Presentations conf 2020

Be(a)ware of (round) brackets (especially ‘Dutch’ ones)!

Joy Burrough-Boenisch, the Netherlands

Punctuation marks aren’t always used with the same frequency or in the same way in different languages. Take round brackets (in UK English, simply ‘brackets’): in Dutch- authored texts they’re often used in contexts and registers in which in English they would be used sparingly, if at all. Although some authorities on punctuation in English say that removing brackets enclosing a word or phrase from a sentence will leave a sentence that still makes sense, if you do this to a Dutch-authored sentence, you usually end up with a grammatically correct sentence that does not mean what the author intended.

Simply removing embedded brackets (brackets enclosing part of a word, as in the title of SENSE Conference2020: ‘(Re)Vision’) certainly isn’t advisable either – yet, strangely, there’s a lack of authoritative advice about using such brackets and about their purpose(s) in English. Small wonder that interpreting and using brackets vexes most language professionals translating Dutch or working with Dutch English. Drawing on my extensive collection of regular and quirky examples, I will therefore explain, compare and contrast ways that brackets are used by Dutch authors and by English native speakers uncontaminated by Dutch usage. My aim is to make language professionals more confident about bracket usage in English.

Although the presentation is intended primarily for language professionals whose exposure to ‘Dutch’ brackets has affected their interpretation and use of brackets in English, it will be an eye opener to anyone unaware of what can happen when a punctuation mark’s conventions and practices are transferred from one language to another.

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About the presenter

Joy Burrough Boenisch

Joy Burrough-Boenisch (MITI) is a founder member and past chair of SENSE with a long career as a freelance authors’ editor and translator for Dutch academics and scientists. She has taught scientific English to graduate students and has presented webinars. She has given workshops for language professionals on editing non-native English in various European countries and for the European Commission. Her conference presentations include two in 2018 as an invited speaker at ATA’s New Orleans conference. Originally a geographer, she learnt to edit in Borneo and Australia before moving to the Netherlands, where her interest in second language interference and non-native English resulted in a PhD thesis on Dutch scientific English. As well as being the author of Righting English that’s gone Dutch (3rd ed 2013), she has various scholarly and professional publications on editing and non-native English to her name.

Editing in the era of digital nomadism: How I look after my mental and physical health

Marieke Krijnen, Belgium

I share, in the form of accounts of a number of short tips, how I deal with being a digital nomad editor: someone without a dedicated home office who often spends periods of time away from her home base. While having the freedom to work from anywhere is an enormous privilege, it also brings potential mental and physical health problems such as loneliness, isolation, burnout, back or neck problems from staring at a laptop screen all day, and a lack of exercise because you can’t commit to classes, for example.

I share practical ways in which I have dealt with these problems, such as joining digital support communities, using ergonomic tools with my laptop, using apps to block my email account after working hours, finding a way of exercising that is not dependent on where I am located at that moment, and much more.

 

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About the presenter

Marieke Krijnen

Marieke Krijnen is a former academic who left academia in 2017 to become a full-time copyeditor. She has since completed a number of training courses and is a member of SENSE and the SfEP. She has edited hundreds of dissertations, monographs and journal articles and is loving the freedom of freelancing while belonging to the warm and welcoming editing community.

Fair Trade Translation in an unfair world

Nigel Saych, the Netherlands

We don’t sell bananas or coffee beans. We don’t outsource translations to child labour in the Third World. So why do I describe Interlex Language Services as a ‘Fair Trade Translation Company’? The answer is as simple as the concept: treating translators and clients honestly and with openness means they will be loyal to you; and working with integrity helps to improve the image of a sometimes tarnished profession. Interlex is a business not a charity, but that does not mean it is solely profit-motivated. In this short presentation-cum-case study, I attempt to demonstrate how Interlex is fair to its translators and its clients but can still make a decent living by doing a decent job. And that also means being fair to oneself, because we all like to think we are doing things the right way – and we all like appreciation, however experienced we are.

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About the presenter

Nigel Saych

Nigel Saych is the founder and owner of a creative translation company based in Nuenen, near Eindhoven. No longer responsible for the daily administration, he is still very much involved as an active translator. For several years his company has implemented a Fair Trade policy, something initially treated with caution by others in the profession, now a hot topic.

From whining to shining

Tiina Kinnunen, Finland

Tired of the memes where the freelancer translator is the only one staying up late or working during the weekend? Yes, they might be funny, but on the flip side of the coin is the cold truth. This is how the public sees us: as poor language nerds, working from home in their sweat suits and woolly socks, doing this for the love of language.

It’s time to change this. How can language professionals position themselves as experts commanding respectable fees? A Finnish initiative by 10 experienced professional translators, ‘The Translator’s Guide to the Industry’, offers practical advice on networking, brand image and management, marketing price negotiations, and much more. The initiative has also spawned cooperation between the authors and universities that train translators, which has resulted in guest lectures, workshops and articles.

