Macros for Writers, Editors and Translators

Paul Beverley, United Kingdom

“If you think that macros are a ‘good thing’, you’re right!” says macro “guru” Paul Beverley, whom SENSE has invited specially to facilitate this Zoom webinar on “Macros for Writers, Editors and Translators”. Not only to appease Paul’s myriad “macro groupies” in the Netherlands but also to introduce others to the marvels of his macros.

Date: Saturday, 16 May 2020
Time: 10:00–15:00 (registration on the Zoom platform from 09:40)
Venue: Zoom video conference (registered attendees will receive the link beforehand)

During the webinar, Paul will provide you with a whole range of macros to use in your work and will also give you a chance to try them out while he’s on hand to help you if you have queries.

The day will provide you first with a conceptual framework to enable you to see what macros can do for you. You’ll also learn how they can be combined with your existing intellectual and professional abilities to enable you to work faster and to produce higher-quality documents.

If you are starting with zero knowledge of macros, the training will lead you through from square one. But for those of you who have already been using some macros, there will be plenty of scope for learning new tips and tricks. As there are well over 700 macros available (!), there is always something new to help you boost your effectiveness as a writer, an editor or a translator. So whether you are a “macro newby” or a seasoned and serious devotee, there’s bound to be something new for you to take away from the day’s sessions.

There will be one lecture-type session (first session, 10:00–11:00) to kick off with in order to explain the principles; this will be followed by two practical sessions, each introduced with a demonstration. Use your laptop, in the comfort of your own home office, to install a set of 20 new macros, and then off you go!

Take advantage of this unique offering to adopt, adapt or simply embrace macros with open arms in your work routine under the caring, expert eye of macro-creator and supplier supreme, Paul Beverley.

A brief overview of the webinar programme:
10:00–11:00 Lecture-type session to introduce you to the use of macros or to more “advanced” aspects, depending on your level of knowledge of and experience with macros in MS Word
11:00–13:00 Under Paul’s supervision, and in contact with him as and when necessary, exploring and experimenting with some of his 700 macros to your heart’s delight
13:00–14:00 Lunch break
14:00–15:00 Further exploration and experimentation, and Q&A, before wrapping up.

Register here.

About the presenter

Paul Paul BeverleyBeverley has been creating macros for use by editors and proofreaders for over 13 years. The macros (over 700 of them) are freely available via his website and are used in more than 40 countries. Despite being of pensionable age, he enjoys editing far too much to stop altogether, so he occasionally edits technical books and theses. He has also produced more than 100 training videos, so that you can see the macros in action on his YouTube channel

Take advantage of this unique opportunity to adopt, adapt or simply embrace macros with open arms in your work routine under the caring, expert eye of macro-creator and supplier supreme, Paul Beverley. We hope to see you there!

Register now for this unique SENSE online workshop and benefit from the early-bird price until midnight on 1 May.

Future competence profiles of EU translators

Emma Hartkamp, the Netherlands

The European Commission’s DG Translation (DGT) fulfils an important role as language services provider in the EU’s multilingual context, and will continue to do so in the future. As translation technology progresses and the DGT’s role and mix of resources change, so the competence profiles of its translation staff will need to be updated.

In this presentation, you will hear about current reflections on new, future-oriented competence profiles for translation staff of the different EU institutions. These will be based both on the current translator profile and on a comprehensive mapping and description of the current and future functions, roles, tasks, competencies and profiles of EU translation staff.

It goes without saying that technological developments – in particular that of machine translation – will require high-level human and linguistic competencies and that the EU institutions will continue to need highly skilled professional translators. For these reasons, the DGT collaborates with a network of MA programmes in Translation (the EMT network) in order to work towards improving the quality of training and helping young graduates to integrate smoothly into the translation job market.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Emma Hartkamp

Emma Hartkamp works as a Language Officer for the Representation of the European Commission in The Hague. Previously, she worked as a translator and advisor at the Directorate for Translation of the European Parliament. She began her career as a freelance interpreter and translator in Paris.

