NEaT Picnic

Welcome to the NEaT picnic! We’d love to see you, and please bring family, friends and your pet to enjoy the end of the summer with us.

Bring your own picnic lunch and drinks. NEaT will provide something sparkling for the welcoming toast and some delicious treats to share. We also promise our annual Mölkky game!

Let us know you are coming below so that we can send out the exact location or alternate instructions for bad weather. Please also let us know if you prefer alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages, and if you have any allergies or food preferences. 

Tokoinranta park, Helsinki

Saturday, August 17, noon

NEaT Mentoring 2024

The NEaT mentoring scheme is running for the third year in 2024 for members to share experience and expertise.  Mentors provide a few hours of their time to mentees to work on a particular issue. This can be core skills in a specific area of translation or editing, or specific business, marketing, IT or other skills related to our work. Regardless of how long you have been working, there are always new skills you might need to learn. Mentees will have a clear goal or skill related to their work as translators or editors that they want to work on over three one-to-one sessions.

NEaT mentors offer the following:

Specialisms: medical, sciences, academic, historical texts (primary and secondary sources), nonfiction books, public service, audiovisual and subtitling, plain and easy English

Linguistic core skills: Finnish and Swedish to English translation, Finnish authorised translator certification, copy-editing, proofreading, book editing 

Writing: blogging, copywriting, nonfiction, academic, grant applications, marketing, SEO, content creation

Tech: Overleaf, tech tools for (academic) editing, audiovisual and subtitling

Business skills: navigating the LSP market, networking, setting up and working as a sole trader/toiminimi, business/entrepreneurship skills and practice

Other: if you are moving into a new field or developing a new skill not listed here, contact the mentoring coordinator who will try to match you to a more experenced mentee.

The programme is open to NEaT members only. If you are interested, contact Kate Sotejeff-Wilson for more information on admin at nordicedit.fi.

Online editing and translation workshop Wednesday 24th April

Work together and compare the fruits of your labour! An excellent way to keep up and develop your professional skills is to discuss the choices you make when translating and editing with a peer. By getting into the nitty gritty of the nuances and subtleties of the language(s) you work with, you can find new perspectives and refresh your own approach to texts. As we know, in our work, there is seldom a “wrong” or a “right”, just a myriad of choices! And no matter how long we’ve been language professionals, we can always learn new things from others. 

You can choose to edit an English text ( EN-EN), or do a FI-EN or SW-EN translation. 

The session will be moderated by Alice Lehtinen. 

When? 17.00-18.30 Finnish time, on Wednesday 24th April (and not 23rd, as I mistakenly wrote in the newsletter!)

ELN Mini Presentation on the Influence of English in the Nordics

NEaT would like to invite you to a special online mini English as a Lingua Nordica presentation on Monday, 13 May at 6 pm EET, 5 pm CET. This talk will be on the influence of English-language culture and the role of English in the Nordic languages. Professor Kristy Beers Fägersten will discuss this influence through the examples of English and Swedish swear words, which apply to the Nordic languages in general. She will also discuss whether and how to translate swear words, the status of English swear words as appropriated into the Nordic languages, and the function of the censorship of native swear words.

The session is free to members, ten euros for non-members. If you are in Finland, pay to BIC NDEAFIHH, IBAN FI48 1237 3000 1522 20, and if outside of Finland, you will be sent a link for payment. Join the meeting here.

About the presenter: Kristy Beers Fägersten is Professor of English Linguistics at the School of Culture and Education at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research disciplines include pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis. Her publications feature analyses of the language of media and popular culture, with a special focus on language play, humor, and swearing. Beers Fägersten is the co-editor of English in the Nordic Countries: Connections, tensions, and everyday realities (Routledge, 2023) and co-author of “The evolution of swearing in television catchphrases” in Languages and Literature (2022), and “Censorship and taboo maintanance in L1 and LX swearing”, submitted to Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.