Preliminary Report to the FIT North America Executive Committee and Board
October 5th, 6th, and 7th, 2023, the FIT North America regional center held a conference on educating the next generation of TTIs (translators, terminologists, and interpreters). The venue was the Monterey, California, campus of MIIS (the Middlebury Institute of International Studies), which kindly rented meeting space for the event. Over one hundred people registered for the NextGen conference.
The primary purpose of the conference was to bring together people of Canada, the
United States, and Mexico who believe there should be a next generation of TTIs and want to do something about it. Participants included educators and representatives of language service
companies.
Steve Richardson, immediate past president of AMTA (Association for Machine Translation in the Americas), and Paco Guzmán, a machine translation developer at Meta (formerly Facebook), both made statements that are on the main page of the NextGen conference (https://fit-northamerica-rc.org/fit-na-next-gen-conference/).
There was no remote real-time access. This was an in-person only event with an emphasis on networking. It began Thursday, October 5th, with a brief opening session that facilitated the creation of small dinner groups consisting of attendees who do not yet know each other. They walked from the Irvine Auditorium to local restaurants. One of the conference sponsors, LanguageLine, paid for thirty restaurant gift certificates that encouraged people to form these dinner groups and get acquainted. Feedback so far indicates that this experiment was successful.
Before splitting up into small dinner groups, the audience heard a pre-recorded greeting by Alison Rodriguez, President of FIT, and a pre-recorded greeting by Jimmy Panetta, who serves California’s 19th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Friday, October 6th, consisted of five invited plenaries with 30-minute networking breaks in between plenary sessions. Our platinum sponsor, MasterWord, made the Indigenous language interpreting plenary possible.
Saturday, October 7th, consisted of a sixth plenary followed by four parallel tracks of submitted presentations.
The primary intended outcomes were to share ideas on how to adapt to the age of Artificial Intelligence and to generate an increased optimism about the future of the Profession. Preliminary feedback from attendees indicates that these outcomes were achieved.
Post-conference tasks for me and my team include bookkeeping, checking and posting audio recordings of presentations, gathering and posting slides from presenters, sending out an evaluation survey to participants, and considering whether to invite presenters to prepare written versions of their presentations for publication as a collection in, for example, Babel, the FIT journal.
An immediate need is to prepare a press release about the NextGen conference.