Should I Renew My Membership in the ATA (American Translators Association) for Next Year?

 

It would make it the 28th year – man, that is such a long time!!! The fact is, this is the first time that I am seriously wondering whether it still makes sense paying them about 200 dollars a year …. for what?

I did pay them a lot of money over the years mostly because I used to believe in the ATA.

In any case, I believed that it was better to have the ATA than nothing. I wrote several articles for the ATA Chronicle about 10 years ago, and I was mildly surprised when they published them in spite of my anti-corporate-agency streak (only a mild one, I tried to control myself back then).

I was also one of the authors of the Patent Translators Handbook which was published by the ATA in 2007. I did all of that in my free time without any compensation, of course, because I thought that I was doing something useful, although some of it was obviously crass self-promotion. But every time when I receive a new copy of the ATA Chronicle, as I did today, the only real benefit of ATA membership for me, I just keep turning the pages looking for something worth reading and I consider myself lucky if I find a single article in it that I am interested in reading.

Lots of ads from SDL Trados, every translator’s favorite computer memory tool. Lots of offers of job openings for translators with the National Security Agency, every translator’s dream job. Lots of cute graphics taking up half a page. Not a lot of interesting articles.

That thing is definitely not worth two hundred dollars a year.

Maybe the problem is that after almost three decades, I finally outgrew this organization as it seems to be more and more geared only toward people who those of us who already are translators, or at least who have been translating for a while, refer to as “newbies”.

Just look at the promotional video from the last ATA Conference. Newbies, newbies, newbies …. and buddies. Tool bar with vendors of tools – here’s your chance to buy SDL Trados if you don’t have it yet – and we’ll give you a great discount if you buy it right now!

Or I could do yoga right there at the conference, or something that looks like yoga. They seem to be calling it “chikan” (probably Chi Kung in Chinese) in the video, which incidentally means “groper” in Japanese. I remember “chikans” groping petrified Japanese “office ladies” in crowded metro trains from the time when I used to ride the metro to work in Tokyo in mid eighties, one and half hour each way.

The fact is, I hate yoga or anything that even remotely looks like yoga. I tried it once in Prague, I think it was in 1979, to please my then-girlfriend who was crazy about yoga. She used to stand on her head for 15 minutes to get the right amount of blood circulating through her brain. Her face was flushed and looked so lovely after the exercise! But when she saw the expression on my face after my first session where there were only two men among something like 30 women (I found the environment quite stressful and intimidating), she wisely never mentioned yoga to me again. Standing on her head like that must have been really good for her brain.

Or I could do a Latin dance called Zumba at the same conference for translators. How exciting! Maybe that’s what I need to break the tedium of my unfulfilled life of a lonesome translator. They even showed a couple of guys with a moderate beer punch in the video not to discourage male translators from attending the next conference, I suppose. A guy with SDL Trados sign around his neck describes “Zumba” experience thusly:”I zig when I am supposed to zag, and I zag when I am supposed to zig”.

Lot of invaluable information for translators, both about Trados and zigging and zagging.

Towards the end there is a “brainstorm networking session” about a fictional guy called Ernesto, (wasn’t there an Ernesto in Sesame Street too? Maybe they should go with Cookie Monster at the next conference, he was by far my favorite), who has a big problem because he can’t finish a translation on time? OMG, that sounds so interesting!

And they end the highly educational video with this joke “What do you call a fish without an eye?” (It’s fsh – OMG, that’s so funny)!

No mention of a single issue that translators who are not necessarily newbies might be interested in throughout the entire video. Judging from that fact that things like corporatization of the so called translation business, predatory agencies, commodification of translation, pressure on rates from machine translation, “fuzzy matches” and “repeat words”, competition of near-slave labor from third world countries …. none of that was even hinted at in the video, these subjects probably did not exactly feature prominently in the discussions.

After watching the video, I am glad that I did not go.

The only other benefit of ATA membership is that you get listed in the ATA database of translators. Most years I used to get a few small translation jobs from that listing, but I cannot remember a single job coming from the ATA database this year. I did get some offers, but only from agencies that wanted me to take a test or some such nonsense. So I did not bother replying. In any case, since only translation agencies know about this database, it is really only useful for translators who aspire no higher than to work only on the translation agency plantation until they die of old age or starvation, whichever comes first.

I have noticed that many if not most old timers that I met over the years in this country were not ATA members. Being an ATA member does not seem to be a very cool designation if you are an experienced translator, with some exceptions. Some hate the organization for reasons that I can understand, some for reasons that I don’t quite understand, and some just gradually gave up on it.

Maybe it’s finally time for me as well to say goodbye to the ATA after 27 years, especially since being listed in their database is unlikely to have any effect on my income. But I am not sure yet what I will do, that is why I wrote this post to see what other people think. Old habits die hard and inertia is the most powerful force in the universe. I think I have until the end of January of next year to send or not to send in my 200 dollars. It’s like enrolling in Medicare or Social Security, if you miss a year, you can just reenroll next year if you want to.

What do you think I should do? Is the ATA still relevant to translators who are no longer newbies and/or who don’t necessary want to be buddies to translator newbies?

If you let me know what you think, I promise that I will consider your advice very carefully, provided that it is offered sincerely, with good intentions, and with no malice in heart and mind, either towards me, or towards the American Translators Association.