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SLAVIC LANGUAGES DIVISION DINNER

September 16, 2017

2017 ATA 58th Annual Conference—Washington DC

Date/Time: Thursday, October 26, 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Establishment: Meze restaurant
www.mezedc.com

Address/Ph: 2437 18th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009
(202) 797-0017

Meze Restaurant is in Washington, DC’s Adams-Morgan District. Located only one-half mile from the conference hotel, the restaurant is easily accessed on foot. The establishment has been in business since 2001 and specializes in Turkish meze dishes. According to the restaurant, meze dishes “are intended for sharing, and offer diners the opportunity to experience multiple flavors in one meal.” The Division’s event will be held in Meze’s private Gold Room with a seating capacity for 50 guests.

Please join other Division members and guests for an enjoyable evening. Converse with friends and colleagues, make new acquaintances, and welcome Division newcomers.


MEZE ELEVEN-ITEM TASTING DINNER MENU


First Course

Vegan Coban Salatasi (*GF/NF/DF) Shepherd’s salad: diced fresh cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, and green peppers, dressed with olive oil, parsley, and lemon juice.

Second Course

Vegan Humus (GF/NF/DF) Chickpeas & tahini paste seasoned with garlic and olive oil.
Vegetarian Mucver (NF) Savory zucchini pancakes mixed with feta cheese served with tomato and yogurt sauces.
Vegan Dolma (GF/DF) Grape leaves stuffed with caramelized onions, rice, and pine nuts and cooked over a gentle fire.
Vegetarian Sigara Böregi (NF) Turkey’s popular crispy cigar-shaped pastry stuffed with feta cheese, parsley, and dill.
Vegan Mercimek Kofte (NF/DF) Veggie lentil cakes with bulgur, onions. and parsley.

Third Course

Köfte (NF/DF) Grilled Turkish-style beef and lamb meatballs, seasoned with parsley and onions.
Fistikli Adana (DF) Ground lamb and beef mixed with pistachio and grilled on a skewer, served with ezme salad.
Tavuk Kebab (GF/NF/DF) Marinated grilled chicken breast on a skewer, served with fresh tomato relish.
Icli Patates Kofte Potato shells stuffed with ground lamb, beef, parsley, and walnuts, served with yogurt sauce.

Dessert

Baklava Delicate leaves of filo layered with walnut, with homemade lemon syrup.

*GF/Gluten Free; NF/Nut Free; DF/Dairy Free

Dietary Options: Vegetarian and nut- and gluten-free options are indicated in the menu. If required, a separate vegetarian menu can be made available upon request. Please coordinate any other special dietary requirements with Fred Grasso (frdgrasso@satx.rr.com; 210-638-9669) no later than Wednesday, 10/25/2017.

Beverages: Iced tea included; non-alcoholic and alcoholic available beverages available for purchase.

TICKET PURCHASE

Ticket cost is $50.00 per person (includes iced tea, sales tax (10%), and gratuities (20%)). Tickets can be purchased by PayPal (preferred) or check received not later than Friday, 10/20/2017.

NOTE: If a vegetarian or gluten-free menu option is required, please so indicate when purchasing your ticket.

Payment via PayPal: Access the PayPal website (www.paypal.com) and select the “Send Money” tab. Enter the amount ($50 per person) and choose the “Friends and Family” option. In Step 2, use the following e-mail address: frdgrasso@yahoo.com.

Check payment: Mail a check for the appropriate amount made payable to “Fred Grasso” at the following address:

Fred Grasso
14414 Indian Woods
San Antonio, TX 78249-2054

NOTE: Provided space is available, a limited number of last-minute tickets can be purchased—cash only—during the ATA welcoming reception on Wednesday, 10/25/2017.

Filed Under: ATA58, SLD Networking Tagged With: conference

How to Tackle an ATA Conference

September 12, 2017

People milling about.

By Natalie Mainland

Photo from Unsplash by Daria Shevtsova

It’s that time of year again! We’ve come back from vacation, summer is drawing to a close, and translators across the country are wondering, “Should I go to the ATA conference this year?”

If you’ve never been, and you’re on the fence, perhaps my experience as a newcomer to last year’s conference can shed some light on it for you.

