#IAPTI2024 Call for presentation proposals for the conference in Bursa, Turkey

The 7th International Conference for the International Association of Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) will be held on September 28-29, 2024, in Bursa, Türkiye. The Call for Papers is still open and we will continue with the proposals selection process until April 30, 2024.

Abstracts submitted should be a maximum of 200 words and be sent to the Organizing Committee at bursaconference@iapti.org. Priority will be given to new topics not presented before at other conferences. 

Please include a title and description, a short bio (up to 100 words) and a profile photo with your proposal. Speakers will have 45-50 minutes for their presentations and 10 minutes for Q&A. 

The Organizing Committee reserves the right to accept or reject proposals and will notify applicants accordingly. The conference fee is waived for speakers (1 per presentation) and no other monetary compensation or reimbursement is offered. 

For more information, please contact the Organizing Committee at the e-mail address above. We look forward to welcoming you at another outstanding IAPTI event. See you in September! 

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.

Virtual symposium on AI, MpT and language processing March 26-29, 2018

The worlds of artificial intelligence and machine pseudo-translation are largely ones of delusion, wishful thinking, deceit and professional manipulation, but once in a while one encounters a few people in these fields who are worth the time to listen and discuss. Dion "Donny the Wig" Wiggins of Omniscien, formerly Asia Online, is one of these: a researcher at heart, it seems to me, and someone with a good appreciation of processes, even those having little to do with the technology he represents in his day job. Although an established godfather of the MT Mafia, his approaches to application have a large dose of common sense largely absent from the ignorant masses who place their faith in technologies they do not actually understand in detail. More than once he has shared workflow "revelations" that back up old research and testing of mine, but with more and better data to show how great productivity gains can be achieved by simple reorganization of common tasks. So when he told me about his company's upcoming symposium, I knew that it probably wouldn't be the usual bullshit-tinted fluff drifting through the professional atmosphere of translation these days.

Click the graphic above to see the symposium program - attendance is free. You'll see some familiar names and perhaps conclude that there might in fact be a bit of BS in the air, but there is likely to be a good bit of substance to consider and to apply even in areas not covered by the program.

One of the biggest problems I have with machine pseudo-translation technologies is the utter ignorance and dishonesty of many of its promoters and the massive social engineering which takes place to persuade and intimidate people to become its willing victims in areas where it offers little or no real value. The continued disregard for documented occupational health issues and language skills distortion in post-editing processes, and the vile corruption of academic programs to produce a new generation of linguistic dullards who cannot distinguish algorithmic spew from real human language are all matters of significant concern. But if we are to engage the Forces of Evil and know our Enemies and keep them within their wholly legitimate domain, this event might be a place to start :-) See you there.

CALL FOR PAPERS: IAPTI Fifth International Conference, September 2018 in Valencia, Spain

IAPTI is inviting all translators and interpreters to submit presentation proposals for its 5th International Conference from September 29-30, 2018 in the beautiful Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain.

Here experienced colleagues will give practical, relevant talks and workshops on many facets of our profession and discuss current trends with peers from around the world on conference time and in accompanying activities of the social program.

IAPTI stands firmly for ethical, sustainable work in translation and interpreting, uniting language practitioners from more than 80 countries. If IAPTI's mission is in harmony with your professional vision, consider sharing your ideas and methods with the very diverse audience of attendees and receiving feedback from many cultures and perspectives in return. All topics related to translation, interpreting and terminology are welcome.

Abstracts should have a maximum of 200 words and be submitted to the organizing committee at spainconference@iapti.org by January 20, 2018. Please include a title and description, a short biography (up to 100 words) and a profile photo with your proposal. The time allotted for presentations is 45 to 50 minutes, with 10 minutes for Q&A.

Priority will be given to new topics not presented before at other conferences. The organizing committee reserves the right to accept or reject proposals and will notify applicants accordingly. The conference fee is waived for speakers (one per presentation) with no other compensation or reimbursement. For more information, contact the Organizing Committee at the email address above.

Save the date (International Translation Day!) and join colleagues from around the world for an outstanding event in one of the Europe's most attractive cities!

Details on the venue will be announced soon.

SDL Trados Roadshow in Lisbon on November 16th!

Next month on Wednesday, November 16th, the SDL roadshow featuring the latest release of SDL Trados Studio will be coming to Lisbon, Portugal. The all-day event is free of charge,but registration is required.

A full afternoon of training on the SDL Trados Studio translation environment is included in the day. Even if you live and work in a country other than Portugal, this is an excellent opportunity to be briefed on one of the leading technologies for efficient translation work and then take a very long weekend to enjoy Europe's capital of cuisine and culture.

See you there?

European Commission Workshop - Contracts for translation services

What the Linguistic Sausage Producers don't want you to know:

Did you know that tenders for work with the European Commission are not just for the big Wortwurstläden but can be submitted by individual translators who are EU citizens - and that these individuals have equal standing before the Directorate General for Translation? The DGT does not differentiate and many of its best external contractors are individuals, either self-employed persons or dynamic teams of two or three professionals.

The DGT uses taxpayers’ money and must be transparent, with fair and equal treatment for each candidate. Reading their specifications may appear daunting at first, but taking a closer look is worthwhile! Questions may be submitted and are answered during the weeks when the call for tender is open; this can be done in three languages, almost in real time, with all questions and replies made public on the DGT web site.

Quality pays and they will pay for quality: decisions are based on a quality/price ratio of 70/30, in favor of quality. For each job done, a quality note with feedback is sent to facilitate ongoing improvement.

But to get this far, you must first submit a persuasive offer to the selection board.

