but it helped me understand its scope and purpose, and made it clear what my role is. Armed with tips and useful resources that Ms. Goldhirsch generously shared, I feel better prepared, both mentally and emotionally, to tackle future translations on this subject.
I am grateful that ATA offered this webinar and included it in its Webinars On Demand. Ms. Goldhirsch mentioned other topics that she believes deserve to be addressed in more detail, such as serious illness conversation guides and palliative care family meetings, and I hope that ATA will offer webinars on these topics in the future.
Author Bio
Veronika Demichelis is an ATA-certified English>Russian translator. She holds an MA in Linguistics and an MBA in Human Resources Management. She specializes in corporate communication, HR, and social responsibility, but also enjoys working with health and wellness, in particular patient outreach and education materials. More information can be found on her website, https://veronikademichelis.com/.
In this latest episode of the SLD Podcast, Veronika and Ekaterina talk to the members of Black Squirrel Translator Collective (BSTC)! In 2016, Victoria Chavez-Kruse, Mary McKee, Jamie Hartz, and Elizabeth Nelsen established Black Squirrel Translator Collective, a working group that provides many tangible and intangible benefits. Tune in to learn how they did it, what working together means to them, and how you can partner up with your colleagues to take your business to the next level!
Just one day left to register for the SLD’s webinar on English>Russian editing on July 31! The more people sign up, the more reason there will be for ATA to continue with language-specific “division webinars.” Don’t miss out!
Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash
On July 31, ATA will host a 2-hour practice-driven webinar for English to Russian translators on editing their own translations. During this webinar, participants will go through a sample text and practice their editing skills, as well as learn a framework to edit their own translations more efficiently.
You can register at https://www.atanet.org/webinars/ataWebinar203_russian_editing.php.
By Maria Guzenko
Image by rawpixel from Pixabay
Having up-to-date subject-matter, technology, and business expertise is one of the things that sets the professional translator apart from the amateur. In addition, if you are certified by the American Translators Association (ATA) or another translation/interpreting organization, you need to accrue continuing education credits to maintain your credential. The requirements will vary depending on the organization, and those for the ATA can be found here.
With that in mind, I would like to start a column where we review continuing education opportunities, whether specific to the languages of the SLD, focused on a certain subject area or text type, or promoting any other skill useful for translators. If you have taken a course, watched a webinar, or attended an event in the last year or so and would like to review it for the SLD blog, please get in touch with Maria Guzenko at maria.guzenko@intorussian.net.
My American Master’s degree, while incredibly helpful in many ways, did not offer practical English-to-Russian classes. Since I mostly translate into Russian, I wanted to fill that gap and started looking for language-specific classes where I could get some tips, guided practice, and feedback. My search brought me to the website of Alliance Pro («Альянс Про»), a company that offers Russian translation and interpreting classes, either as live webinars or as recordings of past events. I have no financial or business relationship with this course provider, other than paying for their class.
The class I took was called Medical Translation («Медицинский перевод») and “met” via teleconference twice a week for two hours. Four weeks of webinars were followed by a final test, which determined whether the participant would get a certificate of completion. Because the live sessions were held in the evening, Moscow time, I was able to join in the early afternoon on the East Coast. Webinar recordings and PowerPoints were available for later viewing if you had to miss the live session, which was also convenient for the times I had to be away from my desk.
The course was taught by Olga Gilyarevskaya (Ольга Гиляревская), the chief editor of a Moscow-based translation agency and a former pharmaceutical representative. It appeared that the curriculum largely reflected the types of documents and subjects Ms. Gilyarevskaya regularly saw in her work, such as clinical study protocols and disease descriptions. Each week covered a different area; by the end of the course, we had looked at clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, oncology, cardiology, pharmaceutical companies, and ophthalmology.
Each webinar started with the instructor going over the homework from the previous class, and she would either comment on our cohort’s proposed solutions or discuss typical errors for the homework passage. Next, the instructor would present new material. Beware, a typical PowerPoint had more than 100 slides, which can definitely be a lot of information, especially if you are trying to take notes! Fortunately, the PowerPoints were available to the course participants online so you could always go over them later.
On the positive side, Ms. Gilyarevskaya did not only lecture and share information; she made sure to keep the group engaged by asking us for possible translations and giving us feedback. Clinical studies can be intimidating for a newcomer, and the teacher put the group at ease with her down-to-earth attitude and not being hard on those giving incorrect answers.
At the end of each class, the instructor would assign homework for the following class. There were two differently priced “access tiers” for this course, so some participants turned in homework and had it corrected, while others simply audited the class. We would normally get a choice of two texts, one more advanced than the other. A typical passage would be some 3-4 paragraphs long, and we would usually get about 2 days to upload our translation. Between going over the new material and doing your homework, you would probably need a minimum of two hours after each session, so I do not recommend taking this class if you are overloaded with work or family responsibilities!
A lot of homework passages came from clinical trial documentation, and I appreciated that we worked on real-life texts. On the other hand, the homework would regularly include concepts we had not discussed in the previous lecture. It could be a bit discouraging when some things in the passage were not clear even after you went over your class notes. I suppose that reflects real-world working conditions, where we often have to research things as we go along.
Any review is bound to be subjective, so what I say here reflects my professional goals and preferences. If you come to this class expecting a comprehensive overview of medicine and different text types in various specialties, you are likely to be disappointed. For instance, the text types I translate most often—patient education materials and descriptions of health benefits—were not represented. Neither were such areas as mental health or diagnostic imaging. That makes perfect sense, though—no single month-long class can cover all possible text types you come across in the medical field.
Personally, I am happy I took this class. I now have a better understanding of clinical trials, statistics, immune therapy, and the cellular mechanisms underlying cancer, even though I still have a lot more to learn. I also enjoyed the easygoing teacher and the “can-do” attitude she encouraged in her students. I would recommend this class to English-Russian translators who are interested in clinical studies and are willing to put in several hours of study and homework every week.
Maria Guzenko is an ATA-certified English<>Russian translator and a certified medical interpreter (CMI-Russian). She holds an MA in translation from Kent State University and specializes in healthcare and marketing content. Maria has also worked as a project manager and has taught college Russian and writing classes. More information can be found on Maria’s website at https://intorussian.net.