 | Exactly one month ago it was time to ditch the desk for a couple of days and reconnect with the human side of the translation industry, i.e. the people behind the emails, profiles and webinars, at the Elia Together 2017. I had already heard good things about last year’s event in Barcelona so when I found out this year’s conference was going to be held just up the road in Berlin there was no way I could refuse! And so it was that I found myself collecting my name badge and info pack on a chilly Thursday morning in Berlin’s Moabit district. |
The conference kicked off with the welcome and keynote speeches, before it was time to get stuck into a busy day of presentations and proactive professional mingling! Three “tracks” were on offer over the two days, with sessions falling under the categories of relationships, processes and technology. Looking back over the schedule, I did a pretty good job of splitting my time between the three and I’m pleased to report that I came away with notes and scribblings a plenty, some of which have already brought about changes in my day-to-day work.
Personally, I found the session held by Delphine Guérou in the morning of day two to be the most useful and instantly applicable. In her presentation “Converting reference material: ready, steady, rock!”, Delphine introduced, among other things, an open-source alignment tool called LF Aligner which ultimately creates TMX files based on bilingual reference files, i.e. parallel texts or past translations for which you might not have a TM to hand. I’ve already found this to be such a useful tool. Recently, for example, a colleague passed a new client on to me who wanted a press release translating fairly quickly in an unfamiliar field. Luckily for me, the German company discussed in the press release has an excellent English translation of their entire website, including pages on the products specifically mentioned in the text. This meant that after feeding a few relevant pages of source and target text into the alignment tool, I was quickly able to create a TM that provided a great base for, and ensured terminological consistency in, the translation.
Similarly hands on yet completely different in nature was the presentation given by Iwona Bak on day one. Entitled “Hide and seek in partners’ recruitment”, Iwona discussed a number of ways to help translators stand out from the crowd and gain the attention of vendor managers. She described, for instance, how a recruiter would go about trying to find a translator, a process that was then flipped around to highlight how a translator can best be found. Advice here ranged from the obvious – including a CV on online profiles that can then be found by a relevant search – to things we may already do but not be fully aware of, such as using keywords specific to our work on our CVs and websites. A very useful tip here was to take a thesaurus and look up keywords that might be obvious to us to then draw our attention to other keywords that could also be incorporated, with the ultimate goal of increasing the chances of being picked up by a recruiter’s radar.
Besides the great many presentations on offer, another fantastic part of Elia Together was the Together Fair held at the end of day one. A number of translation companies were represented here both in a little booklet, which was really handy for preselecting companies that matched your specialisms and language combinations, and of course in person at various stands. Due to the sheer popularity of the event and the number of freelance translators in attendance, it did turn into a bit of a speed dating scenario, but it was still a great way of making initial contact with potential clients in person.
Alongside the many new companies at the conference, I was also fortunate enough to be able to put faces to the names of a couple of colleagues I already work with. This is something we don’t have the chance to do often enough in our industry, making this kind of event even more worthwhile. Just being able to put voices and personalities to the names often cropping up in our inboxes really helps bring our virtual workplace to life and reinstates an element of social interaction that many of us lose when predominantly working alone. As I’m writing this, I’m not-so-secretly hoping that there are people out there reading my emails, or this post, in a little Yorkshire accent – what a treat that must be!
In all, I think it’s fair to say my reconnection with the more human side of our industry was a great success and well worth straying away from my screen. If you happen to have missed this year’s conference and are now wishing you hadn’t, worry no more! Plans are already under way for Elia Together 2018, quite possibly in a slightly sunnier location... Watch this space!
Personally, I found the session held by Delphine Guérou in the morning of day two to be the most useful and instantly applicable. In her presentation “Converting reference material: ready, steady, rock!”, Delphine introduced, among other things, an open-source alignment tool called LF Aligner which ultimately creates TMX files based on bilingual reference files, i.e. parallel texts or past translations for which you might not have a TM to hand. I’ve already found this to be such a useful tool. Recently, for example, a colleague passed a new client on to me who wanted a press release translating fairly quickly in an unfamiliar field. Luckily for me, the German company discussed in the press release has an excellent English translation of their entire website, including pages on the products specifically mentioned in the text. This meant that after feeding a few relevant pages of source and target text into the alignment tool, I was quickly able to create a TM that provided a great base for, and ensured terminological consistency in, the translation.
Similarly hands on yet completely different in nature was the presentation given by Iwona Bak on day one. Entitled “Hide and seek in partners’ recruitment”, Iwona discussed a number of ways to help translators stand out from the crowd and gain the attention of vendor managers. She described, for instance, how a recruiter would go about trying to find a translator, a process that was then flipped around to highlight how a translator can best be found. Advice here ranged from the obvious – including a CV on online profiles that can then be found by a relevant search – to things we may already do but not be fully aware of, such as using keywords specific to our work on our CVs and websites. A very useful tip here was to take a thesaurus and look up keywords that might be obvious to us to then draw our attention to other keywords that could also be incorporated, with the ultimate goal of increasing the chances of being picked up by a recruiter’s radar.
Besides the great many presentations on offer, another fantastic part of Elia Together was the Together Fair held at the end of day one. A number of translation companies were represented here both in a little booklet, which was really handy for preselecting companies that matched your specialisms and language combinations, and of course in person at various stands. Due to the sheer popularity of the event and the number of freelance translators in attendance, it did turn into a bit of a speed dating scenario, but it was still a great way of making initial contact with potential clients in person.
Alongside the many new companies at the conference, I was also fortunate enough to be able to put faces to the names of a couple of colleagues I already work with. This is something we don’t have the chance to do often enough in our industry, making this kind of event even more worthwhile. Just being able to put voices and personalities to the names often cropping up in our inboxes really helps bring our virtual workplace to life and reinstates an element of social interaction that many of us lose when predominantly working alone. As I’m writing this, I’m not-so-secretly hoping that there are people out there reading my emails, or this post, in a little Yorkshire accent – what a treat that must be!
In all, I think it’s fair to say my reconnection with the more human side of our industry was a great success and well worth straying away from my screen. If you happen to have missed this year’s conference and are now wishing you hadn’t, worry no more! Plans are already under way for Elia Together 2018, quite possibly in a slightly sunnier location... Watch this space!
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