From Edinburgh to Budapest?

In November I travelled to Edinburgh for the ProZ conference which boasted over 140 participants from 22 countries. For those of you who are so securely established that you don’t need to tout for business on internet-based translators’ forums, ProZ is an internet based translators' forum where translators get webspace to market themselves, can post and discuss queries and work issues (http://www.proz.com/).

The audience was a fortuitous mix of more mature, experienced translation professionals like myself, and relative newcomers to the profession with only a few years of experience. This made for very lively conversation and evening entertainment, but more of that later. With the exception of the plenary key note and summary sessions, the conference was organised in three workshop streams, with parallel chat networking sessions for the main language groups. The program was well-rounded, with plenty of practical advice on marketing, research techniques, the use of translation memory software and other useful software tools that can improve our productivity. I particularly enjoyed the first day’s keynote address by Sarah Adams, an award-winning translator of children's literature. Her multimedia presentation was funny, informative, and highly inspiring. In most of us - as we slave away battling with annual reports, instruction manuals, patents etc. - slumbers a literary translator dying to give voice to an author who might otherwise not be accessible to millions of people. After all, most of us originally embarked on our path in pursuit of this dream, and although our creative limits and economic necessities may not ever enables us to spend four years of our working lives translating War And Peace like the very entertaining speaker Tony Briggs, it is exhilarating to spend a few hours playing with language instead of battling with file formats and trying to maximise throughput.

As a complete newcomer to ProZ - I had only joined six weeks before the conference as one of my strategies to revive my freelance career after six years as a director of Salford Translations Ltd - I was surprised, amazed, and delighted to find myself surrounded by a bunch of such vibrant, friendly people. This gathering was truly international, and although English mainly served as lingua franca, a lot of German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, etc. could be heard. To my delight, there was a sizeable German speaking contingent, and as a German translator living in the UK, the opportunity to speak my native language with my colleagues for three days alone would have been a worthwhile professional development activity. The lunch buffets were absolutely wonderful, and although the Edinburgh Thistle is not noted for its architectural beauty, on the whole the conference facilities were good, and the staff helpful and friendly.

The social program was also amazingly well organised. The evening before the conference, we all met at lovely bar/restaurant, the conference dinner & ceilidh were a big success, and the following night most of us took over a wonderful pub with live music, and we absolutely rocked. At this point I would like to state that any rumours of me pole-dancing are a misrepresentation of the facts, the Pole in question was called Jerzy, a Trados expert and a Polish to German translator.

In summary, I must say that I am looking forward to the next ProZ conference which will take place in Budapest from 28th April to 1st May 2007 (http://www.proz.com/conference/10 ). I have met a number of colleagues who I hope will become very firm friends. On a more pecuniary note, attending the conference enabled me to make contact with a number of potential collaborators and work providers, and with colleagues whose specialist knowledge might just help me out in a difficult job. In my experience, attending conferences and workshops is one of the best ways a translator can invest in himself/herself and his/her business.