On November 28, 2015 from noon to 4 pm, IAPTI's UK chapter is hosting a workshop in Manchester (UK) to inform you of what it takes to tender and win at Europe's highest public level for translation. Profit from this important business event at yet another iconic venue! Registration information is available here.

The beautiful Manchester Central Library, venue for the EC tender workshop!

*******

The speaker: Monica Garcia-Soriano started her EU career as a lawyer linguist 24 years ago at the Court of Justice in Luxembourg. She later joined the Spanish Translation Unit at the European Commission in Brussels and for the last 8 years she has been in charge of procurement at the Commission's External Translation Unit.

MpT, limericks and innovative disruption in Porto and Seville

A few weeks ago I received a kind invitation to the JABA Partner Summit in Porto, Portugal. It's a unique event hosted by JABA CEO Joaquim Alves, subsidized by various solution providers whose tools he uses in his business, which I think is the largest translation agency in the country. I wasn't really sure what to expect, though with the likes of Across and my old nemesis Dion Wiggins, aka "Donny the Wig", godfather of the MpT Mafia, Mr. Get-On-The-MT-Boat-Or-Drown himself, I knew it would be plenty evil. Sure enough, on the first day DW challenged me to a duel, so at memoQfest this year in Budapest, we will meet on the field of honor in the park across from the Gundel and settle our differences at ten paces.

I encountered a veritable rogues' gallery of linguistic sausage shoppers at the summit days, discussing plans to conquer the world. As GALA board chairman Robert Etches put it, controlling 1% of content translation is not enough, the elite cabal of translation technologists must march boldly forward with an army of cyborg post-editors and their purely electronic betters and take the 99% by storm, as the 1% have taken control of the rest in society at large.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Gentz

People like that need watching, so when I heard of the conspirators' bus to Seville for another of those wicked GALA gatherings which yield so many damning and amusing YouTube video clips (see In HampsTr We Trust) I decided to go undercover and ride along. As you might expect with me, Asia Online, Across and a bunch of capitalist translation agency owners on a bus, there would soon be blood on the floor.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Gentz

As the team of emergency paramedics treated my head wound and did their best to save me from the shock and awe of a relentless technology agenda, co-conspirators celebrated by the bus with cigarettes and champagne, toasting The New Word Order.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Portuguese paramedics I was able to return to the scene of the crime, where I fought to stay awake and alert to survive the journey to the L10n Den that awaited.

Shore 'nuff, there was an orgy of celebration for the Power of Machines. Not only do they do translation that way, but at the 5-star Barceló Sevilla Renacimiento the 1% Masters have even done away with the baristas (is that why the roses bloom so well?) and replaced them with Nespresso machines to make the coffee. I kept myself alert throughout the three days of the meeting with milky triple ristrettos. I considered the evil in store for Third World babies with that technology as the caffeine hit my veins and I buzzed from one point of innovative disruption to another.

The Wonderful World of Disruption in Translation

Paula Barbary Shanno(n), disruptive Pirate Queen and the Right Hand of Darkness for Sales at Lionbridge, shared her ecstatic vision of such disruption in an explosive, multimedia keynote celebrating the slash-and-burn creativity of Big Wordsters who have learned to think and act in small ways, moving ever closer to Mr. Etches' vision of a world in which commodities such as translation are free and profits are reserved for those studs who service the customers so well. I could see the excitement of bulk market CEOs as she spoke eloquently in well-tuned corporatist clichés. I could imagine the disruptive IEDs of innovation catching the proud wordsmiths en route to their value-priced boutique forges and the cyborg armies of post-editors blasting the bounds of mere human translation and meaning to compose new algorithmic hymns to Common Sense and Cost Reduction.

This photo is the only thing that isn't sharp with this perceptive language and training consultant

But a kinder, gentler, revolutionary vision of disruptive innovation was offered by one who actually took the time to read and understand Clayton Christensen's work, rather than simply plagiarize it, Ms. Diana Sanchez of Nova Languages in Barcelona. When she gave her excellent presentation of one of the best-organized classic PEMpT workflows, I was impressed. Not by the idea of such an application, which I consider to be rather toxic in most cases, but by the fact that it was so well-structured, a good reference against which to measure alternatives I think. And the presentation was excellent, one of the few I have seen delivered quietly behind a podium which would not put me to sleep. However, I objected (rather rudely in fact) to the title of her talk, as I considered the process described neither innovative nor disruptive.

Ms. Sanchez mercifully spared me the public execution I deserved for my insistent error and waited until the knowledge-sharing roundtable later that day to explain the unique costing model applied by Nova in serving their cash-poor startup clientele in the Barcelona area (innovative - check!) and then went on to explain patiently that the "disruptive" character of the innovation was that it entered the lower end of the market where there was in fact no choice, for financial reasons, but to accept quality compromises. Usually when I hear such arguments, they come from the mouth of some bulk market bogster which I am tempted to punch, but with Ms. Sanchez and another Nova associate at that table what I heard was a tale of respectful partnership with aspiring new businesses. And a very profitable one at that. Hut ab!

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned at my first GALA event was that, although the lighted stage and multimedia extravaganza might be dominated by the rapacious and somewhat idiotic one-percenters of the corporatist translation world and their acolytes, who comprise perhaps another four to nine percent, the vast majority of translation company CEOs who attend are sincere partners of the language service providers (translators and interpreters) they depend on, and they earn my respect in stride. I asked myself why some of my long-term, struggling agency partners were not represented in the crowd of 370 attendees and thought perhaps that might be why they were struggling. The information shared by so many presenters and by the mingling participants was worth far more than the four-figure cost of registration.

After a quarter century of not speaking the language, I still give a shit about Japanese!

