by William Giller
The goal of the NCTA Member Spotlight is to showcase our association’s diverse and multitalented members. Up next: current NCTA Webmaster Carola F Berger.
1. When did you first join the NCTA?
I joined NCTA way back in 2012, when Juliet Viola, long-time NCTA Administrator who sadly passed away a few years ago, talked me into joining. We had had a very nice chat at my first ever ATA conference in San Diego, but I didn’t need much convincing to join NCTA. I was fairly new to the profession at the time and had never even heard of ATA Chapters before I met Juliet.
2. What motivated you to stay an NCTA member?
The people!
3. Are you more of a translator? Interpreter? Both?
As a very visual person, I’m a translator. 1000%!
4. What is your language pair?
I translate between German and English, in both directions, and am also ATA-certified in both directions.
5. Care to share a memorable professional anecdote?
I translate mostly patents, where terminological accuracy is paramount, so I usually spend a fair amount of time researching terminology for every project. But in this most memorable case from about 10 years ago, I was translating a user manual for an industrial printing machine for a direct client. A German company had just acquired a US printing machine manufacturer. This machine had computer screens which I was to translate as well. There was this label on one button that I could not make heads or tails of. I searched high and low in all available dictionaries and on the pre-AI Internet. I asked in every professional forum I could find. Of course, I asked my client. Nobody had an answer. After nearly a week of racking my brain, I went on a bike ride with the bike club. Yes, you read that correctly. I spent a whole week on this one term. Not continuously, but the hours sure added up. On this most fortuitous bike ride, I ended up talking about work to a fellow cyclist riding up the same hill. It turned out his brother worked in the printing industry, so he offered to facilitate introductions. A couple hours later, I had my answer: The term was a non-industry-standard, misspelled (!!) acronym that the manufacturer had made up! In the end, my client was extremely grateful that I figured out this particular term because they didn’t know either and had just bought expensive equipment with buttons whose function they couldn’t decipher. They ended up being a very good direct client for years to come.
The moral of this lengthy tale: Sometimes it pays off to spend an inordinate amount of time on a microscopic portion of a project to make sure it is done correctly.
The second moral: You can’t beat direct connections with knowledgeable humans. In this case, it was the bike club, but in another, it may very well be the NCTA discussion forum.
6. What is something notable you have learned from an NCTA meeting or colleague?
Too many things to list here. I learn something new at every meeting, at every workshop, at every webinar, it’s a miracle my brain hasn’t exploded yet.
7. What do you think the biggest challenge our industry faces today?
The over-hyping of AI and under-valuing of the human factor. GenAI is a tool, a brilliant development, and in the right hands, it can be an extremely useful tool. In the wrong hands… Let’s just say, I have my popcorn ready and am expecting the worst, but hoping for the best.
8. Outside of work, what can you be found doing?
I compete in agility with my dog, who is much more talented than me at this sport. Before old age set in (in cycling you’re considered old at 35!), I used to race bicycles semi-professionally and am still riding a lot. When not building a robot or a portable solar generator, I’m taking yet another online class on a geeky topic: currently, one on Web3 (Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the Metaverse). I also read a lot!
Speaking of books, I recently had the pleasure of doing a translation for fun that had nothing to do with my usual patent/science topics. Fellow ATA Chapter, OSTI, in Oregon, organized a collaborative translation of Kim Stafford’s poem: “A Proclamation for Peace.” I contributed a transcreation into Upper Austrian (a Bavarian dialect of German), and fellow NCTA member Anne-Charlotte Giovangrandi contributed a French translation. Kim Stafford and Allison deFreese edited the 50 translations into a book, which you can get here, along with excerpts in several wonderful and exotic (to me, at least) languages. While this was a fun project, and quite different from my usual patent translations, I think I’ll stick to reading poetry in the future, not translating it!