Annual Conferences

ATA66: SLD Roundup

October 10, 2025

If you’re heading to Boston for the 66th ATA Annual Conference this year (October 22-25) and wondering what will be there for the Slavic languages enthusiast, we have you covered! In this roundup, we’ve compiled a rundown of SLD-related happenings at the conference, from the Wednesday night division meetup to our Distinguished Speaker sessions to the annual dinner. Hope to see you there!

And if you haven’t registered for the conference yet, there’s still time!

Division Mingle

Keep Connecting and Celebrating with Divisions & Special Interest Groups

Wednesday, October 22, 7:00–8:00 PM (after the Welcome Celebration)

Commonwealth Ballroom AB

Come find the SLD area, meet our administrators and fellow members, and get the conference off to a good start!

SLD-Related Sessions and Sessions by SLD Members

(067) Changing Attitudes to Translating from Russian

Robert Chandler (Distinguished Speaker)

Friday, October 24, 2:40–3:40 PM

Session description: Constance Garnett was a courageous and independent woman. She translated at least five great Russian writers well enough that readers could sense their greatness for the first time (there are few translators of whom one can say that). Her translations influenced such varied writers as Arnold Bennett, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. Bizarrely, both Nabokov and Brodsky and, more recently, Pevear and Volokhonsky, have criticized her work. These attacks exemplify how rigid ideologies of translation can interfere with our real work–that of communicating meaning, whether thought, fact, or feeling.

(099) Learning from My Mistakes

Robert Chandler (Distinguished Speaker)

Saturday, October 25, 10:30–11:30 AM

Session description: In some fields of translation (e.g., legal), mistakes are likely to be noticed. In other fields, there may be no one checking your work. That’s why it’s essential to find a way of getting another person to do this. One of the dangers in our profession is that the better one’s command of English, the better one can be at disguising a misunderstanding. A serious source of misunderstandings is verbal aspects. The speaker will provide memorable examples of his own misunderstandings to help attendees grasp the power of these aspects.

This session is also available on livestream (https://www.atanet.org/ata66/education/livestream/), which is included with every level of conference registration and can be purchased separately before October 16.

An interview with Robert Chandler is available on the blog.

(103) New Directions on the Contact Line: How the Russia-Ukraine War Changed Terminology

Steven McGrath

Saturday, October 25, 10:30–11:30 AM

Session description: After more than three years of intense fighting, the war in Ukraine has resulted in numerous consequences for diplomatic and military affairs, as well as for the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians in harm’s way. Nonetheless, English-language media has struggled with terminology for discussing even the technical aspects of battlefield weapons and tactics, let alone the deep, distinct Russian and Ukrainian cultural contexts involved in home-front mobilization and information warfare. In this session, attendees will discuss various approaches for conveying wartime concepts to a general audience in English as they explore terminology with potential applications in various translation fields.

(119) Three Paths to Publishing Professional Literary Translations

Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Saturday, October 25, 1:30–2:30 PM

Session description: No literary translator can succeed without publishing their work, but most translator certification programs teach nothing about publishing. That means too many highly skilled translators never pursue a career in book translation. This session will dispel some of the mystery around the publishing process through case studies of three recent translations published by different routes: a teen romance self-published by the author, short fiction published by a tiny university press, and literary fiction commissioned by a prestigious imprint of another university publisher. We’ll explore specific differences in process, cost, editing, marketing, and more in each publishing scenario.

(138) Court Interpreting – The Translation Side of It

Ana Biškup

Saturday, October 25, 2:40–3:40 PM

Any court interpreting job, whether consecutive or translation, will always include analyzing relevant documents and making sure to use accurate terminology. This session will highlight the importance of research for a court interpreter that goes beyond what any available Artificial Intelligence tool could offer. This includes knowledge of consular affairs, relevant historical sources, and comparative analysis of the source and target language. It also implies using consistent terminology that conveys the correct meaning in the target language.

SLD Annual Dinner

Thursday, October 23, 7:00-9:00PM

Join us for a delightful dinner featuring dishes from Mediterranean, Italian, and Mexican cuisines. We will head out to Servia, located near the famous Faneuil Hall Marketplace, on Thursday evening between the job fair and After Hours Cafe. Servia offers a buffet of dishes to serve various tastes (salad, ratatouille, grilled chicken, pork tacos).

