ITI Conference 2022: A look back. Part II

This is certainly the more difficult part to write. Here I’d like to go into some detail about my favourite sessions, what I thought really worked and what I thought was perhaps missing.

The first highlight for me was the format of the event. Putting on a hybrid event was a stroke of genius by the ITI team and added a lot to the conference experience for on- and offline delegates alike. Because all delegates could catch up on session recordings later, I felt so much less pressure when choosing which sessions to attend and less guilt (and FOMO) when I needed a breather or had a family emergency. I even sat outside the room for one talk, watching on my phone, while waiting for an important call.

The top of the talks

Most of the talks related to soft skills, e.g. building client and colleague relationships, approaches to diversification and productivity, or the profession and the translation market as a whole. The first session I attended was by the inimitable Fiona Grey, who shared her strategy for managing different types and tiers of clients sustainably. I currently work with both direct and agency clients and her advice (and her extended bus metaphor) really resonated with me.

Other gems from the Tuesday sessions included Juliet Baur and Mason Colby’s joint talk on working as a professional partnership and Silke Lührmann’s presentation of her research on translators’ experiences of the pandemic. Juliet and Mason had spoken at previous conferences about their partnership and it was interesting to see how it had evolved over the years even though I had not attended their previous talks.

Having responded to Silke’s survey on translators’ experiences of the pandemic, I was particularly interested to hear her present her findings. Her insights on the trends she uncovered were thought-provoking, reassuring — it’s always nice to know you’re not alone — and extremely well delivered.

Highlights from Wednesday included Hayley Wood’s talk on parenthood for translators and Lydia Marquardt’s session on making your business work for your life. Lydia’s talk was the one that most inspired me to act. Her enthusiasm for prototyping new business ideas and working to your strengths was contagious and easily applicable in practice.

Hayley’s session was full of practical tips about the support available to new parents and stories she had gathered from other freelance translator parents. I certainly feel better prepared now than I did before her talk and pleased to know that there are freelance parents out there ready and willing to share their knowledge and advice.

I would like to give a special mention to Michael Robson’s talk advocating that we share our personal lives with our clients where appropriate, in which he shared his own story. The case studies really brought home the importance of recognising our own needs and vulnerability, if we’re going to make freelancing work for us. And the need to bring our clients in as partners rather than trying to pretend we’re emotionless automata.

In his keynote, Daniel Hahn shared his process, in detail, with examples, and it was fascinating. It definitely hit its mark with the audience and prompted a number of discussions about how we (don’t) talk about process, how process is (barely) taught and how we can encourage people to think about and share their process.

Missing in action

While I understand that with so many people working into and out of so many languages it is difficult to deliver training on core skills at a conference like this, I do think hard translation skills were missing in action.

There were no slams (a tragedy) and very few talks on the nuts and bolts of translation. Oliver Lawrence’s talk on paying attention to musicality in our writing, Daniel Hahn’s keynote and Tomas West’s session on cross-Atlantic translation of legal terms were pretty much it as far as I could see.

I found a few of the sessions a little light on relevant, new or useful content. Whether this was down to the talk selection process or because some speakers would have benefited from additional guidance, I’m not sure. For me, these sessions lacked insight, practical or actionable advice, in some cases because they spent too long setting the scene and ran out of time and in others because the content was too superficial.

My takeaways

There were loads of great sessions that offered insight (e.g. Silke’s research presentation and the presentation on language industry dynamics by Slator’s Anna Wydnham) or concrete actionable steps to make changes in your business (e.g. Bex Elder’s talk on productivity tools, Lydia’s session on going beyond work-life balance, Nicole Hawkesford’s deep dive into Airtable, and Amelie Aichinger’s presentation on specialization).

While I won’t be implementing them all, they have given me plenty of food for thought and ideas to get going. Some I’ve already put into practice (thanks Fiona for the push to have a proper client management strategy) and some are more ongoing principles I’ll endeavour to apply (like prototyping new ideas to test them out).

Overall the conference was a wonderful opportunity to catch up with colleagues, learn a lot and really appreciate how lucky I am to be a member of this fantastic profession.

And here’s that headshot: