On a Saturday night, while I sit typing away at a desk in a colorless white-walled bedroom, concealed in an apartment building next to the university where I’ve been finishing my two-year master’s degree in translation, I have reason to be excited. I am a schoolboy waiting for his favorite food at a restaurant on a Friday night, exhausted by his own anticipation and the simmer and bubble of his lingering hunger.
While the thriving and motley translation industry in the United States and abroad has continued to reveal itself over the years, unfurling its tiny spotted petals with all the tempered glory of Mother Nature (who always takes her time), there is a mainstay in the industry that has long been the sun shining on all these reluctant flowers, venomous in their unwillingness to yield while lolling on the meadow. The ATA Annual Conference, this year heading into its 65th edition, has long been the mecca for translators from all over the world. Nothing could be more foreseeable—or more brilliant.
Some translators see in it a Shangri-La of professional development; others, a giant professional reunion at a time when high-school reunions, passé as they are, have become nothing more than hit parades of forgotten characters, friends, and figures receding into oblivion. Some find it too intimidating as an actual event, weighty with the expectation of your actual physical presence, alive, incarnate, and they wind up putting it off, shunning it even, until at last yielding after a decade or more to its devilish charisma. Some find it stunning, the lucid silvery whir in the eye of a hurricane, a measured dose of tactful insanity. Others find it enlightening, substantial, and everything in between. And yet I myself haven’t found anything at all—and that’s because I’ve only heard these things. Until now it has all been a matter of hearsay. This will be my first experience as an attendee.
I am prepared—but am I? A single-minded fiend when it comes to an extended phase of preparation, I have my itinerary, my clothes, my suitcase, my navy blazer together with the business cards in which I invested the better part of myself in order to bring visibility to my character as a professional. But really, how prepared can we be for events unforeseen and uncharted, experiences that we can only half-know with all the diligent research leading up to the actual, physical event, the moment, the conference in all its fluttering colors? And there it is…and there it goes. It is gone—flown away at the tail end of a rain shower. And now the verdant springtime can take over, the time of exultant reflection.
Things are never as they seem, it seems. Even this event, scheduled to begin in just a few days, will be blowing past shortly before it is set to begin receding. And I will be there, catching a glimpse of its speed and wonder. So what is my resolution for this, my first ATA conference as a translator in 2024? To catch it, that is all—and to hope that it doesn’t slip, not even for a moment, from my hungry and frantic and bobbling hands.