I decided that, as long as I was there to keep an eye on the troublemakers, I might as well add my own value for the deserving majority, so I made it my mission to seek out translation company owners, project managers and localization specialists and destroy their misconception that there is no viable speech recognition available for languages such as Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Slovak, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Norwegian et alia. Throughout the three days of the conference I tested my recently researched solution with native speakers of the many "minor languages" that are so important in the global business ecosystem, with excellent results. It even worked without errors for Romanian in the crowded lunch room, so I suppose it could be used in the open plan offices one finds in many translation sweatshops. The recognized text can be transferred easily to translation management systems for alignment, review and quality assurance, allowing me to kick back with my goats now, guzzle sangria and pet the chickens as I knock out high quality translation in the Alentejan sun. One translation agency owner from Cairo estimated that this new method might increase the hourly earnings of his freelance Arabic translators eightfold. My kind of disruption, certainly better than the sort of coke-fueled destruction that some corporate high flyers are addicted to.

The short, easy bus ride back home after the GALA event ended got a little complicated when the border zone resentments of the Spanish against their Portuguese betters were visited upon me in a practical joke that left me stranded for an extra day in Badajoz, where I took a 2 am kick in the ribs from a pugnacious little station minder who was frustrated to learn that I had done the impossible and bought a ticket for the 4:15 am bus that he had told me I was not allowed to board. It was interesting to learn that my Portuguese has improved to the point where the Spanish think I'm a native and as I near the border hate me accordingly. Just as I learned in Germany years ago, sometimes there are advantages to keeping a foreign accent, and, alas, I always end up the loser with any language I learn.

In the final kilometers between Estremoz and Évora, where I faced another two-day gauntlet of memoQ lectures and workshops at the university with my interns, I reflected on the lessons of my nine-day translation business odyssey, the high points such as, in the middle of an excellent presentation of the Open Source application translate5, the brave and honest call by Marc Mittag for Germans to forgive the debts of suffering Med countries as they were forgiven their far greater debts after the horrors of the Second World War, after which they experienced their foreign-financed Wirtschaftswunder, to those moments of bulk market bogster idiocy, calling for us all to drink the shitstream of the worldwide content firehose. Mr. Etches can take his 99% and the consequences thereof; my glass is more than half full :-)

Notes from a silly discussion of the need for greed.

As is often the case, I found poetic inspiration in the lessons learned and penned these limericks in the final kilometers of my return:

Megalomaniac Bob
will MT his way out of a job.
Being a fool,
he forgot the old rule
that the 1% own the whole mob

In Moreslavia's quality check,
the meaning can just go to Heck.
In the LQA game
Renato's the name
of the guy who is stacking the deck!

Let the corporates trumpet success
and disrupt the whole holy mess.
With speech recognition
we'll pay our tuition
and unequal pay then redress.

memoQ&A in Porto - good people, great bagels!

Last night from 6:00 to 9:30 I enjoyed a "memoQ&A Evening" at the Porto Bagel Café as a reward for surviving the long bus ride to Porto/Gaia from Évora to attend the JABA Partner Summit. About 25 local colleagues attended to hear my not-as-short-as-promised presentation and discuss approaches to memoQ and other translation technologies as our working tools. The evening was part of the Translators in Residence initiative and a good start to my second visit to the area after my whirlwind tour last month to investigate venues for teaching events. Many thanks to the sponsors. the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters and Chip7 of Évora for providing the funding and tools (an excellent LCD projector - thank you, Carlos!) to do this.

I very much appreciate IAPTI's commitment to the professional education and continuing development of my good colleagues in Portugal, particularly in difficult economic times when many findit difficult to attend translators' events in faraway places. The evening was free for all attendees, who only had to pay for whatever they drank (great coffee - I had my usual galão) and ate (the best bagels in Portugal!).

After an initial hour of snacks, coffee and chat, the evening began with a discussion of the game-changing implications of speech recognition technologies for our working lives. Not only is it now possible for colleagues to use high-quality speech recognition on desktop computer and laptops in languages such as Hungarian and Portuguese, which are not currently supported by Dragon NaturallySpeaking (using, for example, the integrated recognition tools in the Mac Yosemite OS, as demonstrated with SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in Lisbon the day that SDL conquered Portuguese translation), smartphones are part of the game now too. Since picking up an older iPhone model (4S) for a few hundred euros about a month ago, I have had excellent results testing it with English, German, Russian and Portuguese and e-mailing texts to myself with just a few taps on the phone's screen. Once transferred as an e-mail, the text is then aligned in a CAT tool such as memoQ and subjected to tagging, QA and other procedures of the usual virtual translation working environments.

The use of memoQ and other CAT tools for single-language original authoring and text revision was also discussed. This flexible workflow extends the relevance of translation environment tools well beyond the usual limits within which translators and translation companies live and operate and offers interesting prospects for collaboration and re-use of creative resources. This topic willalso be covered next week in a lecture and workshop at Universidade de Évora and in an eCPD webinar on June 2, 2015.

Interoperability is another important topic for translators; I discussed different ways in which I use SDL Trados Studio and other tools to prepare projects to work in memoQ and vice versa as well as mz highly profitable use of SDL Multiterm to enhance customer loyalty and my professional image with this terminology management ssystem's excellent output management features.

Other tips and tricks in the memoQ&A included the untapped potential of LiveDocs, tracked changes and row histories in memoQ, dealing with embedded objects, graphics and transcription, PDF 3-ways and new tricks for nasty and/or illegible image PDFs, versioning and a concept for transforming translation memory concordancing into something much, much more useful and less prone to errors in editing and translation.

Copies of the slides from the evening's presentation are available here. It is, however, merely a palimpsest of the evening.

Many thanks also to colleague and translation tools teacher Felix do Carmo for kindly chauffeuring me around town and for the interesting tour of the training and production facilities at his company, TIPS.

