2020 CLD Membership Survey Report

BIG thanks to all who participated in our survey last November! It was a tumultuous year for most of us, and we released the survey in the fall to understand how you were doing and what we could do to support you. We heard from 65 CLD members, which accounted for 14% of a total of 479 when the survey closed.

The majority of our respondents are translators and interpreters who work in various fields: business (56%), legal (48%), medical (42%), technical (35%), etc. Regarding how the pandemic affected them, at least 62% of the respondents experienced less work between March and November 2020. However, 9% reported having more work, and 14% said they did not notice any change.

We also found out that professional development is the second reason our respondents joined ATA after professional credibility. In particular, they are interested in the following topics:

• Interpreting skills building (52%)
• CAT tools (52%)
• Quality assurance (48%)
• Business operation (44%)
• Terminology (38%)
• Remote interpreting (38%)
• Post-editing (33%)

There is a strong preference for Chinese-into-English (39%) or bi-directional (28%) training and professional development opportunities. When asked about the delivery mode, 75% of the respondents prefer free, live CLD member-only webinars, followed by ATA webinars for a fee tailored to Chinese linguists (live and on-demand, 65%). They also responded their preferred times for CLD events and webinars are weekday evenings (48%) or weekend mornings (35%), U.S. Eastern Time.

We also asked an open-ended question, “If you could decide the direction of CLD in the coming two years, what would you choose to do? What would you like to see happen?” Many respondents suggested more collaboration among members and colleagues, which could start with networking. Some also said that Chinese linguists should have a stronger voice in ATA.

To briefly respond to those comments, we’d like to welcome you once again to join our CLD Cafe (members only) and CLD Happy Hour (public) networking events. We have been hosting CLD Cafe regularly since last summer. We’re confident that our members have enjoyed the conversations with each other—from remote RSI to OCR tools and from headset recommendations to new hobbies developed during the pandemic.

If you’re interested in strengthening our presence in ATA, we’d like to encourage you to volunteer on the CLD Leadership Council or another ATA division, as well as ATA chapters, affiliates, and committees. There are no better ways to connect with fellow ATA members than to serve our community alongside each other! You should also consider becoming a voting member if you haven’t done so already. And hey, perhaps run for the ATA Board some time, as quite a few of our colleagues have done!

Please see a full report below. Thank you again to those who took the time to answer our 12-question survey. Thanks to our volunteers, Liming Pals, Prudence Miller, and Tianlu Redmon, for designing the survey. And thanks to Jamie Padula at ATA Headquarters for the regular email reminders of our members to answer the survey. (What? You didn’t get any? Make sure you’re checking your emails from divisions@atanet.org! That’s the surest way to receive important messages from CLD and other ATA divisions.)

To view the full report in PDF format, please click here.