ITI’s 25th anniversary conference was held in Birmingham on 7-8 May, and the theme was ’Expanding our horizons’.

On a personal level, a great thing about the event was the huge Twitter buzz surrounding the event. This hadn’t happened on quite the same scale before, and it was particularly nice to see after my social media presentation with Sarah Dillon at the 2009 ITI conference. The hashtag #iticonf was being used throughout the weekend, and the Twitter feed was displayed in the conference foyer all weekend. There was even a tweetup on Saturday afternoon (which to my embarrassment I managed to miss, as I was engrossed in another conversation!).

You can see a twitter feed captured by @valivonica here.

I think that one of the main highlights for many people was a chance to hear Chris Durban give her ‘mystery shopper’ talk, a very interesting experiment where she posed as a client who required a translation. After a sending her request to a number of language service providers (translation companies in this instance), her conclusion was that ‘It’s hard being the client’. With such a wide range of quality and pricing, who can they rely on, if not the language service providers? And that includes the freelance translators providing the translation via the companies.

Like many of the other speakers, the overall message was to always strive for quality, and with this in mind Chris repeated her call to translators to sign their translations. Fly-by-night operations are playing on a different field to those of us who are in this business for the long haul, and whose reputations are at stake. We have more to lose.

Interestingly, Nicolas Ostler, the keynote speaker, pointed to a possible emergence of a two-tier industry: information-only (possibly processed using machine translation) vs. top-end, very high quality writing.

On the Saturday I chaired Janet Fraser and Michael Gold’s session on their 2010 recession survey. Their findings were extremely revealing – they found a rather large gap in the 40-50 age bracket. Meanwhile, many respondents were under 34, and lots were over 55. This is fascinating because to me, 40-50 is a key age bracket. It is usually the stage in a career where you at the top of your game and are leading the way for others. What does this mean for the translation industry?

Respondents’ perceptions of themselves as entrepreneurs differed wildly according to age bracket, too, which I would have expected. Most of those under 34 saw themselves as ‘natural’ entrepreneurs – i.e. that they hadn’t necessarily set out to be business people but were happy to be business people. In the discussion that followed, we explored reasons for this, including how the dramatic change in the cost of going to university in the UK since 1999 might influence how people approach their careers. It will be interesting to see how the under 34s’ responses change as they age and progress through their careers.

Jonathan Downie’s talk ‘Oan the telly’ was another highlight for me, and he retold his 15 minutes of fame in a highly entertaining talk. But there was a wider message to be learned from his experience: when someone asks you about what you do for a living, find a way to condense that down into a punchy message that would fit onto a t-shirt. I’m calling this Jonathan’s personal rebranding of the ‘elevator pitch’.

I don’t know if anyone else felt this way, but the overall tone of the conference felt a bit like regrouping and taking another look at how our industry presents itself. Should we re-align our approach to professionalism? When we talk about the vague term ‘quality’, what do we really mean? Do we have the confidence to promote ourselves more ‘actively’ to the outside world, including putting our name to our work?

As always, the conference was a chance to meet old and new faces, learn new things, and confirm and challenge existing knowledge. I came away with plenty of food for thought.икони

Image courtesy of Wired magazine

The Institute of Translation and Interpreting will hold its General Meeting this Saturday (13 November). I urge all ITI members to attend if they can, or to vote by proxy if they haven’t already done so*. There are a number of important motions to be voted on, and I’m sure it will be a lively meeting. In my view, what many of these motions reflect is the need for greater professionalism and transparency in ITI as a membership organisation, which is a good thing. I want to be part of a professional body which represents real-life practising translators and interpreters, and which is represented by real-life practising translators and interpreters.

I intend to speak up at the meeting, but in advance of that I’d like to share some things I would like to see ITI introduce:

a) Greater transparency. The primary aim of this would be for ITI’s members, whose subscriptions sustain it, to have better knowledge of how their membership fees are being used.

b) Ensuring ITI’s leadership is similarly transparent, and that Council and Chairman are a visible team who members feel they can approach and who can be relied upon to represent their interests. Since the Chairman and Council represent members’ interests (without whom, of course, there would be no ITI at all), it is essential that they are able to interact freely with other ITI members as part of a two-way dialogue.

c)  Following on b), I’d like to see a permanently-available (perhaps on the website), clear  description of network coordinator, committee member, committee chairman, Council member and ITI Chairman roles. It doesn’t have to be lengthy, but should at least tell members what the roles involve, and how much time they would typically require. This would help members to decide whether to volunteer for them in future.

d) In order to ensure that these voluntary roles are performed by the best possible people for the job, drawing on the wide-ranging skills of ITI’s membership, I’d like to see a slightly more formal application process for roles, in addition to incentivising them (financially) where appropriate. This could involve advertising vacancies, for which a standard ITI application template could be distributed. This would seek to emulate the procedures used by other professional bodies, and I hope that with the new Equality and Diversity Committee in place, a new and transparent process will eventually emerge.

The ‘incentivising’ bit I sneakily slipped into my final point is a perhaps an audacious and controversial wish, but there is so much talent within ITI and I think it is currently underused and underrepresented. What proportion of that talent is unable to find a way to contribute because they are put off by the amount of uncompensated time they might have to give up? It’s not just that the roles (primarily that of Chairman) appear so cumbersome to members that’s the problem – I can’t imagine many freelance translators or interpreters earning a decent crust falling over themselves to sacrifice a large chunk of that income to act as Chairman, a vital and hugely time-consuming role, on a voluntary basis (or in return for ‘token’ money). I don’t think it’s money-obsessed to say this, it’s simply a practical observation based on the reality of the situation. I believe that practising translators can and should be able to be accommodated in order to sit on committees, on Council, and as Chairman alongside their normal work commitments. We should not rely on academic members and retired members to fill these roles. If proper financial compensation is what it takes to draw from a broad spectrum of the wisest people in the industry in this role, I believe that dismissing this idea altogether would be a serious misjudgement.

The topic of the role played by professional associations in their professional communities is so broad and open-ended that a single blog post will never begin to cover it. There is so much more to say, and I look forward to the discussions on Saturday! But for now my closing thoughts are these: what we as 21^st Century translation and interpreting professionals need is a professional association that accurately represents us, supports us in our careers, and projects a positive image of our profession. If we really want to promote and strengthen translation and interpreting as professions then we must walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk.

* 11 November (tomorrow) is the deadline for receipt by the ITI office of proxy forms.

Before I get too excited though (complacency is a dangerous trap to fall into, after all), it’s important to take stock of what this ‘qualification’ really means, and what it doesn’t. Whilst MITI status is not a qualification as such, in the same way an MA in Translation is, it’s probably the most widely-recognized mark of experience and expertise across the British translation industry. The criteria for the route I took are:

• At least 3 years’ translation experience (usually expressed in number of words)
• A pass in the ITI membership exam, which includes a text of the examiners’ choice (you only get to select the general subject area, so when you do receive the test document it’s a nice – read terrifying – surprise ). The exam also requires you to write a ‘linguistic commentary’ about the translation.

It’s a tough process to get through, as it should be, but MITI status should not be a badge that says a translator is definitely a wondrous human being and is 100% certain to be the best translator in the world ever. To quote a saying (sort of), you’re only as good as your last translation. Incidentally, it doesn’t mean that Associate members of the ITI aren’t just as good. They might even be better in some cases, and just haven’t chosen to upgrade to MITI membership (oh, it costs twice as much as Associate membership, too).

I always seen a lot of debate both offline and in the blogosphere about translation qualifications, and which is the ‘best’ one to get. In general, whilst of course qualifications are no substitute for real, practical experience, I am wholly in favour of more ‘letters after your name’ if they have a clear professional purpose. I will come back to the topic of translation qualifications, and plan to provide a brief overview of MAs vs. the DipTrans.

In the mean time, take a look at There’s Something About Translation for more details of the requirements for MITI status, and information on the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ new Chartered Linguist qualification.  I am also considering applying for Chartered Linguist status at some point in the future, so there’ll probably be more on this later. Watch this space.

Interestingly, a slightly different viewpoint is expressed on Brazen Careerist today. A platform for debate…