I have to admit, I wasn’t sure about attending the 2016 ATA conference. I have a degree in translation and have been translating for a few years now, so I didn’t know how useful it would be, and I am—like I think many translators are—extremely introverted. Given the choice between getting a root canal or chatting up a room full of people I don’t know, I’ll take the root canal, please. However, I keep in touch with my former classmates, and not a single one of them has said that attending the conference was a waste of time or resources. I wasn’t sure if going would be helpful, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

What next? Well, my personal philosophy is to always have a plan. Once I’d decided to attend the conference I immediately started planning so I could get the most out of it. I had a look at the first-timer’s guide in the ATA’s “Savvy Newcomer” blog, downloaded the conference app, and immediately began organizing my schedule. By the time I landed in San Francisco, I had each day planned for (supposedly) optimum effectiveness.

Educational sessions held throughout the day are organized into subject-specific tracks and are a major part of the conference. I’m trying to expand my business, so I planned to attend sessions in the “Independent Contractor” track. These were great, and I picked up tips and tricks for getting more work and running my business smoothly, but by the second afternoon I was feeling burnt out…so I decided to change things up. I went to a few medical sessions, even though they focused on language pairs other than mine. Were they helpful? You bet! Although the target language examples didn’t apply to me, I still learned strategies to improve my medical translations. Overall, I’m pleased with how much I learned, and in the months after the conference I even put that knowledge to use when I worked on a large medical project.

The other major part of the conference is networking, and that’s the part that worried me. I went to the Welcome Celebration on the first night, where everyone from the ATA divisions can mingle and learn more about one another, and I honestly felt a bit like a deer in the headlights. However, the whole process became markedly easier when I realized one obvious thing: everyone else is here to network, too!  They want to meet new people and talk with them, and all the people that I spoke with were wonderfully welcoming. After making it through that first hectic evening, everything else—such as talking to agency reps in the Exhibit Hall—was no problem at all.

Now for the big question: do I think going to the conference was worth it? I absolutely do. I picked up new skills and met other people working in my field. This profession can be a solitary one, and having actual, face-to-face contact with other humans was, for me, one of the best parts of the entire experience.

So, now that I’ve (hopefully) convinced you to go, what are my suggestions for your first conference?

  • Go. I was on the fence about going, but I’m glad I did. Although I’m no neophyte, I still learned a lot of things that will help me improve my craft. I also met a multitude of wonderful and interesting people, and found new prospects for my work.
  • Leave. Just because you’re at the conference doesn’t mean you need to attend every single event. In fact, that’s a good way to wear yourself out. At the conference in San Francisco, none of the early morning events made my ‘must-do’ list, so every morning I took a walk along the bay instead. Not only did I get fresh air and exercise, I also got a chance to take a break from being ‘on’ all the time. This helped me recharge and gave me the energy to do all the other things that I wanted to do.
  • Participate. If you’re introverted, never fear! There are plenty of ways for you to make connections without having to walk into a crowd of strangers and start cold. I signed up for the “Buddies Welcome Newbies” program, which partnered me with an experienced translator and conference-goer (hi Jen!) who showed me the ropes. She answered my questions, introduced me to people in the division, and was a very welcome familiar face in a sea of strangers. I also attended division events. The great thing about this is that people in the division know each other and know that you’re new, and they really do go out of their way to be welcoming. My worries of being the silent person standing awkwardly in the corner never materialized.
  • Ditch the plan. Or rather, be willing to ditch the plan. I had my entire conference schedule laid out before I stepped off the plane. Yet, some of the best experiences happened when I deviated from that schedule—skipping a mass networking event to go to dinner with some newfound colleagues, for example.

All in all, my first conference was a resounding success. I’m glad I went, and I would encourage anyone else to do the same.


The ATA 58th Annual Conference is fast approaching! This year’s conference is in Washington, DC, on October 25-28, 2017. Register by September 15th to take advantage of Early Registration Rates.

Natalie Mainland holds an M.A. in Translation from Kent State University. She currently works as a freelancer, translating Russian into English (with a focus on medical texts) as well as Finnish into English. She can be reached at natalie@mainlandtranslation.com. This post was adapted and updated by the author from an article that appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of SlavFile.

