Congratulations to our own Cristina Helmerichs and Odile Legeay, who have been elected to the Board of the ATA:

Election of American Translators Association officers and directors took place Thursday morning during the Annual Meeting of All Voting Members.

Dorothee Racette was elected President-elect, Virginia Perez-Santalla Secretary, and Gabe Bokor Treasurer.

Three new Board members were also elected to fill 3-year terms: Cristina Helmerichs, Odile Legeay, and Frieda Ruppaner-Lind.

David Rumsey was elected to fill a 1-year term on the Board.

Conference photos and news will be posted on the ATA website.

For those who won’t be attending the ATA’s 50th Anniversary conference in New York, the AATIA’s November 14 meeting is the next-best thing! Four Austin members will provide a debriefing on their experiences at this milestone event in the Big Apple.

Pat Bobeck, who translates French and Spanish into English and specializes in (among other things) geology, petroleum engineering, and environmental sciences will talk about her visit to New York.

Esther Diaz, Administrator of ATA’s Medical Division, will also share her perspective on the conference.

And literary translators Liliana Valenzuela and Tony Beckwith will discuss their conference presentation, “Two Heads are Better than One: A Literary Translation Story,” and explain how they jointly translated a book of 73 stories riddled with jokes, puns, plays on words, cultural references, and onomatopoeia.

Join us and get a first-hand report of what’s going on at the heart of our industry. As always, there’ll be refreshments and lots of good networking on Saturday, November 14, from 1 to 4 pm at our downtown space at the ICA premises (check www.aatia.net for the address, directions, and parking instructions.)

Watch this blog for more details!

Free parking is available at the Convention Center parking garage, which is on the west side of the building that houses our offices. Enter from Brazos Street, inform the attendant that you are attending an AATIA event, and sign a garage parking record sheet. There is no charge. 
 

In 382 A.D., Pope Damasus commissioned Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (the legendary St. Jerome) to revise the multiple existing Latin translations of the Old Testament and produce an authorized rendering for the Catholic Church.

Jerome’s decades-long work based on the original Hebrew texts, along with later revisions of the New Testament translations from the Greek, became the basis for the Vulgate Bible.

In 1991, The Public Relations Committee of the International Federation of Translators declared September 30th, the date of St. Jerome’s death in 420 A.D., as International Translation Day.

The AATIA salutes linguists everywhere, and is proud to be among those who help people understand each other.

Michael Blumenthal 
 

Liliana Valenzuela and Cristina Garcia will perform bilingual readings at 7 p.m. this Thursday, October 1, as part of Austin Community College’s The Big Read program. The readings will be held at the Main Theater of ACC’s Rio Grande Campus.

Former ATA President Ben Teague was shot and killed Saturday afternoon by a University of Georgia professor at a reunion picnic of community theater volunteers. Details are sketchy, but Ben’s step-brother gives a brief account of the shooting in his blog. According to that account, Ben died trying to protect the apparent target, the shooter’s ex-wife.

Ben and I began our translating careers at roughly the same time in the early 1970s here in Austin. He was active in the local t/i community, co-founding the Translators Association of Central Texas (TRACT) and encouraging colleagues to join ATA. We actually took our accreditation (now certification) exams in Austin at one of the first sittings ever held.

Since we both translated from Russian at that time (he later dropped Russian to concentrate on German translating), we often hashed over thorny linguistic problems. I probably benefited more from his expertise than he did from mine. When his wife Fran joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, the Teagues moved to Athens, so we continued our consultations long-distance.

I will remember him for his wit, intelligence, and generosity, some evidence of which appears on Ben’s website. I hope others who knew and loved Ben and Fran will share their memories in the comments to this post.

The Texas Institute of Letters has named AATIA member Marian Schwartz’s translation of White Guard a finalist for the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Translation.  The winner will be announced at TIL’s April 18 annual meeting at the Hilton Waco Hotel.

Don’t miss the all-star cast of Macondo Writers Liliana Valenzuela, Vicente Lozano, and Gregg Barrios who will perform during the San Antonio arts celebration Luminaria. They will perform from 7:10 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the Convention Center Galleries on Saturday, March 14, 2009 (details).