I’m back from last week’s ATA conference in Boston, and I’m happy to report that it was highly enjoyable! If you attended the conference and haven’t yet given ATA your feedback, here’s the online form, and if you fill it out by November 25 you’ll be entered in a drawing for a free registration to next year’s conference in San Diego. Jill Sommer also wrote an informative overview of the conference that you should check out!
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to tweet or blog much from the conference (WiFi issues, more on that later!), but I’ll give a brief wrapup here and then use future posts to summarize some of the presentations I attended. I was part of four sessions: Blogging 101 with Riccardo Schiaffino; Working Successfully With a Translation Partner with Eve Bodeux; the Smart Business panel with Chris Durban, Judy Jenner and ace moderator Jost Zetzsche and a freelancer-agency panel at the annual meeting of the Translation Company Division. If I’m not deluding myself, I think that all of these went well, with sizable audiences and positive feedback.
The ATA staff and officers deserve huge thanks and congratulations for organizing yet another successful conference. Those of us who organize regional conferences for 100 people can appreciate what it takes to run a national conference for 2,000 people, and ATA pulls this off every year with very few logistical glitches. Huge kudos to conference organizer (and now ATA President!) Dorothee Racette!
Some highlights from this year’s conference:
- The hotel was beautiful and in a great location. Although I lived in Boston for 8 years I’m not a die-hard city person, and to me, the New York conference hotel (in 2009) felt very claustrophobic and hard to navigate. The Copley Marriott felt very spacious and modern, and the conference rooms were very pleasant!
- I really like the trend toward more panels and co-presented sessions. It seems as if many of the Divisions are using their meeting time to discuss pertinent issues, and more presenters are willing to collaborate for a better presentation.
- The sessions I attended were really fantastic. The presenters who I always look forward to hearing were great once more, and some of the sessions I attended on impulse got me thinking about new possibilities for my own professional directions.
- Translators are just really cool, interesting and nice people. I know this sounds pollyanna-ish, but it’s true; translators are lots of fun to spend time with, especially when you have three uninterrupted days!
The very minimal lowlights:
- Problematic WiFi. I’m still back in the early 2000s without a smart phone, so my only way to check e-mail, tweet or blog on the road is with my netbook. Normally not a big deal because the netbook has a great WiFi radar and it’s small enough to fit in my briefcase. The conference WiFi just was not great: in the hotel room, in the lobby, even at the WiFi hotspot outside the exhibit hall…ultra-slow connection or no connection at all. But hey, it was nice to spend a few days not worrying about constantly checking things online.
- I agree with Jill’s assessment that the opening reception could be longer and the division open houses need their own rooms.
- Every speaker needs to run a countdown timer so that they know when their session ends and how much time they have left. It’s a problem for the presenter and the attendees if the session runs late or the presenter has to speed through 10 slides in the last 5 minutes.
It was great fun to get out of the office for a few days and reconnect with colleagues and clients in Boston; any feedback from others who were there?
I agree with you completely! I arrived on the 25th to be able to attend the great workshops. I was impressed by the Marriott at Copley Place, the level of the presenters, and the positive energy of my fellow translators and interpreters.
I, too, was disappointed by the mediocre wifi and mobile carriers connections (but I think this demand increased way over the capabilities of most facilities across our country).
Wouldn’t it be nice to create a forum with information and follow up about the different presentations?
Hello Edurne and thanks for your comment. I agree, the sessions this year were fantastic; I went to one in nearly every session block and they were all fantastic. And as you said, the conference just has such great energy! I’m sure that you’re right that 2,000 translators frantically trying to check e-mail, Twitter, blogs, etc. probably maxed out the hotel’s network. Honestly in the end it was kind of nice to have a technology break!
Edurne,
One place to follow up on various sessions is ATA division blogs and mailing lists.