Filed Under: ATA58, Networking, SlavFile Tagged With: ATA, conference, networking, newcomers

Coming Out of the Shadow: Review of Madeline G. Levine’s Susana Greiss Lecture [from SlavFile]

August 31, 2017

Reviewed by Christine Pawlowski

Reprinted from SlavFile

Each year at the American Translators Association Annual Conference, the Susana Greiss lecture brings an eminent guest lecturer to speak upon some aspect of translation/interpretation related to the Slavic languages. ATA’s Polonists owe a debt of gratitude to Nora Favorov, who initially reached out to Madeline Levine, the 2016 speaker. Dr. Levine’s address, “In the Shadow of Russian: Forty Years of Translating Polish Literature,” proved a seminal event: Dr. Levine became the first speaker in the nineteen-year history of the Greiss lecture to address a Polish subject.

Graduates of Slavic Studies programs in the United States have often encountered the tendency to categorize the various Slavic literatures as “major” or “minor,” with Russian at the top. In 1963, Dr. Levine, a Russian specialist at Harvard, chose to study Polish as her secondary literature requirement. It turned out to be a serendipitous decision; the need for scholarly attention to and good literary translation of Polish was extreme. In fact, an American colleague of Dr. Levine’s once greeted her with the question, “Is there really such a thing as Polish literature?” Learning “at breakneck speed” to read Polish, Dr. Levine began a lifelong career translating this “minor” literature.

Dr. Levine’s early work was made more difficult by the lack of critical resources available. (She singled out Kridl’s “stupefyingly dull,” blue-covered, pictureless survey.) This situation was radically transformed by the publication of Miłosz’s 1969 work, The History of Polish Literature, which helped to provide a cultural and historical context for Polish literature in a “readable, even exciting” way. As I pulled out my 40-year-old copy of this book, heavily annotated in the early ‘70s, I found myself in wholehearted agreement. Miłosz’s work, with its determination to “avoid… scholarly dryness” and “preserve… a trace of a smile” must have created something of a Lazarus experience when it first appeared—Polish literature was alive after all.

Among other groundbreaking efforts for Polish literature in English, Dr. Levine explored the “labors of love” undertaken by Celina Wieniewska and Barbara Vedder. These pioneering women translated the works of Bruno Schulz and Tadeusz Borowski, two unknown writers whose influence now reaches worldwide. Dr. Levine has produced new translations of these works, and her translation of Bruno Schulz’s prose fiction is soon to be published by Northwestern University Press.

A primary focus of Dr. Levine’s work has been Jewish-themed literature in the Polish language. In translating works about the Holocaust and in her work as a university professor, she has delved into the question: “How is it possible that such horror can be captured and transformed into works of artistic beauty?” She has also taken on another wartime subject: her re-translation of Białoszewski’s Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising was released by the New York Review of Books in their Classics series.

Dr. Levine has had her share of good fortune: at a very young age, she obtained her first position as Assistant Professor at the City University of New York “sight unseen” after a phone interview. She enjoyed the stability of her position in the University of North Carolina’s Slavic Languages and Literatures Department (now Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures). However, she has also experienced the vicissitudes of the publishing industry and, as a result, seems to have developed the patience of a saint! After 40 years of sharing an unknown literary culture with readers and students, Dr. Levine leaves her audience with the firm conviction that she has only just begun. When I asked her at our communal lunch: “So what still needs to be translated?” She responded: “Everything!”

I encourage you to read excerpts from Dr. Levine’s talk on the next page to learn more about the fascinating and, at times, frustrating professional journey of a “student-teacher-scholar-translator.”

Christine Pawlowski is a freelance Polish and Russian translator with an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Indiana University, “Tsvetograd.” She is retired from teaching elementary music and enjoys being called “Busia” by her 10 grandchildren. She is ATA certified (Polish-English). She may be reached at pawlow@verizon.net.

end of SlavFile reprint

This article first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of SlavFile. We invite you to check out the full publication for the excerpts from Dr. Levine’s talk referenced in the review, as well as a follow-up by Nora Favorov, “The List,” about the list of pre-1945 works in various Slavic languages that still need to be translated.

Going to this year’s ATA conference in Washington, DC? Then we encourage you to attend this year’s Susana Greiss lecture! “The Long and Winding Road to Becoming a Presidential Interpreter,” presented by Nikolai Sorokin, will take place on Thursday, October 26, at 3:30 PM. Nikolai Sorokin will also present a session on interpreting on Friday, October 27, at 10:00 AM, titled “Wow! How Am I Going to Interpret That?”. We hope to see you there!

