A Brief Dispatch From the FIT Congress

As noted last week, I am attending the congress of the International Federation of Translators (Federation Internationale des Traducteurs - FIT) in San Francisco. Despite a good number of cancelled sessions (some of which were offset by last-minute additions), I found at least one presentation to attend during each of the 5 one-hour slots per day over the last three days. Taking in that quantity of information in such a short time does get tiring after a while, however. Two more keynote speeches tomorrow and the congress will be over.
A few highlights so far:

• Maggey Oplinger discussed "hybrid careers": jobs that include, but go well beyond, translation, such as bilingual writers, localization specialists or post-editors for machine-translated text.
• Nataly Kelly spoke about trends in the translation market, noting that while the volume of translation services has declined over the last year, multimedia localization services have increased.
• A panel discussion on translators' relationship with language service providers emphasized long-term relationships with freelancers willing to use the client's own tools remotely on the client's servers.
• Nicholas Hartmann noted "educated German disease," the tendency of German third-party reviewers to believe that their English is superior to that of the translator.
• Rosana Wolochwianski explained the various levels at which machine-translated text can be edited and what qualities are needed in a successful post-editor.
• David Rumsey advocated that translators talk to end clients so as to better understand the client's own processes.

I will report more fully on these sessions next week.