NEaT is now a partner of the UK Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, alongside many of our other peer and sibling organisations, as you can see on the CIEP website. Some NEaT members have been CIEP members for many years, and you may know it by its old name, the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. We share a commitment to high standards of professional development.
Don’t forget that NEaT members receive a discount on the CIEP conference. Booking closes on 8 September!
NEaT is looking forward to working more closely together with the CIEP in future.
As “global” English
overtakes local languages in academia and public life, what is our role as
editors? When and how (if ever) do we edit our authors’ style? We asked you
what you think, and your opinions varied.
Editors love their style guides, but some questions
of style are too controversial for a manual to rule on, as this answer to one
question in our survey shows:
Can you guess which question split the respondents?
Want to steer the debate in one direction? You still have until 7 September to
respond to the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NEaTstyle
NEaT members and revisors at the University of Helsinki will discuss the survey results on Thursday 23 September at 17:30–18:30 EET, on Zoom. Looking forward to debating with you about whose style matters!
If you want to join
the debate, email info@nordicedit.fi and we will send you the Zoom link
nearer the time. If you aren’t a NEaT member yet, ask to join so you can
attend.
NEaT’s annual picnic will be held in Sibelius park, Helsinki, on the 20th of August, at noon. Come to the Merikannontie side of the park, and we’ll find a sunny spot facing the bay near the ice cream kiosk. Dogs and family are very welcome!
Bring a blanket to sit on and a picnic lunch for yourself or to share, and NEaT will take care of dessert and offer bubbly beverages (alcoholic and not) for our annual toast. Expect friendly faces, great conversation, surprises and prizes, and a follow-up to last year’s intense Mölkky match! You can usually find free parking on the side of the park near the water on Merikannontie and nearby streets.
RSVP to info@nordicedit.fi so that we know how many to plan for, and let us know if you want a non-alcoholic option or if you have specific dietary restrictions.
News from the KäTu Symposium on Translation and Interpreting Studies, 20–22 May 2021
Some are sceptical about how
relevant academic translation studies can be for the world of work. Isn’t it
too theoretical to be useful? Isn’t it too postmodern to be practical?
Shouldn’t translation students spend more of their time learning how to run a
business? If the machines are taking over, why analyse how humans translate?
If this is you, you can learn from KäTu. How you do the theory shapes how you do the practice, and you can’t disengage the two. I certainly got engaged. This year’s symposium was on Zoom, which made it easily accessible, but less easy to get to know participants. Hopefully next time there will be more opportunities to talk and meet informally and in smaller groups.
Four insights zoomed down to me from the ivory tower at KäTu 2021:
Writers need
training in how to do and commission translations
Academics – like everyone else – are translating a lot themselves. They don’t always trust a professional to do it because they have had bad experiences with translation agencies. They are worried that they don’t have the budget. And their organisations – the universities – don’t usually have good systems to find the right translator. Training can help – Esa Penttilä and others at the University of Eastern Finland offered PhD students courses in translating their research. They are looking at other ways of training academics, both in translating and in working with professional translators. Organisations like NEaT can help.
New ways of
describing gender create new linguistic opportunities
Genders are challenging to translate well. Finnish only has one personal pronoun (hän) for he, she, and everyone else. But Finns still use old “male” forms more than necessary, like laki- palo- or virkamies – literally “law, fire, and office man” for lawyer, firefighter and official. So hän tends to mask the male default still assumed in Finnish. This makes it tricky to translate a story about people whose genders change like Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, as Anna Merikallio from the University of Turku showed. Meeting this challenge inclusively is an exciting creative process.
Easy language
makes your message clear and benefits everyone
Neural machine translation (NMT) works better for the big languages than smaller ones. Jörg Tiedemann from the University of Helsinki showed how open-sourced translation tools and open data projects can counter this trend towards digital language death (András Kornai’s term). NMT tools can be trained with transfer learning. You can do this by translating texts from multiple source languages into one target language, or by translating monolingual texts in the small language into a bigger one and then back again. This is useful for crisis response and to counter reliance on commercial tools that favour bigger languages.
Here are some of those open
resources:
Fiskmö translation data and tools for Finland’s two biggest languages
Enjoy playing with the tools, read some of those links, and join the debate about how English and Finnish are changing at NEaT’s event on 8 June. Next time the ivory tower of translation opens its windows, you might be ready join me and look – climb? – in.
Kate
Sotejeff-Wilson translates, copywrites and edits for academics at KSWtranslations,
facilitates Ridge
Writing Retreats, and is vice chair of NEaT.
Image: Tower of Babel c. 1372, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München Meister der Weltenchronik, via Wikimedia Commons.
