FCICE Written Test Prep Seminars are beginning in a city near you! These training seminars by the National Center for Interpretation have assisted up to 40% of participants in passing the written portion of the FCICE. Test Prep Seminars will be offered in Texas on these dates:
El Paso - May 31 and June 1, 2008
Houston - August 9 and 10, 2008

Cost: $375. For more information download the brochure.

If you cannot attend one of these seminars, take a look at the FCICE Written Sample Examinations so that you can practice at your convenience!

AATIA will offer two great professional development opportunities in coming months. The first, “Business Basics for Freelancers,” will take place on the morning of June 14th. This four-hour workshop will cover general business aspects of freelancing, including basic bookkeeping and record-keeping requirements, ensuring payment, and tax and financial planning. The presenter, AATIA member Ted Wozniak, holds degrees in Accounting and German and has worked as an accountant in both the private and public sectors. Ted is also the owner of the well-known Payment Practices website.

The second event will be a “Translator’s Toolbox” seminar presented by Jost Zetzsche on September 6th. This all-day affair, designed to help you unleash the power of your computer for greater speed and efficiency in your work, will include two sessions, the morning devoted to computer basics and the afternoon to specific translation and terminology management tools. Participants will have the opportunity to register for one session or both. Jost is an ATA-accredited English-to-German translator, a consultant in the field of localization and translation, and a writer on technical solutions for the translation and localization industry, including the Tool Kit newsletter for translators. He is a frequent presenter at ATA and other conferences.

Mark your calendar, and watch this site for further information about these two events. Registration for the Business Basics workshop will begin in mid-May.

Spanish translator, writer and editor Xosé Castro played to a sold-out house at last Saturday’s workshop. As Marta Blumenthal writes in her review (below), who would have thought that a six-hour workshop on grammar could have been so witty and so thoroughly entertaining? Marta was the driving force behind this workshop and its main organizer. On behalf of all of us who had the pleasure of participating in the workshop: ¡Gracias, Marta!

Castro serves up grammar feast:
a review by Marta Blumenthal

Who would’ve thunk that a six-hour grammar workshop could be useful and enjoyable at the same time? Spiced with humor and wit, the “English-Spanish Contrastive Grammar Workshop” taught by Xosé Castro was a toothsome grammar feast.

On April 5th, fifty-one eager-to-learn translators from the four corners of Texas and beyond met at the International Center of Austin, the new AATIA office site, for the first workshop at this venue.

Sponsored by AATIA’s Spanish Special Interest Group (SpanSIG), the workshop covered translation from Romance languages, sociologic issues, market trends, neologisms, politically correct language, and symmetry between source text and translation: how to produce the same understanding, reaction and emotion conveyed in the original text.

Xosé encouraged the participants to practice the healthy exercise of re-thinking in Spanish to achieve natural-sounding translations. Ask yourself, he suggested, “How would my mother say it?”

Drawing from real life examples, Xosé covered lexicon, idiomatic expressions, syntactic structures, spelling, and taboos. He reminded participants to be aware of false cognates; to translate concepts, not words; and, in some cases, just to translate (terms such as “display,” for example, which translators of computer documentation and ad copy may tend to leave in English, assuming that everyone will understand what a display is).

Xosé has been a freelance translator since 1989. He resides in Madrid and works with clients who translate for Spanish-speakers in the US and Latin America, as well as Spain. This experience has afforded him the opportunity to grapple with the linguistic challenges that confront many of us every day in our work

Participants left eager to continue exploring the topics discussed during the day and willing to come back to more workshops.

AATIA members are encouraged to communicate with Laura Vlasman, AATIA Workshop Coordinator, or Maurine McLean, AATIA Director of Professional Development, if they have suggestions for future workshop topics and presenters.

Only a few places remain in the English-Spanish contrastive grammar workshop, to be presented by Xosé Castro on April 5th. If you’ve been intending to register, but haven’t done so, don’t delay! Contact Laura Vlasman to find out whether there is still room in the workshop.

ATA-certified translators may earn 6 continuing education points for the Xosé Castro contrastive grammar workshop, which is scheduled for April 5.

The registration form and flyer for are now available. Space is limited, so register today!

If you’ve been dragging your feet about registering for the information session on ATA certification, drag them no longer! The registration deadline is Monday, February 25th. Contact Laura Vlasman, ATA Certification Coordinator for AATIA, for more information.

CyraCom is partnering with Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth to present an Interpreter Skills Development training course on April 8–10, 2008, open to all practicing medical interpreters in the area.

This comprehensive, three-day course teaches how to apply interpretation techniques of clear, effective communication between Limited English Proficient (LEP) patients and healthcare professionals. The cost is $325 per person, which includes lunch each day and all educational materials.

AATIA’s Spanish Special Interest Group (SpanSIG) will host a workshop on English-Spanish contrastive grammar in Austin on Saturday, April 5, 2008. The day-long workshop will focus on compared grammar structures, discursive elements, phrasing and wording, direct and indirect speech, idioms, false cognates, and the “transcreation” (translation + creation) methodology for identifying these foreign elements and adapting them to the target language.

Although the workshop is aimed mainly at translators of English to Spanish, translators of Spanish to English will benefit from the discussion of contrastive grammar and “transcreation” methodology.

The presenter, Xosé Castro, is an English > Spanish technical translator and localization specialist based in Madrid, Spain, whose work also includes writing, dubbing, and subtitling for television and film. He has taught translation courses and seminars for T&I programs in Spain and has spoken at numerous international workshops and conferences on a variety of translation topics, including software and website localization, movie script translation, writing in neutral Spanish, and proofreading. Among many other distinctions, he is the creator of the online help for the CD-ROM version of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary).

The workshop will be held at the International Center of Austin. Participants who are ATA-certified will be eligible to earn six continuing education points. Registration for the workshop will begin in early March.