Location: Servia (https://serviaboston.com/)

126 State St, Boston, MA 02109

Guests will pay for their own food, but registration ensures we can reserve the right number of tables. To register, please contact Assistant Administrator Natalia Postrigan at divisionSLD@atanet.org.

Attending the conference? Consider writing for SlavFile Online, the division blog! Doing a writeup of an SLD-related session (or any session if it really made an impression!) is a great way to collect your thoughts and impressions, extend the reach of knowledge shared at the conference, and raise your own profile. If it’s your first time attending, you can also share general impressions of the conference for a Newcomer’s Column. If interested, contact editor Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya at eugenia@sokolskayatranslations.com.

Interview with ATA66 Distinguished Speaker Robert Chandler

September 8, 2025

SLD DS Robert Chandler reading Platonov's novel Chevengur At ATA66 in Boston this year, SLD has invited literary translator and translation teacher Robert Chandler as its Distinguished Speaker. Robert began learning Russian at 15, and when he was 20, he spent a year as an exchange scholar in Voronezh, where Andrey Platonov was born and Osip Mandelstam was exiled. He has translated a wide variety of works, including by Sappho, Nadezhda Teffi, Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Grossman, and the Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov. He has edited three anthologies of Russian poetry, Russian short stories, and Russian magic tales for Penguin Classics. He has also taught translation workshops in London for many years. Before deciding to translate full-time, he worked for eight years as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, a valuable discipline involving breath, voice, and movement. In Boston, he will be presenting two sessions:

“Changing Attitudes to Translating from Russian” on Friday, October 24, at 2:40 PM, about the shifting legacy and interpretation of the classic translations by Constance Garnett and what that reveals about attitudes toward translation
“Learning from My Mistakes” on Saturday, October 25, at 10:30 AM, focusing on misunderstandings of verbal aspects

If you haven’t already registered for ATA66, don’t wait: early bird registration ends Sunday, September 14!

What brought you to Russian in the first place, and what motivated you to stick with it? What was your path toward translating professionally and teaching translation workshops?

I was fifteen years old. I was very good at Latin and Greek but did not want to continue with what, at the time, I contemptuouly thought of as “dead languages.” And we had an excellent Russian teacher at my school – kind, patient and dedicated.

You have been teaching translation workshops for many years. What do you find rewarding about teaching translators, and what do you find challenging?

Teaching is rewarding in many ways. It makes me focus more intently than ever on each word. And there are few subjects where a complete beginner may come up with truly helpful contributions. If I were teaching engineering or astrophysics, it is unlikely that a beginner would come up with something I have never thought of. But in a translation workshop it happens all the time. There are often thousands of choices to be made, and I am never going to think of all the different possibilities myself. Real collaboration is very enjoyable.

In your opinion, what makes a good translation? Is the ability to translate well something that can be taught, and how do you go about imparting it to your students?

What makes a translation good or bad is no different from what makes any piece of writing good or bad. As for imparting the ability to translate, I don’t really know. All I can do is encourage people to focus on every word of the original – and every letter of every word. And if something doesn’t make sense – to ask questions. And then to read their translation aloud to someone who does not know the original. That is the real test: does it or does it not convey real intellectual and/or emotional meaning to the listener?

I’m very far from literary translation, so I’m mystified by the process of choosing what gets translated. When reading foreign-language works, do you ever come across something that speaks to you and makes you want to translate it? Is there any pattern to the types of works that inspire you in this way? Or do publishers come to you with something they want translated?

Every translator’s experience is likely to be different. For the main part, I myself have made my own choices and proposed them to publishers. I choose works I believe in, works that I can re-read many times with pleasure. And if it is a long project, I need to feel confident that I can live for months or years in that particular author’s world.

When translating, what’s your approach to elements of the text that draw on cultural knowledge the Russian reader would have, but an English reader wouldn’t?

As with nearly all translation questions, it depends on the individual case. Sometimes a five or ten page introduction may be the best way. Sometimes end notes may be more helpful. Sometimes, for the sake of clarity, it may be possible to slip a few extra words into the main text.

I know that picking a favorite translation project can be a bit like choosing a favorite child, but do any of your translations stand out to you as particularly memorable in some way – positively or negatively?

