Administrative Updates--2011 - 2012 Winter Issue

MESSAGES FRoM THE ADMINISTRATOR

Dear CLD members:

Hope this finds you well again in the holiday season.  I want to provide further updates of the activities and recent developments in our Division.  I hope to keep our members informed and engaged so they know what's going on and how to contribute to our growth in their own way.

Congratulations on a Successful Conference

As announced in my recent broadcast message, we had a very successful ATA's Annual Conference in Boston and 75 CLD members attended the Conference.  I want to thank again all the attendees for their time and participation.  I want to thank specifically our Division Distinguished Speaker, Mr. Bok Kow Tsim, who gave us a very detailed presentation of the translation work at the United Nations.  All our speakers were well organized and impressive in their presentations.  If you missed the Boston Conference and want to get a feel of it or subscribe to its econference, here is the link to ATA's website: http://www.atanet.org/conf/2011/

Shortly after the Boston Conference, I emailed our Leadership Council members and our Nominating Committee members about what we achieved at the Conference.  It's important to note that it was a team effort and we need to keep it up at our next or any future ATA conference. 

To that end and to energize our Division's larger role, here again are the members of the CLD Leadership Council and their functions:

Mr. Bin Liu: Administrator, serving as the principal representative of the Division. 

Mr. Di Wu: Acting Assistant Administrator, serving as the Chair of our Division's Chinese to English Certification Workgroup.

Ms. Katie Spillane: CLD Newsletter Editor, responsible for the solicitation, compilation and editing of our Division's newsletter and/or other digital or print publications.

Ms. Evelyn Yang Garland: CLD Newsletter Layout Editor, responsible for the format and design of our Newsletter and/or Division image projection.

Ms. Liping Zhao: Administrative Coordinator, responsible for our Division's clerical work as well as the function of Conference Participation and Presentation.

Mr. Huilin Gao: Webmaster for CLD's soon-to-be-developed website.

Mr, Todd Cornell announced his resignation as CLD's Assistant Administrator shortly after the Boston Conference.  In accordance with ATA's Division Governing Policy, Mr. Di Wu was appointed the Acting Assistant Administrator for the remainder of the 2010-2012 term.

Mr. Wu will assist me in running the general affairs of the Division, and will assume the duties in my absence. We will welcome your continued cooperation and support.  We especially would like to seek more volunteers to work on our Chinese to English Certification Workgroup.  If you feel as strongly as we do that Chinese to English Certification is a worthy goal for our members, please step out and offer your valuable service.  To join this Workgroup, please contact Mr. Wu at your earliest convenience at champlanguage@aol.com. I want to thank you in advance for your volunteerism and selfless contributions.

To facilitate the election of our next Administrator and Assistant Administrator at ATA's Annual Conference in San Diego, we have formed a Nominating Committee.  We now have three voting members who volunteered to serve on the Nominating Committee and here are their names and contact info:

Ms. Hua (Barbara) Robinson

Contact: hua@goamcan.com

Ms. Xiaolei Kerr

Contact: xiaolei@kerrtranslations.com

Mr. Xianjun (Edward) Liu

Contact: edwardliu@kinglytranslations.com

Ms. Robinson will be the Chair of the Nominating Committee.  If you would like to run for the position of Division Administrator or Assistant Division Administrator for the 2012 - 2014 term, please don't hesitate to contact our Nominating Committee members listed above.  You can also recommend qualified candidates to the Nominating Committee for consideration.  Per ATA's Division Governing Policy, "[p]reference shall be given to candidates with previous involvement in the activities of the Division’s Leadership Council."

Other Division News

The Chinese Language Division has experienced growth during the past few months.  Based on the ATA's Division count that I received on November 16, 2011, our membership stands at 814.  I saw many new faces at the Boston Conference, which is a sign of the fresh strength we are drawing to our Division.  We need to promote more our image and further enhance our standing.  I encourage each member to spread the word among your friends and colleagues so they will join our ranks.

In late July, on my trip back to China, I visited the Headquarters of the Translators Association of China in Beijing.  I met with Ms. Changqi Huang, Assistant to President, Mr. Yonggang Jiang, Executive Deputy Secretary General and later Mr. Youyi Huang, President of TAC.  I had an extensive discussion with Ms. Huang and Mr. Jiang.  I learned a lot about TAC's membership, services and training programs.  I was truly impressed with the scale and impact of some of their organized events.  I touched upon the possibility of dual membership between our organizations and I raised the prospect of ATA offering its English to Chinese Certification Exam in China.  TAC was very open to either idea and we agreed to explore this and other areas of cooperation further in the near future.

