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Fall 2024 Newsletter 🍂🍁

A note from Kay Heikkinen on behalf of the Publications Team:

“Oh, October! Crisp days filled with red, yellow, and orange leaves, still on trees or underfoot, with memories of the excitement of new pencils, new classes, new teachers, and of Halloween on the doorstep—all alternating with our first atmospheric river of the season, bringing dense gray skies, chilly rain, and early darkness. It’s almost as if the weather were reflecting the mood of so many people I know, swinging from hopeful, or even joyful, to fearful dread of the next national or international news alert. Still, somehow we cling to the best in it all, and this newsletter brings a lot of memories and anticipation to cheer us...

Image: The NOTIS Board of Directors takes a brief break from the toing and froing of #NOTIS2024 to smile for the camera. Pictured, left to right, are Timothy Gregory, Eunyoung Kim, Maria Lucas, Yvonne Simpson, Zakiya Hanafi, Christina Woelz, Kay Heikkinen, Rosemary Nguyen, and Laura Friend.
Not pictured: Dubravka Martincic.

Recent NOTIS sightings 🧀

NOTIS’s Northwest Literary Translators put on a Literary Translation Publishers’ Panel in September, inviting the editors of local presses to discuss their work and the [translated] works they publish. Pictured here, L-R, are moderator Shelley Fairweather-Vega with publishers Joshua Rothes (Sublunary Editions), Gabriella Page-Fort (HarperCollins), Rita Wirkala (All Bilingual Press), Heidi Broadhead (Wave Books), and Knox Gardner (Entre Ríos Books). 

NOTIS 2024, our Annual Conference, was a hit! Keep an eye out for more photos and comments in our next issue. For now, we can’t help but share a few... Above, Keynote Speaker Corinne McKay delights the crowd with what one attendee described as “an amazingly invigorating package of information, humor, and spirit-boosting,” resulting in a high they were “still living off days later.”

NOTIS 2024 also afforded attendees some necessary downtime to compare notes, collect swag, and connect with friends and colleagues, new and old. Above left, Naomi Uchida, NOTIS Office Manager, poses (center left) with presenters (L-R) Yuliya Speroff, Cindy Roat, and Elena Langdon. Above right, NOTIS Board Member and CID Chair Yvonne Simpson gets caught in a laugh with past NOTIS President Shelley Fairweather-Vega.

A room full of smiling conference-goers—all of whom we hope to see again soon. 

Sponsored ad from Washington Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC)—valued #NOTIS2024 Diamond Sponsors!

ICYMI (or, in longhand, “in case you missed it”), NOTIS has an Ethics Panel—that is, a group of subject matter experts to whom you can address your prickliest of ethics questions. Responses will be sent directly to your email and posted anonymously on our webpage. Here’s the latest...

QUESTION:

I have been working in a psychiatric hospital where interpreters are assigned one patient per job by the language company. Some Interpreters help whomever the hospital staff asks them to assist. One interpreter mentioned the Good Samaritan law, telling me that we are required under this law to help. Other Interpreters absolutely refuse to help due to liability concerns. I had my doubts, so I asked the language company. The language company told me that is up to me and my level of comfort.

Does the Good Samaritan law apply to us, Social Services Interpreters? Is it ethical for the interpreter to interpret for a patient that has NOT been assigned to that interpreter?

ANSWER:

At times, well-meaning but ignorant colleagues may provide unsound advice. You may want to smile politely and ignore them.

The Good Samaritan law does not apply in this case. Washington state’s Good Samaritan law protects from civil damages anyone who provides first aid or transportation during an emergency without expecting to be paid.

There is a Duty to Rescue law, also known as a “Bad Samaritan” law, which holds people responsible for not helping someone in imminent danger. It appears from your description of the situation that this law does not apply either.

Beyond that, the issue of whether you may provide interpreting services for another patient is not an ethical one, but a contractual one. If you are required under your contract to provide interpreting services for patient X, you are not contractually obligated to interpret for any additional patients. There is no ethical reason that you cannot do so if you so choose.

On the other hand, if you are being asked to provide services other than interpretation (e.g. administer medication) this would be beyond the scope of your professional responsibilities and indeed a liability concern, as well as an ethical violation.

Have a question about interpreter ethics? Email an expert at ethics@notisnet.org.

