The ATA Chronicle - July/August 2017 - 12

OUTREACH REPORT

BY KAREN M. TKACZYK

Translating My Way Around the Periodic Table

A

t the end of 2016 I was invited
to speak at the Spring 2017
National Meeting of the American
Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco.
With nearly 157,000 members, ACS
promotes and supports chemistry and
its practitioners. (For more information
about the ACS, see www.acs.org.)
A freelance technical writer I met about
10 years ago at a prior ACS meeting
invited me. She and I had kept in touch,
being rare freelancers among chemists,
and had met several times at various other
ACS events. As symposium coordinator,
she was looking for a diverse set of people
who are chemists, write for their careers,
and can speak in public.
Now, fast-forward six months. Several
of the six speakers chosen for the
symposium connected beforehand on
Twitter and LinkedIn. We used the hashtag
#chemistscanwrite before, during, and after
the event to help promote the symposium,
which was one of many taking place
simultaneously across the city for the 18,917
people (!) registered for the national meeting.

I was able to explain what an
association like ATA can do to
help attendees and how subject
matter experts can thrive as
translators and interpreters.
In early April I found myself in the
lovely Nikko Hotel in downtown San
Francisco. Our symposium was called
"Chemists Writing for Fun and Profit:
Write Your Own Career." The other
speakers included a journalist, a blogger,
a trainer, and published authors. The
audience was a roomful of chemists from
academia, industry, and government.
The title of my talk was "Translating
My Way Around the Periodic Table."
Translating chemistry for a living was a
novel idea to many in attendance, so my
topic appeared to grip the room. Making
assumptions based on the accents of
12

The ATA Chronicle | July/August 2017

Karen Tkaczyk (left) with fellow symposium speakers

those asking questions and the contacts I
made afterward, I think that a substantial
portion of the audience was bilingual.
When preparing my talk, I knew I
needed to establish some fundamentals,
as translation and interpreting would not
be well understood by the majority of
those present. The format I came up with
appears to have worked and would be
applicable to almost any technical field.
Here it is:
■■

I established my credibility as a chemist
(gave a short biography).

■■

I set out some fundamentals about
translation on a single slide. (I used
ATA's resources for School Outreach
at the college level for inspiration:
http://bit.ly/ATA-outreach-college.)

■■

I explained the nature of the business
(freelancers, agencies, end customers,
limited in-house work) and a little about
being self-employed.

■■

I talked about the benefits of being a
member of an association, using ATA
and the Northern California Translators
Association, the local ATA chapter in
California (www.ncta.org), as examples.

■■

I talked about the credentials that
can help us stand out in an industry
with no barrier to entry, specifically
those I have: ATA certification, SDL's
certification program for Studio and
similar tools, and being an MITI (a
qualified member of the Institute of
Translation and Interpreting).

■■

I then used real-life examples to
show how much broader the range of
chemistry I translate is than the narrow
areas to which practicing chemists tend
to be exposed: everything from standard
operating procedures for pharmaceutical
manufacturing to adhesive datasheets to
patents for photovoltaic cells.

■■

I concluded by stating that I was very
fortunate to have a freelance career
that I love and tied that up with some
thoughts on the symposium's theme that
"chemists can write" for a living.

The first questions were just as you
might expect. "Where did you get
your first jobs?" "How do you price
translation?" For me, the answer to the
former is ProZ.com, so I explained online
marketplaces. Regarding pricing, I talked
about per word/hour/job pricing and
explained the norm for the bulk market
and then what can happen over time if
you move into the value-added market.
Attendees also asked about my business
name and other aspects of branding as a
self-employed person.
Overall, I feel that speaking at this
event resulted in an increased awareness
of translation and interpreting as a career
for professionals with a very specific skill
set. In addition to those in the room,
many of the attendees had followed
the #ACSSanFran Twitter feed and
seen tweets about my talk. It was also
encouraging to see supportive tweets
from ATA's Public Relations Committee at
the same time, using the event hashtags
#chemistscanwrite and #ACSSanFran.
I enjoyed this opportunity to promote
translation and interpreting as a
profession and to familiarize people with
the importance of what we do. I was also
able to explain what an association like
ATA can do to help them and how subject
matter experts can thrive as translators
and interpreters.
The comment that stood out to me most
from my experience came early in the
morning, when I was introducing myself
to one of the other speakers. "Wow, that's
amazing. You can do that for a living?"
Why yes, yes I can.
www.atanet.org
http://www.acs.org http://www.ProZ.com http://www.bit.ly/ATA-outreach-college http://www.ncta.org http://www.atanet.org
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