The past year had been very productive for the New York Circle of Translators. In addition to our regular monthly events, we held our first all-day literary translation workshop co-organized by Program Director Kate Deimling and Vice President Alta Price and the first symposium towards the professionalization of the translation and interpreting professions spearheaded by former President Leonard Morin and co-organized by volunteers Miosotis Vargas, Ana Lis Salotti and Administrator Louise Jennewine.
In mid-2015, the Board hired former NYCT Secretary Gigi Branch as our Webmaster. Gigi had worked on a new website for the Circle on a volunteer basis and unveiled it at last year’s Business Meeting and Mixer. She helped us migrate the website to a new, substantially cheaper hosting service this summer with a view to resolving some of its problems and worked closely with the design team to fix any bugs that came up last year.
Sadly, 2016 marks the departure of Program Director Kate Deimling, who had brought a wealth of events to the Circle. Since fall 2014, she had organized panels on subjects as diverse as machine translation, ATA certification and transcreation, relaunched the Circle’s mentoring program and found time to organize a joint mixer with the Community of Literary and Magazine Presses. Kate also executed our first speed-networking event in October. She will continue heading the mentoring program, which pairs novice translators with seasoned professionals. We cannot say enough about how grateful we are to Kate for all her energy and ideas and wish her the best in her future endeavors.
In 2015, we also learned about the elimination of NYU’s highly successful and reputable online translation certificate program, which had offered a multitude of courses, attracted students from all over the world and helped many of our members acquire the skills and subject matter knowledge necessary to take the leap into commercial translation. The Circle had written to NYU administration to express our disappointment with the termination of longtime Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting and NYCT supporter Milena Savova, who had helped us secure our current meeting space. We also expressed our concern about the elimination of another U.S. translation certificate program, as well as the simultaneous interpreting certificate program, following the 2014 closing of the University of Chicago translation studies certificate program, copying then-ATA President Caitilin Walsh on the letter. We urged NYU to retain translation and interpreting studies and to allow both new and former students to take translation courses on a one-off basis for the purpose of continuing education and specialization. We are glad that the M.S. in Translation program was retained and sincerely hope that the newly developed diploma program, which currently offers an Advanced Diploma in Digital Media Translation and Localization, will continue in the same vein.
We offer a warm welcome to our newly elected Board members, who will be available to meet members in person at the February 2nd Business Meeting and Mixer. Program Director Ana Lis Salotti, Secretary Lisa Rodriguez and Treasurer Andre Kononenko have been proactive members of the Circle and I’m already excited by everything they bring to the table. I enjoyed collaborating with and supporting our Board members in their roles in 2015 and hope to continue doing so this year. A big thanks to everyone who contributed their time to the Circle! I look forward to seeing you at our meetings.