Well MET near Madrid.

It's been nearly three weeks since I returned from my first meeting of the Mediterranean Editors and Translators association, METM14. In that time I've wondered how to share all that I brought back from the gathering, and I'm afraid I still don't know how to put it all into words. I've become increasingly reluctant to participate in translation conferences in the past few years, took a break of about a year and a half from them, because too many had become venues for pushing a corporatist agenda which I feel has little to do professional language service of real social value. The unexpectedly excellent IAPTI conference in Athens last September marked my return, and what pleased me most there was the clear focus of the event program on the professional practice of freelance translators and interpreters. No sales pitches, no Linguistic Sausage Producers explaining their multiphase chop-and-grind workflows to redefine quality as a complex function of engineering incompetence, empty promises, pseudoscientific LQA scores and extrusion rate. MET's outstanding 10th annual meeting in San Lorenzo de El Escorial near Madrid was an exquisite dessert after the feast in Athens: once again I had the great pleasure to meet a number of professional peers with experience and competence well beyond my own, some who have been mentors of mine for years with their contributions for practical corpus linguistics in translation and other topics dear to me.

And once again I had the delight of a program that was, for me, truly something completely different. In all the professional conferences I have attended in the past 15 years, this was the first one where a substantial number of attendees were serious, professional editors. Many translators take on "editing jobs" for better or worse, but at METM14 I was surrounded by people who pursue this activity with a professional seriousness and rigor which was quite frankly new to me. And their perspectives on some matters which are routine in my own work seemed more than a little weird at first.

I was definitely out of my comfort zone on the pre-conference workshop day as I sat in an excellent session by Mary Ellen Kerans on corpus-guided decision-making. A paper that she co-authored years ago with two other colleagues gave me my first exposure to the effective use of corpora for my translation work, but I had always applied these techniques from my own rather settled perspective as a translator. On that day, I saw how editors use the same techniques for very different purposes, and after about a half hour of considerable confusion, I enjoyed surprising new insights in how I might improve my own work by considering these other perspectives.

The editors' perspectives continued to alternately confuse and inspire me for the next two days. I learn something at most conferences, but usually what I walk away with are ideas that are not too far from my usual professional comfort zone. Here I was challenged in new and different ways, and I really loved that. I had been aware of MET for a number of years because of a few colleagues in Stridonium who were members, and I've looked at the conference program off and on for about five years and was always impressed by their focus on peer-to-peer teaching, but what I found was really well beyond my good expectations.

I attended the event with another colleague from Portugal who is relatively new to translation; she was a little nervous about her first professional conference, and although I expected she would gain some useful insights, I did not really know what would await a new professional at METM14. Any concerns were quickly dispelled; I was extremely pleased to see how many new professionals were welcomed and encouraged to participate by so many with more experience than I am likely to gain still in what remains of my professional life.

My friend was thoroughly inspired by the people she met and the presentations and workshops she attended, and on the long drive home after the last day she put together puzzle pieces from a number of talks and hit me with new ideas for teaching translation support technology to new users that still have my head spinning and will be the foundation for my next book, which I hope to release by early next year. This was just one of many occasions where I have found that newcomers to a profession can contribute some of the most important insights for improvement.

Defenders of the Portuguese language at METM14

Next year's annual meeting (METM15) will be held at the end of October in Coimbra, Portugal at the university there. If you are getting tired of the same old topics presented by the same old suspects and programs clearly driven by agendas at odds with the ethics and interests of freelancers and staff professionals who put quality first, then you may want to join me next October in Portugal for another healthy serving of professional dessert.

Emma Goldsmith has blogged a good overview of the sessions she attended at METM14, which can give you a feel for some of what you may have missed. The conference program offers more, less personal information. But don't rely on the impressions of others; come next year to a great event in a great country and then tell others yourself what this unusual mix of extreme professional competence has to offer.

Confessions of an American MpT User at #iapti2014

A specter is haunting language service professions – the specter of machine translation! Or as I prefer to call it, machine pseudo-translation, because translation is a cognitive process requiring human intelligence.

As interesting as algorithm-based simulation of language translation may be, it is not translation in the real sense as we understand it: it is not fault-tolerant, able to cope with the frequent shortcomings of human language use and overcome these. Little things like a spelling mistake or confusion of words, which we might recognize and correct easily, quickly reveal that we are not dealing with truly intelligent processes!

As with any tool or process, we need to take a careful look at its potential benefits and its disadvantages. An honest look. And we need to ask ourselves who benefits?

Today, I would like to come clean. To make a confession. Or perhaps several confessions…

But as we translators like to say… context is everything.

In a recent project, I shocked a German colleague with whom I was preparing a quotation when I remarked that the job was a perfect candidate for machine pseudo-translation. It was

• highly structured catalog text with many errors and
• pattern-based rule sets were needed to identify the errors and cope with the mind-numbing work. I used memoQ auto-translatables to cope with the challenge, but a customized MpT process would have been even better.

I am blessed with a diverse lot of friends, from many countries and language backgrounds. And I sometimes use MpT technology to understand the gist or subject matter of their commentaries in Arabic, Japanese, Spanish – or even Russian, which I used to read reasonably well. If I have any interest in pursuing the conversation, I do so in a language with which we are both competent.

Similar use of MpT can have many positive professional applications, such as screening large volumes of content in legal discovery to identify the most important documents for which human translation is needed.

I also used MpT technology throughout the day for months recently in a relationship with someone whose language I was only beginning to learn, someone with no knowledge of languages I know well. MpT, even when it failed, greatly facilitated the human communication and helped me to go from being unable to form more than a few simple sentences to conversing in my new language all day… and night… long. In less than a week.