Karen
I too felt that the sessions have improved exponentially, I found that they were thought-provoking or confirming the direction I’m going. I was very pleased to see the focus on partnerships and how this benefits all the people concerned, alleviating the concern of losing jobs to the competition. It is a lot of fun to be around other translators and interpreters, and I’m impressed at the level of ethics expressed.
I really liked the couple of workshops I attended that you gave, Corinne. I thought the delivery was excellent and fun.
Keep it up, and thank you for all you do!
Thanks Daniela! Glad that you enjoyed the conference too. I do try to keep my presentations fun; I think we all sat through enough dull and boring lectures in college to last a lifetime… Thanks for your insights into the presentation topics too; maybe you should present something next year!
This was my first conference, and I agree with you on all points. I only attended one of your sessions (the Smart Business panel), and no, you’re not deluding yourself about that one — you did an excellent job! Now I’m looking forward to using everything I learned.
Thank you for the recap!
Thanks Danielle! I’m glad that you liked the business panel; it was lots of fun to participate in! And yes, I agree completely: the real challenge of the ATA conference starts when you get home and have to implement the information. Best of luck with it!
Hi, Corinne! It was good to finally meet you! I’m also in agreement about the Wi-Fi. I’m not sure why, but I was never able to connect, so I did have to do a lot from my smart phone. I also like the way the ATA is incorporating more sessions for companies and I found Karen’s session on working with translators to be really helpful in general. It is always good to reflect on business practices and fine-tune things to make the experience more enjoyable for freelancers, and not simply for our clients.
Looking forward to San Diego already!!
Thanks Madalena! I think that the number of people at the conference just overwhelmed the hotel’s network; good excuse to take an e-mail holiday for a few days! That is great that you found so many helpful sessions and I agree that Karen Tkaczyk’s session about “making translators rave about your agency” is fantastic and a much-needed place to get some dialogue going between freelancers and agencies. Plus, I love her accent. I could listen to her read the list of conference attendees and it would be fantastic!
I agree! I could listen to Karen talk for hours. I love when she says, “Indeed!” 🙂
Aw. You two are dreadful. ‘Come to my sessionss because I have a great accent’ Not my new marketing pitch! It’s pretty ordinary where I come from.
It was good to see you both. I enjoyed giving that session and it is obvious from the response I got that there are many good companies out there who want to work in that communicative, professional way with freelancers. The best moment though was this: a young, newly appointed PM from one of the giant LSPs many of us don’t want to work for approached me. She was with two of her colleagues. She said that it had been really helpful to her – that she was going to implement some tips when she went back to work.
It was my first “big” conference, and I loved it! Went to two of your presentations, and enjoyed them both (I totally agree that you have a perfect NPR voice btw).
I was the only one at the conference with my language combination (English-Norwegian) and was a bit disappointed at first – but soon I realized I had total monopoly! I have since gotten several nice e-mails from potential clients.
Well worth it all around, and I am already looking forward to next year’s meeting in San Diego.
Thanks for your comment, Karin! Yes, being scarce is a good thing; you are in high demand which means you’re in a great negotiating position. San Diego should be great, I am already looking forward to it too. And rest assured, the one time I actually got to be on NPR (explaining the difference between a translator and an interpreter), it was so stressful and terrifying that I’m sticking to webinars and ATA conferences 🙂
Thanks for the summary Corinne. I heard great things about your session with Eve Bodeux on working with a translation partner.
The wifi was OK in my room. Not fast, but always connected. And I always got a connection in the wifi corridor too. Not always in the meeting rooms.
This was a strong year for me in terms of sessions on subject matter I work with. Now I have to decide if I want to buy the eConference to see all the rest that I missed.
In response to what Karen said above about a PM that she met who wants to implement some of the things she mentioned in her presentation…I am happy to say that I found some very useful tips, too. Also pleased that I am already doing a lot of the things Karen mentioned with my own contractors 🙂 Good to hear both sides of the coin in the same place though. Thanks to you both for great presentations and contributions!
Thanks Madalena! It’s always great to find out that you’re on the right track! And I agree, Karen’s presentation is fabulous.