Circling the Translation Studies Hub
An update from our friends at the UW Translation Studies Hub

UW Professors Sasha Senderovich and Aria Fani at the University of Iowa’s 2024 Translation Pedagogy Workshop. The mural on the wall behind them features a colorful stack of books that reads, from spine to spine, “Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature.” Did you know? Seattle and Iowa City are the ONLY two UNESCO Cities of Literature in the United States of America! 

The University of Washington’s Translation Studies Hub has a full roster of exciting events lined up for the 2024-2025 academic year. The best way to keep up with the schedule of events—ours and those we co-sponsor or help promote—is to join our mailing list (we promise not to inundate your inboxes). 

Coming off the excitement generated¹ by the visit last spring by Anton Hur, our inaugural literary translator in residence, we are delighted to share the news that Lee Scheingold—the cherished community member who established this residency—has extended the duration of her gift by another seven years! With deep gratitude to Lee for her generosity, we are at work organizing the visit by our second literary translator in residence: Sawad Hussain, who translates from Arabic and one of whose co-translated books was just named a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. We are working closely with NOTIS on parts of this May 2025 residency: for example, there will be a discussion on translating young adult literature with Sawad Hussain and NOTIS’s Takami Nieda and Shelley Fairweather-Vega as well as another gathering in which two NOTIS Arabic translators, Kay Heikkinen and Tim Gregory, will be involved.

We have more exciting events coming up even sooner, such as this panel on Persian literature in translation on November 14 and this book launch—for Mothersland by Shahzoda Samarqandi, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega—on November 13. Please join our mailing list to stay up-to-date on these and other events.

¹ See here, from Julia Park at Cascade PBS, and here, from Timothy Gregory at NOTIS.

How to Catch a Colleague  🎣
Spotting NW Linguists at ATA65 and ALTA47

NOTIS expects a strong showing at the 2024 annual conferences of both the American Translators Association (ATA) and American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)—with the former, of course, taking place in our own backyard!

The guides below, while not exhaustive, were carefully cobbled together to help conference attendees find and support their friends and PNW colleagues. Are we missing something? Let us know!

The 65th Annual ATA Conference
October 30-November 2 in Portland, OR
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Translating & Interpreting: How Do They Differ?, Thursday 10/31 at 2pm
Helen Eby, regular NOTIS trainer and volunteer

Banding Together for Advocacy, 10/ 31 at 2pm
Caitilin Walsh, past NOTIS + ATA president; Bellevue College T&I
with Ben Karl and Bill Rivers

Connecting Classrooms to Careers: Collaborating on Pathways for the Language Profession, 10/31 at 3:30pm
Caitilin Walsh, past NOTIS and ATA president; Bellevue College T&I
James Wells, language access supervisor at WA AOC
Eunyoung Kim, NOTIS Board Member and WA AOC program coordinator
with lead Veronica Trapani-Hubner

Using Objective Data to Set Your Freelance Rates, Friday 11/o1 at 11am
Corinne McKay, past ATA President and #NOTIS2024 presenter

AI-Powered Subtitling: Revolutionizing Multilingual Movie Subtitling and Transcription, 11/01 at 11am
Sameh Ragab, NOTIS workshop presenter

Make AI Your Ally: Leveraging AI in T&I Classrooms, 11/01 at 2pm
Yasmin Alkashef, ATA Board Member and #NOTIS2024 presenter

How to Handle Ambiguous or Unclear Source Sentences, 11/01 at 2:35pm
Rainer Klett, NOTIS member and many-hatted freelance translator

Public Speaking for T&I Professionals, 11/01 at 3:30pm
Marisa Rueda Will, regular NOTIS presenter and owner of Tica Interpreter Training and Translations

Making Sense of Images and Figurative Language in Translation, 11/01 at 4:45pm
Shelley Fairweather-Vega, past NOTIS president and NW Lit Trans founder
with Kate Deimling

The Recipe for a Successful Language Access Program for Your School, Saturday 11/02 at 10:15am
Stacey Brown-Sommers, owner of Mindlink Resources, LLC; member of the WASCLA Board of Directors

The 47th Annual ALTA Conference
October 25-28 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
_____________________________

Translating Gender and Sexuality (Panel), Sat., Oct. 26, at 9am, with Tabatha Leggett (mod.), Sergio Waisman (mod.), Michelle Quay, Lola Rogers, and Esther Allen

