I know it's been over a month since the conference, but I did promise a second post, and there was one session I wanted to mention. This was the session I was asked to chair. It was part of the "Business and Other Track" and this particular session had a good representation of both.
Among the speakers were Inga Michaeli and Eliezer Nowodworsky. They're both ITA members and regular speakers at ITA conferences. Inga has translated literature and travel guides and has a blog which is also on the Translation Israel Planet. Her talk was entitled "Starving Artist or Businessperson? Are They Mutually Exclusive?" She explained how you can both practice the craft you care about, and be a businessperson. Eliezer excels at taking fringe issues and making them relevant and interesting. This time he did it with a discussion of some approaches to writing the name(s) of God.
He was followed by one of the guests from abroad, Anne Diamantidis of GxP Language Services who discussed how translators can effectively use Facebook. Among the points she made was that people don't go to Facebook to look for services providers. So translators should find translator groups, get involved, and possibly get referrals from other translators. Another way is to find professional groups in one's area of expertise, get involved with the group, and make it known that you also translate in this field. She also emphasized the need for separation between a personal profile and a professional profile, and recommended the latter over a Facebook page. The latter being just an instance of a service provider page. To my question regarding using automation with FB, she recommended against it. The following day Anne gave another great talk social networks.
This made me take a look at my Facebook profile, as well as my presence on other social media sites. My profile is a mix of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues relating to my various hats. There is no clear separation there. However, I don't really post any personal stuff. I might like the family/party photos of friends, but my own posts are of things I'm interested in, links about language and translation, links about programming, open source, technology, science, my sister's concerts, my mother's art blog, interesting photography. All of those are related to fields I translate in. Thus the eclectic nature of my FB profile doesn't detract anything from my online presence as a translator.
The last talk in the session was Joana Chen's talk "Translating Creativity" in which she discussed her translations of Agi Mishol's poetry and the creative path of her work with Agi Mishol. I've heard, read and discussed poetry translation more than once, but each discussion is just as unique as the poetry, and this talk was no exception.
Altogether, a very good session.
On the "hallway track" I visited Memsource's desk. Memsource is a cloud based translation platform. It includes translation memories, terminology management and a few other things. I haven't had a chance to see it beyond the demonstration I got in the conference, but the in the demonstration it looked useful, and I plan to look into it.
On the last day I caught the end of Ruth Moses's talk about Word tips. Even if we use other tools for some of the work we do, we all use Microsoft Word to some degree. Over the years Ruth collected a lot of her tips on Textility website. The last talk I attended was a rundown of terminology management tools given by Marek Pawelec. I usually don't remember all the comparisons made in such talks, but I like to note the main point of comparison, and the names of the tools and get a sense of what I might want to look up later.
The conference was enjoyable and the mingling was good.