All-round Translator Terminology Workshop Pre-event Webinar

As previously announced, on June 30th in Amsterdam, the All-round Translator (ART) is offering the workshop "Coming to Terms: Mining & Management" covering a range of practical topics for applied corpus linguistics, optimizing terminology management and efficient sharing of terms in teams. This technical workshop will cover a range of tools and techniques as described on the ART event page.

A month before the Amsterdam workshop I will be presenting a free webinar offering an overview of some of the material planned for June as well as related topics with a particular focus on one of the tools I use most - memoQ - with highlights of recent improvements in its terminology features with memoQ versions 8.3 and 8.4.

This webinar is open to anyone interested regardless of whether or not they plan to attend the June workshop. The talk will use Zoom, which I adopted for remote teaching of corporate clients and others because of its greater versatility and superior recording facilities compared to my old favorite, TeamViewer. (Technically it's also a "meeting", not a "webinar" in Zoom-speak, but that's a distinction without a difference for people who don't feel up to 50 simultaneous speakers and 10,000 viewers.) The platform is free for participants to use, and if I'm not mistaken, a web browser can also be used, though interaction is more limited via that medium. (Don't ask me how, I am still gathering experience with this tool and its myriad options.)

The presentation (approximately one hour, starting at 4 pm Central European Time = 3 pm Lisbon time on May 24th) is free, but registration is required: the link for that is here.

Come to Terms in Amsterdam, June 30th

At end of June this year I'll be doing an expanded, in-person reboot of my occasional terminology workshop with new material and workflows for those who want to do more to control quality and improve communicative vocabularies in interpreting, translation and review projects.

Space is limited at the All-Round Translator event, but I hope you can join us to learn about

• Better teamwork through timely terminology sharing
• Faster, more effective discovery of frequently occurring specialist terminology
• Better access to critical terminology in many environments
• More efficient and accurate QA for terminology
• More accurate, efficient and fault-tolerant term use when translating with memoQ
• Greater flexibility to meet client terminology needs

The Early Bird rate for the workshop is €99 + VAT until the end of April, €120 + VAT  thereafter.

The content is applicable to work with many translation environments, but some segments will share particular tips for maximum productivity using the unbeatably practical memoQ environments.

Call for proposals: 2018 Mediterranean Editors & Translators Meeting in Girona, Spain

The submission deadline for presentation abstracts is February 28, 2018.

The Mediterranean Editors and Translators annual meeting is an opportunity for professional education and exchange which has been on my radar for quite a few years. It was a publication by a few of its members which got me started more than a decade ago with corpus linguistics and better approaches to terminology identification and management, and the group's workshops are among the best value-for-money CPD programs I've seen. When I attended the meeting near Madrid a few years ago, I was deeply impressed by the way in which highly experienced, top-notch colleagues mixed well with rank beginners. This year, I'll be extending my time in Spain after the IAPTI conference in Valencia and go a bit farther up the coast to learn from and share ideas with the excellent professional peers there. Why don't you join me?

The 2018 METM in Girona, Spain offers a day and a half of presentations and keynotes, two half-days of pre-conference workshops, and a program of additional events. The city is located about 440 km from Valencia and 100 km from Barcelona and has good local air and train connections. The venue, Centre Cultural La Mercè, is in the heart of the old town, on the site of a 14th-century convent, which is now a municipal cultural center.

Come to METM 2018 for the professional atmosphere and enrichment, stay to enjoy the beautiful Spanish culture and cuisine.

The ART of all-round translation....

There is a certain mythology that in Ye Goode Olde Days, life was simpler and more generalist and a whole lot easier. I suspect that is mostly bunk. The stresses and pressures were different, but probably no less when considered objectively. I remember trying to help my wife, a sometime English to German translator, find clients in the early 1990s, and back then if you weren't local, the clients mostly did not want to know. And don't get me started on the time and effort of terminology research for my own translations then and in the decades before.

But I think it is fair to say that today, even the specialist must be a JOAT of sorts, at least when it comes to the bag of technological and project management tricks to subdue the unruly projects that many of us often face. Colleagues Dorota Pawlak and Ellen Singer recognized the difficulties faced by many language specialists in acquiring some of the specialist and non-linguistic skills needed to cope with particular work challenges and designed a program of quarterly, half-day small workshops to provide just the environment needed to cultivate this new knowledge and establish bonds with others in the same endeavor.

Upcoming workshops I find particularly interesting include:

Transcreation with Alessandra Martelli on February 4, 2017 in Leiden and

no kidding, the regex workshop on April Fool's Day 2017 with my favorite tech guru, the brilliant but articulate Marek Pawelec, a first-rate teacher who can make even nasty stuff like regular expressions seem simple for the rest of us. And as I have pointed out in various articles, this knowledge can be extremely useful for those who work with tools like SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Xbench and more.

I encourage you to have a look at the ART project site and see what else is on the menu; it seems to me that they have the right approach for those looking for a good start in interesting new areas.

And keep up to date with them on Twitter....

