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- Notes from break-out sessions
- CAT tools
- Everything you wanted to know about payment, but didn’t dare to ask
- How to get (good) clients
- Inhouse translators vs. freelancers
- International organisations – Translation trends & processes
- Machine translation
- Machine translation and CAT tools
- Post-editing
- Pricing
- Productivity
- Quality of the source text
- Reputation of translators/translation and how to promote it
- Software localization trends
- Translation of marketing materials
- Translation research
- Translators and certification
- Pictures taken on the day
- Some feedback on the event
- Notes from break-out sessions
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Date and location
The first Swiss translation unconference took place on 24th of June, 2011, on the top floor of the tower of the Federal Statistical Office in Neuchâtel.
Keynote Speaker was Silvia Cerrella Bauer, Vice-President of the Swiss Association of Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters (ASTTI).
Participation was free but limited to registered participants.
Why a translation unconference for Switzerland?
Switzerland has a particularly dense and varied translation landscape. Yet there seems to be only very little exchange between its many translation actors, across administrations, industries and linguistic regions. Most of us probably undertake more networking with colleagues in other countries than within our own country.
At the same time, there are some megatrends that challenge the demand for translation as well as the way translations are produced. While some of these underlying trends may only be directly relevant to some of us, others will impact the Swiss translation “ecosystem” in very specific ways. The Swiss translation community can only benefit from looking at these trends together.
Finally, the participant-driven format of unconference is not only a very convenient way to test the waters—it requires only minimal investment from the organisers and can therefore be free and open to a wide audience—it also enables a much more lively exchange of ideas than is typically possible at traditional conferences.
Who attended?
Out of the 130 registered participants, 94 actually made it in the end — which was good because the building capacity was limited to 100!
The participants had many different translation-related backgrounds:
- freelance translators
- in-house translation departments in industry, insurance, banking and pharma
- agencies
- federal administration
- international organisations
- translation tool makers
- MT experts (and users)
- universities
- localisation departments
Who were the organisers?
The idea for this unconference was born out of conversations between a handful of people from different translation backgrounds—federal administration, in-house department, service provider and consultant.
The event was hosted by the Federal Statistical Office. This website is being sponsored by Autodesk, a software maker headquartered in California who has a localisation team based in Neuchatel. (Autodesk makes CAD software—and not CAT software—so there is no commercial intention behind Autodesk’s support of the translation unconference.)
About unconferences
The concept of unconference originated around 2005 in the Californian software industry, which has long experimented with less rigid ways of exchanging ideas (events organised on the base of similar principles are sometimes known as barcamp, camp, open space, etc.). A good introduction to the thinking of those who started the first unconferences is Dave Winer’s article What is an unconference.
But unconferences have been held in Switzerland, too, on topics other than translation, e.g. THATCamp on Humanities and Technology, or StartupCamp for Swiss startup companies.
Highly successful translation unconferences have been organised in California and in Ireland, under the name of Localisation Unconference, due to the particular nature of the translation industry in these locations (see www.localizationunconference.com).
The most recent localisation unconferences were organised in April 2011 in the Silicon Valley and in May 2011 in Dublin. This blog post by a participant to a past Silicon Valley localisation unconference provides a good summary of one of these events.
Animated introduction
(No audio)