Fair Trade Translation in an unfair world

Nigel Saych, the Netherlands

We don’t sell bananas or coffee beans. We don’t outsource translations to child labour in the Third World. So why do I describe Interlex Language Services as a ‘Fair Trade Translation Company’? The answer is as simple as the concept: treating translators and clients honestly and with openness means they will be loyal to you; and working with integrity helps to improve the image of a sometimes tarnished profession. Interlex is a business not a charity, but that does not mean it is solely profit-motivated. In this short presentation-cum-case study, I attempt to demonstrate how Interlex is fair to its translators and its clients but can still make a decent living by doing a decent job. And that also means being fair to oneself, because we all like to think we are doing things the right way – and we all like appreciation, however experienced we are.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Nigel Saych

Nigel Saych is the founder and owner of a creative translation company based in Nuenen, near Eindhoven. No longer responsible for the daily administration, he is still very much involved as an active translator. For several years his company has implemented a Fair Trade policy, something initially treated with caution by others in the profession, now a hot topic.

Be(a)ware of (round) brackets (especially ‘Dutch’ ones)!

Joy Burrough-Boenisch, the Netherlands

Punctuation marks aren’t always used with the same frequency or in the same way in different languages. Take round brackets (in UK English, simply ‘brackets’): in Dutch- authored texts they’re often used in contexts and registers in which in English they would be used sparingly, if at all. Although some authorities on punctuation in English say that removing brackets enclosing a word or phrase from a sentence will leave a sentence that still makes sense, if you do this to a Dutch-authored sentence, you usually end up with a grammatically correct sentence that does not mean what the author intended.

Simply removing embedded brackets (brackets enclosing part of a word, as in the title of SENSE Conference2020: ‘(Re)Vision’) certainly isn’t advisable either – yet, strangely, there’s a lack of authoritative advice about using such brackets and about their purpose(s) in English. Small wonder that interpreting and using brackets vexes most language professionals translating Dutch or working with Dutch English. Drawing on my extensive collection of regular and quirky examples, I will therefore explain, compare and contrast ways that brackets are used by Dutch authors and by English native speakers uncontaminated by Dutch usage. My aim is to make language professionals more confident about bracket usage in English.

Although the presentation is intended primarily for language professionals whose exposure to ‘Dutch’ brackets has affected their interpretation and use of brackets in English, it will be an eye opener to anyone unaware of what can happen when a punctuation mark’s conventions and practices are transferred from one language to another.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Joy Burrough Boenisch

Joy Burrough-Boenisch (MITI) is a founder member and past chair of SENSE with a long career as a freelance authors’ editor and translator for Dutch academics and scientists. She has taught scientific English to graduate students and has presented webinars. She has given workshops for language professionals on editing non-native English in various European countries and for the European Commission. Her conference presentations include two in 2018 as an invited speaker at ATA’s New Orleans conference. Originally a geographer, she learnt to edit in Borneo and Australia before moving to the Netherlands, where her interest in second language interference and non-native English resulted in a PhD thesis on Dutch scientific English. As well as being the author of Righting English that’s gone Dutch (3rd ed 2013), she has various scholarly and professional publications on editing and non-native English to her name.

Word skills for editors and translators

Jenny Zonneveld, the Netherlands

MS Word is one of the essential tools of our trade and mastering it will give you more time to focus on and enjoy creating beautiful language. But in order to deliver ready-to-use documents, editors and translators often have to tidy up the client’s draft first. Tackling this can be a quick-and-easy way to impress, but many language professionals lack the finer points of MS Word, so they pass up this opportunity.

Besides picking up many productivity tips, you’ll learn and practise how to tidy up a document by:

  • defining and applying styles to create a consistent layout;
  • controlling numbering and bullets;
  • applying headings to generate the perfect table of contents;
  • dealing with headers and footers in large documents with multiple sections.

If you want to focus on your clients’ message rather than on what MS Word does when you’re not looking, then this one’s for you! Focusing as it does on the practical aspects of tidying up a document rather than on the individual word features, this workshop is ideal for any language professional who wants to use MS Word more efficiently and effectively. Participants should bring their own laptop to the workshop.

Register here.

About the presenter

John Linnegar

Jenny Zonneveld has a business background. Before she became a freelance translator, copywriter, and editor over 20 years ago, she spent more than 15 years at a firm of management consultants and worked in the UK, USA, Belgium, and the Netherlands. At the start of her freelance career Jenny compiled and prepared a series of reports stretching to hundreds of pages and including many tables and images, all in MS Word. In 2002 she developed a two-day hands-on MS Word workshop for SENSE, which was presented several times. From 2004 to 2006 it was offered to translation students as part of the Editing Minor run by SENSE and the ITV School of Interpreters & Translators.

