Covid-19 restrictions mean that — like other industry groups — the Israel Translators Association (ITA) is unable to hold its annual conference in person this year. So organizers have taken the event online — and international.
Starting today, the March 1-3 virtual conference includes presentations not just of import to Israel’s translation market and community, but to other countries as well. (Sessions are available in both Hebrew and English.) In addition to talks about the Argentine Federation of Translators, translation censorship in Egypt and court interpreting for England and Wales, the conference is also hosting sessions that break away from the normal industry humdrum localization professionals have become used to seeing across multiple industry events. Freelance translator Dana Szabados is hosting a session on localizing emojis, for example, and freelancer Alfonso Gonzalez is speaking on search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) localization.
There’s also a client tell-all from attorney Paige Dygert, who’s discussing what legal translation clients really look for from language services providers (LSP) and why she stopped working with certain translation companies in the past.
Based in Tel Aviv, ITA is the leading representative of the community of translators, interpreters and editors in Israel. Before the onset of covid-19 — when ITA’s conference and other events were held in person — more than 300 translators were known to be in attendance.
Other localization and translation industry events that have made the move to remote since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic include Localization World’s LocWorldWide, the Association of Language Companies’ (ALC) Unconference, the European Language Industry Association’s (ELIA) Together At Home and the Nordic Translation Industry Forum (NTIF), as well as one day client conferences from private translation tech providers like Lilt and XTM International (XTM LIVEStream).
Some events — such as the American Translators Association (ATA) conference — have already announced virtual options through fall.
