A little bird has tweeted that Nordic Editors and Translators (NEaT) has recently celebrated their 5th jubilee … cause for a resounding kippis! ('cheers!' in Finnish) to our sister society, if ever there were.
To hear NEaT tell it, everything began on a cold mid-January day of 2014 in the hazy back room of a small Helsinki pub, the Leijuva Lahna. It was there that the mission, the name, and the founding members, some twenty in all, came together to create a professional network of editors, translators, and language professionals. Julie Uusinarkaus was to act as chair that first year, Daryl Taylor did the legal documentation and paperwork, and Virve Juhola translated everything into Finnish. On 20 October 2014, the Nordic Editors and Translators association became registered as a professional organization in the Finnish Register of Associations.
Of course, all founding fables have a back story, and NEaT’s began at the Mediterranean Editors and Translators Meeting 2011. Four revisors from the University of Helsinki – Julie Uusinarkaus, Lisa Muszynski, John Gage, and Stephen Stalter – met with MET members Mary Ellen Kerans, Marije de Jager and Alan Lounds to ask them about how to create an editors’ association in Finland and the other Nordic countries. Back in Helsinki, the team began collecting the names of local editors who might be interested in launching an organization. In 2012, Lisa and Julie began their first editing seminars at the university. When Virve joined the effort, translation was added into the organizational mix. By the end of 2013, just in time for a mid-winter’s founding, the list of potential members of what was soon to become an association of editors and translators had built to around 100 professionals. A star was born.
Over the years, NEaT has held a number of events, and under the watchful eye of the likes of stalwarts Julie, Lisa, Virve and Ian Mac Eochagáin they just keep getting better. In September 2014, NEaT partnered with KAJ (since 2019: Kieliasiantuntijat), the Finnish trade union for language specialists, and SKTL, the Finnish Association of Translators and Interpreters, to present a seminar on noun stacking by lecturer Stephen Stalter. The following year, an annual NEaT event, English Today, was introduced together with new partner the Finnish-British Society (Finn-Brit), and a panel discussion on Demanding Quality was organized. The year 2015 also saw NEaT’s first Annual General Meeting take place and witnessed the inauguration of the NEaT newsletter and website, www.nordicedit.fi. In the ensuing years, workshops, seminars, lectures, roundtables, panels, social events and topic-oriented committees followed.
Open to non-members, NEaT’s unique English Today seminar series now attracts language professionals from far and wide, taking as it does a deeper look at ‘what editors and translators working in and out of English have to keep in mind as they go about their work’. Clearly, ensuring that the quality of the English in translations and revised or edited documents is in conformance with international usage was, and remains, one of the society’s primary goals. Stop Press: English Today VI is scheduled for 13 March 2020, so mark your calendars and get ready for the trip north to Helsinki!
Reflecting a need to be a part of a community of practice, partnering has been a key strategy for NEaT’s growth and success – both locally with Finnish language organizations such as Kieliasiantuntijat, SKTL, and Finn-Brit, and internationally with MET, EASE and SENSE – something immediate past chair Virve Juhola worked hard to achieve. With the election of new chair Ian Mac Eochagáin in 2019, the focus has turned to strengthening and broadening the already-extant relationships with language professionals in other Nordic countries through the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association (NFFO) and the Norwegian Association of Professional Translators (NORFAG).
Thanks to the close ties our respective societies have developed, ties SENSE treasures, a number of our members now also belong to NEaT. Some have attended, and continue to speak fondly of, NEaT events such as the summer social, the year-end Christmas function, and English Today. Such binding, bonding and learning encounters will, we hope, benefit both societies, which together now constitute a much wider community of language practice. And whereas our members who have had the opportunity to attend MET conferences annually have been able to make the acquaintance of kindred professionals from Norway and Finland there, now SENSE’s own conferences have begun to attract speakers and delegates from the more northerly climes. NEaT members Kenneth Quek and Carol Norris filled out our SENSE 2018 conference programme with an introduction to Chinglish and NEaT, a colloquium on journal-acceptable manuscript style, and participation in an international panel on editing texts for doctoral theses/dissertations – contributing appreciably to the conference’s success.
What’s emerged is that our collective quest to improve the English used in the documents we translate, revise and edit will continue to draw us together, lead to our finding common ground, and perhaps even enable us to pass assignments one another’s way in the best interests of clients. Such exchanges and cross-pollination can only bode well for all our members. Long may that continue as NEaT goes from strength to strength as the newest member of our European community of professional bodies.
Our congratulations and best wishes go to our sister society up north!