Getting to grips with connectors in English texts

John Linnegar, Belgium

An increasing number of authors are having to write in English as their SL or FL. This places the onus on copy-editors and revisors to improve authors' writing so as to render it accessible to readers. Sometimes, in order to do so optimally, grammar skills need to be honed further. The incorrect or inappropriate use of connectors (either verbal connectors or punctuation marks) is a particularly troublesome aspect of much writing that requires editorial intervention.

This workshop will focus on the devices that can be used in written texts to ensure a smooth flow and logical connections between the parts of sentences, and even between sentences themselves. Skilled use of the appropriate connectors ultimately leads to texts that convey an author’s intended meaning most effectively. Such texts are also more accessible to readers.

We will be investigating ways of using (and ‘abusing’) both verbal connectors – conjunctions, relative pronouns, sentence adverbials – and punctuation marks – in particular the comma, the semicolon, the colon, the dash, parentheses – not only correctly but also to achieve the author's intended effect or meaning.

The participants will ‘learn by doing’ by engaging with a selection of substandard texts and considering ways of making them flow more smoothly and logically, using any or all of these devices. What will emerge from this workshop is a better grasp of how to use each of these connective devices to best effect.

Register here.

About the presenter

John Linnegar

An author and a passionate copy-editor with some 40+ years’ of manuscript improvement behind him, John Linnegar is a former teacher of English at secondary school and undergraduate levels. His specialty as an editor is law. In 2009 he published a book on common errors committed by writers in English in South Africa (NB Publishers, reprinted 2013); in 2012 he co-authored Text Editing: A Handbook for Students and Practitioners (UA Press) and in 2019, together with Ken McGillivray, wrote and published grammar, punctuation and all that jazz … (MLA Publishers). He contributes regular articles on the usage and abusage of the English language to professional bodies.

Making reporting guidelines more useful for authors and language professionals: In biomedical science and beyond

Jennifer de Beyer, United Kingdom

This talk from the UK EQUATOR Centre (www.equator-network.org) will introduce reporting guidelines, why and how they are developed and disseminated, their quality, and the evidence for them.

Reporting guidelines aim to help authors in preparing journal articles by listing the minimum information needed about a particular study design in order for the results to be replicated or used. Originating in the biomedical sciences in the 1990s, they have since spread to research areas such as education, livestock, and environmental research – and new fields continue to adopt them. As funders and journals endorse and sometimes require their use, language professionals are often asked to use reporting guidelines or suggest checklists themselves. They could be required either to guide manuscript development or to flag missing information during copy-editing. However, reporting quality remains poor in every study design and research area studied, despite the promotion of reporting guidelines.

I will talk about why reporting quality has been slow to improve and what is being done in response. One reason is that users often struggle to choose an appropriate reporting guideline, there being more than 400 available for research involving people alone. In the absence of an agreed-upon development methodology or an overseeing body, the quality and utility of reporting guidelines remains variable, in addition to which the guidelines have overlapping and competing applications. Ongoing work to improve the way in which guidelines are developed and disseminated, and how users are supported, will be presented, as will the tools for authors and editors to use. I shall include in my presentation the role that language professionals can play in promoting reproducibility through reporting guidelines and in influencing how they are developed and disseminated.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Jennifer de Beyer

After training in laboratory research and working in academic editing, Jennifer de Beyer joined the EQUATOR Network’s UK Centre at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (CSM), University of Oxford. Here she develops online and in-person training in academic writing and using reporting guidelines for clear, transparent research reporting. She also provides editing and writing support for CSM’s team of medical statisticians and methodologists.

The EQUATOR Network is an international initiative dedicated to improving the quality and transparency of health research. It focuses on research reporting, so that future research is based on a sound body of evidence. Through its four centres in the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia, EQUATOR raises awareness of reporting guidelines, provides online resources, develops education and training, and conducts research into research quality and transparency.

Honing skills through near-peer exchange: How language professionals and academics can shape each other’s outcomes, practice and well-being.

Wendy Baldwin, Spain

Translators and editors have a number of options for engaging in peer exchange, allowing them to benefit from their peers’ expertise and improve their practice and outcomes. But what if language professionals (LPs) could engage in a similar exchange with near-peers, professionals who work in adjacent areas of content and/or practice? Imagine a translator of anthropological texts working in parallel with an anthropologist: How might the partnership work and what knowledge, skills and benefits might accrue to each?

