See You at the 3rd IAPTI Conference in Bordeaux, September 4 – 6, 2015

 
I very rarely go to conferences of translators. In the 28 years that I have been an independent translator, I have been only to 2 conferences: the first one was the Second International Japanese-English Translation Conference (IJET 2) held in June 1991 in San Francisco. I was a member of the Conference Committee and the topic of the paper I gave during the conference together with Alex Shkolnik was “Translation from One Foreign Language to Another Foreign Language by a Native Speaker of a Third Language”.

I can’t believe it has been 24 years already. It seems like only yesterday that I was changing diapers (once in a while), but it has been a quarter century already.

The second conference that I attended, this time without being a speaker myself, was the 38th ATA (American Translators Association) Conference in November of 1997 in San Francisco. I see that the next ATA conference will be in San Francisco again in 2016. Maybe I will go to see again the places where I spent 19 years of my life when I was still full of life, vigor and illusions, before I became a decrepit, disillusioned old man.

I hear rumbles of discontent with the ATA as it functions now, and some of the discontent that I hear comes from people who are running for office because they want to change the way ATA functions now, namely for the most part as an incubator for “newbie translators” who are trained to become pliable, obedient workforce for translation agencies who have been running the ATA for quite a while.

If there is more information that that ATA Conference next year in San Francisco might be shaping out as an interesting place to be, I just might hop on a plane to San Francisco in 2016.

Back in the nineties, getting to the site of these 2 conferences was not a problem for me because I lived in San Francisco (during the IJET 2 Conference), or in the Wine Country (during the ATA Conference), only about 40 minutes north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge.

This time I will have to fly, although I don’t like flying too much. Not that I am afraid to fly – I usually visit Prague and my hometown of Český Krumlov in Southern Bohemia every 2 or 3 years, but because it is such a hassle, especially when you have to change planes at least a couple of times since I now start my trip from a small airport in Norfolk in Eastern Virginia.

I will start from Norfolk, then go probably from New York or Atlanta to Paris, and then change planes again in Paris, because this year I am definitely going to attend the 3rd IAPTI Conference in Bordeaux.

This time I have to go because I will also be one of about 30 speakers at the 3rd IAPTI Conference (you can click on the link if want to see the lineup of the speakers), and the working title of my presentation is “Threats, Challenges and Opportunities for Translators in the Modern Version of Corporatized Translation Industry” (click on the link of you want to see a summary).

IAPTI, which stands for International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters, was founded on St. Jerome’s day in 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina “by a group of professional language mediators as a vehicle for promoting ethical practices in translation and interpretation and providing a forum for discussing problems typical of the globalized world, such as crowdsourcing, outsourcing, bad rates and other abuse” (quote from Wikipedia).

It now has members in 70 countries, and most of its members are about half my age as evidenced by these photos from 2nd IAPTI Conference last year in Athens, Greece.

Among other things, I hope to also meet some regular commenters on my blog in person in Bordeaux. I hope it will not be a major disappointment for them to get to meet me in person. Or if it is, hopefully they will not let me know.

Even if you have just come across this blog post by accident, you may want to give a try to the 3d IAPTI Conference in Bordeaux at the beginning of September if you are a translator.

The problem that some translators have, even those of us who have moderately successful blogs where one can hear from many other bloggers and interesting commenters, is that we almost never get to meet other translators, unless we live in a place like London, or Paris, or San Francisco.

There are several bears in the neck of the woods where I have been living for the last 14 years, specifically in the Great Dismal Swamp on the border between Virginia and North Carolina. I have not met any of them yet, but the local newspaper said so.

It might be easier to meet a bear than a translator where I live. Since I have not met any translators here yet, and there is nothing about translators in my newspaper either, I am getting on the plane come September to finally meet some of them in Bordeaux.