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Hello, and happy spring!

The early signs are always heartening. We emerge little by little from the longwetdark, pale, bleary-eyed, and cautiously optimistic that this — that all of this — might soon pass. Outside, pale lilac buds blossom deliciously, new green emerges, finally, and the municipal gardeners fill long-naked parcels with colorful pansies. 

I always found “pansy” to be an ugly word for such a pretty little flower. It wasn’t until later that I learned the flower’s Spanish name, pensamiento, followed by the Portuguese pensamento and the French pensée...

In this issue 🧐 

- AI Committee: What We’ve Been Up To

- Arabic short fiction

- King County language diversity – a milestone 

- Event photos

- Call for #NOTIS2026 Conference proposals

- Upcoming events

- Publications, calls for submissions, etc.

Our NW Literary Translators once again teamed up with the UW Translation Studies Hub for the Hub’s 3rd annual translator’s residency — this time featuring famed Indonesian–English literary translator and author Tiffany Tsao. 1) Tsao poses with NW Literary Translators Shelley, Tim, and Takami. 2) Tsao and NOTIS Board Member Jen Mendez prep for a Q&A at Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum. Keep scrolling for more photos from Tsao’s weeklong residency in Seattle.

Call for Proposals – Now Open!
NOTIS 2026 Annual Conference 🤩

Here it is! Your chance to inspire, inform, and empower fellow translators and interpreters with practical tools, fresh ideas, and hard-earned insight. 💡

We welcome proposals on topics relevant to all T&I specializations. 

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to share your expertise, grow alongside your peers, and make meaningful connections that last well beyond Sept. 12. 

Learn more & submit here by May 15 for primary consideration. 

More snapshots from Tiffany Tsao’s visit. First, with UW patron of the humanities Lee Scheingold; second, with Spencer Ruchti of Third Place Books and the Cercedor Prize.

More or less apace with other large counties in the U.S., King County, WA, hit a major language diversity milestone in recent years. According to a Seattle Times analysis of recent U.S. Census Bureau data, one-third of all KC residents over the age of four now speak a language other than English at home.

Spanish is by far the first most common non-English language spoken in King County — at over 7% — and Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese) comes in at second.

The areas with the greatest linguistic diversity are around the west end of Kent, where over 40% of residents speak Spanish at home, and South Beacon Hill/NewHolly, where Chinese speakers average 30%. 

As for the least linguistically diverse areas? English-only speakers make up about 93% of the North Bend/Riverpoint/Skykomish area. 

And, within city limits, English-only households account for approximately 95% of West Seattle’s North Admiral/Genesee neighborhoods.

Artwork by Jenni Salmi, local translator (Finnish <> EN), editor, and life-long language learner. To pay more attention to the little things in life, Jenni started a comic journal during the pandemic. You can find more of her doodling on Instagram @ehtoota_amerikasta.

What does this all mean for language access? The future of human-centered translation and interpretation? Email us at social@notisnet! We’d love to hear — and share — your thoughts.

Read the full analysis by Gene Balk in the February 23, 2026, issue of The Seattle Times. ☐

What I’m Reading... 📚

Here we’ll feature reading recommendations — fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between — from your colleagues. Each installment will begin with a note from the recommender, followed by an excerpt of an article, story, or book they think you’ll enjoy.

Today, Kay Heikkinen recommends “A Bird with a Broken Wing,” a short story by Syrian author Imad Saad, translated from Arabic by Mandy McClure.

“ This story is from a bilingual anthology of the 15 finalists (among over 800 entries) for a prize for Arabic flash fiction, defined as stories of 1001 words or less.

The story caught my eye in part because it’s written from the point of view of an interpreter, and it reminded me of stories I’ve heard from some of our NOTIS colleagues.

Additionally, I was drawn by the ethical questions it presents:

How much can the interpreter intervene, and when should she? What does honesty mean, in these circumstances? What can we guess about the author’s attitude toward the committee sitting in judgment, and what are we to think of a world that creates such situations? Of course the subject is also topical at the moment, and likely will be for some time.

The volume is Slender Thorns: Award-Winning Flash Fiction in Arabic and English, published by ArabLit Books and Komet Kashakeel (pp. 31-35 in English, 158-155 in Arabic). The story was written by Imad Saad and translated by Mandy McClure, and is printed with permission from ArabLit.”

