The conference took place in Skopje, Macedonia on October 1, 2011 and was attended by 35 professional translators from 11 countries (Macedonia, Romania, Egypt, Netherlands, UK, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Ireland and Germany). As the local organizer Hristina Dojcinova (communications professional, interpreter, translator, university lecturer in T&I and founding member of the Macedonian Association of Conference Interpreters, and Macedonian Translators Association) pointed out during the opening:
“the conference aimed at gathering individuals from the region and beyond interested in investing in their professional development, discussing the latest trends in the translation industry, contributing to the community by volunteering their services and joining efforts in order to improve the professional standards and to earn higher rates, as well as to promote and improve the reputation of the profession.”
The goal of the session Global Voices Lingua: Volunteer-Powered Multilingual Translation Community was to present the opportunities for translators to contribute to increasing knowledge about their countries, and bringing knowledge to their compatriots in their local languages through volunteer engagement.
Global Voices is a community of more than 500 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Project Lingua amplifies Global Voices stories in languages other than English with the help of volunteer translators. It opens the line of communication with non-English speaking bloggers and readers of Global Voices by translating content into over 35 other languages. Such engagement can also provide higher visibility to other aspects of their work, due to high ranking of GV author profiles on Google (SEO). The presenter shared the experiences of Metamorphosis Foundation in running the Macedonian and Albanian Lingua sites.
The event resulted in interest by some of the participants to joint the GV community as translators for their native lingua sites, or as authors who would report on the citizen media related to their country/culture in English via the main GV site.
Update (Jan 2012): A conference participant, Oana Maria Dan, became GV author covering Romania protests.
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