If you have a Twitter account and logged in last Saturday, you cannot fail to have noticed that the IAPTI (International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters) was holding its first conference in London. Having grown in numbers over the past four years the association has been up and running, and now with members in 59 countries, its president, Aurora Humarán, and her team decided it was time to get together properly and have a “non-mild” discussion about what’s going on in our industry and what we can do about it. Despite being rooted in Argentina where the IAPTI was founded, London was chosen as the venue so we could all stand in solidarity with UK interpreters.
Being rather old-school at heart and definitely in years, I had fully intended to write notes with pen and paper. However, one random tweet whilst waiting for it all to kick off led to another, and before I knew it I was frantically tapping away whilst listening as avidly as possible, and even finding some moments to retweet others’ posts. Multitasking has never been so fun, or indeed so exhausting. And there’s definitely something a bit odd about being retweeted by the person sitting next to you, but that probably happened to quite a fair few of us last Saturday. Marta Stelmaszak, who was also multitasking on the day as one of the conference organisers and presenters, has chirpified the tweets onto one page, and I would encourage you to read through them to get a real feel for the vibrant atmosphere and core ideas we all took away from the day.
No doubt there’ll be a few more tweets with the #iapti2013 hashtag as we all reflect on the conference, consolidate our new connections (don’t forget about looking people up on LinkedIn) and digest the vast amount of information that was crammed into just over 10 hours. With three simultaneous talks at the same time for most of the day, it was often difficult to decide where to go next. But now that I have caught the conference bug (it was my first too), I hope I will have an opportunity to listen to these speakers at the next one. Because there’s no stopping IAPTI now. Here’s to #iapti2014.
This was first published on 7/10/2013 on my previous blog.
If you’d like to explore this blog further, start here with the blog categories.
Tranix Translation & Editing Services 