Hard to say. I feel a great warmth towards Teffi. Her wit, grace and resilience are remarkable. It is a joy to be in her company. I am also deeply moved by the number of people who have written to me, unprompted to say that reading Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate has changed their lives.

Slovo Episode 36: John Riedl and Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya

August 14, 2025

The SLD podcast, Slovo, has a new episode! Host Halla Goins chats with Russian-to-English ATA exam graders Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya and John Riedl about the session they presented last year at ATA65 in Portland, entitled “I can’t place the accent: Identifying the characteristic traits of machine translation.” Eugenia and John share how they approached the contentious topic of AI in translation, how they drew on their background as graders and their fellow SLD members to gather data on perceptions of human and machine translations, and what they and their audience learned during the session in Portland.

This session has also been reviewed for this blog by Christine Pawlowski, and the slides for it are available in the Slavic Languages Presentation Archive.

You can listen now on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/atasld/episode-36-eugenia-tietz-sokolskaya-and-john-riedl or look for this and past episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify.

Join SLD at the Annual Dinner in Boston!

August 13, 2025

Thursday, October 23 | 7:00PM-9:00PM

Join us for a delightful dinner featuring dishes from Mediterranean, Italian, and Mexican cuisines. We will head out to Servia, located near the famous Faneuil Hall Marketplace, on Thursday evening between the job fair and After Hours Cafe. There, we will be offered a buffet of dishes to serve various tastes (salad, ratatouille, grilled chicken, pork tacos), non-alcoholic drinks, and table wine.

Location: Servia (https://serviaboston.com/)
126 State St, Boston, MA 02109

Cost: $55 per person (includes tax, gratuity, non-alcoholic drinks, and table wine while supplies last)
Guests will have the option to order alcoholic beverages out of pocket.

Space is limited! Reserve your seat by October 16th or as space allows.

To register, please contact Natalia Postrigan at divisionSLD@atanet.org.

Division Roundup: June 2025

June 25, 2025

Natalia Postrigan, SLD Assistant Administrator

Registration for the ATA 66th Annual Conference in Boston, MA, is open now! Head to the conference website for updates on registration and the agenda for what promises to be an exceptional gathering of translation and interpretation professionals.

The conference kicks off on Wednesday, October 22nd with:

AST (Advanced Skills & Training) sessions
In-person certification exam
Welcome reception at 5:30 PM
Divisions & Special Interest Group (SIG) meet & greet, 7-8 PM

Over the following three days, attendees can enjoy multiple sessions alongside exciting networking opportunities including division events, a job fair, after-hours open mic café, book & resource fair, game night, and the annual ATA members meeting. The conference concludes on Saturday evening with a closing session (5:15-5:45 PM) followed by the legendary annual dance party.

SLD Annual Dinner: Our team is currently working on picking a restaurant. Stay tuned for updates! If you can recommend a great venue, please contact Natalia at divisionSLD@atanet.org.

Get Inspired: ATA65 Session Reviews

Need motivation to start planning for Boston? Read Conferences and Marketing on Stephen Rifkind’s blog for ideas on how to maximize the economic benefit of participating in a professional conference.

You can find reviews of sessions presented by SLD members in previous conferences on the SLD blog. For example, “On Interpreting for Russian-Speaking LGBTQ+ Individuals“ (presented by Olga Bogatova and reviewed by Julia LaVilla-Nossova).

Distinguished Speaker Announcement

We are thrilled to announce that our Distinguished Speaker will be Robert Chandler, a literary translator and poet with over 50 years of experience, including highly acclaimed translations of Vasily Grossman and Teffi.

Mr. Chandler began learning Russian at age 15 and spent a transformative year at 20 as a British Council Exchange scholar in Voronezh – the birthplace of Andrey Platonov and the city where Osip Mandelstam was exiled. It was there that he first discovered these writers and began his lifelong journey translating Russian poetry and prose. Currently based in London, he runs translation workshops and mentors emerging translators. We’re honored to welcome him from England and hope you’ll join us in Boston to celebrate his remarkable achievements.

