NETA board meetings are held four times a year, generally in September, January, March, and June. All except the June meeting occur just before monthly meetings, and usually from 10:00 to 1:00. Final dates, times, and agendas are announced in advance via email. All active NETA members are welcome to attend.

Board meeting dates for 2017-18: September 23, January 27, March 24, June - TBD.

General meetings are usually held once a month from September through April on Saturday afternoons.

2017-18

September 23: 12th Annual Translation Bash, 1:30-4:30 Email mcomenetz@gmail.com, tell us your language pair, and receive a copy of this year's English passage. Translate that passage at your convenience before bash day, and join in as we debate the ins and outs of each sentence. We'll have a facilitator in place for Spanish. If you work in another language pair and would like to participate on September 23, just write to us. We'll keep a tally and let you know about other people who sign up to work with your language. If a given group is large enough, we will attempt to find a facilitator.


October 21: TBD

2016-17

September 24: 11th Annual Translation Bash, 1:30-4:30 Email mcomenetz@verizon.net, tell us your language pair, and receive a copy of this year's English passage. Translate that passage at your convenience before bash day, and join in as we debate the ins and outs of each sentence. We'll have a facilitator in place for Spanish. If you work in another language pair and would like to participate on September 24, just write to us. We'll keep a tally and let you know about other people who sign up to work with your language. If a given group is large enough, we will attempt to find a facilitator.

October 22: Mind the Gap: Teaching Culturally Situated Interpreting, 2:00-4:00   This talk will focus on teaching interpreting skills in an upper-level translation class, where certain kinds of interpreting tasks force students to nimbly negotiate and mediate cultural differences while improving their linguistic awareness and enriching their vocabulary. The talk will be illustrated with brief video clips featuring examples of consecutive interpretation in various simulated real-world situations, such as renting an apartment or making a business presentation.

While effectively improving students' language proficiency, interpreting practice encourages students to think creatively between languages as they must make quick judgments as to what to translate, what to leave out, and whether some cultural repositioning of information is necessary.

Attendees will be asked to offer examples of cultural differences they encounter in their own work and to discuss strategies they employ to deal with them.

Educated in Poland and Japan, our speaker, Anna Zielinska-Elliott, teaches Japanese language and literature as well as translation and interpreting at Boston University, where she is head of the Japanese language program. She is also a translator of modern Japanese literature into Polish, best known for her translations of Murakami Haruki, as well as of Mishima Yukio and Yoshimoto Banana. She is the author of a literary guidebook to Murakami's Tokyo as well as of a Polish-language monograph about gender in Murakami and articles on Murakami and on translation practices relating to contemporary Japanese fiction.

November 19: Interpreting for Sexual Assault Intervention Network (SAIN) Interviews, 2:00-4:00  A SAIN interview occurs when all the agencies involved in cases of suspected child abuse and neglect coordinate their efforts and simultaneously investigate the matter. Interpreting in this setting is not an easy task since the subject matter adds a layer of difficulty to the already demanding cognitive interpreting process. This session will be illustrated with real-life cases and will explore in detail the aspects of interpreting involved during these interviews. In doing so it will provide guidance for interpreters working in community and medical settings.

Ana Helena Lopes, our speaker, is a court interpreter certified by the Trial Court of Massachusetts, where she has been working as a per diem interpreter since 2007. She has extensive legal interpreting experience and expertise in criminal and civil trials, probate and juvenile matters, interview and trial preparation for the Child Abuse Unit of the District Attorney's Office, mental health forensic evaluations, and attorney-client interviews for the Committee of Public Counsel Services of Massachusetts. She has also been a conference interpreter since 2010, and her assignments include executive leadership programs at MIT, Babson College and Harvard University. In May of 2015 she became a Qualified Interpreter of the Office of Language Services at the U.S. Department of State, and in March 2016 she completed her second year as an interpreting instructor at Boston University's Interpreter Program.

December 10: Annual Holiday Party, in Woburn, MA

January 28: Techniques and Suggestions for Working with PDF Files, 2:00-4:00  Our speaker, Bruce Popp, will cover a variety of topics related to creating and using PDF files with either image or live-text content. Examples and tools will be demonstrated on both a laptop and an iPad, with discussion of Android and Mac alternatives, as possible. Specific techniques include: creating PDF files with the camera in your iPad; creating PDF files from applications; using OCR to convert page images to editable text, if appropriate; embedding text with page images; annotating images; extracting images for pasting into Word; annotating and editing text-based PDF files; extracting text from text-based PDF files; and using Trados with text-based PDF files. As in past presentations, Bruce welcomes relevant questions.