Introduction to memoQ in Lisbon / Introdução ao memoQ em Lisboa

From July 6th to the 11th, the summer school of the New University in Lisbon will offer a week-long introductory course for memoQ 2015, which includes:

• The functional modules of the memoQ translation environment and how these work together;
• Common workflows for translation and editing tasks;
• Making use of legacy translations and data from other environments;
• Collaboration with users of other translation environments (SDL Trados Studio, OmegaT, etc.);
• Tips for problem-solving and added value for translation customers.

The course will be taught by me an Professor David Hardisty, with whom I have spent most of this year so far exploring innovative speech recognition and editing workflows, which will also be an important part of this course. It's a pleasure to work with David, because not only does he have a strong commitment to the success of his students, but he has a marvelous talent for taking my concepts and recasting them in a way that work really, really well for undergraduate and graduate students at all levels.

The course is open to anyone (limited enrollment, 16 persons I think) and offers 24 hours of instruction in the week. It will be taught in English with summaries in Portuguese.

A description of the course in English and Portuguese is here. I am not responsible for the errors in the English. Registration information (Portuguese only, alas) is on this page. Attendees who don't read Portuguese but manage to figure out how to register nonetheless will receive a special reward during the course.

During the week, the course is offered in the evenings, leaving the days free for work or local tourism. It is recommended that translators make a pilgrimage to the monastery named after the patron saint of translation in Belém. Miracles have occurred there, carpel-tunnel syndrome has been healed and dead text has even come to life, but not even the intervention of St. Jerome can save a machine pseudo-translation. You might learn that trick from us, however. Or not.

On August 3rd a course on project management with memoQ will be offered on a similar plan.

End February in Madrid: Workshop for Translators and Editors

I have long respected the Mediterranean Editors and Translators association because of its commitment to excellent continuing professional education. Next month in Madrid there will be a workshop presented jointly with the Spanish association of translators, editors and interpreters, ASETRAD. Have a look at the workshop page of MET with information on the schedule of this English and Spanish event. There is a little over a week before registration closes.

MET-ASETRAD workshop day in Madrid
Saturday, February 28, 2015

Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET), a peer-driven professional association of language professionals working into or with the English language in the Mediterranean area, is proud to announce that on February 28, 2015, it will once again organize a day-long workshop and networking series in Madrid, Spain. Following the success of last winter’s event in central Madrid and on the heels of MET’s tenth-annual meeting in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the 2015 workshop series promises to draw an even larger crowd thanks to the participation of the Asociación Española de Traductores, Correctores e Intérpretes (ASETRAD) as co-organizers. Both members of the Vértice network of professional associations for translators, interpreters, and editors, the two sister associations will offer participants a unique opportunity to attend three-hour workshop sessions on topics relevant to the field, short presentations by members of both associations, a free discussion on both groups and their aims, and also a lunch and dinner for networking and socializing with colleagues.

The morning session will feature four simultaneous workshops, two in Spanish and two in English. MET members Emma Goldsmith and Tom O’Boyle will each conduct a workshop in English, while two members of ASETRAD will hold their respective sessions in Spanish. Emma Goldsmith, a medical translator and translation blogger based in the greater Madrid area, will offer insight on how to translate a variety of documents according to the standards of the European Medical Association (EMA), including tips on how to use official templates and terminology when dealing with medicinal product information. For his part, Tom O’Boyle will lead a session on punctuation as a tool for improving text flow. Tom is also based in Madrid and works as a freelance medical translator and author’s editor. Participants who prefer to hone their skills in translation and editing into Spanish may choose to attend the architecture workshop facilitated by Beatriz Pérez Alonso or the website-localization session by Manuel Mata.

After lunch at a nearby restaurant, participants can attend a two-hour block of brief talks, two by members of MET and two from ASETRAD. MET CPD chair Alan Lounds will speak of lesser-known false friends between Spanish and English and strategies when encountering these thorny items, while MET webmaster Timothy Barton will speak of the Excel spreadsheet he has designed to facilitate tax declarations in Spain. The other two talks by ASETRAD members will deal with pharmaceutical translation into Spanish as well as Spanish punctuation. Stephen Waller and María Galán will bring the training activities to a close with a free talk to present their respective associations. A special dinner will be held in the evening, offering participants a chance to get to know members of both groups.

Stridonium's Third Way: freelance translation teams

On September 30th, Stridonium will host its second professional education workshop in Holten in the Netherlands, The Third Way, to discuss practical strategies for teams of freelance language service providers to overcome the barriers of distance and technology and keep pace with the latest demands for service in a rapidly evolving market. Participants can arrive the night before the workshop for a relaxed networking dinner, enjoying the venue's outstanding cuisine and a good night's rest (a limited number of rooms are available at no additional charge to early registrants as part of the workshop package) before the the 9:00 am start the next day with a discussion led by Chartered Linguist Christina Guy and Helen Gibbons on the benefits and practicalities of working in teams and the TagTeam concept.

"The three-course lunch ... was the best I
have experienced at a conference venue."

Demonstrations and hands-on practice with tools such as TeamViewer for coaching and work collaboration alone or in combination with other media will follow with Christina on-site and me at a remote location, and after lunch I will continue teaching how free online applications can be used for restricted sharing of reference resources for group work, including translation memories and terminologies. Novel possibilities for dynamic group translation and review - almost like translation management servers but without platform restrictions - will be presented for discussion and testing. The early afternoon session will also include a brief overview of interoperable file formats for different combinations of translation environment tools among team members.

After the afternoon tea break, colleague Riccardo Schiaffino will join us remotely from Colorado in the USA to present ideas for creative, collaborative thinking in distributed teams. Riccardo is a technical translator, language consultant and teacher with long experience in managing team processes for translation and developing cost-effective, intelligent solutions to challenges expected and spontaneous. I've followed him particularly over the years for his good advice on SDL Trados and tools such as ApSIC Xbench (a QA tool which I think he knows more about than anyone else in my circles... check out his Xbench training page!).

The workshop fee, including the hotel room Sunday night (but excluding the cost of dinner) is €250 (€225 for Stridonium members) ex VAT. The availability of rooms included in the workshop fee is limited, so book early. Further information and updates can be found on the Stridonium events page, which also includes a button link for registration and payment ("Register for the Holten Lectures 2").

Attendees should bring a WLAN-capable laptop to use for the practical exercises.

The workshop is designed for freelance translators, language resource managers and others interested in effective teamwork strategies and looking to optimize workflow and keep options open for flexible language teams.

CPD points have been applied for with Bureau BTV in the Netherlands. (Update: 6 CPD points have been awarded.)

Translation project management in Wiesbaden... no bull

Many corporate translation projects today are very complex. Fewer texts are based on paper documents, but all the more derive from web sites, software, databases, multimedia, engineering drawing files or publishing layouts, and they may often involve coordinated efforts for many languages for many formats. Project managers must work with specialists in a variety of fields such as translation, localization, software development and web design, advertising and commercial graphics. A roadmap is critical to cope with such challenges. Reliable roadmaps are based on grounded, practical knowledge of project management in general as well as the specifics relevant to localization.

Project management not only helps organize and define strategies, but also provides flexibility: the flexibility to refine something which works to work even better, and the flexibility to respond when things don’t go as expected. Good project management increases the probability of success and offers peace of mind, which increase customer satisfaction and provide opportunities for growth.

The workshop (in English) on November 4th and 5th in Wiesbaden, Germany will enhance your practical project management skills for translation and localization. It is designed for language service experts, corporate executives, project managers, heads of translation departments and translators interested in project management.

The workshop will be taught by Loctimize partners Angelika Zerfass and Martin Beuster. Ms. Zerfass is an independent trainer and consultant for translation technologies with more than a decade of experience in the field, a frequent speaker at localization conferences and university lecturer. Mr. Beuster is the managing director at Context (Ireland) and has over 25 years of success in the language services industry. As a training consultant, he offers services to corporate clients, professionals in multi-lingual environments and language service providers.

Further details and registration information are available here.

The Holten Lectures: upcoming CPD events

After its debut with a day on corpus compilation and analysis for legal terminology last June, the Stridonium series of Holten Lectures will continue with two events planned for this autumn at the venue in the east of the Netherlands.

September 30th will present concepts and strategies for "The Third Way" - methods and technologies to support teams of translators collaborating and exchanging information effectively from any location. The day will include presentations and practice with simple tools for small "conferences" for project planning, content consultation and instruction, practical guidelines and hands-on practice for dynamic terminology exchange and maintenance, making translation memories available even to those who do not use CAT tools and a basic overview of "interoperable" formats to determine the most effective strategies for data sharing. Workshop instruction will be a blend of on-site and remote teaching to better emphasize the day's lessons. The fee for this workshop, including the hotel room Sunday night (but excluding the cost of dinner) is €250 (€225 for Stridonium members). The availability of rooms included in the workshop fee is limited, so book early. Online registration will open next week but arrangement can be made before then with the e-mail contact below.

On November 17th, there will be a one day workshop on the Open Source translation environment tool OmegaT, taught by Marc Prior, who has been involved in advocacy, education and coordination with that tool for many years. I've been frankly amazed by the range of function offered by this free software and the fact that it often provides features and file compatibility not available in leading commercial tools. And, as with many other tools, there are options for integrating various kinds of server resources. For individual or even corporate users this is a tool worth taking seriously and perhaps including in your workflows.

Each Monday event in Holten offers a Sunday night arrival and networking dinner to prepare for a refreshed start early the next day with the sessions running from 9 am to 5:30 pm. The days I spent at this venue last summer impressed me with the quality of its intimate meeting facilities, outstanding staff service and cuisine and beautiful natural environment around the hotel on the outskirts of the village.

An application for continuing professional education points has been made for these events with the Bureau BTV for those in the Netherlands who require them to maintain their certified status.

More information on these and other events will be forthcoming; for further details on schedules, content and availability, you can also contact info (at) stridonium (dot) com for updates.