“A Bird with a Broken Wing”
By Imad Saad, tr. Mandy McClure

Claiming asylum is an inhuman process. It’s excruciating to go begging to a country that your mind wants but your heart rejects and to which your whole self does not belong. You’re always torn between here and there. It’s not fair. I’ve long noticed how exiles are so solitary and polite—overly polite, more than is natural. Their bodies have a different rhythm. Alienated from their surroundings, they’re assailed with a sense that they have reached an unwelcoming place. It’s largely true, and it has nothing to do with their inability to adapt... 

That’s why you see them plodding along in silence, their eyes cast down, squinting at whatever they encounter, their usual Levantine audacity having deserted them. If they do raise their eyes, their gaze is vacant, lost, as if they don’t comprehend what they’re seeing. They haven’t yet reconciled themselves to all these novel, untested situations, especially the older, more sensitive ones who don’t know the language. The language deficit oils the machinery of exile, enabling it to defeat them with greater efficiency. . . .

. . . The stories I heard and translated were not complete or coherent. People offered up excerpts to make themselves look better to the committee. I didn’t blame them. We all have our imagined, invented life and the life fit for public consumption. I deliberately helped to iron out the wrinkles. With time, I became more prone to fantasy, lying remorselessly so these people could quickly move beyond their present ordeal and find a better life. Yousef, however, disagreed with this approach...

Read the full story here on The Northwest Linguist Blog, where we’ve reprinted it in full with the permission of the collection’s editor. To learn more about the anthology, Slender Thorns, click here. 

What have YOU been reading? Send us an email and let us know. We’d love to feature your recommendation — and you — in an upcoming installment! ☐

To learn more about NOTIS’s upcoming events, visit our main website calendar. For a list of our on-demand offerings, click here!  

👀 Have a great idea for a presentation or workshop? Interested in hosting a social gathering in your neighborhood? NOTIS wants to help! Click here to get started.

Our latest social gathering was a trip to the PNW Ballet to see Stravinsky’s Firebird. 

What’s next? Join us on Wednesday, May 20, at 7:30 PM for Aviatrix: A World Premiere Musical, at Seattle Public Theatre.

Learn more and RSVP here. 

AI at NOTIS: What We’ve Been Up To ⚙️

The NOTIS AI Committee was established with three goals: to promote peer learning among members, to identify member interests that will inform future programming, and to develop a comprehensive AI Usage Policy by the end of 2026.

Peer learning takes place at our monthly, members-only AI Jam Sessions, where committee chair Elizabeth Adams opens with a short presentation and attendees freely share their knowledge, experiences, and workflow challenges while exchanging ideas about the ethical and practical issues raised by AI. Here’s what we’ve been up to...

🔧 January: AI as a Tool, Not the Boss

Our first Jam Session in January looked at how members are currently using AI in their day-to-day work. A few highlights:

• One interpreter uses ChatGPT to create glossaries before new assignments, but types the terms into Excel one by one instead of exporting them, because the extra effort helps with memorization. 

• An interpreter manager at a government agency uses Claude to put bureaucratic jargon into plain language. Interpreters can edit the glossaries or use them as-is.

The real takeaway from our first session was about workflows. In the first case, an interpreter built their process around how they personally learn best. In the other, AI was used to support interpreters rather than second-guess them. Technological empowerment is a theme we expect to return to often. [Continued below...]

⌨️ February: Testing Prompting Strategies

February’s session put common prompting advice to the test and explored practical tasks members want AI to handle. Highlights:

• Start with a goal and have the AI tool clarify what you need: [“My goal is to have a bilingual SP-EN table of terms used at prenatal appointments in csv format so I can easily paste it into Excel. Ask me questions to clarify the task before creating the table.”] The goal-and-questions approach produces better output, though it takes longer, so save it for complex, high-stakes tasks.

• Use the right tool for the task: In a comparison of Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, all four LLMs (“large language models”) performed well when asked to draft emails or create glossaries. Only Gemini and Perplexity were able to create glossaries from links to YouTube videos – neither Claude nor ChatGPT have direct access to YouTube content. 

• Rank uncertainty: Ask your LLM to rank its confidence for items in a list or table. Elizabeth demonstrated a list of baseball idioms translated into Russian with confidence rankings for each entry. The rankings helped flag problematic items, but it wasn’t always clear whether the LLM was ranking the popularity of the original idiom or the quality of the translation. Lesson: be specific about what you’re asking your AI tool to rank.

💯 March: AI for Translation QA

In March, we looked at the differences between existing quality assurance (QA) software and LLMs for translation quality checks. Highlights:

• PerfectIt, a popular proofreading tool, offers comprehensive consistency checks for things like abbreviations, formatting, and spelling (“color” vs “colour”), but it doesn’t always catch inconsistently spelled names. It also fails to identify missing words or source language text that was accidentally left out of the translation.