On August 1, 2011, at the venue of FIT's Congress in San Francisco, Ms. Evelyn Yang Garland, one of our Leadership Council members, coordinated a successful networking dinner with the delegation of the Translators Association of China headed by Mr. Yonggang Jiang and Ms. Changqi Huang.  They picked up the above topics and a few more.  (For details, please read the relevant article in the Newsletter.)  Here I want to congratulate Ms. Garland for her tremendous effort and success.  She demonstrated to all of us that with a strong unwavering public spirit and plenty of good hustling, each of us can lead and achieve a lot of things.  Apparently, Ms. Garland did just that.  Earlier in spring, she coordinated the Translation Company Division's Annual Conference in Washington, DC.  At the Boston Conference, she was appointed TCD's Acting Assistant Administrator.  I want to applaud Ms. Garland on her multi-tasking skills and cross-divisional achievements.

In closing, let me welcome all the new members to our Division as well as all the new members to our working committees.  Thank you all for your hard work and team spirit.  We look forward to another year of good work and good growth.

Bin Liu, ATA Chinese Language Division Administrator (2010-2012)

English to Chinese Translator

e-mail: acumen@acumentransmedia.com

ATA Annual Conference 2011: Bok Kow Tsim (Distinguished Speaker) and Yian Yang (Speaker)

ATA Annual Conference 2011: CLD Dinner

A Message from the Nominating Committee

Dear Fellow CLD Members:

I am honored to become a member of CLD’s Nominating Committee joined by Mr. Edward Liu from Toronto. 

ATA membership dues allow us to join different divisions. How can you get the most out of your association and division, to make your membership worthwhile?  

The best way is to get involved. Your participation will help to shape our profession and our perspective. Volunteering is very much the essence of American culture, a culture we all come to embrace. It is also one of the most rewarding and satisfying experiences you can ever have, especially when working with talented and like-minded fellow volunteers.  

Edward, Xiaolei and I are confident that the Nominating Committee will identify and present highly qualified leadership candidates to the membership for the 2012 CLD elections. We will update you on our progress in the next newsletter.

Sincerely,

Hua (Barbara) Robinson
Nominating Committee Chair

Administrative Updates

From the Administrator

Hello, it's a great honor to address you as the CLD’s new administrator.

For those of you who attended the Denver Conference, it was a pleasure meeting you.  For the quiet but hard-working majority of the CLD membership, thank you for your confidence in me.  I look forward to working with you to accomplish our new and renewed goals and to serving our membership's best interests. We will work on the design of our website and promoting our services to the world 24/7 as well.  As more people in the U.S. are taking courses and pursuing degrees in Chinese, we need to reach out to them and increase our division membership.  We will continue to work with the ATA on the Chinese to English Certification Exam so that our existing and prospective members will have the training and qualifications to work in that language pair. We will publicize news about our Division, the work groups we are forming, and all other developments that are taking place.  I encourage all of you to volunteer and take part in a work group of your interest and to turn the CLD into a major player.

Bin Liu, ATA Chinese Language Division Administrator (2010-2012)

English to Chinese Translator

e-mail: acumen@acumentransmedia.com

From the Immediate Past Administrator

Dear CLD colleagues,


Many thanks to those of you who attended the ATA Annual Conference in Denver.  We had a good turnout and I think the attendees also enjoyed the joint JLD-KLD-CLD social evening at the Mongolian Grill.  Although we had planned for about 30 attendees, based on email responses, we had a final tally of 62!!  It was fortunate that the restaurant could accommodate all of us.


The results of the CLD election were announced at our Division Meeting, and I'm happy to tell you that Mr. Liu Bin is our new CLD Division Administrator.  Congratulations to Liu Bin!!  The election was close, and the other candidate, Mr. Wu Di, has indicated his intent to continue helping the CLD.  Thanks to you both for your efforts in serving our members.


We want also to thank Mr. Wen Huang, an accomplished literary translator, for his excellent and enlightening presentation at Denver.  I think there must be someone else in the CLD who could do this kind of work in conveying the sense of one culture to another.  Wen Huang certainly showed us some of the pitfalls of this kind of work, and his success in publishing several translated works should be an inspiration to us all.


I noted at the CLD meeting that I will continue to work on the Chinese>English certification exam.  Michele LeSourde, Bart Zobel and I attended some grader sessions during the conference, and Jessie Lu will be helping us from his perspective as an English>Chinese grader.  We also have the strong backing of Jim Walker on the Certification Committee to get this thing done soon.  We'll be submitting passages for approval by the Certification Committee, and hope to have a practice exam ready by May next year.  Remember that there are some incentives for you to sign up as 'intending' to take the Chinese>English exam.  Please contact ATA Certification Committee Manager terry@atanet.org for further information and registration. 


