A Grab Bag of Goodies to Enjoy in 2019
We wish a most happy and excellent New Year to all of our friends and colleagues in the language world!
We have a lot to share as we kick off 2019. This is the first year that we have two events stacked up within two months of each other: Lenguas 2019, which takes place later this month in Mexico City, Mexico; and our think! Interpreting track at GALA in Munich, Germany in March.
We also have expanded content coming your way in Barry's Tech Savvy Interpreter blog, an upcoming webinar for GALA on Artificial Intelligence and the interpreting market, and big news for indigenous interpreting training.
Read on for a summary of what's coming your way.
There's Still Time to Register for Lenguas 2019
On just its second go-round, everyone is excited for Lenguas 2019. This unique conference pulls together translators and interpreters from the United States and Mexico (and beyond). We'll take stock of the state of the profession and hear from international leaders during the plenary day, and then receive two full days of in-depth training through educational workshops on days 2 and 3.
2019 is especially significant as it is the United Nations Year of Indigenous Languages. Lenguas is the only conference to attract a large cohort of indigenous interpreters and translators who not only attend sessions but teach them, in addition to producing some of the only market research on indigenous practitioners in our field.
Maria Teresa Panchillo, a noted indigenous poet and activist from Chile will bring her wisdom and linguistic artistry to the plenary, right after the heads of the major international translation and interpreting associations share their insights as to where our professions are headed, Representatives from the International Federation of Translators (FIT), the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) and Critical Link International (CLI), as well as the Ibero-American Association for the Promotion of Literary Translation (ALITRAL) will all be present.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The educational workshops are rich and diverse and represent a lot of top expertise in our field. CEUs from ATA, CIMCE, CCHI and IMIA/NBMCI are available as well.
Complete conference information can be found on the Lenguas website. Or you can simply go straight to the registration portal and sign up. Time is of the essence, both because the conference is less than two weeks away, but also because the educational workshops are filling up fast. But it's not too late to come to beautiful Mexico City for an inexpensive conference chockfull of invaluable knowledge, networking and professional development. We hope to see you there!
Also, be sure to follow the conference at on Twitter and Facebook: #lenguas2019
Please Support Our Scholarship Fund for Indigenous Interpreters and Translators
We want to THANK everyone who has contributed to our Donadora fundraising campaign to sponsor indigenous interpreters and translators to attend Lenguas 2019. Donadora is a Mexican-based fundraising site similar to Indiegogo.
We're more than a 1/3 of the way to full funding. It's definitely not too late to help us support this important constituency in our field. The funding site is in Spanish, but you can read the full campaign write-up in English here.
Help our indigenous colleagues benefit from hard-to-find training by donating today!
Don't Miss Our Upcoming Webinar on Artificial Intelligence and the Interpreting Market
think! Interpreting 2019 is coming up in March in Berlin. This is our 6th time providing curated interpreting content to GALA's annual conference and this year's focus is on Artificial Intelligence (AI). We have a great lineup of speakers in Munich, which you can see on our think! Interpreting page on our website.
As a teaser of what to expect in March, we are giving a GALA-sponsored webinar on Thursday, January 17 titled: AI and the Interpreting Market-What You Need to Know.
Just a year ago, it seems like all anyone could talk about was remote interpreting. Now, the conversation has leapfrogged to artificial intelligence and how it will impact the language services industry.
For example, in-ear translation devices made headlines at the just-completed CES 2019 in Las Vegas. Industry news outlet Slator did a nice write-up of the multiple machine translation interpreting devices. It's definitely worth reading. Their overall conclusion, however, should give us some anxiety relief.
All in all, there was little groundbreakingly new from translation and interpretation technology during CES 2019. The most talked about development, Google’s new Interpretation Mode—and even the WT2 Plus and Pilot translation earpieces—are unlikely to impact the professional language services market (yet). Most applications are focused on letting people communicate in different languages in simple terms.
So just how is AI impacting the interpreting market if we are not on the verge of being wiped out by machines? Here's a hint, client expectations are currently providing the biggest challenge for language service providers.
Join us for this informative webinar to get a handle on what you need to know about AI and interpreting.
The Tech Savvy Interpreter Blog Is Expanding
In 2015, translation tech guru Jost Zetzsche invited InterpretAmerica’s Co-President Barry Slaughter Olsen to write the Tech Savvy Interpreter—a monthly column to be included in the wildly popular electronic publication the Tool Box Journal. When he has time in his busy schedule, Barry has created video reviews of the content he has written which we've posted as our Tech Savvy video series.
Now, we want to share the written posts with you as well. Starting next week, we will be posting the articles written for The Tool Box Journal over the past three years. These articles are typically longer and more comprehensive than a standard blog post. Watch your email box for our notifications of when they are posted.
The Indigenous Interpreter: A Training Manual for Indigenous Language Interpreting Has Arrived!
For more than five years, InterpretAmerica Co-President Katharine Allen has been immersed in a long-term project to create interpreter training resources for indigenous interpreters. We are incredibly proud and excited to announce the imminent release of the fruits of this project: The Indigenous Interpreter(R) Training Manual and The Indigenous Interpreter(R) Workbook of Role Plays and Activities.
The project was sponsored and funded by Natividad Foundation, a non-profit that supports Natividad, a public safety-net hospital located in America's "salad bowl" in California's central valley. Through its unique language access program, Indigenous Interpreting+(R), the Foundation has shown a singular commitment to creating resources where none existed before.
The result of over five years of training creation, pilot workshops, evaluations and finally a formal launch of the training program in January 2017 has been captured in the form of a 600+-page training manual and 300+-page workbook of activities. The books are complete and ready for publication. And the best news of all: they are being published under a Creative Commons license, which means they will be available FREE as downloadable files for any and all to read, use, incorporate into trainings and share. The only restriction? Proper attribution to the source material when used or shared.
The training manuals were authored by Katharine Allen, Victor Sosa, Angelica Isidro and Marjory Bancroft, but they represent the combined efforts of years of community outreach and relationship-building between Natividad and members of the local indigenous communities. The books are really the story of the pioneering indigenous interpreters who took the leap into our profession.
Stay tuned for the announcement of formal publication and more details on the rich and unusual journey that made their creation possible.
And our deepest gratitude, as always, for your support and interest in InterpretAmerica.
