Thank you all for a successful 2016! January 16 is NEaT’s birthday, and we will turn three. Our plan is to continue providing networking and seminars to engage more and more professionals of the English language in the Nordic countries while developing our skills and standards.
In 2016, we held our second English Today seminar in conjunction with the Finnish-British Society (Finnbrit). We also became an official partner of Finnbrit, which means that our members are welcome to their events and that we can combine our resources to plan bigger and better events for our members.
We continued our cooperation with Translation Industry Professionals KAJ in the form of seminars. In September, we organized a joint workshop on personal style guides, including a presentation by Julie Uusinarkaus. In 2017, we will work with KAJ on the legal standing of editors in Finland and on educational seminars.
NEaT is also an official partner organization of Mediterranean Translators and Editors (MET), which provides excellent further education and networking opportunities in English for language professionals outside the Mediterranean area, too.
Other education this year included a lecture on English in business by Anne Kankaanranta of the Aalto University Department of Management Studies and a roundtable discussion on current topics in grammar and style at Finnbrit, introduced by our members Rebecca von Bonsdorff, Alice Lehtinen and Terry Forster.
We now have an official brochure to give to potential members and partners at meetings and events in any of the Nordic countries. Please ask for brochures to hand out! We also now have an online discussion group to share both questions and ideas and job listings, and we communicate actively through Facebook, on both a public page and a private group for members only. In addition, we use Twitter and LinkedIn for communication and discussion.
NEaT members met for meetups and networking for our anniversary at Beerhouse Kaisla in Helsinki in January, for our first annual picnic in Suomenlinna in August, and at the Christmas party in Hakaniemi in the beginning of December. For the fun of it, here are the results of the translation-slam-christmas-2016 from the Christmas party. This year in April, our Annual General Meeting included a beer tasting lesson after the official agenda.