Your new administrator, Liu Bin, will be needing help from our entire membership.  There are many ways we can help, by developing presentations for the conference, by suggesting and helping organize activities for the CLD (dinner in Boston next year, outings and interesting tours), and by getting involved in the mailing list and website work.  We need to show ATA that Chinese is an important language and our work in the language pair is worthy of greater recognition by ATA.


The group who attended the conference this year has already started to correspond with each other.  We need to reach out to all CLD members who are active in our language pair, and we need to recruit new members among those translators who are not yet ATA members.  We need to show them that there is benefit in ATA membership and in CLD membership.  We have previously offered to share terminology and discuss obscure phrases and new meanings, and we encourage you all to continue such discussions among members.  It can only make us all better translators!


Finally, it has been an honor to be your Division Administrator for the past two years.  Now let's all help Liu Bin develop the CLD to new heights in membership and to raise our profile at ATA headquarters!!


Sincerely,


Bruce Hyman, Administrator 2008-2010
Chinese to English & Vietnamese to English Translator
e-mail: banda.hyman@verizon.net

CLD Update

-       At ATA's 51st Annual Conference in Denver (Oct. 27-30, 2010), the Chinese Language Division renewed itself again.  Veteran members brought to the Conference new ideas and grander plans.  They are joined by new members with fresh perspective and overwhelming energy.  A higher percentage of members from the West, Midwest and Canada made it to the Conference, which is evidence of CLD's global reach and local presence.  Their thoughts on the Denver Conference and the benefits of being a CLD member are captured in this Newsletter. 

-       At the Conference Division Meeting, a new CLD Administrator and Assistant Administrator were elected for the term 2010-2012.  Bin Liu became the new Administrator through ballot voting and Todd Cornell became the new Assistant Administrator by acclamation.  As the new Administrators, Bin Liu and Todd Cornell will work to accomplish the set-out goals: design a CLD website and initiate an ATA Chinese-to-English Certification Exam.

-       Immediately after the Denver Conference, Bin Liu followed up with a thank-you e-mail to our Distinguished Speaker, Mr. Wen Huang, our equally distinguished joint presenters Professor Yuanxi Ma and Mr. Di Wu, and our immediate past administrator, Mr. Bruce Hyman.  Their active participation and contribution to CLD sessions won our admiration and praise.

-       In early November, a call for articles was issued to CLD members who had attended the Denver Conference as a way to kick start to the much-anticipated renewal of the CLD Newsletter, much missed over the past 10 years.  A dozen suggested topics were given and members were also encouraged to propose interesting and informative topics of their own.  Katie Spillane, a CLD member and Chinese to English translator, agreed to be the Editor of our Newsletter.  Evelyn Garland, another CLD member and contributor to The ATA Chronicle, will serve as our Layout Editor.  We owe them much appreciation and good wishes.

-        In order to develop Division services, we have set up specific Workgroups tasked with specific duties.  Mr. Di Wu, a highly regarded CLD member and charismatic presenter, offered to head our Conference Presentation and Participation Workgroup.  Our immediate past administrator, Mr. Bruce Hyman, is leading our efforts for an early launch of the Chinese to English Certification Exam.  He will be assisted by Michelle LeSourd, Dan Tutolo, Todd Cornell and others.  Bin Liu is spearheading the CLD Website Design Workgroup.

-       To facilitate the CLD's activities and accomplishment of set goals, Liping Zhao has kindly agreed to act as the administrative coordinator for the current term.  Our sincere thanks goes to Ms. Zhao for her willingness and time.

-       On December 9, 2010, our much-anticipated CLD listserv was made available to all CLD members.  Listserv members have responded to this online forum for sharing ideas and work with enthusiasm.  Productive discussions on a range of interesting topics have already begun and we welcome all CLD members to join.  For those who have not yet joined the list, here's how:

If you don't already have a Yahoo! account, you will need to get one.

Go to http://groups.yahoo.com and next to _New User?_ click the _Sign In_ button. The next page will take you through the steps.

Once you have a Yahoo! account, go to this link:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ATA-CLD_Listserve/ and click the _Join This Group!_ button on the right hand side of the home page.

Or you can ask to join the group by sending a message to ATA-CLD_Listserve-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

You can control how you receive messages: individual messages, a daily digest, or you can choose to receive no messages and just access it online. If you have any problems, feel free to contact the CLD listserv moderator, Bin Liu at: acumen@acumentransmedia.com

Bin Liu, ATA Chinese Language Division Administrator (2010-2012)

English to Chinese Translator

e-mail: acumen@acumentransmedia.com