Community Building Initiatives

Polish Certification Study Group

SLD member Katarzyna Kawalec is launching a peer practice group for the Polish<>English ATA certification exam. Inspired by Maria Guzenko and Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya’s primarily Russian-language study group of past years, Katarzyna is building a community for feedback exchange on practice texts and mutual support throughout the certification journey. If you’re planning to take the PL>EN or EN>PL exam, contact Katarzyna at kontakt@kawalec-tlumacz-przysiegly.pl.

Turkic Languages SIG

SLD members Shelley Fairweather-Vega and Jamila DelMistro are working on starting a Special Interest Group for Turkic languages within ATA. To learn more or volunteer as a moderator, contact Jamila (jamdmistro@gmail.com) or Shelley (translation@fairvega.com).

Continuing the conversation about AI in translation

The impact of AI on translation remains a hot topic. At ATA65 in Portland, Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya and John Riedl presented “I Can’t Place the Accent: Identifying the Characteristic Traits of Computer Translation,” which compared output from newer AI/LLM models to that of older machine translation and human translators. Read Christine Pawlowski’s review on the SLD blog, and access the presentation slides in our Slavic Languages Presentation Archive.

Coming Soon: Slovo podcast editor Halla Goins is preparing an interview with Eugenia and John. Catch up on previous Slovo episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify.

Share Your Voice

Want to contribute to our community discussions? Contact Halla about podcast opportunities or Eugenia about blog contributions and address any general questions and comments to SLD Administrator Steven McGrath and Assistant Administrator Natalia Postrigan by reaching out to divisionSLD@atanet.org.

ATA65 Review: On Interpreting for Russian-Speaking LGBTQ+ Individuals

March 17, 2025

A review of On Interpreting for Russian-Speaking LGBTQ+ Individuals, presented by Olga Bogatova at ATA65

Review by Julia LaVilla-Nossova

Finding a session that was not related to AI in translation or interpreting at the ATA Conference was a nice change of pace. It was therefore refreshing to come across the session titled “Interpreting for Russian-Speaking LGBTQ+ Individuals” by Ms. Olga Bogatova among the offerings of the 65^th ATA Conference in Portland, Oregon. What can be better than learning about something new and practical and, most importantly, related to the development of languages – the love of our lives!

In her lively and well-illustrated presentation, Ms. Bogatova examined various LGBTQ+ reference terms (such as queer, transgender, questioning, ally, pansexual, etc.) and their newness. In addition, she guided the audience in understanding the language barriers that LGBTQ+ asylum seekers encounter when they initiate asylum claims and the process that leads to obtaining legal status in the United States. Ms. Bogatova mentioned the well-founded fear LGBTQ+ persons have of being persecuted for belonging to a certain social group and how that impacts what words should be used to characterize their situations. She also described the asylum interview structure and provided information about general and special questions one needs to answer during an interview. Her presentation (which is available on the SLD website) included a table with a fascinating comparison between the LGBTQ+ situations in Ukraine and Russia. While this complex and sensitive topic is of great interest even of itself outside of making asylum applications, using appropriate terminology and forms of expression can be determinative in deciding the outcome of any particular case; therefore, especially in this context, Ms. Bogatova emphasized that one needs to be very careful in choosing precise English and Russian equivalents for the phrases used in connection with LGBTQ+ individuals.

This made me think about a different, albeit related, subject – translating Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the Department of State prepares and publishes every year. The annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, also known as the Human Rights Reports, cover internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements, including sections on LGBTQ+ rights. Acts of Congress mandate the annual submission of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices to Congress. These important reports serve as guidance to help craft U.S. foreign policy that bolsters respect for human rights around the globe (additional information about the Human Rights reports, Trafficking in Persons Reports, and Religious Freedom Reports may be found on the official site of the Department of State). These reports are translated into several dozen foreign languages to make them available to people in various countries around the globe. They are presented to Congress on an annual basis for its committees to pass decisions regarding granting countries most favored nation status or, on the contrary, putting countries on sanctions lists due to poor human rights environments. Information about the most recent of these reports can be viewed here.

One of the most important emphases of Ms. Bogatova’s presentation is the idea that language is a dynamic entity. These changes are often driven by societal evolution – therefore, for translators to be relevant, they must always pay special attention to this societal evolution in order to establish correct equivalences for the languages they translate. And this makes the research conducted by Ms. Bogatova in the LGBTQ+ milieu and her sharing of it especially valuable.

