Report on the activities of the FIT Europe board

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φιλικά
John

FIT EUROPE
REGIONAL CENTRE EUROPE OF THE
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF TRANSLATORS
info@fit-europe.org
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Postal address: c/o CBTI-BKVT, Rue Montoyer 24, bte 12 1000 Bruxelles
April 2018
Report on the activities of the board of FIT Europe
The new board of FIT Europe
The 2017 General Meeting of FIT Europe was held in Barcelona, Spain. It was attended by 39 delegates
from 27 member associations. In addition, seven associations were represented by proxy. FIT Europe
now has 59 full members and 16 associate members.
The new board is as follows:
Annette Schiller (chairperson), Reiner Heard (secretary general), Dimitra Stafilia (treasurer), Henrik
Walter-Johnsen (vice-chair), Wanda Ruiz-Brunelot (vice-chair), Gabriella Vanzan, John O’Shea.
The board of FIT Europe holds a virtual meeting once a month (November, December 2017, January,
February, March and April 2018). The next online meeting is in the third week of Mayl.
The June meeting will be a face-to-face meeting in Bratislava. The Slovak association, SSPUL, has kindly
put their premises at our disposal for this meeting on 23 June. The meeting will be held over the entire
day and will give the board the opportunity to discuss strategy, prioritise projects, identify possible
events, discuss the most recent general meeting and prepare for the upcoming annual meeting, in
addition to the general items that are discussed on a monthly basis.
The 2018 FIT Europe Annual Meeting will take place in the Hague on 24 November. This event will be
hosted by the FIT associations in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The planned pre-meeting
event on Friday, 23 November is a joint FIT / FIT Europe conference entitled “How can IP legislation
benefit translators?” within the family of Translating Europe Forum events. Details to follow.
FIT Europe projects
Conference interpreter platform
As Michal Staša is no longer on the board of FIT Europe, this project has been set aside for the
moment. We will return to it over the next 12 months.
Working group on continuous professional development (CPD)
CPD is a post-qualification commitment. It is vocational, content-driven, practical - and even
theoretical. It is not an exotic concept. Individuals have to give their skills a health check and identify
their own targets. They often have to finance the learning experience and they expect it to be efficient
and equitable. They should also be able to demand recognition and mobility as part of any
accreditation or certificate they gain.
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Postal address: c/o CBTI-BKVT, Rue Montoyer 24, bte 12 1000 Bruxelles
FIT Europe has gone back to the drawing board and has prepared a new survey on CPD aimed at collecting an overview of CPD policies with the objective of exchanging information, experiences and best practices, as well as of establishing minimum and comparable benchmarks for our associations that are not imposed by industry-level players or tertiary educational establishments. The link to the survey https://goo.gl/forms/RVhQN5ToweLFgFqA2 was disseminated a few weeks ago The response has been very good and we would encourage anyone who has not yet participated to do so over the next few days.
CPD can become a distinguishing mark and a competitive advantage for us as professionals, on our ever-changing markets. Just as learning is lifelong, this survey is also only the first step in a long-term project aimed at spreading CPD Europe-wide.
Anti-harassment and anti-bullying policy for the voluntary workplace
This policy intended for workers in the voluntary workplace was ratified by the FIT Europe General Meeting in Barcelona and has been disseminated to all FIT associations, as agreed.
MIME (Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe)
The MIME Project was launched on 1st March 2014 with European Commission support. MIME identifies, assesses and recommends measures for the management of trade-offs between the potentially conflicting goals of mobility and inclusion in a multilingual Europe. It is now in the final stages of implementation.
One of the key features is the Stakeholder Forum, aimed at facilitating direct contact between the 25 MIME teams, which come from 22 different institutions in 16 European countries and represent ten disciplines, and professional or political organisations such as FIT Europe.
Dimitra Stafilia will represent FIT Europe at the Stakeholder Forum on 19 June 2018 in Brussels.
Translating Europe Forum (TEF)
FIT Europe is in contact with LIND-Web, the organisers of this annual event on behalf of DGT, through former chair of FIT Europe, Eyvor Fogarty. The theme for the 2018 event is “data and humans”. As is the case each year, we have proposed a greater contribution/participation by the professional associations/FIT Europe. We have also suggested running a number of short (15 minute) information sessions on various topics that are relevant to translation students/recent translation graduates (e.g. CV preparation, benefits of joining a professional association, working for agencies). The latter appears to have been given a positive reception.
Translating Europe Workshop
Various workshops are run each year by the national EU Commission field offices as part of TEF. FIT Europe has submitted a proposal to the Athens field office to hold an event about the migration crisis. The proposal was submitted in 22 February 2018 and the proposed date was for early July. The Athens
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Postal address: c/o CBTI-BKVT, Rue Montoyer 24, bte 12 1000 Bruxelles
field office is positively disposed towards co-hosting the event but prefers a date later in the year. If the proposal is accepted, the date will probably be 7 December. The event will seek to showcase best practices which have emerged in Europe in relation to the handling of the translation/interpreting aspects of the migration crisis. The idea is to share best practices among associations and other stakeholders in the field and promote a more professional approach to this pressing topic, especially in relation to the use of community interpreting services.
Collaboration with the industry
FIT Europe was involved as a partner together with Elia, EMT, EUATC, GALA and LIND in the 6th edition of the “The Language Industry Survey - Trends, Expectations and Challenges in the European Translation Industry”.
The 2018 questionnaire was disseminated to all FIT Europe associations, the survey closed on 16 February 2018. There were 1289 responses, 70% of which were from independent language professionals (about twice as many as in 2017). Responses from translation companies increased by 15% compared to the previous year. The data are now available and will be disseminated to the FIT Europe associations during the coming week.