Filed Under: Annual Conferences, Literary, SlavFile, Translation Tagged With: literary, Polish, SlavFile, translation

Welcome Celebration at ATA 58th Annual Conference

August 22, 2017

Welcome Celebration
Wednesday, October 25, 5:30pm – 7:00pm

ATA welcomes you to Washington, DC!

This is the event that starts it all. Everyone you hope to see and meet will be there. Reunite with friends and colleagues, and mingle with this year’s speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors.

Here’s your chance to get to know ATA’s Divisions! Divisions are professional interest groups providing specialty- and language-specific networking. Connect with fellow Division members, leadership, and newcomers.

New this year: Meet the Candidates! Engage with this year’s candidates before you vote on Thursday.

Filed Under: ATA Networking, ATA58, SLD Networking Tagged With: ATA, networking, SLD

T&I Advocacy Day at the ATA 58th Annual Conference

August 7, 2017

If you plan to attend ATA58, consider participating in the T&I Advocacy Day on Wednesday before the conference.

“Learn about the Federal issues that impact language services professionals, challenges to and opportunities for growth of the profession, and best practices for advocacy before heading to Capitol Hill. This all-day advocacy event is complete with training sessions, collaborative working groups, and meetings with Congressional offices and Executive Branch agencies!”

You can find additional information here: https://www.atanet.org/conf/2017/advocacy/.

Please note that number of spaces is limited – sign up early!

Filed Under: ATA58 Tagged With: ATA58

A [Better] CAT Breed for the Slavic Soul

July 12, 2017

A review by Jennifer Guernsey

Aha! I said to myself upon spying this presentation among the 2013 ATA Conference’s offerings. At last, I will find out which elusive CAT tool actually does a good job with Slavic languages! I had tried several tools, but hadn’t yet run across one that was able to accommodate the peculiarities of my language, Russian, particularly when it came to all of the inflected forms.

Alas, it took no more than two slides for me to be sorely disappointed – not in Konstantin Lakshin’s presentation, but in the sad news that there is, in fact, no such thing as a good CAT tool for Slavic languages. Or, at least, there isn’t yet.

Despite my initial dismay at the news, I fortunately stayed to hear the entire presentation. It can be briefly summarized as follows: A combination of technical, linguistic, and particularly market forces have conspired to make CAT tools what they are today: decidedly Slavic-unfriendly. The good news is that many of the pieces needed to improve them already exist, and it’s up to us to put pressure on developers and companies to make use of those pieces.

The reason it took the better part of an hour to provide this information is that the presentation included a lot of very interesting history, examples, and details. It really was quite educational, at least for me.

Kostya started by outlining the history of computer use in translation, and the development of CATs in particular. He began with a discussion of a 1966 government-funded report by the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee on the use of computer technology in translation. The gist of this report as it applies to our CAT tool discussion is that machine translation doesn’t work well, but that something vaguely resembling what we now consider a CAT tool, with a similar workflow, might be useful. This pseudo-CAT workflow used the punch card operator – i.e., a human being – as a morphology analyzer. This is interesting, because one of our principal complaints about today’s CAT tools is that they do not have morphology analysis capability. The report also compared use of this early form of CAT with a standard translation process, and found that while it might save some time, its primary advantage was that it “relieve[d] the translator of the unproductive and tiresome search for the correct technical terms.” The report emphasized that compiling the proper termbase was really the key to an effective translation tool.

In the decade or so following the report, the emphasis in computer-assisted translation was thus on building termbanks. In other words, the focus was on words and phrases – small subsegments, if you will – and these termbanks were generally compiled for specific large organizations operating in specific contexts and were not readily transferrable to other entities.

The philosophy that drives current CAT tools – the “recycling” of previously translated texts – emerged fully only in 1979, though large corporations had begun exploring this starting in the late 1960s. This philosophy was in great part a result of the requirements and technologies in place at the time. In the 1960s, for instance, the world was a less integrated place, and there was limited control over the input side – the source text content, editing, and so on. The example Kostya provided was scientific texts coming out of the USSR that were being translated. Fast-forward to the 1980s and 1990s: large corporations have end-to-end control of processes and utilize translation (and translation technology) for their own documents. In this latter context, being able to retrieve and reuse entire sentences made a lot of sense. Note also that in the prevailing markets in which the early CAT tools developed, the primary languages were not highly inflected.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the first commercially available CAT tools appeared: IBM Translation Manager II, XL8, Eurolang, and two still-familiar tools, Trados and Star Transit. Trados, in particular, started life as a language services provider trying to get an IBM contract.