Julia LaVilla-Nossova received her M.A. at Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has been working as a freelance interpreter and translator in the United States for more than thirty years. She has been a staff translator at the Department of State Language Services since 2011.

ATA65 Review: I Can’t Place the Accent

March 5, 2025

A Review of: I Can’t Place the Accent: Identifying the Characteristics Traits of Computer Translation, presented by Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya, CT and John Riedl, CT on Friday, November 1 at ATA65

Review by Christine Pawlowski; slides from the presentation available in the Slavic Languages Presentation Archive

I do not feel threatened by AI, and this is not because I think my language skills are superior to the machine. Perhaps it is mostly that my monthly social security check allows me to lighten my workload to a manageable volume. And maybe it is also that I am technologically challenged (being provided with a modem to do my work for FBIS in the 90’s was a huge step).

In my very limited experience with AI projects, I have enjoyed “beating” the machine, as when the AI translation of the word “wygodny” in Polish, which may be translated variously as “convenient” or “comfortable,” resulted in an English version of an apartment advertisement that sported a comfortable bedroom armoire—perhaps a magician’s prop?

Well before the October/November ATA65 Conference, we received a survey from Eugenia and John in which we were asked to select the best translation of several Russian texts, but we were not told who (or what) did the translation. When we arrived at the session, we learned that the translations had been done by Deepl, an NMT (Neural Machine Translation) service launched in 2017; ChatGPT 3.5, an LLM (Large Language Model) service launched in 2022; and a few different humans.

Given its timeliness, it is not surprising that generative AI figured prominently in many of the conference sessions. John and Eugenia’s session dovetailed beautifully with the subject of Holly Mikkelson’s Wednesday training for ATA graders: Prescriptive and Descriptive Language. In a nutshell, we investigated how we really speak.

In both Holly’s presentation and that of our Slavists, we looked for the “tell”—a clue or indication that reveals information or suggests a hidden truth. All translators—human or generative AI–have these tells. To find them, we looked to cohesion, fluency, syntax and terminology.

From the survey results and our on-site bantering about some of the linguistic conundrums, we learned that:

ChatGPT’s renditions will be grammatical and flow deceptively well but may not be accurate.
DeepL is easier to peg as a computer translation.
Human translators take liberties, which can be a blessing or a curse (hence the dangers of prescriptivism and the difficulties encountered in evaluating translation).

The good news disseminated by Eugenia and John is that humans can achieve higher quality by:

recasting or rewriting clauses
splitting or combining sentences
choosing subject-appropriate terms
substituting phrases for words and vice versa

This list suggests that skills in manipulating syntax are critical. The bad news is that humans also misspell words, misuse collocations and struggle with job fatigue.

Comparatively speaking, for the three passages we studied in the session, in every case ChatGPT came out on top of DeepL, which sticks very close to the original syntax, even to the point of unreadability. In two of the three examples, the human translation won.

Discussions of AI are ubiquitous—on Linkedin, in journals and magazines. An opinion piece in the latest edition of the journal First Things offers the suggestion that society can resist the techno-tyranny trend, which is making us miserable, by demanding human-to-human businesses because “People…will pay for happiness.” There is some nostalgia for the way things were before the modem and the ease of searching the web for the contextually right word—but not much, in my opinion.

Christine Pawlowski is a freelance Polish and Russian translator with an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Indiana University, Bloomington. She is retired from teaching elementary-school music and delights in being Busia to her 17 grandchildren and in directing and accompanying her church choir. She is ATA-certified for Polish-into-English and an ATA Certification grader for that language pair. She may be contacted at pawlow@verizon.net.

SLD Announcements: Networking Zoom and ATA66 Deadline Extended

March 3, 2025

Networking Gathering on Zoom: March 9th

Please join SLD the upcoming quarterly gathering on Zoom. Come chat with Slavic Languages Division colleagues about what’s going on in life and in business. The past meetups have offered members a valuable chance to catch up with each other. We hope that this one will give attendees a sense of connection and motivation going forward.

Grab something from the fridge and meet us on Zoom from 3-5 PM EDT on Sunday, March 9th. Latecomers are welcome. Attendance will be limited to 100 attendees, but this has not been a problem in the past.

To register, go to https://tinyurl.com/cdj9z3rt. With questions, please email SLD AssistantAdministrator Natalia Postrigan (postrigann09@gmail.com) before the event. We hope to see you there!

Proposal Deadline for ATA66 Extended to March 10th

Call for Speakers for ATA66 - Submission Deadline March 10

Speak at ATA66 – Proposals Due March 3

February 18, 2025

Call for Speakers for ATA66 - Submission Deadline March 3

Call for Speakers – Submit Your Proposal by March 3!

Speaking at the ATA Annual Conference is a challenging and rewarding opportunity. You will gain recognition as an industry leader by sharing your expertise.

Submit Your Proposal by March 3, 2025!

Book Your Hotel Now!

ATA66 will be held at The Westin Seaport – Boston. ATA66 rates at the Westin are available until September 29, 2025, or as space allows.

Hotel Reservations are now available!

Visa Information

You may need a visa to travel to the U.S. We encourage you to make the necessary arrangements as soon as possible. Please see the ATA66 website for additional information.

Review visa information now!

Need More Information?

If you have any questions, please contact:

Cat Kenol

Senior Professional Development and Events Coordinator

cat@atanet.org

More ATA66 Information

Notes from the Administrative Underground

December 13, 2024

Steven McGrath, SLD Administrator

At long last, I am reaching out to you in the first administrator’s column on the SLD Blog. I acknowledge that it would have been ideal to update you on events in the division sooner, especially since this has been an eventful year for the ATA and SLD, but, as is fitting at the year’s end, I can now report to you a summary of challenges overcome and successes for our membership.

The first success I’d like to mention is the SLD website and blog where you are reading this column, which is now our division’s primary organ. After some technical difficulties earlier in the year, website administrator and blog editor Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya has started to right the ship. Starting in May, she oversaw the first member-submitted articles on the blog, a series on translation quality by Mikhail Yashchuk and a guide to generative AI by Viktoryia Baum. The blog is now publishing the post-conference staples of session reviews and newcomer first impressions, as well as administrative updates, announcements, and job opportunities. Kudos to Eugenia and to all SLD Blog contributors!

In speaking of the conference, it was a pleasure seeing many of you at ATA65 in Portland. Special thanks to Eugenia, John Riedl, Olga Bogatova and Shelley Fairweather-Vega for presenting under the Slavic Languages topic category. Thank you as well to SLD members who presented under other topics – I tried to attend them all when the schedule would allow.

Preparations for ATA66 in Boston are already well underway, so I encourage you all to consider presenting sessions. The call for proposals typically goes out in January, so start brainstorming now! SLD’s leadership council has already decided on a nominee to be the Susan Greiss Lecturer in Boston: British literary translator Robert Chandler, who has made an incredible mark on the profession over the course of his distinguished career – including his highly praised translations of the works of Vasily Grossman, to name only one of many authors. He has been on the SLD’s short list of speakers for several years now, and both Paul Gallagher and Nora Favorov, respectively our incoming and emerita Greiss Lecture sherpas, endorsed him in a competitive process.

The past year was quite productive for SLD volunteers. Halla Bearden has been steadily recording interviews for the Slovo podcast, notably with Viktoryia Baum concerning, among other things, her experience with NASA, and also with the Language Technology Division administrative team Daniel Sebesta and Bridget Hylak. An interview with Polish>English literary translator Phillip Boehm has been ready for some time and the link should go out to SLD members shortly. SLD’s social media moderators – Mikhail Yashchuk for the LinkedIn group, Anna Livermore for the Facebook group, and Julia Thornton for the Google listserv – helped spread the word on various opportunities and requests made known to the division.

Moving the administrator’s column to the SLD Blog seems a bit like the start of a new era, and in some ways this reflects changes in the ATA and in the profession as a whole. The sustaining force for any organization in times of change is the energy of its members. Next year, the columns will become regular again, we will have our own Greiss Lecturer at the conference, and there will be new initiatives in new formats. In 2024, a year of transition marked by staff turnover and technological changes at ATA headquarters, we were fortunate to have an enthusiastic body of volunteers who helped us connect with each other and stay abreast of the industry. Thank you all! I look forward to working with you again in 2025!