Here, too, the shortcomings of MpT were very clear:

• The inability of my conversation partner to spell often compromised the machine results… but in this case, the final result was greater attention to the human communication, because both sides were committed to understanding.
• Without a good background in several languages, the essentially monolingual person was unable to cope or even recognize many of the machine translation errors. This reminded me of the dangerous absurdity of monolingual post-editing.

So how is it that I have acquired a reputation for opposing something as wonderful as machine pseudo-translation, with all the benefits it provides to me?

And isn't it rather hypocritical of me to speak out against something I use, often daily?

Context is everything.

What is it then that I oppose? What is it that you should oppose?

I confess that I'm opposed to all these things. 

And I hope that you can make this same confession from your heart.

For me, these confessions have certain, specific implications and require specific actions from me:

• Opposition to post-editing processes with the potential of unmitigated mental damage and deterioration of one's communication skills
• Opposition to compensation models which require more work for less pay which discourage professional and personal development of sustainable nature
• Opposition to individuals and organizations whose true objective is the disempowerment of professionals and the hamsterization of communication processes

Doesn't this apply to more than just machine pseudo-translation? Of course it does.

This might apply to the dismantling of corporate translation departments, which once served as the breeding grounds for some of our best specialist translators. 

This might apply to abusive, so-called non-disclosure agreements, monstrosities of many thousands of words designed to intimidate and impose often illegal – and certainly immoral – conditions of work.

This might apply to attempts by corporate privateers to impose on an ergonomic working tools, such as web-based translation environments or environment tools such as Across, which cut productivity drastically and compromise quality and hourly earnings.

And the list goes on… All this can be summarized in one word:

Ah, but haven't we all got those? I doubt that, unfortunately.

We have professional associations of translators and interpreters which clearly give priority to the interests of corporates over individuals. Their publications and events are often dominated by unconsidered or ill-considered promotion of harmful practices involving technology or professional activities.

I would also question the ethics of abusive practices like calling nonprofessionals to donate services en masse to organizations like Translators Without Borders. At the least, points like these should be considered and discussed much more.

We even have professional organizations and many individuals of standing in the profession willing to overlook such minor indiscretions as long histories of physical and psychological abuse, with these organizations and honored colleagues continuing to support abusive individuals with such suspect histories in the organization of events.

There is a lot of scope for organizations like IAPTI and for individuals who take a stand to engage in issues – technical or otherwise – which affect us, and where we should feel some ethical or moral imperative to demand something different. And in doing this, we should maintain a respectful dialogue with those who oppose us and make the same commitment to respect in personal and professional exchanges. We will make mistakes as we do this, but we have no other good choices.

*******

This is a partial transcript of my keynote speech at the opening day of IAPTI's second international conference, which was held this year in Athens, Greece. In the many excellent presentations that day and the next, I was pleased to hear experienced peers present their competent and reasonable approaches to professional practice and ethics with clarity, insight and solid research which went far beyond my generalizations here. It was an honor to be a guest at one of the best professional events I have attended in my career as a commercial translator.

Photo credit: Danielle Gehrmann

Surprises from the IAPTI 2014 conference in Athens

I stopped traveling last year; the stress of dealing with ridiculous airport security and my uncertain resident status in the country of my choice (Portugal, resolved in April of this year) simply were not worth any benefits I could perceive from attending professional events or even visiting family. Thus from autumn last year until spring of this year I battened down the hatches and waited for the weather to change. In that time I declined some seven or eight speaking invitations for language service and technology events, even skipped the memoQfest in Budapest for the first time. My withdrawal from public presence in the world was also facilitated by a growing dissatisfaction with the same old suspects at conferences, saying more or less the same things - often with the same script - and the creeping transformation of these platforms into vehicles for sales and seldom-interesting corporate success stories better read in a brochure or blog post somewhere. Events which were formerly inspiring sources of useful technical and business information had become corporate echo chambers of declining value or simply boringly repetitive. This feeling was shared by others, including one friend organizing premium workshops and conferences who is determined to break the dull mold in which too many events are now set.

I had been aware of the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) since the organization was founded in 2009, when I was asked to join the ethics committee and declined for lack of time. After that I could not help but note some of its development given how small the world of translation is, but although its ranks grew to include a number of colleagues who have earned my greatest respect for their skills and conduct, some actions like nagging letters to various governments about the shocking situation of native interpreters stranded in conflict zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and the somewhat confused battle over HAMPsTr work made me wonder whether the organization's energies were well-focused. Nonetheless, my ongoing discussions with colleagues in the group made it clear that many of the assertions in strangely biased EU publications, private forum discussions and public media statements by some persons with particular corporate interests were not entirely accurate.

So it was the spirit of investigation which led me to accept the keynote invitation soon after receiving my Portuguese residence approval which gave me a permanent base in a Paradise too often disrespected by the frigid North. It was not entirely unlike my decision to travel often to the old German Democratic Republic many years ago to be a witness to the real conditions there and not rely on the reports and opinions of the ignorant or those with particular political agendas. And the Athens meeting proved to be quite a surprise. An excellent one.

I am reminded time and again how careful we must be of third-hand "knowledge" and impressions formed through social media. As an example, I had certain impressions of a colleague whose social media contributions and mentions I had followed vaguely for four or five years on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and various blogs. I knew this person as a young attorney, recently graduated, of South American origin and bright, but.... Wrong. The colleague in question proved to be a Ph.D. engineer of European (non-Latin) origin with quite a different background and impressive depth for one so young... and who, in fact, proved to be about 15 years older than I thought. I identified a number of other, similar mistakes about colleagues and the IAPTI organization as I took a careful look in the days I was their guest in Athens. And the openness of the organization's officers with details of past events involving ethical positions resolved the last questions I had.

