Aberdour, 1 June 2019
Three years ago, Victoria Patience, Simon Berrill and Tim Gutteridge were looking for ways to improve the quality of our work. We realised we couldn’t afford to have each and every one of our texts professionally revised by another translator, so we decided that, instead of focusing on improving individual translations, we would focus on how to become better translators all round.
There was only one small obstacle. Victoria lives in Buenos Aires, Simon’s home is in Barcelona and Tim is based in Cádiz, so whatever we did had to work remotely. The result was a collaborative professional development group, which goes by the name of Revision Club. We started simply by taking turns giving each other feedback on our work, sending back heavily annotated Word documents via email. But the arrangement quickly flourished and we now do a monthly translation slam (by Skype), we communicate regularly by email and WhatsApp, we share the occasional assignment, and we have presented our ideas at workshops and conferences.
Our ScotNet summer workshop, presented by Simon and Tim, is designed to give participants a feel for how Revision Club works, and an insight into the many benefits it can offer, which range from clearing up those little niggly-naggly doubts about false friends and punctuation all the way up to life-coaching and superpowered professional networking.
We have designed our workshop with multilingual groups in mind.
Session 1 consists of a short presentation of how Revision Club works, followed by a discussion of what collaborative professional development involves, the key elements, and the potential benefits of such an arrangement.
For session 2, participants will need to bring an example of one of their own translations, along with the corresponding source text, which will then provide the basis for working in pairs or small groups. For this activity, there will need to be at least one other participant working into the same TARGET language.
For session 3, participants will need to complete a short translation, which will then provide the basis for working in pairs or small groups. For this activity, participants may be grouped either according to SOURCE or TARGET language depending on numbers, so as long as all participants work either into or out of English (which we’re assuming they do), there are no further participant requirements.
Session 4 has two elements. During first 60 minutes, the presenters will do a translation slam using the same text as the one participants translated and discussed in session 3. The slam is designed to give participants a feel for how we conduct our monthly Skype slam and will be framed as wider discussion between the presenters and all of the workshop participants. The final 30 minutes of session 4 will provide an opportunity to discuss practical aspects of establishing, organising and maintaining a collaborative development partnership.
For further information, including booking please contact ITI Scottish Network.