On Friday morning, I did end up choosing "The End of Translation as we know it: Were the Luddites Right?". The speaker was Jost Zetzsche. He was referring to the "Luddites", who went around England and destroyed the looms that took their jobs. Are translators losing their jobs to machines? The question is an extremely hot topic in our industry. There are certain new technologies that are capable of replacing certain translation situations, this is true. And for a company like ours, it is important to keep an eye on these tools and use them when appropriate. However, with all the tools that I've seen, I have yet to find anything that has close to the capabilities of my native-speaking human team. The great thing is that tools, such as Trados or Wordfast, can be helpful to my translators in providing more consistent translations - faster. An interesting point he brought up is that there is - and has been since the 1950's - the "5 year rule". Since the first machine translation of 12 Russian sentences in the 1950's, people have been saying that "in 5 years, there will no longer be a need for human translation". Well, let's be honest, we're making some serious progress right now... but we're not there yet.
Lunch was with two great Spanish translators that I have been working with for a while now, Marta and Cecilia. Cecilia made it all the way from Córdoba, Argentina for the conference - I hope she enjoyed Colorado!
My afternoon session on Friday was on social media for translators with Marsela A. Jenney. I may have even gotten a few tips for this blog (thanks Marsela!) Some of it was a review for me but there were some very good tips mixed in as well. Apparently I should "write with passion in an authentic voice"... we'll see how it goes! :)
I spent the rest of the conference networking and catching up on work. I even got to direct someone to a day trip in the Rockies in German, and I met many of the "locals" - other members of the Colorado Translator Association.
The ATA conference was well worth it this year - I'm REALLY looking forward to the annual conference next year in Boston.
Best,
Geoff
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