We hope to empower other self-employed and freelance language professionals to position themselves correctly as experts in the language market and to benefit from others’ best practices. We aim also to establish and strengthen professional networks both to boost sales and to provide back-up and additional language services for clients.

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About the presenter

Tiina Kinnunen

Tiina Kinnunen is a Finnish professional sub-titler and translator who has been working in the field for more than 30 years, and also training and mentoring numerous translators. A co-author of the Translator’s Guide to the Industry, she’s spreading the word of best professional practices at various events. She’s an active participant in translation conferences and a contributor to the university education of translators in the form of guest lectures and university visits.

Future competence profiles of EU translators

Emma Hartkamp, the Netherlands

The European Commission’s DG Translation (DGT) fulfils an important role as language services provider in the EU’s multilingual context, and will continue to do so in the future. As translation technology progresses and the DGT’s role and mix of resources change, so the competence profiles of its translation staff will need to be updated.

In this presentation, you will hear about current reflections on new, future-oriented competence profiles for translation staff of the different EU institutions. These will be based both on the current translator profile and on a comprehensive mapping and description of the current and future functions, roles, tasks, competencies and profiles of EU translation staff.

It goes without saying that technological developments – in particular that of machine translation – will require high-level human and linguistic competencies and that the EU institutions will continue to need highly skilled professional translators. For these reasons, the DGT collaborates with a network of MA programmes in Translation (the EMT network) in order to work towards improving the quality of training and helping young graduates to integrate smoothly into the translation job market.

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About the presenter

Emma Hartkamp

Emma Hartkamp works as a Language Officer for the Representation of the European Commission in The Hague. Previously, she worked as a translator and advisor at the Directorate for Translation of the European Parliament. She began her career as a freelance interpreter and translator in Paris.

Honing skills through near-peer exchange: How language professionals and academics can shape each other’s outcomes, practice and well-being.

Wendy Baldwin, Spain

Translators and editors have a number of options for engaging in peer exchange, allowing them to benefit from their peers’ expertise and improve their practice and outcomes. But what if language professionals (LPs) could engage in a similar exchange with near-peers, professionals who work in adjacent areas of content and/or practice? Imagine a translator of anthropological texts working in parallel with an anthropologist: How might the partnership work and what knowledge, skills and benefits might accrue to each?

In this talk I present an LP–academic co-working model (LPAC) that I have been using with different academic partners and which has benefitted all the parties in various ways. The model draws on current social writing practices in academia: at the LPAC’s core are regular, structured co-working sessions during which the LP and the academic meet (in person or online) to work in parallel on individual tasks, with slots agreed upon for goal-setting, focused work, stocktaking and discussion.

I then discuss how the overlap and complementarity inherent in the LP–academic pairing shapes the benefits each offers the other in the context of the LPAC, focusing on the dimensions of discipline, language(s), career stage, and geographical location. One major benefit is knowledge exchange and improved outcomes: for example, the academic contributes content expertise and insight into current academic/publication practice; the LP provides their expertise in language and writing. The other type of benefit, equally crucial to both LPs’ and academics’ long-term practice, relates to cognitive–affective well-being: the supportive nature of the model means that both partners are likely to become more focused, motivated and productive and feel less isolated.

I end by outlining guidelines for setting up an LPAC and best practices for keeping these mutually beneficial partnerships going.

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About the presenter

Wendy Baldwin

Wendy Baldwin is an authors' editor and Spanish–English translator specialising in scholarly texts in linguistics, language acquisition, education, computer science and engineering. Prior to starting her freelance business in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, Wendy trained in linguistics in the United States and taught academic writing at universities and colleges there and in Sweden. She has recently returned to her academic writing roots, offering writing courses and workshops to academics and PhD students in the Basque Country.

How much time does quality require?

Brian Mossop, Canada

Translators and editors face a conflict between business pressures to produce quickly and professional pressures to achieve adequate quality. There is no easy way to resolve this conflict, but I will present some food for thought on the matter, giving special attention to two factors: attitude to the job and the difficult concept, ‘quality’. My presentation will be punctuated at intervals with opportunities to make comments or ask questions.

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About the presenter

Brian Mossop

Brian Mossop was a French-to-English translator, reviser and trainer at the Canadian Government’s Translation Bureau from 1974 to 2014. He continues to lead workshops and webinars on revision in Canada and abroad. Since 1980, he has also been a part-time instructor at the York University School of Translation in Toronto, teaching revision, scientific translation, translation theory and translation into the second language. For more, visit www.yorku.ca/brmossop.

Language interference: Forewarned is forearmed

Joy Burrough-Boenisch, the Netherlands

People who speak several languages fluently are at risk of one language interfering with another when they write or speak, especially if the languages are closely related. As language interference is therefore likely to crop up when someone writes in their second (or third) language, language professionals need to know about it so they can recognise and deal with its manifestations in non-native-speaker texts. But language professionals living and working outside their native- language country are themselves susceptible to language interference. So, awareness of how one language can interfere with another is important for language professionals for two reasons: it improves their approach to editing non-native-speaker texts and, if they’re expats, it makes them vigilant about language interference when they write or speak in their own native tongue.