In the past when some friends asked my advice about joining professional organizations, I consistently advised them to focus on the large, established groups such as the ATA, ITI, IoL, SFT, BDÜ, AdÜ Nord, etc. A big part of this is my belief in the concept of "think global, act local". Considering the utter uselessness of organizations like the FIT (an umbrella organization for professional associations whose purpose is unclear even to many of its members), I was highly skeptical of a young "international" organization like IAPTI to exert much real, positive influence on the professional experiences of its members in a way that involvement in local organizations can. In my own primary market (Germany), the BDÜ has put in efforts for resolving problems involving the compensation of court-sworn translators and interpreters which I could never expect from any grouzp spread across the globe. And local meetings, training events, etc. in so many national organizations offer value to new and experienced professionals which I could not really see happening with a group officially domiciled in Argentina, no matter how wide a distribution of local members it claims.

I was, of course, overlooking some obvious parallels, including a certain commercial organization which too often serves interests contrary to the well-being of translating professionals. And when I formed my opinions of the importance of local (national) involvement versus fuzzy-headed internationalism, I had not given full consideration to the growing cross-border nature of the language professions and the need to consider its implications. Nor was I fully aware of the extent of ethical compromises in some of the major professional organizations and the stubborn insistence of some leaders in these to continue to support ethically and morally debased individuals and professional practices, including the unprofessional hampsterization of translation with inappropriate applications of MpT technology. 

What I found in Athens, upon closer examination and many hours of tiring but encouraging discussion, was an organization with clearer concepts than were apparent in much of the public banter and one with an ethical foundation which I believe to be among the soundest I have observed in associations of language service professionals. I still take issue with some thingsa, but these are minor matters, and the willingness of the IAPTI leadership to engage in honest, transparent discussions of differences is very encouraging. One executive at a major translation company commented that I had chosen to speak to "the Shiites" by agreeing to the talk in Athens, which was surely meant to say that I was putting myself in league with crazed fanatics - though if I'm not mistaken, most of the suicide bombers have Sunni ties of some sort. Not a helpful comparison in any case, as even my valued Sunni colleagues are unlikely to blow up anything more than balloons for their kids' birthday celebrations.

This blog has been fairly quiet in recent months because I've been occupied with resettlement on a lovely small farm and various personal arrangements, and I was growing tired of engaging in the same arguments with advocates of inappropriate machine pseudotranslation (MpT) according to the principle of not arguing with fools, because others might be unable to tell the difference. But - despite a rather nasty flu resulting from the stress of travel - I have returned from my time in Athens with more professional inspiration than I have felt in years, which will likely result in a number of blog posts as I examine some of the interesting matters discussed at the second international IAPTI conference in Athens last weekend.

My current understanding of IAPTI is that, despite its relative "youth" (about 5 years of existence), it is a professionally and ethically credible organization worthy of serious attention by translators and interpreters. Unlike some other organizations (such as the ATA) it does not serve multiple masters by trying to include corporate members (my own association, the BDÜ, is also admirable in this regard, allowing only individual membership by qualified translators or interpreters, although these individuals may in fact head translation companies of any size). The concerns of translation companies and related organizations are not de facto in conflict with those of individual service providers, and indeed I have always considered boutique agencies operated by qualified individuals with a good understanding of professional practice to be among the best allies of freelancers. But I think a separation allows for a better focus on the particular needs of each, and those of us with a foot in both worlds are well enough able to follow the paths of personal and organizational growth as we need in these separate organizations.

The level of professionalism and the relevance of the content presented at the IAPTI 2014 conference in Athens frankly blew me away. I cannot say how pleased I was to have delivered the second-worst talk I attended on the first day. I even heard a presentation by a young attorney describing in a carefully limited scope possible approaches to protecting the profession against unqualified and harmful intrusion in the provision of medical and legal translation services. When people start talking about "regulating" the profession of translation, I generally mutter something like "yea, yea, wordworkers of the world unite - fuck you" and excuse myself from a pointless, naive discussion. This guy carefully differentiated areas in which restrictions were both desirable and legally feasible and distanced himself from ridiculous ideas that all of translation itself could or should be restricted by some sort of silly national or international guild.

Most of the presentations were on a much more practical level and would have fit well at any professional event I have attended in the last 15 years. All were presented with a consistent competence and relevance which has been sadly missing at other events. Too much time is wasted at a great number of events, where the purpose of a presentation is clearly sales or bragging about some server integration or corporate success story of limited interest to freelance service providers. Such presentations are not worthless by any means and may indeed be exactly what a corporate department or translation agency manager needs, but often the mix of these with content more focused on individual interests results in a brew which satisfies the legitimate interests of neither group. What I saw in Athens was a conference which was uncut, mainlined nourishment for the interests of individual translators and interpreters without denigrating the interests of others with sound ethics and business practices.

So watch this space... there are many thought-provoking matters from the conference in Athens which I feel are worth discussing on this blog. And based upon my experience I would recommend the next IAPTI conference to any of my professional peers.

See also:

Anmerkungen des Übersetzers: IAPTI 2014 in Athens and the Day After

What I did before, during and after IAPTI’s Conference in Athens: Confessions of a freelance translator/mother-of-two.

IAPTI 2014 Athens tweets "storified"

A post on InGreek Translations

Practical terminology management with Mark Childress - October 2014

Here is an opportunity to spend the day learning from one of the world's leading industrial terminologists and the current president of the German Association for Terminology (Deutscher Terminologie-Tag) in the next of Stridonium's scheduled professional education events in the Netherlands. I made Mark's acquaintance some 14 years ago as a systems consultant, software developer and sometime translator for an electronic archiving solutions provider and SAP integrator. We needed to get the SAP terminology in the translations of our software manuals right, and I soon learned that he was the man. He also very unbureaucratically made the French, German and English terminology available to me in formats I could use with Trados and Déjà Vu in the days before the current online terminology portal for SAP, when the only game in town seemed to  be a CD that was never up to date. This gave me an edge in certain areas of technical and business translation for years, for which I was very grateful. It was, alas, another ten years before I could made that acquaintance a face-to-face one at the Warsaw conference for Translation Management Europe, where I also discovered that he was a gifted speaker and a patient teacher with a wealth of inspiring examples.

On October 29, 2014 at the Restaurant Hotel Savelberg in Voorburg (NL), just a few minutes by car or train from The Hague, Mr. Childress will be conducting a  full-day workshop with an overview of practical terminology management:

• The basics of terminology theory and practice in an organization
• Deciding between process-based or project-based approaches to terminology issues
• Simple pro-terminology arguments you can use to convince your managers, your colleagues, your clients – or yourself!
• Get started climbing the terminology mountain, one step at a time

The cost for the workshop is €375 per person (€325 for Stridonium members). Register by August 25th to receive the Early Bird rate of €325. Further information on the schedule and registration are now available on the Stridonium events page.

In Mark’s own words,

"This one-day seminar gives an overview of topics related to practical terminology work. No academic theorizing, no technobabble, no sales pitch – just good solid tips you can use to make your work run more smoothly."

*******

Mark Childress has a B.A. from Humboldt State University in California and an M.A. from Heidelberg University in Germany. He joined SAP AG in Walldorf, Germany in 1995 as a translator and has been responsible for the company’s terminology management since 1998. He is the current president of the German Association for Terminology (Deutscher Terminologie-Tag / DTT). Mark gives frequent lectures and training on terminology management to technical writers, translators, and universities and has written articles on terminology work for publications including MultiLingual and eDITion, the journal of the DTT.

Let them eat cake (in translation)!

Ya really gotta wonder what kind of Kool Aid is guzzled by those social anarchists mistakenly called "conservatives". No outrage is beyond them, no depraved indignity too great in the Pursuit of Capital. We look askance at North Korea, rightly so, but fail to notice that particular interests have long since stepped in to offer their puppet Great Leaders to the sheeple afraid of a freedom which tolerates difference and calls for a minimum of respect.

In the wake of the US Supreme Courts astounding, radical declaration that the "religious rights" of registered businesses trump the rights of the wage slaves they keep, when women who feel they should have a right to use an IUD for birth control and have it covered by the same health insurance that covers Viagra and vasectomies are casually called Nazis and perhaps worse, ya really gotta wonder what latter-day Kesey is running around spiking the juice in the Cuckoo's Nest.

We have our share of those in translation too. More than our share, as a friend in Bairro da Câmara rightly observed. Todos os tradutores são loucos. Not all perhaps. Yet. Give the hamstermeisters in the Big Agencies a little more time to MpT your brains and the day will come. Their acolytes have been ejaculating in prayer for a long time now in service of their algorithmic subcommunicative gods of pseudotranslation and professional degradation. Yoga instructors have even joined their cause to teach wordworkers to bend over just a little farther to receive their labor's rewards.

In her eagerness to show flexibility in her professional standards and squash the "unfounded rumors" that there might have been some quality issues, such as machine-translated content or just general sloppy garbage on the web site of voracious venture capital consumer Smartling, Ms. Bell wrote:

January 16, 2014, German translator Kevin Lossner Tweeted that a business in our space was “toxic waste” and “a load of crap” because he thought the company had machine translated its site (they hadn’t)

Screenshots from Smartling's web site taken on January 16, 2014. Jus' mah 'magination?

Namaste.

What can be done about the rising tide of mediocratizers and profiteering liars who give the many good eggs in translation technology a whiff of rotten odor? Recently in a PuffPo piece, Smartling apologist Nataly Kelly tried to claim how that "so many" translators hate translation technology. Her perspective might be skewed given that many do in fact hate the dysfunctional, browser-based translation interface offered by the aggressive venture capital guzzler Smartling, her employer, but the truth is that as support technologies for translation have improved and early misconceptions based on the primitive functions of old technologies like Trados Workbench and Wordfast Classic are slowly displaced by real knowledge of modern productivity tools, many "technophobes" have casually embraced what might have once seemed a daunting technology. But the same person who brought you the argument that translators will soon go the way of blacksmiths, to be replaced by the technology her owner offers, has a certain pecuniary interest in making us all seem like dippy, frightened housespouses desperate to pick up a little mad money for shoes or to get the kiddies' over-sugared teeth fixed. Really, Jayne Fox said it better and in touch with reality.

The desperation of the MpT interests, the clownsourcers and other linguistic riffraff has been growing visibly in recent months, as their attacks escalate on "haters and naysayers", who oppose the greedy cabal by suggesting that translation quality is still possible by emptying your mind of MpT thoughts. It all so much resembles the desperation of COBOL programmers at the dawn of a new millennium, scamming in those Y2K bucks as fast as they could before their Emperor's knockoff duds were revealed for what they are and the limits of their 2 cm caralhos of competence became all too apparent. MT hasn't gone where it claims it will in more than 50 years and it's not going now where the carnival barkers claim it will if you part with six or seven figures of major Western currency cash. Or as some would have it and go cheap by gargling your confidential translations and following the advice of some "gurus" to throw out considerations of law and ethics.

