Members Exchange Valuable Help Online
By Yves Avérous, Publications Director
If you are not a subscriber to the NCTA Members mailing list, you are missing out big time! Some members could not be bothered by the registration process with Yahoo! Groups or were taken aback by the nature and/or volume of messages sent by the list. First, there are ways to minimize your privacy risk—even though it is minimal with Yahoo!, and second, you can turn off the flow of messages while keeping access to the thousands of valuable emails kept archived on the list site. Here is a sample of the information exchanged this past Summer.
Resources—Among the countless links exchanged on the list, two are particularly worth repeating since bad payers remain a sad reality: the Payment Practices list, www.trwenterprises.com/payment_practices.htm, and the Translation Client Review list, www.tcrlist.com. Read more on the site in the May messages. Also, in August, members shared the content of the cover letters they use to certify their translations to their clients—valuable information both for novices and seasoned professionals.
Terminology—It’s amazing how some itsy-bitsy words can generate big threads. Now I know what “Vo Bo” means. Jobs—More than 20 jobs were posted, of different kinds, for many languages, during the May-August period, an average of 7 per month. And we can do much better with a little help: we are close to 500 members, individual and corporate, with barely more than 200 on the list, and much fewer contributing. I was particularly impressed by the response to a new interpretation graduate who obtained two job leads shortly after posting to the list!
Events—We were alerted by fellow members of an international translation conference in Barcelona, a seminar in Rome, a meeting in Palo Alto to do business in Bavaria, and cruise opportunities during this Fall’s FIT conference in Finland. Interpreters were also informed through this channel of NAJIT’s latest Spanish examination.
Tech help—Advice comes in handy on the list, too, especially since we now have a programmer posting utilities, like a convenient word counting macro currently tucked in the Files section.
Community—And the list would not be such a great online forum without its literary and other cultural exchanges.