In this talk I present an LP–academic co-working model (LPAC) that I have been using with different academic partners and which has benefitted all the parties in various ways. The model draws on current social writing practices in academia: at the LPAC’s core are regular, structured co-working sessions during which the LP and the academic meet (in person or online) to work in parallel on individual tasks, with slots agreed upon for goal-setting, focused work, stocktaking and discussion.

I then discuss how the overlap and complementarity inherent in the LP–academic pairing shapes the benefits each offers the other in the context of the LPAC, focusing on the dimensions of discipline, language(s), career stage, and geographical location. One major benefit is knowledge exchange and improved outcomes: for example, the academic contributes content expertise and insight into current academic/publication practice; the LP provides their expertise in language and writing. The other type of benefit, equally crucial to both LPs’ and academics’ long-term practice, relates to cognitive–affective well-being: the supportive nature of the model means that both partners are likely to become more focused, motivated and productive and feel less isolated.

I end by outlining guidelines for setting up an LPAC and best practices for keeping these mutually beneficial partnerships going.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Wendy Baldwin

Wendy Baldwin is an authors' editor and Spanish–English translator specialising in scholarly texts in linguistics, language acquisition, education, computer science and engineering. Prior to starting her freelance business in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, Wendy trained in linguistics in the United States and taught academic writing at universities and colleges there and in Sweden. She has recently returned to her academic writing roots, offering writing courses and workshops to academics and PhD students in the Basque Country.

From whining to shining

Tiina Kinnunen, Finland

Tired of the memes where the freelancer translator is the only one staying up late or working during the weekend? Yes, they might be funny, but on the flip side of the coin is the cold truth. This is how the public sees us: as poor language nerds, working from home in their sweat suits and woolly socks, doing this for the love of language.

It’s time to change this. How can language professionals position themselves as experts commanding respectable fees? A Finnish initiative by 10 experienced professional translators, ‘The Translator’s Guide to the Industry’, offers practical advice on networking, brand image and management, marketing price negotiations, and much more. The initiative has also spawned cooperation between the authors and universities that train translators, which has resulted in guest lectures, workshops and articles.

We hope to empower other self-employed and freelance language professionals to position themselves correctly as experts in the language market and to benefit from others’ best practices. We aim also to establish and strengthen professional networks both to boost sales and to provide back-up and additional language services for clients.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Tiina Kinnunen

Tiina Kinnunen is a Finnish professional sub-titler and translator who has been working in the field for more than 30 years, and also training and mentoring numerous translators. A co-author of the Translator’s Guide to the Industry, she’s spreading the word of best professional practices at various events. She’s an active participant in translation conferences and a contributor to the university education of translators in the form of guest lectures and university visits.

Using your network to branch out into new areas

Sally Hill, the Netherlands

To ensure the money keeps rolling in, freelance language professionals must keep their skills up to date but also follow changes in the market and in clients’ needs. Adjusting the way we run our businesses sometimes means learning new skills and even branching out into new areas. However, as freelancers we are not necessarily well equipped to make such changes on our own, and we must therefore make use of others in our network – be this in the form of a mentor or of sharing with others who are going through the same process.

In this presentation I will share with you how an increase in clients’ requests for writing services led me to get interested in medical writing. I will recount how I got in touch with others in this field and helped set up a network for science and medical writers in the Netherlands. Organising and attending events for the network has led not only to new contacts but also several new clients. I’ve also learned a lot more about using social media platforms. An additional discovery along the way is that many young scientists with language skills are looking to move away from academia and into writing jobs in the Netherlands – a move that may need the support of organisations such as SENSE.

This session will probably be of interest to language professionals – freelance or otherwise – looking to move into new areas. I hope to give you pointers on how you can use your network to explore new options, discover new talents and expand your business. Those interested in learning more about medical writing and the newly formed Netherlands SciMed Writers Network are also very welcome to attend.

Click here to register for the online conference

About the presenter

Sally Hill

Sally Hill studied biology at the universities of Sheffield and Nijmegen. A former research scientist, she works as a freelance medical writer, editor and trainer in scientific writing at Dutch universities. She finds her experience in education sometimes slows down her editing work, though using the comments function to educate her non-student clients about good writing is not necessarily a bad thing. She is a keen networker and helps organise meetings for other Netherlands-based science and medical writers. She’s also a contributor to and editor of the SENSE blog.

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