• Claude AI catches the same inconsistencies as PerfectIt, but it also flags missing words, source text that wasn’t deleted, and sentence structures that too closely follow the grammar of the source language. The only drawback – and it’s a big one – is that you have to be sure you are using the LLM in a way that protects your client’s data privacy. 

• A translator shared that they use a paid service called TypingMind, which allows them to interact with LLMs using a special access code called an API key. Major AI developers offer much better security guarantees when you access their tools with an API key, compared to the standard paid or free plans that most people use.

🏥 April: AI in the Language Industry, a Conversation with Yuliya Speroff 

On April 20, Elizabeth joined up with Harborview Medical Interpreter Supervisor Yuliya Speroff to discuss the implications of artificial intelligence for medical interpreters and the language industry as a whole...

 Yuliya explained that existing laws and hospital accreditation standards require “meaningful language access” and gave detailed examples of how AI-powered speech translation falls far short of this standard. She also expressed her view that human relationships and people skills will become more valuable than ever. 

The recorded session is now available on demand for all NOTIS members. Click the button below to tune in! ☐

Also of Note... ✍️️

• 🎗️ Resource reminder #1: The NOTIS Ethics Panel – Have a question regarding interpreter ethics? Ask our panel of experts! 
• 🎗️ Resource reminder #2: NOTIS T&I Practice Groups – Peer-led support for exam prep, skill building, and professional growth. To learn more and find a practice buddy, visit NOTISnet.org/Practice-Groups. 
• ⚕️ NBCMI is accepting applications and/or nominations for its board of directors. Click here to learn more.
  

• 🥇 The ATA/AFTI Student Translation Award is accepting submissions through  June 30. With this semi-annual prize, ATA & AFTI offer a grant-in-aid to a student for an exceptional literary or sci-tech translation/project. The selected translator receives $500, up to $500 toward expenses for attending the ATA Conference, a certificate of recognition, and a one-year ATA student membership.
• 🥇 Submissions are now open for the 2027 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants (Deadline: June 15), supporting the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama into English.
• 🥇 UW Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC) calls for submissions for the third cycle of the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature, this time for Persian prose, from any genre or period, translated into English. Deadline: Sept. 1. Learn more and submit your work here. 

• 🇵🇸 Alf mabrouk to Kay Heikkinen, whose co-translation of Every Moment is a Life, a rich new Arabic-English bilingual anthology of essays by young Palestinians, is now available for purchase. NOTE: All proceeds go to the contributors in Gaza and to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival.
• 🌏 Best Literary Translations 2026 — with Wendy Call as co-editor — is now available from Deep Vellum. Compiled from over 450 submissions written in 62 original languages, the third annual edition of this groundbreaking anthology features a chorus of voices from across the globe. 
• 🇲🇽 Also hot off the presses: another Wendy Call collab! Red Seed: Poems for Luno — a trilingual chapbook by Mexican poet Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez, in Call’s SP>EN co-translation — is now available from Cardboard House Press.
• 🇺🇿 Two poems from Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, a 2025 National Book Awards finalist translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, appear in the latest issue of New Verse Review.
• Gratulation to Monika Cassel! Her latest translation, Portolan, by Daniela Danz (“the first English translation of one of Germany’s most inventive and celebrated poets”) is now available for pre-order from University of Nebraska Press.

• Coming soon to Seattle Center’s FESTÁL calendar: A Glimpse of China, May 9; Spirit of Africa, May 16; Pagdiriwang Phillipine Festival, June 6–7; and more... 
• LEO’s 13th International Conference, 100% online, is taking place June 25–26. The theme is “We Are Here To Stay: The Irreplaceable Language Industry,” and Caitilin Walsh, past president of both NOTIS & ATA, is among the speakers. ☐

About Our Publications ️🗞️

Every year, in addition to regular blog posts, NOTIS publishes four quarterly  newsletters. The principal objective of our publications is to inform, educate, and entertain. 

The 2026 editorial team is led by Brianna Salinas, NOTIS Marketing and Communications Specialist, as editor-in-chief. Her trusty advisors and co-editors are Kay Heikkinen and Jen Mendez. 

Letters to the editor, short translations or articles, anecdotes, images, calendar items, and other announcements are both welcome and encouraged! For more information, please see our call for submissions.

To submit content, place an advertisement, or for any other inquiries, please contact our team at social@notisnet.org. ☐

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