2021 Professional Development Days (PDD)

Day 1: Saturday 18 September 2021, from 10:00 to 15:00
Day 2: Saturday 25 September 2021, from 13:00 to 17:15

With all-day networking available in the online networking platform Wonder.

Come join us for our Professional Development Days, the biennial event in which SENSE members learn from (and with) other members. This year's programme is all about horizontal knowledge-sharing and learning from your peers throughout your career.

Topics include digital nomadism, the linguistics of wine, branding to money management, balancing multiple niches, collaborative translation, intercultural communication, the SENSE mentoring programme, and battling imposter’s syndrome.

We open with a plenary session called "Peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing" on day 1 and close with a plenary session called "CPD: Changing professional development" on day 2.  Choose up to nine out of 18 possible elective sessions that match your interests. And if none of the sessions interest you at any time, head on over a virtual watercooler to network with other members while you wait.

There are three panel discussions:

• Intercultural business communication (Day 1, morning)
• The SENSE mentoring programme (Day 1, afternoon)
• Strategies to combat imposter's syndrome (Day 2, afternoon)

Six electives are available on both days:

• How the language industry has changed over the past 20 (or so) years
• The freedom of freelancing – deciding on a digital nomad journey
• Spanish wine and translation: what could they possibly have in common?
• How to be a specialised generalist
• Money management: does your "boss" treat you well?
• What gives you energy? And how do you earn a living doing that?

And nine other electives to choose from:

• Recognising and working with inductive/deductive communication styles
• How to increase your visibility and market your services
• Working as collaborative translators in arts and culture
• Maintaining language pairs
• Personal branding: Lessons learnt through trial and (t)error
• An ergonomic workspace: keep fit while you work
• An editing slam
• Keep track to keep up: organizing your workflow
• (and a session yet to be confirmed by Christy de Back)

Of course, we haven’t forgotten about the social aspect. An unmoderated Wonder room will be available throughout the two days to allow for networking and mingling with old colleagues and new faces on the SENSE scene.  At the end of each day, we’ll have a moderated networking session.

Sign up

Tickets cost €25 for SENSE members and €40 for non-members. The ticket grants access to both days.

IMPORTANT: If you have not yet registered for this event, you can still register for Day 2 of the event. Please visit the registration page for Day 2 to register for the second day of this event.  If you have already registered for this event, your ticket is valid for both days. Members, remember to log in!

Are you not a SENSE member? Consider joining! You can find more information about joining SENSE here.

Click here for the programme.

Click here to register.

Terminology extraction and management

Angelika Zerfass

Week 30, 29 July 2021, 15:00–17:00

During this webinar, Angelika will be posing and providing answers to the following questions:
• What is a term (the view of the terminologist versus real life)?
• How are term bases structured, i.e. what kind of information can you save with your terms?
• How do you go about collecting terminology in your translation tool?
• Importing/Exporting term lists (how to structure the import list for easy import).
• How do translation tools recognize terms from the term base in the documents (settings)?
• How do translation tools check whether (forbidden) terms have been used in the translation?
• Extracting terms from text (with and without a term extraction tool).

Click here to register

About the presenter

After her studies at the University of Bonn, Germany (translation degree in Chinese, Japanese and Computational Linguistics), Angelika Zerfass worked for the Japanese Embassy in Bonn and then for Trados (1997-2000) as a training and support specialist in Japan, Ireland and the US. In 2000, Angelika started her own business for training, consultancy and technical support. Since then, she has been working as an independent consultant and trainer for translation tools and technologies, located in Germany. She is also a frequent speaker at conferences all over the world.

The plain truth: applying Plain Language to creating accessible, user-friendly texts

John Linnegar

Week 31, 7 August 2021, 10:00–13:00

PLAIN (the international association of plain-language professionals) has drafted this definition:

‘A written communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended readers can easily find what they need, understand it, and use it.”
This requires authors to make informed judgments about whether the text (”wording”) is clear enough. It also means using good organisation (“structure”) and layout (“design”) to help them navigate.’

During this webinar, the aim will be to help practitioners learn how to harness Plain Language (or plain English) principles to improve the flow, accessibility and easy comprehension of authors’ texts. The aim is to introduce participants to a suite of handy Plain Language techniques with which to turn verbose, high-register texts into those that the identified readers will find accessible and understandable at first reading.

‘The message is important, not the fancy language wrapped around it.’
(George Orwell)

It’s astonishing how many writers feel they need to ‘dress up’ their writing to the extent that they lose their natural (aka plain) voice completely! Their reasons are no doubt many: from wanting to impress to needing to sound important or authoritative – and sometimes even because their boss or professor ‘writes like that, so it must be good’! But in this day and age we should rather be ‘dressing down’ writing to make it more accessible and flow better. Where writers themselves are incapable of doing so, the task usually falls to us wordsmiths to dress (not dumb!) writing down.

We need to make authors’ words clear and straightforward, using only as many words as are necessary. Plain Language helps us to do so by dispensing with the ‘fancy language wrapped around [their words]’: obscurity, inflated vocabulary and convoluted sentence constructions. Applying Plain Language principles systematically, our aim is to render the authors’ messages readily understood at first reading.

By the end of this online workshop you will be able, with confidence, to:
● convert long, complex sentences into shorter compound or simple ones;
● replace, where possible, passive voice (O-V-S) constructions with active ones (S-V-O);
● remove embedded clauses from complex sentences;
● replace ‘difficult’ polysyllabic words and jargon with more everyday, accessible synonyms (eg ‘remuneration’ with ‘pay’ or ‘wage’);
● make impenetrable noun strings accessible by inserting prepositions and articles into them;
● supplant nounisms (nominalisations) with healthier vigorous verb equivalents (eg ‘invitation’ with ‘invite’);
● dispense with archaisms such as ‘aforesaid’, ‘herein’, ‘thereby’, ‘whereafter’;
● find ways to introduce useful visual elements (eg lists). Fundamentally, we wordsmiths will be asking – and answering – the questions ‘Who is the audience?’ and ‘What are their needs?’ In so doing, we’ll be using the reader-centric approach authors should have adopted.

Click here to register

About the presenter

John Linnegar began his career as a teacher of English, History and Mathematics. His passion for working with words was ignited by his high school teachers of English, Latin and German. Those strong grammatical foundations combined with a love of his mother tongue led him towards authorship and, as a direct result, towards improving authors’ texts for publication. He has been an avid ‘improver of authors’ words’ for four decades now, and remains dedicated to making their texts read as clearly as possible (and in the process saving a reputation or two!).

John is author of several texts dealing with matters grammatical and stylistic, including contributions to the Oxford English grammar: The advanced guide (OUP, 2015) and, most recently, with Ken McGillivray, grammar, punctuation and all that jazz . . . (MLA Publishers, 2019). He currently offers a personalised ‘online’ Grammar for Editors course aimed at those who need to brush up their English grammar and an online training course on Plain Language.