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ATA 60th Annual Conference: Proposals Due March 1st!

February 27, 2019

The American Translators Association is accepting presentation proposals for the ATA 60th Annual Conference in Palm Springs, California, October 23-26, 2019. Proposals must be received by March 1, 2019.

Learn more: http://bit.ly/ata60speak

If you are looking for proposal ideas, here is a call from Jen Guernsey specific to the SLD:

Hello everyone! The deadline for submitting a proposal for a conference presentation is March 1. Presenting at a conference – whether as a solo act, with a colleague, or as part of a panel or a translation slam – is a fun way to get your name and face out there, connect with your colleagues, and support our conference, which relies on us members to provide nearly all of the sessions on offer. Jen Guernsey would be happy to provide you with information, suggestions, and help in getting your proposal submitted.
We have had requests for presentations on tricky interpreting situations, differences in training (particularly interpreter training) in the US vs Slavic countries, and additional translation slams. Please email Jen Guernsey (jenguernsey@gmail.com) if you would be willing to serve as a participant, panelist, or moderator on any of the following:

Panel comparing interpreter training programs in the US versus Slavic countries
Panel on challenging situations in interpreting
Translation slam: from English into any Slavic language
Translation slam: from any Slavic language into English

Thanks, and see you in Palm Springs!

Apply to Speak at ATA60!

January 14, 2019

The ATA has put out its call for speakers for the 60th Annual Conference in Palm Springs, CA. Details on proposal requirements and perks can be found here.

The SLD encourages anyone with an idea for a session to apply. Our members have expressed specific interest in sessions focusing on the day-to-day practice of interpreting, including cultural expectations, as well as deeper dives into specialized fields and the linguistic aspects of translating, but other topics are always welcome! Keep in mind that the SLD is limited to 6 slots (of which 2 are reserved for the Distinguished Speaker), so we encourage potential speakers to consider submitting sessions overlapping with other topics and divisions (such as interpreting, literary, T&I education or technology, etc.).

We look forward to seeing you at the conference in October!

ATA Law Seminar in Jersey City

January 3, 2019

Happy New Year! If one of your professional New Year’s resolutions was to do more continuing education in the coming year and you are a legal translator or interpreter, the ATA has just the opportunity for you. It will be hosting a full-day law seminar in Jersey City on February 16, with morning and afternoon sessions divided between translation and interpreting. ATA-certified attendees can earn 7 CEPs!

The schedule, session descriptions, and hotel and registration information can be found here: https://www.atanet.org/events/law_jerseycity.php.

ATA59 Review: Strategies for Avoiding Language Interference and Coping with Opinionated Clients

December 10, 2018

Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash

Review by Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya

Topic: Dutch, Independent Contractors, Translation

Speaker: Joy Burrough-Boenisch

Haven’t we all, at some point or another, had to deal with a client best described as “opinionated”? Or noticed that our language skills needed a bit of brushing up? So it should come as no surprise that Joy Burrough-Boenisch’s unambiguously titled session was packed, including by plenty of people who didn’t know Dutch.

Joy, a British expat permanently residing in the Netherlands, set the stage with some important context: the Dutch have some of the highest English proficiency levels in the world among non-native speakers. Translators working in this environment find themselves constantly having to justify their translation choices—or discovering after the fact that their translations were subjected to “disimprovement” without their knowledge by clients overconfident in their own English skills.

Based on her own experiences and reactions she’s seen from her colleagues, Joy offered a few suggestions for reacting to disimprovement (whether suggested or already irreversible):

At the far timid end of the spectrum, you can follow the “client is always right” mantra and let it go, especially if your name is not explicitly associated with the translation.
At the other extreme, if a client is being particularly intransigent, drop them! One of Joy’s colleagues blacklisted an entire Dutch government ministry as a client for some particularly egregious edits and accompanying disrespectful treatment.
There is, of course, a middle ground, mostly centered around tactfully voicing your objections, whether during the editing process or after the fact, respected authorities in hand to justify your objections. View the time spent justifying your version as an investment in your professional reputation.
Speaking of professionalism, take a moment to step back and ask yourself if maybe the client is actually right. Do your research and be willing to admit it if you were wrong.
Reiterate your advice against the changes in every communication, and if changes are made without your knowledge or against your advice, get it in writing that it was not your responsibility. In matters of law, it becomes particularly important to request a written statement that unauthorized changes were made.

When it came to resources to cite, Joy came out as a strong proponent of corpora, such as COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). In addition to researching the frequency of certain collocations across the language as a whole, they can be used to determine the register of a particular word or phrase.

Corpora also featured prominently in the first section of the talk, which covered language attrition, a particularly salient problem for expats like Joy, who work in a country where they are surrounded by a foreign language (and often by a lot of foreign-inflected English). Over time, this exposure begins to interfere with their native-speaker intuition for how English should sound. The first signs of trouble will show up in mixed-up prepositions and false friends, but language interference is at its most insidious where it affects style and rhetoric. Different languages prefer sentences of different lengths and different argumentation styles (do you state your conclusion first, then support it, or do you lead the reader gradually to your main point?), and these standards are so ingrained that we can barely articulate them, let alone notice when they start to slip.

Joy’s recommended treatment for language attrition is reading up on contrastive grammar and—you guessed it—making good use of corpora to check yourself on prepositions, word frequencies, and appropriateness for the specific text type. I would add that these approaches are also worthwhile for those of us not living abroad: if I spend long enough staring at a Russian source text, or worse, editing non-native translations from Russian, eventually I notice language interference rearing its ugly head as well. Listening to Joy’s engaging talk inspired me and gave me the tools to fight off language interference and remain professional in the face of client feedback.

Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya is an ATA-certified Russian to English translator specializing in legal and financial texts. She has a Master’s in Translation from Kent State (2016) and has been working freelance since graduating. She can be found at eugenia@sokolskayatranslations.com and www.sokolskayatranslations.com.

ATA59 Review: Publishing Literature in Translation

December 3, 2018

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Review by Evgeny Terekhin

Topic: Literary, T&I Industry

Speaker: Gabriella Page-Fort

As a literary translator, I couldn’t help but gravitate towards literary sessions. When I read the title of this one, “Publishing Literature in Translation: How Translators Help AmazonCrossing Bring Stories to New Readers by Page-Fort Gabriella,” I scratched by head – what is AmazonCrossing? I didn’t bother to look it up but went straight to the room.

It took me a while to start making sense of Gabriella’s multiple references to book sales statistics, but after a while I got the hang of it. AmazonCrossing is actively searching for great international reads for a global English-speaking audience.

Basically, if you know of a book in a language other than English and feel it would really appeal to the English-speaking world, you go to the AmazonCrossing website, https://translation.amazon.com/submissions, and propose it. They are constantly looking for interesting titles, and their list of translated books is very diverse.

Gabriella shared several intriguing stories of how they hunted for books to translate, including an example of how they got connected with an elderly Uzbek author who wrote a wonderful story but couldn’t even use email. She emphasized that as an editorial director she can never tell which story will grab her attention. They are looking for stories regardless of the source language and genre – the main idea is for it to be appealing.

Turns out AmazonCrossing is the biggest producer of translated literature in the US market. Gabriella’s talk was very inspiring, so I immediately had several titles pop up in my head, and I proposed one. We’ll see.

I didn’t realize you could actually go to their website and register as a literary translator. You could also upload your resume, and if they have a matching job, they will contact you. If you are interested in the field, it’s a great opportunity to get your foot in the door.

Much of the session was devoted to the discussion of what makes for a good story. One may find a story fascinating, but when it’s published it doesn’t necessarily get traction. In Gabriella’s words, you don’t really know. You pick a book based on your gut instinct, but who knows if the readers’ gut will have the same instinct? Though it’s often hit and miss, the success of the endeavor is obvious, with 62 new titles translated just in 2017.

Even though, according to Gabriella, Americans don’t read translations very much – for whatever reason – AmazonCrossing stands out from among the other 13 imprints of Amazon Publishing, translating into English from a wide variety of languages: Danish, Hebrew, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Indonesian, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, French, Chinese, Spanish, and German.

After the session, I had lots of questions for Gabriella, but, unfortunately, there was a line of people vying for her attention. The main question I had was: what are some of the characteristics of the kind of literature that would be equally appealing across cultures? For instance, “The Karamazov Brothers” is appealing to all cultures, but I know other great Russian titles which do not have the same international appeal.

It would be an engaging project in itself to analyze what kind of books have found their way into the hearts of the global community while retaining features of their home culture. Obviously, the Lord of the Rings is a distinctly British book, but it captivates audiences all around the world. Why? Having those essential characteristics down would greatly facilitate the process of finding potential “winners.”

Well, maybe I will ask my question next year. As it is, Gabriella focuses on “a good story” over a specific category, like “fantasy,” or “romance.” They are looking for the stories that make people feel more similar than different. “Things that make it so you can connect and see directly into the eyes of whatever today’s ‘other’ looks like.”

So, do you know a title that you think would be interesting for the English readership? Let Gabriella know.

Evgeny Terekhin is an En-Ru and Ru-En translator with a master’s degree in English and German. Born and raised in Omsk, Russia, he and his family moved to the US in 2016. In the course of his 25-year career, he’s translated and edited over 150 books, brochures and tracts across a wide range of subjects like children’s literature, marketing, psychology, spirituality, health-care, business, and legal. He lives in Friendswood, TX and can be reached at terekhin11@gmail.com Website: www.russiantranslators.org

ATA59 Review: Patent Translation for Liberal Arts Majors

November 16, 2018

Complex computer parts and circuitry

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Review by Karen Yesowich Schmucker

Topic: Science and Technology

Presented in English with Chinese examples

Speakers: Evelyn Garland and Aaron Hebenstreit

I wanted to review this session because I have a liberal arts background and have translated a few patents myself. While I have some knowledge of engineering and manufacturing terminology from previous work, I found patent translation daunting and I hoped to come away from this presentation with a few helpful resources.