What can be done? Stop listening to the relentless propaganda of the commercial interests who have neither the interests of language service providers like translators, editors, writers and interpreters at heart nor the interests of the successful clientele whom the good ones serve with pleasure and skill. Most importantly, unplug the noise machines of "professional translator associations" who are too often becoming sellout puppets to commercial interests and are too often merely adding their wheezing voices to the chaos of the translation profiteering echo chamber. In their own separate ways, newer organizations and watering holes for wordwalkers like Stridonium and IAPTI are taking necessary risks to ensure that a place will remain in the future of translation for ethical service of the quality needed to move beyond the bulk market bog.

I'll be talking about a few of these matters in between shots of ouzo and poetry slams at IAPTI's 2nd International Conference in Athens, Greece on September 20th & 21st. Get to know the professionals with backgrounds in engineering, physics, law and other disciplines who get under the skin of the hamstermeisters so much that one recently called them "Shiites". That reminds me of an agency friend who for years has referred to my direct clients (and many of my agencies) as Die Ahnungslosen, because they foolishly pay a mere freelance translator more than that company's clients will usually give to a "full service" agency. There are other places to run with your language business than the HAMPsTr wheel. Come to Athens or come to a Stridonium event and see a much brighter side of translation.

Oh yea, and click around on those pics above for your reading pleasure....

IAPTI 2nd International Conference in Athens!

Photo by Aaron Logan (LIGHTmatter Photography) used under the Creative Commons License

Registration is now open for the second international conference of the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) to be held on September 20 and 21 this year in Athens, Greece at the beautiful Electra Palace Hotel Athens (Plaka) under the lights of the Acropolis. Further details on the schedule and speakers will be published soon, but places in the event hotel are already growing scarce, so you might want to register soon at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/2nd-iapti-international-conference-tickets-8549360367.

I will be speaking at the event in a talk titled "Confessions of an American MpT User" in which, among other things, I come clean about how Google Translate has improved my life.

Cambridge conference - Getting Language Right!

One of the phrases best known from the Monty Python is "And now for something completely different!" This could be applied well to the conference at Cambridge (UK) next month (March 24th), which one leading conference planner and industry insider noted does not feature the "usual suspects" :-)

The sameness of conferences in the translation profession is wearing. Same topics, same speakers most of the time, perhaps a change of venue. What I find most distressing is that most (or all) of these conferences that I can recall off-hand are insiders talking to insiders. Chris Durban and others wisely advise participation in professional meetings and conferences related to one's specialties, but there are few venues where businessmen and other professionals gather to deal with issues of language that are important to good working translators, and the best opportunities for networking are generally at events where language and translation is definitely not the focus. One walks the trade fair floor for a day, mingles at event happy hours and pans the silt of interactions for the few nuggets that might be found with care.

The conference Communicating in Business – Getting Language Right features speakers involved in domestic, EU and international business, law and diplomacy and some translators working at high levels of public and private service with direct clients, who all share a deep understanding of what goes missing when we waste too much time fussing over technologies and forget that these are merely the form - irreplaceable human knowledge and skill in communication are most often the content that matters, especially so when one deals with the most important services, products, legal, social and political issues.

It's nice to see the rigid, repetitive mold of yet another Are You Ready for the Future of Translation Technology? event replaced by one that offers substance, nourishment and useful interactions for those who do not aspire to the compromised communication practices of the anonymized bulk market but instead concern themselves with carrying messages most effectively to those who want and need them.

I am a strong believer in good technology, properly applied, but private reports of a recent major translation project where all the processes worked perfectly, with translation memory tools, terminology review, planned workflows, etc. delivered an absolutely flawless format, perfect consistency and all of it perfectly unusable because the most important element was left out: the real communication specialists, the expert linguists who know the subject matter to be translated and how best to express it for another culture in the language needed. That's what the Stridonium conference is about - sharing best practice and working together as true partners in communication to stay on top of the top of the game.

Riccardo Schiaffino's About Translation blog has details of the conference, which can also be found on the Stridonium events pages.

"The Future is here" and the end is near

On September 9th, the Dutch Association of Translation Agencies (ATA the Lesser) will be hosting a conference on the bubbly, bright future of MT post-editors and why all good translators should be eager to hop on that gravy train and ride it to the greatest challenge of their professional careers: turning pig shit into gold.

The conference keynote speech will be by industry prophet Renato Beninatto, which will undoubtedly be full of entertaining claims and predictions. Most of the presentations will be in English, hopefully machine translated to convey the real quality of that present future. Presentations will include a sales workshop by Renato, and Atril, SDL and Plunet will present their products, presumably with some MT-related spin. The rest of the workshop titles are clearly focused on MT editing processes.

Information on the conference program is available in Dutch and English. Those who read both pages will note the date discrepancy on early bird rates. I presume that the Dutch information citing August 10th is correct and someone simply botched the translation and editing of the English page.

Those who need to collect PE points to maintain their Dutch certifications will receive 5 points for attendance.

See you in the future!

TM Europe 2010

Just got an interesting note from an industry acquaintance about the upcoming event in Poland. I would like to share it here, because it sounds quite worthwhile.

This year the conference takes place from September 29 to October 1, 2010 at the Qubus Hotel, Krakow, Poland. The updated program for the TM-Europe 2010 International Conference is available on the conference website.  The Early bird registration ends on Friday August 27th.  The attendance figures are very high, with many customer and translation company managers planning to participate, so I thought you might consider attending too.

This year’s conference theme is “Project and Technology Management, and Business Optimization for the Translation and Localization Industry”. The TM Europe 2010 program will cover the following topics, among others:

• Project Management Workshop
• Translation Technology Primer Workshop
• The Warsaw Pact Debate - The Future of Translation Technology
• Customer- vendor business case-studies
• Translation technology and tools overview (MT, TM, TMS) and new developments
• Business development, optimization and change management in times of recession
• Budgeting, process and cost optimization strategies
• Industry standards, business models and forecasts