Rolling on to the Columbia – the upcoming 65th American Translators Association (ATA) conference

 

[Columbia River]

In around one week, the ATA conference will open in Portland, Oregon. If you have never attended a large national translation/interpreter conference, it is a special experience involving bountiful opportunities to network, learn and expand horizons. The ATA annual conference generally attracts around two thousand people.  This year, I personally have a special interest in it not only professionally but also personally but any person that is currently a part of or considering joining the language industry can benefit.

One of the amazing riches of the conference is the overwhelming choice of lectures. During each lecture period, a participant can choose among nine different presentations. It is almost too much especially since conversations in the hallway on the way to the lecture often prevent you from getting to them. This year, I will be giving two presentations, one on project-based quotes and the other demonstrating a step-by-step approach to preparing presentations. For a full program, see here. Clearly, regardless of a person’s actual area of specialization, there are numerous lectures of interest. Notwithstanding this opportunity to gain knowledge, the most important benefit of the conference is the creation and reinforcement of the feeling of a translator community, a large one even, so often lost as we work alone in our (office) caves, isolated from others. I finished my last ATA conference in Palm Springs, before Corona struck, exhausted but inspired. If you have a chance to attend this year or in the future, it is a worthwhile investment of time and money.

On a personal basis, I lived in Oregon before I immigrated to Israel 35 years ago. I am looking forward to seeing both the friends and place I left behind. Aside from attending a reunion party of Hopa, the Balkan dance troupe in which I was a member back then, I plan to rediscover and show my wife the beauty of Oregon as I remember it: Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge, Mount Hood, the Oregon Coast, the 5^th Street Market in Eugene and any of the places I can get to. Of course, rain is forecast. The joke is that it rains twice a year in Oregon, from January to June and June to January. My wife and dealt with killer humidity in Shanghai in July; we will deal with frequent pissing from the sky in Oregon. Another, albeit unfortunate, personal benefit is that we will not have to be on constant alert for air raid warnings as is the situation right now in Israel. They do get one one’s nerves very quickly. Thus, I am looking forward to returning to Oregon even if you cannot go home again as Thomas Wolfe wrote.

Therefore, if you can attend the conference and are interested in any aspect of the translation and interpretation (including the effect of AI on the business), it is not too late to register and profit from an amazing event in all aspects. Contact me if you want to meet at the conference. As follows from the words that Woody Guthry wrote in the song about the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Columbia river, you can see the power of language turn the darkness to dawn. Roll on to the Columbia, roll on.

The Weather of My Life

As a stereotypical wandering Jew, I have been privileged to experience many types and descriptions of weather in my life.  On a linguistic note, the most interesting aspect is the terminology or lack thereof describing them.  I present a brief autobiographical weather tour.

I grew up in L.A., a city loved by many but not by me.  In LA, in the sixties, we had the famous Sig Alert, a measurement of smog, a wonderful American combination in itself of smoke and fog.  As I recall, at Sig 1, it was recommended that people with breathing problems stay home; At Sig 2, the schools were closed; at Sig 3, factories were closed.  I understand that pollution SIGgy days no longer occur in LA or they just don’t report them.

I lived in Paris for six months.  Maybe because I was young, I don’t remember anybody talking about the weather at all.  Apparently, they were too busy talking about the latest restaurant or the previous/next vacation.  There is something to be said for this approach.

I then moved to Oregon.  The Pacific Northwest, western Oregon and Washington, offers a long list of jokes about the climate: it rains twice a year, from January to June and June to January and Oregonians don’t tan, they rust, to name a few.  In reality, a good year is three months without rain while a bad year is one month without rain.  Granted, generally the rain is not strong, closely resembling a permanent drizzle.  Similar to the Japanese approach to describing a short person, avoidance, i.e. the person next to the tall man, Oregonians talk about the sun, not the rain: There may be sun today or No chance of the sun breaking through today.  This is an example of reference by ignoring.

I now live in Israel, where rain is a blessing and reason for a blessing.  In fact, interestingly, there are words to describe the first and last rain of the season, יורה [yoreh] and מלקוש [malkosh], respectively.  At this moment, I am enjoying a late version of the latter on Shevuot, rendering me a bit sad that I won’t hear the sound of rain drops until October or November.  Alas, instead we will have חמסין [hamsine], an Arabic word meaning 50, or שרב [sharav], the Hebrew word referring to days with a hot, eastern desert wind, which sucks out all of the oxygen and drives everybody crazy.  This phenomenon is more common worldwide, called the Santa Ana winds in L.A. for example.  Yet, it does have a special word locally.

So, if you have a unique weather term in your part of the world, let me know.  I will be happy to share it.

A Tempest in a Teacup

The word “exotic” can be defined as that what is extraordinary.  For example, blonds are exotic in the Middle East but quite commonplace in Scandinavia.  When a phenomenon is exotic, it creates problems of description.  While the dictionary literally translates words from language to languages, the phenomenon they describe can in practice vary, as in the example of weather.

Rain in some quantity is essentially a global event experienced by basically all cultures.  So, the word storm exists in all languages. However, it means different things to different people.  I lived in (Western) Oregon, home of such classic jokes as “It rains twice a year, from January to June and June to January” and “Oregonians don’t tan; they rust” (To be fair, the same jokes are made about the northern half of the Pacific Northwest, Washington state).  If the weather forecaster mentioned a storm, it had to be more than the usual constant piss outside, something with high winds and torrential rain.  There was no purpose in saying there was a storm outside to describe the constant fall of water particles typical of nine months of the year (in a good year).  I imagine that the British also can relate to this.   By contrast, in the arid Middle East, a storm is anything more than a half a day of rain.  A whole slew of experts appear on television to advise the public how to prepare for the event, each and every millimeter of rain, in terms of dressing children, driving precautions, and staying healthy.  Two days later, the whole nation joyfully listens how the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) went up such and such millimeters and is this far from the red line.  The only real damage is a few more car accidents than usual and a few low lying areas get flooded (as they do every year due to non-existent drainage).  However, you have to watch out for that storm.

In contrast, there is the wonderful term heat wave.  In northern Europe and parts of the United States, a heat wave is anything beyond 30° C (86° F) for more than three days.  The main reason for this panic is the lack of air circulation within the cramped cities, air conditioners, ice, or any other means of getting cool, and general knowledge of how to react to heat.  Hundreds people in Europe actually died during a recent wave there.  In the Middle East, this is not a heat wave; it is the climate.  From May until October, the temperature is over 30° C, often even at night, not taking account high humidity in the coastal areas, an added pleasure as any New Yorker would know.  A heat wave, like we are having now, is a week of over 104° with some added high humidity.  Now that is suffering, as we say as we sit in our air-conditioned cars, offices, and houses.

On a final note, I once asked a group of newly-arrived immigrants from the former Soviet Union what temperature they considered cold.  Apparently, most of them came from the Siberia region as their consensus was -30° C (-22° F).  They said that -20° C (-4° F) was quite tolerable.  To paraphrase Alice, a word means what I want it to mean.