Grammar in the Trenches: How Words Become Weapons in Times of Conflict (Panel), Sat., Oct. 26, at 10:45am, with Brian James Baer (mod.), Sasha Senderovich, Alta L. Price, and Ellen Vayner

Whose Voice Is It? Translating Texts that Blur Human and Machine (Panel), Sat., Oct. 26, at 10:45am, with Karen Kovacik (mod.), Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and Kate Costello

Human Translators with Machines: CAT Tools and Literary Translation (Panel), Mon., Oct. 28, at 9am, with Shelley Fairweather-Vega (mod.), Steven Capsuto, Lola Rogers, and Viktorija Bilić

“I chose to stop writing in ___”: How War Changes Language Choices (Panel), Mon., Oct. 28, at 9am, with Anne O. Fisher (mod.), Sibelan Forrester, Olena Jennings, and Chana Toth-Sewell

Impossible Passages: A Workshop on the Untranslatable, Mon., Oct. 28, at 10:45am, with Clyde Moneyhun (Boise State) and Adam Ray Wagner

____________

Additional ALTA47 buddies can be spotted waxing wordy at Translation Trivia, meditating in the morning, gathering for a pint, or sharing their work at one of several Bilingual Readings. 

Find links to both the schedule-at-a-glance and the full conference program at https://literarytranslators.org/conference/alta47

Finally, here’s that Friday night PDX wine hour we mentioned above! Join your fellow NOTIS members on Friday, November 1, at 6:30 p.m. at Amphora Wine Bar & Merchant (across from the OR Convention Center) for a chance to relax mid-conference, compare notes, and reconnect with old friends while making new ones. We have the back room reserved, where snacks and refreshments will be available for purchase. Please RSVP with a quick email to info@notisnet.org.

Click anywhere on the table above to visit our calendar of live NOTIS events (both in person and online). All events without an “in person” note in the left column will happen online via Zoom.

Want to earn CEUs when and where it’s most convenient? View our current slate of 11 on-demand courses.

Also of Note ✍️️

Have something to share? Email us at social@notisnet.org and let us help you spread the word.

Sponsored advertisement from Gold NOTIS 2024 Conference Sponsor, Dynamic Language. Ad copy reads: “Dynamic Language. Transform Lives Through Language: Join our network of Interpreters and Translators. Click here to find out more.” 

• Have a drink on us! Plan a gathering with NOTIS members in your area (at least 30 miles outside of Seattle), and NOTIS will cover up to $100 of the cost. Click here to learn more and start planning.
  
  
• Congrats to NOTIS 2024 Conference Grant recipients! Round 1 winners were Brenda Anguiano-Alvarez, an English to Spanish medical interpreter from Sunnyside, WA; Sabrina Fountain, a self-taught Italian-English literary translator based in Spokane, WA; Amanda Wheeler-Kay, a Spanish-English interpreter and MA student of Interpreter Studies (teaching track) at Western Oregon University; and Jeanett Quintanilla, an Edmonds-based attorney and interpreter from Peru who is currently preparing for WA State court interpreter exam. 
  
  
• Round 2 Conference Grant recipients — for ATA 65 — were Andrew Banion Belisle, a full-time German and Spanish to English court and medical interpreter in Spokane; and Jennifer Mendez, an emerging German-English literary translator based in Portland who is hard at work paying her way through school.
  
  
• Based in or near B.C.? Check out STIBC’s CE calendar! Currently on the schedule is a 3-part series on Finances for Freelancers. See their upcoming events here.

Thank you, #NOTIS2024 Sponsors!

NOTIS was thrilled to count on the generous support of our industry partners Universal Language Service (ULS), Washington Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), UW Medicine, Dynamic Language, AMN Healthcare, Moli, Certified Languages International, Language Network, Wordfast, Seattle Central College - Continuing Education, DE LA MORA Institute of Interpretation, Bellevue College Community Education, and Greenleaf Neuropsychology.

Click on our sponsors’ names above to visit their websites and learn more about who they serve and what they offer.

Thank YOU for reading! 🎃

In our newsletters and blog, NOTIS publishes content created by and for NOTIS members, their colleagues, and other T&I industry professionals. The principal objective of these publications is to inform, educate, and entertain our publics.

At present, the NOTIS Publications Committee—and editorial team—is comprised of:

Have a question or comment? Want to volunteer for the committee, submit content for an upcoming publication, or place an ad? We would love to hear from you. Please direct all inquiries to social@notisnet.org. 

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