By Karen Tkaczyk and Alicja Yarborough
Every year we take a brief look at the division’s activity for the prior year to see how we’re meeting the criteria divisions are meant to fulfill. This year ends with the division having 2,313 members. Many of those don’t participate in activity throughout the year, as is the case with most ATA divisions, but there is a small crowd who do network and share year round. The places we do that most are an online Yahoo forum and a Facebook group. To a lesser degree we also use LinkedIn. We have a Twitter feed where we post notices and news and ask for input: follow @ATASciTech.
The Annual Conference in Chicago had a great set of S&TD sessions including one pre-conference seminar. There were some outstanding presenters this year, led by our distinguished speaker, Christiane Feldmann-Leben, who gave two sessions. We also socialized at the Division Open House on Wednesday, a breakfast meeting on Friday, and of course the dinner at Emilio’s Tapas on Thursday evening. Organizer Alicja Yarborough came up trumps with that choice—it was copious and delicious—amazing for a large group dinner. We also networked at the Annual Meeting on Friday. The agenda and minutes were posted on the website after the event. During the Annual Meeting we appointed the Nominating Committee for 2015 by acclamation. Members are Abigail Dahlberg, Steven Marzuola and Patricia Thickstun.
The division’s website was updated monthly, thanks to Lebzy Gonzalez for news updates and Iryna Ashby for more substantial web maintenance. That is the hub of our activity and links to everywhere else are there. Members can also find resource files that members share and quarterly reports to the board there.
We continued to post to the blog, and welcome ideas for content. We owe a big thanks to Editor Amy Lesiewicz, and her helper Sarah Koby who joined us for a year. Leadership Council member Matthew Schlecht and wrote great posts for us this year, as did the editor Amy, whose post “went viral” in T&I terms, with over 2,000 page views, 16 comments on the blog, and more discussion on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the business practices listserv. Overall, the blog had more than 31,000 page views in 2014. Members are welcome to submit articles for publication on the blog, whether new or re-posted from another source, by writing Amy Lesiewicz at amy@russian-chem-trans.com.
To achieve all this, we need volunteers. The Leadership Council handles many administrative matters for the division. The council is formed each year and is a one year volunteer commitment. At the end of 2014 one member, Sarah Koby, left after she took employment outside translation. One new member has joined us, Carola Berger. She will be known to many of you from her presentations at recent annual conferences.
The Council’s members for 2015 are:
Iryna Ashby (Webmaster)
Carola Berger (Facebook admin)
Lebzy González (Website news updates, Assistant webmaster, LinkedIn admin)
Amy Lesiewicz (Blog editor)
Matthew Schlecht (Yahoo group admin)
Petra Schweitzer (Yahoo group admin)
Stephanie Strobel (Events coordinator)
Karen Tkaczyk (Administrator, Twitter feed)
Alicja Yarborough (Assistant Administrator)
Feel free to contact us by writing karen@mcmillantranslation.com if you wish to become more involved. Any interested members are welcome to join us and help the division thrive during 2015!
Karen Tkaczyk, Administrator
Alicja Yarborough, Assistant Administrator January 9, 2015