Bruce Popp is an ATA-certified Translator for French into English and a US Patent and Trademark Office registered Patent Agent with a PhD in Astronomy. In the past he has held various positions in NETA and in the ATA; currently he is the French-into-English Language Chair for the ATA Certification Program. In his day-to-day translation work, Bruce translates patents and scientific documents.

February 25: Google Tools for Your T & I Business, 2:00-4:00  Come learn about some of the various free tools that Google offers entrepreneurs like you to make their work easier and more efficient. Do you want to separate your business calls from personal calls? Try Google Voice. Do you want to organize your client feedback? Use Google Forms. Do you need to collaborate on documents and presentations? Google Drive makes it easy.

Sign up for a Gmail account, and bring a laptop or tablet with you to the session. We'll walk through each and every tool. You won't want to miss the chance to test drive them immediately!

Noah Lynn, our speaker, was a medical interpreter and an in-house translator for the software company Meditech for several years before recently switching  fields. While in the T & I community he chaired NETA's annual conference and then served on NETA's board for two years. He still loves the community, and he uses Google tools every day in his work. He is a graduate of the University of Vermont and earned a Master's Degree in Business Analytics from Bentley University.

March 18: Producing Top-Notch Translations, Romance Languages>English, 2:00-4:00  Two major culprits in the production of less-than-sparkling English translations are using the same hackneyed words or phrases each time we see certain source words, and allowing our source text to exert undue influence over our writing. This presentation will encourage us to rise out of the translation rut in order to write solid translations that sound like English, and position ourselves among the highest-quality providers. We will discuss some common pitfalls of translating from Romance languages into English, and what to do about them. All the source-language examples used will be in French or Spanish, but knowledge of any Romance language will allow you to follow along. Native speakers of Romance languages will gain insights into how to translate their English source-language texts.

Our speaker, Diana Rhudick, is a graduate of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where she learned many of the techniques she will be presenting at this talk. She has 30 years of experience as a translator of French and Spanish business and legal texts, and as an editor of English texts. Her long-standing involvement with NETA has included stints as newsletter editor and board member. Currently, she is the association's president and cowebmaster.

April 22: Honing Your Interpreting Skills, 2:00-4:00  Whether you are a neophyte or an experienced interpreter, you will surely welcome the opportunity to brush up on the essentials and engage in practice exercises with a view to fine-tuning your interpreting techniques. Our facilitator will provide some general pointers and then present a variety of scenarios from the legal, medical, and community contexts. Given his years of experience teaching interpreting, you will no doubt benefit from his expert feedback. He can include participants from mixed backgrounds, so feel free to join in regardless of your language pair. (If you work with a language other than Spanish, please invite a colleague who uses that language pair.)

Frank Geoffrion, our speaker, has a national reputation as a trainer and examiner of interpreters. He has been a Spanish-English court, conference, and medical interpreter since 1975. He has been certified by the Federal Court, the Massachusetts Trial Courts, and the American Translators Association. He was a faculty member at the National Institute for Interpretation at the University of Arizona and a consultant to the Federal Court Interpretation Certification Project. He administered the 1995 Federal Court Interpreter Oral Certification Examination in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

At an earlier state of his career he established a language school in Cuzco, Peru and gave intensive courses there in the Quechua language, developing a 250-hour course and writing two teaching manuals in Spanish for the Quechua spoken in Central Peru, Southern Peru, and Bolivia. He now interprets in Quechua as well as Spanish for the Massachusetts Trial Courts.

Mr. Geoffrion was a founding member of the Association of Legal Translators and Interpreters of Massachusetts (ALTIMA) and was their first treasurer/vice-president and editor of their newsletter. He is a member of the American Translators Association (ATA), the National Association of Judicial Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT), the International Medical Interpreters Association (IMIA), and NETA. He served on the IMIA committee to develop a process for certifying medical interpreters.

He has been teaching court and medical interpreting first at Bentley University and now at Boston University for 22 years.

August 13: Annual Summer picnic in Newton, MA