The mid- to late 1990s saw the emergence of tools being created ostensibly for translators: Déjà Vu, Memo Q, and WordFast. However, rather than being fundamentally different from their larger predecessors, these often turned out to be essentially smaller, less functional versions of Trados. This era also witnessed the development of smaller commercial players, such as WordFisher (a set of Word macros) and in-house tools such as LionBridge, Foreign Desk, and Rainbow (specifically for software localization), as well as Omega T, the first open-source CAT tool.

That brings us to the present day, the 2000s, when there are too many CAT tools to list, and there have been many mergers and acquisitions among them. However, NONE of the existing tools can be considered very useful for Slavic or other highly inflected languages. In addition to the reasons noted above, there were other issues that contributed to this situation as the software was being developed. First, there were no obvious ways to incorporate Cyrillic into early software. Second, there were additional market forces, such as software piracy, the cross-border digital divide, and the lack of major clients, that provided little incentive to software developers to make CAT tools that would be particularly useful in Slavic-language markets.

Today, we have a much wider playing field in terms of the market for translation. Translation work is “messier” now, and involves things like corporate rebranding and renaming, a variety of dialects and non-native speech, outsourcing, rewrites for search engine optimization, and bidirectional editing in which both source and target documents are being modified. In this environment, the old “termbase plus recycled text” CAT model is not sufficient.

From this historical background, Kostya next proceeded to illustrate just what the difficulties are that Slavic languages present for today’s CAT tools. These can be boiled down to their relatively free word order, their rich morphology, and their highly inflected nature. The CAT tool’s “fuzzy match” capabilities are insufficient for Slavic languages.

Kostya then provided a number of illustrative examples. Consider the following pairs of segments:

To open the font menu, press CTRL+1.

Press CTRL+1 to open the font menu.

Analyzing and characterizing behaviors

Analysing and characterising behaviours

He ran these and other examples through about a half-dozen CAT tools using a 50% match cutoff, and found that the first example was considered only a 60-80% match, and the second was 0% (in other words, below the 50% threshold). The CAT tools on the market generally do not recognize partial segments in a different order, nor can they tell that “analyzing” and “analysing” are essentially the same word. In other words, they lack language-specific subsegment handling, and morphology-aware matching, searching, and term management. They are also missing form agreement awareness (e.g., noun/adjective case agreement). This diminishes their utility for those translating out of Slavic languages, to be sure, but it also complicates matters for those translating into Slavic languages, as word endings in retrieved fuzzy matches must constantly be checked and corrected.

The obvious question that Kostya next asked is, can this situation be fixed? In theory, yes. Kostya believes that many software tools already in use by search engines, machine translation, and the like could be integrated into CAT tools. These include Levenshtein distance analyzers that can handle differences within words; computational linguistics tools such as taggers, parsers, chunkers, tokenizers, stemmers, and lemmatizers, which analyze such things as syntax and word construction; morphology modules; and even Hunspell, the engine already in use by numerous CAT tools for spellchecking but not for analyzing matches.

Developers continue to cite obstacles to integrating these tools: it’s complicated, they are too language-specific, we don’t know how to set up the interface, there are licensing issues, we have limited resources. While all of these are legitimate factors, Kostya believes that they do not present insurmountable obstacles. He is hopeful that developers will start seeing these tools as data abstraction tools that enable the software to break down the data into something that is no longer language-specific.

So what can we do about this lack of suitable CAT tools? Kostya’s recommendation is principally that we talk to software developers and vendors and explain what we want. We need to create our own market pressure to move things along. In addition, we need to educate developers and vendors about the existing tools that are available; for instance, we might point them to non-English search engines that utilize morphology analyzers.

Alas, there is neither a good CAT tool for the Slavic soul nor a quick fix to this situation. But after listening to Kostya’s presentation, I have a much better understanding of how this situation developed and how we might take action to prompt vendors and developers to move in a new direction.

Filed Under: Annual Conferences, Tools, Translation Tagged With: CAT tools

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