Last weekend (4-6 October) I attended the annual meeting of MET – the Barcelona-based group for editors and translators, of which the UAB Language Service is a corporate member. This year the event took place at the Centre Cultural La Mercè in Girona.
The title for this years’ conference was “Giving credit where credit’s due: recognition for authors, translators and editors”. This is am important issue for professionals in a world where so often it is only the primary author who receives credit for writing that often involves others behind the scenes.
The keynote speakers were the award-winning British writer, editor and translator of Portuguese, Spanish and French, Daniel Hahn, and Iria del Río, a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
In addition to these main speakers there was a series of interesting parallel sessions covering a diverse range of areas and angles from grammar to legalese, machine translation to genre analysis, and even using poetics to tune translated or edited texts!
This years attendees came from 24 countries from all over the world, the majority fro Spain. ‘Off-MET’ lunches and other events enabled plenty of meet ups and networking opportunities. As usual one of these events was the MET choir and I am pleased to say that with only about 2 hours of rehearsal time from scratch we managed a pretty mean rendition of L’Himne de les pirates from Mar i Cel!
In all, apart from the opportunity to spend a couple of days in beautiful Girona, this was a really good way to catch up with current thinking about the important issue of recognition and also to catch up with fellow and new MET members.
Tal com vaig escriure fa uns dies, la setmana passada vaig anar a Bristol University amb una beca Erasmus PAS. L’objectiu de la visita va ser la continuació d’un projecte de nomenclatura d’àmbit universitari. Em van donar una benvinguda molt cordial i les dues persones amb qui em vaig reunir (Sally-Ann Kitts, professora de l’escola d’Estudis Hispanics i Helen Bainbridge, coordinadora d’Erasmus) em van poder ajudar molt en la validació i (de vegades) discrepància amb les traduccions per les quals havien optat el Grup Interuniversitari de Nomenclatura en Anglès (GINA) en una serie de reunions prèvies aqui a Barcelona.La primera fase del projecte de nomenclatura de la GINA ja esta tancada, però amb la nova informació obtinguda a Bristol i la d’altres visites de validació que faràn companys del Servei durant els propers mesos tindrem material molt més complet per contribuir a la tarea del GINA i a la nostra nomenclatura interna a la UAB.