The presentation will draw heavily – but not exclusively – on examples of interference from Dutch and will focus on types of language interference in written English. It will go beyond false friends and literal translations and explore less obvious transfers from one language to another. Strategies for dealing with language interference will be discussed and the audience will be invited to share experiences. The presentation will be relevant to editors of non-native English and to language professionals at risk of language interference permeating their own writing and utterances.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Joy Burrough-Boenisch

Joy Burrough-Boenisch (MITI) is a founder member and past chair of SENSE with a long career as a freelance authors’ editor and translator for Dutch academics and scientists. She has taught scientific English to graduate students and has presented webinars. She has given workshops for language professionals on editing non-native English in various European countries and for the European Commission. Her conference presentations include two in 2018 as an invited speaker at ATA’s New Orleans conference. Originally a geographer, she learnt to edit in Borneo and Australia before moving to the Netherlands, where her interest in second-language interference and non-native English resulted in a PhD thesis on Dutch scientific English. As well as being the author of Righting English that’s gone Dutch (3rd ed 2013), she has various scholarly and professional publications on editing and non-native English to her name.

Maintaining productivity as your family grows

Ashley Cowles et al, Netherlands & United Kingdom

Parenthood not only turns your private life upside down; it can also greatly affect your business. Whether you work from home or in an office, you’ll find yourself facing a number of different challenges: dealing with sleep deprivation, restructuring your workflow, dividing your attention between your clients and your family, safeguarding your productivity, minimising distractions, etc.

So how do you get your business (and your sanity) back on track after such a momentous life change? And how do you make sure your already established business stays on track as your family grows? By asking your fellow SENSE members for tips and tricks, of course! Whether you have toddlers or teenagers, or are expecting your first addition to the family, there’s plenty of helpful, hands-on advice to go around.

During this panel discussion, SENSE members with children of various ages will share their own experiences and offer some practical advice on how to balance effectively freelance work and the different aspects of family life. Naturally, audience members will also have the opportunity to ask questions and contribute their own stories.

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About the presenters

Simon Adams

Simon Adams is a translator, editor and content writer. He lives in Utrecht with his wife and their infant daughter.

 

Lloyd Bingham

Lloyd Bingham translates from Dutch, German, French and Spanish into English and is based in Cardiff, Wales. He and his wife have an 18-month-old daughter and a six-month-old son. A freelancer for four years before his first child was born, he has been learning how to juggle babies and business ever since.

  

 

Ashley Cowles

Ashley Cowles is a copywriter and editor who works mainly in marketing for tech and innovation. She lives in Utrecht with her husband and their two children, aged two and four.

 

Cathy Scott

Cathy Scott is a copywriter, editor and translator living in Maarssen, north-west of Utrecht. She works for advertising agencies and direct clients. Married to a Cloggie, she has two horse-mad daughters, aged 11 and nine.

Making reporting guidelines more useful for authors and language professionals: In biomedical science and beyond

Jennifer de Beyer, United Kingdom

This talk from the UK EQUATOR Centre (www.equator-network.org) will introduce reporting guidelines, why and how they are developed and disseminated, their quality, and the evidence for them.

Reporting guidelines aim to help authors in preparing journal articles by listing the minimum information needed about a particular study design in order for the results to be replicated or used. Originating in the biomedical sciences in the 1990s, they have since spread to research areas such as education, livestock, and environmental research – and new fields continue to adopt them. As funders and journals endorse and sometimes require their use, language professionals are often asked to use reporting guidelines or suggest checklists themselves. They could be required either to guide manuscript development or to flag missing information during copy-editing. However, reporting quality remains poor in every study design and research area studied, despite the promotion of reporting guidelines.

I will talk about why reporting quality has been slow to improve and what is being done in response. One reason is that users often struggle to choose an appropriate reporting guideline, there being more than 400 available for research involving people alone. In the absence of an agreed-upon development methodology or an overseeing body, the quality and utility of reporting guidelines remains variable, in addition to which the guidelines have overlapping and competing applications. Ongoing work to improve the way in which guidelines are developed and disseminated, and how users are supported, will be presented, as will the tools for authors and editors to use. I shall include in my presentation the role that language professionals can play in promoting reproducibility through reporting guidelines and in influencing how they are developed and disseminated.

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About the presenter

Jennifer de Beyer

After training in laboratory research and working in academic editing, Jennifer de Beyer joined the EQUATOR Network’s UK Centre at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (CSM), University of Oxford. Here she develops online and in-person training in academic writing and using reporting guidelines for clear, transparent research reporting. She also provides editing and writing support for CSM’s team of medical statisticians and methodologists.

The EQUATOR Network is an international initiative dedicated to improving the quality and transparency of health research. It focuses on research reporting, so that future research is based on a sound body of evidence. Through its four centres in the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia, EQUATOR raises awareness of reporting guidelines, provides online resources, develops education and training, and conducts research into research quality and transparency.

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