The presentation was based on the premise that liberal arts majors, while not a natural fit for translation of scientific work, can still become good patent translators. The speakers discussed their experiences working with translators educated in liberal arts and how they helped them to deliver high quality patent translations. They also pointed out that sometimes a translator’s lack of scientific training actually helped because it meant they did not have preconceived notions about the subject matter and were able to look at the matter objectively. Since patents are produced for new ideas, someone without hardened ideas about subjects can be a valuable asset.

In addition, the speakers stressed that translators with a liberal arts background were well-suited to paying close attention to the language used in patents and to clearly telling what they called the “story” of the patent. They encouraged new translators unfamiliar with the idiosyncracies of patent language to look at other patents in the same field and the same jurisdiction to gain an understanding of how particular terms and turns of phrase are used and get a sense of what is considered normal in patent style.

The examples given in the session were in Chinese, but I did come away from the session with a few resources that would be useful for anyone interested in translating patents. Since the speakers had worked for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the resources they mentioned were related to WIPO:

WIPO Translate https://patentscope.wipo.int/translate/translate.jsf An instant machine translation tool designed specifically to translate patent text
WIPO Pearl (multilingual terminology portal) http://www.wipo.int/reference/en/wipopearl
Google patents (where you can read full text of patents)

If you want to learn more about translating patents, the speakers suggested starting with the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

Finally, because patents must be translated, they are a good source of work for translators. One of the speakers mentioned that Russian was one of the languages where there was always a need for linguists.

Karen Yesowich Schmucker is a certified Russian into English Translator in Bellevue, WA. Karen holds both an MA in Russian Language and Literature from the University of Toronto and a BFA in Graphic Design from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco. You can reach her at karen@kysdesigns.com (www.kysdesigns.com).

SLD Podcast Conference Preview: Saturday

October 22, 2018

ATA59 is almost here! Time to wrap up the SLD Podcast’s conference preview series with the third installment, featuring speakers from Saturday. This lineup includes Mike Collins, Silvia D’Amico and Catherine Christaki, Michele Hansen and Stephen Volante, our own Ekaterina Howard, Mercedes Guhl, and Ewandro Magalhaes, covering topics in translation and interpreting, as well as business skills like writing website copy and managing work-life balance. More information on the sessions and speakers is available in the show notes.

You can access all of the SLD Podcast episodes through SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Google Play. Make sure to subscribe to avoid missing an episode!

SLD Podcast Conference Preview: Friday

October 18, 2018

If you enjoyed the first episode full of ATA59 previews, don’t miss the second episode, featuring speakers from Friday sessions. This Friday episode brings you over two hours of interviews with twelve speakers, both SLD members and non-members: Elizabeth Adams, Larry Bogoslaw, Veronika Demichelis and Natalia Noland, Winnie Heh, Corinne McKay and John Milan, Elena Morrow, Lydia Razran Stone, Ana Lis Salotti, Madalena Zampaulo, and Jost Zetzsche.

More information on the speakers and their talks is available in the show notes. As always, you can find all of the SLD Podcast episodes on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Google Play. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

SLD Podcast Conference Preview: Wednesday and Thursday

October 16, 2018

As we gear up for the ATA conference in NOLA (just a week and a half left!), now is a great chance to take a listen to the conference preview series from the SLD Podcast. This set of three episodes features mini-interviews with various speakers, both SLD members and beyond.

The first podcast in the series, which you can go to directly on SoundCloud, features speakers from the training sessions on Wednesday (Athena Matilsky, Jay Marciano, and Sameh Ragab) and one from a Thursday session (Manuela Sampaio). The interviews cover topics from machine translation and technology to project management and interpreting skills. Additional information on the speakers and their sessions can be found in the show notes.

You can access all of the SLD Podcast episodes through SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Google Play. Make sure to subscribe to avoid missing an episode!

ATA59 Pre-Conference Bulletin Available!

October 2, 2018

Are you not yet excited enough for this year’s Annual Conference? Are you wondering what you can expect if it’s your first time? Are you looking forward to perennial events like the SLD Dinner or Newcomers’ Lunch and wondering about the details? Then you’re in luck: the SLD’s ATA59 Pre-Conference Bulletin is now available to answer all your questions!

You can find the bulletin on the SlavFile page or directly here. This year’s edition includes information on off-site events such as the SLD Dinner and Newcomers’ Lunch, links to past conference reviews, meeting minutes and other SLD business, and – new this year – a rundown of SLD Podcast interviews with conference session presenters. You can find the episodes themselves on SoundCloud, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.

Looking forward to seeing you all at ATA59!