In the past month I’ve attended two mid-year conferences, one organized by the ATA Translation Company Division and one that I helped organize for the Colorado Translators Association. Both of these conferences went very well, and both got me thinking about some of the differences between large conferences and small conferences.
No question about it, I love the annual ATA conference and all of its 1,500-2,000 attendees. Tons of sessions, tons of colleagues, and a great chance to see a new city. However, I’ve become increasingly excited about small conferences as well. Here’s why:
- They generally cater to a non-beginner audience, and attract a more homogeneous group than larger conferences do. That might be people who work in a certain language pair or specialization (like Translate in the Catskills or the summer financial translation conference organized by the Swiss Translators Association) or people who are interested in honing their business skills (like the ATA-TCD conference).
- The sessions are more discussion-friendly. Both of the small conferences I recently attended had about 30-40 attendees per session. This is enough people to create a convivial feel, yet few enough that it’s possible to have a real discussion. I really noticed this when I was presenting: my pre-conference seminar at the Denver ATA conference had 70 attendees and it was definitely tough to manage the discussion. But with 30 people in the room, the presenter can put questions out to the audience or ask experts in the audience to talk about something specific.
- It’s easier to have real conversations with people. To me, the best and the worst part of the ATA conference is that everyone you know in the industry is there. It’s energizing, but it’s tough to fit all those people into the 3 days of the conference. At both the TCD and the CTA conferences, I was able to have more in-depth talks with people, rather than the “Great to see you! How was your year?” conversations that so often happen at the ATA conference.
- Sometimes two sessions are better than 10. When there are two sessions at a time, you only have to make one decision: this session or that session. When there are 10 sessions, it’s easy to see something appealing and something unappealing about all of them (or maybe that’s just me being indecisive!).
I do think that there’s a large and untapped market for even more small, niche conferences. Kilgray recently held memoQfest in Budapest which sounded like a blast, so maybe other tool providers will follow suit. Chris Durban’s Translate in the Catskills is proof that one high-profile person can organize a conference and lots of people will come. Any other ideas for niche conferences you’d like to attend?
I attended both of the conferences you mention above as well (well, you know that since you were there too, but for your readers’ info)…and I attended another “niche” conference last summer in Las Vegas focused on vendor relations in our industry (end clients to LSPs and, in turn, LSPs relationships with their vendors – freelancers or single-language LPSs).
It was similar to what you describe – very “nichey” and with a “cozy” number attending. I was very pleased impressed with the conversations I had at this conference, the people I met and the in-depth info I came away with. Kudos to small (well-organized) conferences!
Corinne,
I agree with you. I get a lot out of smaller or niche conferences around the 100 attendee mark. Tradulinguas in Portugal hold great conferences along these lines. I went to the last one, on Technical Translation, and it was fantastic. The next one is on Legal Translation. I think they sold out at 120 attendees.
Remember smaller countries too. I was just at the ITI’s annual conference and there were only about 150 people there, with two tracks. It was a great event. I imagine many smaller European and Latin American countries hold the kind of event you’re talking about routinely.
The biggest translation-related conference I attended was the FCT / Union Latine one about Technical Translation, at the “Alliance Française” in Lisbon, several times.
I would say there were roughly some 500 people there, half of them from Portugal and the other half from the rest of the world, mostly translators, some of them freelancers, some of them still students, some of them working in goverment institutions, academic researchers and teachers, and also some official delegations from the EU-DGT and others alike, etc..
Most of these people did know each other already and had very neat small-talk chats like the ones you described, Corinne, but for me, at that time I did not know many faces in our “milieu”, so I only happened to get to talk to a few people with whom I had lunch, because there were so few tables at the closest snack that we “had to” share them, even with complete strangers 🙂
Also, this event was only 1 day long and packed with presentations and discussion pannels, so it was very interesting for what was talked about “on stage”, but the informal opportunities (2 very short coffee breaks, 1 lunch break) to do some networking were not the best one could wish.
Then I went to the 3-days-long MemoQFest in Budapest, 2 years ago and this year again. Really great atmosphere, great presentations about all kinds of translation and translation-technology related subjects, plenty of informal opportunities to know peolpe from all over the world, mostly freelance translators or working in several positions at small to medium to large LSPs, technology vendors, a certain number of celebrities and web-opinion makers about our “industry”, even Jeromobot was there ;-), etc… and they all are within reach, with no formal barrier that keeps you from getting directly in touch with them, and ask them how they solve this or that problem, or how they managed this or that situation, as they still were at a development level similar to the one you are at now.
This is definitely a conference I would recommend, but they voluntarily wanted to keep it small and cosy (~200 people this year), so don’t talk about it to too many people 😉 or the event will get overflooded next year.
Or better : talk about it to your friends and colleagues, but make sure not to mention it to your competitors : you sure do not want them to know about all the cool stuff and meet nice people and use the same cutting-edge technology as you, do you ?
I live in Hanover in the north of Germany. From 20 – 22 May I also attended a small conference in Hamburg hosted by ADUE-Nord – a regional association of interpreters and translators. We were given the option of visiting a company on the Friday morning – some of us went to Airbus, others to the Maritime Court and others to Desy. In the afternoon workshops were held. I chose copywriting and as there were only 8 of us we had plenty of time for questions and debate. The next two days were followed by the usual sessions and lectures. All in all it was thoroughly enjoyable with plenty of time for networking. I also went to the BDUE conference in Berlin about 18 months ago. It was good too, but attracted an enormous number of attendees. As a result, the atmosphere was not as personal and it wasn’t so easy to get to know people. Yes, these small events can sometimes be more beneficial than the large ones. And by the way: the food scored top marks whereas the BDUE’s lunch was at the level of the British school dinners of my childhood!