Annette Schiller was invited to speak on a panel discussing “Forging a fit-for-purpose profession” at the Directorate-General for Interpretation Universities Conference on 20 April 2018 in Brussels. She looked at how possible synergies between interpreters and translators could be exploited to enhance overall performance and create a better understanding among professionals.
Annette Schiller was invited by TAUS (the Language Data Network) to participate in a panel discussion on “Education and the translator’s future” at the TAUS QE summit 2018 in Dublin on 11 April 2018. Despite the fact that we heard from TAUS at the 2017 Translating Europe Forum that human translators would probably be obsolete within five years, the panel discussion proved to be interesting and not necessarily a foregone conclusion. Some of the views from the panel (which included practitioners, academics, MT specialists, etc.):
- there was a general opinion that MT would not actually change the day-to-day work of a human translator a lot (as MT is already used to a greater or lesser extent by translators) and that neural MT is very much in the very early stages of its development
- post-editing as a specialisation in the future was considered by some experts on the panel not to be a viable option as it simply doesn't allow the translator/post-editor to earn enough.
- generally speaking, a lot of people feel that there is a "sea change" in terms of attitude to translators in the [localisation] industry, meaning that the model they are using has to change and [highly qualified, experienced and properly paid] translators brought back to the core of any assignment.
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Postal address: c/o CBTI-BKVT, Rue Montoyer 24, bte 12 1000 Bruxelles
Monitoring and Lobbying
The Transparency register:
FIT Europe is listed in the Transparency Register which is a database that lists organisations that are interested in having a say in the law-making and policy implementation process of the EU institutions. The register provides information on the interests that are being pursued, by whom and with what budgets. In this way, the register allows for public scrutiny, giving citizens and other interest groups the opportunity to track the activities of lobbyists.
FIT Europe contributed to a consultation process by responding to the survey 'Public consultation on a possible EU action addressing the challenges of access to social protection for people in all forms of employment within the framework of the European Pillar of Social Rights'. Participation here is of particular significance given the high levels of self-employed people in our profession and the lack of protection in many countries in terms of unemployment, sickness, maternity benefits, etc.
FIT Europe most recently contributed to a consultation on the “Training of justice professionals on EU law - From evaluation to the new 2019-2025 strategy”.
Monitoring
The Monitoring Project (sponsored by the BDÜ) is carried out by Dr. Koch Consulting e.K., and provides regular information resulting from monitoring future EU projects and directives.
A seminar on lobbying in Europe to be delivered by Dr. Koch Consulting e.K. is currently under discussion. This workshop would explain how Europe (Brussels/Strasbourg) works and how to exercise influence on the legislative process, and the motivation for doing so.
Social Media and communications
Upon electing a new board in October 2017, the old Twitter channel of FIT EU President was changed to FIT Europe, now representing the entire board and organisation, not just the chair. The channel currently has 1755 followers, roughly 250 more than when we took over. We try to keep the updates regular with a good blend of posts, retweets and replies, with up to seven tweets weekly, most of them aimed to entertain and inform our followers. Our official Facebook page currently has 893 followers and 864 likes, and offers updates at approximately the same interval as the Twitter channel, but somewhat different content (since they are run by two different people). The FIT Europe official website was last updated in 2014, and we are currently working on updating it.
Generic email addresses have been set up for the new board of FIT Europe: chair@fit-europe.org; secgen@fit-europe.org; treasurer@fit-europe.org, henrikwj@fit-europe.org. etc. However, as we are experiencing problems with some of the addresses, they have not yet been made public.
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Postal address: c/o CBTI-BKVT, Rue Montoyer 24, bte 12 1000 Bruxelles
EULITA
Dimitra Stafilia gave a paper at the recent Eulita pre-General Meeting conference in Sofia, Bulgaria on “The Greek refugee crisis: a linguistic stress test”.
FIT Europe (Annette Schiller and Dimitra Stafilia) had a meeting at the same event with the current and former presidents of Eulita, Daniela Amodeo Perillo and Liesa Katschinka respectively, where the transition at Eulita and future relationship of the two associations were discussed.
Member associations
Annette Schiller has been invited to join a discussion panel led by PEM at the Thessaloniki Book Fair in May 2018 on “The translation of non-fiction from languages of limited diffusion in the digital era”. FIT President, Kevin Quirke, will also be on the panel.
Annette Schiller has been invited to attend the ASETRAD Annual Conference in Zaragoza, Spain, from 18-20 May celebrating the 15th anniversary of the founding of the association.
Member associations were reminded of the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation which takes effect from 25 May 2018 and is relevant to the EU / EEA and any other organisation holding data on citizens in the EU. The penalties for non-compliance are onerous.
Member associations were invited to provide information about their online blogs, newsletters, etc. which may be of interest to other member associations.
FIT
Cooperation with FIT
A calendar has been set up at FIT level to allow Regional Centres to be informed of visits by Executive Board / Council Members in their respective regions: http://www.fit-ift.org/presence-of-fit-office-bearers-around-the-world/.
Regular virtual meetings between FIT president and the regional chairs are planned.
At the most recent FIT Council meeting in Astrakhan, Russia, Council agreed to disseminate documents such as minutes of council meetings directly to the chairs of the regional centres so that they can be further disseminated from there to the associations.
FIT Council has agreed to provide the board of FIT Europe with feedback on the amendments to the FIT Europe regulations that were proposed by FIT Europe in 2016 but not ratified by the 2014-17 FIT Council.
This feedback will be provided by 1 June 2018 and will enable the FIT Europe board to study the reasons whey FIT Council refused to ratify them and also to draw up a new set of amendments, where applicable, in time for the 2018 FIT Europe annual meeting in November.