TranslateCluj 2022

It’s a marathon, not a sprint: to build a career in translation you need to take a long view. But in the short term, you also need to eat, keep a roof over your head, and earn enough to finance your professional kit. 

So buckle down. In today’s market, it’s more critical than ever to identify growth segments, position yourself in those areas, and connect with translation clients who are worth it. And one of the best ways to do that is to get a clear brief for every document you translate. Without a brief—without understanding the purpose of the texts entrusted to you—it’s all too easy to tumble into word replacement, which machines can do much faster and at lower cost. 

This practical presentation looks at how to interact with the businesses that use our services, and how a series of focused, short-term actions can end up being part of a long-term relationship. But above all, how a clear brief can help you produce your best work, of greatest benefit to your client and your career.

The European Accessibility Act (2019/882) aims to make access to products and services, including TV content, across Europe, easier for people of all disabilities. As a Directive, it is legally binding and the EU states have the responsibility to transpose it into national legislation. This is complemented by the EU Directive on the Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications (2016/2102) which puts emphasis on the need to develop services and applications to meet accessibility requirements for the online context. Therefore, the need to develop content, services and applications that meet accessibility requirements - be it online, for television broadcast, for cultural events or face-to-face situations - is gaining central importance for content creators, broadcasters and policy makers. However, throughout Europe, the implementation and delivery of access services is far from uniform and, in some countries such as Romania, still in their infancy. As countries gradually pass legislation regarding the provision of access services, demand for specialists in this area is likely to rise. This presentation will highlight opportunities likely to arise from these legislative transformations and requirements, and provide an overview of such services supported by examples of existing implementations in various European countries and contexts.

At xl8cluj 2020, we introduced ReACTMe as a project that had barely started and still had many questions to answer. The input from the participants indicated back then we had been right to embark on this adventure, so we are happy to present now, at xl8cluj 2022, the main results of our work: the state of the art in medical interpreting in Romania, the ReACTMe learning platform, the training events organized. This will also be an opportunity for us to discuss with fellow interpreters about the future steps to take in Romania so that medical intepreting can benefit from proper training and recognition. For more details on the project, please visit: http://reactme.net/home

In this talk for interpreters wishing to develop or improve their work into a B language (‘retour’), Sophie Llewellyn Smith will talk about the proficiency required in order to work into a B language, how to diagnose your weaknesses, and what sorts of exercises are most useful when practising by yourself or with others.

Translators and interpreters have a demanding profession, full of complexity, subtleties and unpredictability. Translators face a lot of challenges including increased workload and time pressure, high-level job demands, unclear job prospects and self-employment state, anxiety and uncertainty about their future, tight deadlines. In an interactive session, we will reflect together on the job of the translator/interpreter and make space to address both difficulties and solutions. While empirical evidence suggests that translators and interpreters experience high levels of both occupational stress and job satisfaction, we will disentangle the resources that buffer the negative effect of job demands on satisfaction and well-being.

Our consecutive skills are the first to get rusty, no matter how active we are. This workshop is intended to be a refresher for those who want to brush up on their note taking and/or get a better idea on how to warm up for consec gigs or accreditation tests.

“Intercomprehension, [as] a form of communication in which each person uses his or her own language and understands that of the other” (Doyé, 2005), may be not only an effective method of verbal communication, but as well one for understanding written texts and, by extrapolation, may also engender new translation skills.

Oftentimes intuitive, IC is based on the principle of interaction between our capacities for language and our previously acquired knowledge. Although the interpretative decoding process is identical with that of decoding an already known linguistic system, the cognitive resources involved are different. 

If language proximity is one of the main IC strategies, knowing more than one language from the same language family can only lead to surprising results in understanding and translating a language that, in theory, we don’t know.

In our case, some basic IC strategies can lead to translating Portuguese texts by knowing one of more of the following languages: French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian.