West Midlands Group

Welcome to the West Midlands Group (WMG) of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. We currently have around 45 members but are always happy to welcome new members, whether they are established translators and interpreters moving to our region or new professionals joining the industry. Our annual subscription is £10 for ITI members and £5 for current students. Membership also includes access to our groups.io e-group, where we chat, support one another and share news. If you would like to join us, please contact our Membership Secretary    Bryan Thomas . Connect with fellow translators and interpreters, enjoy the encouragement and support of our friendly group and attend affordable professional events in the West Midlands. We organise several professional and social events each year and have an e-group where members can ask for advice and post job offers and other relevant information.  We offer CPD bursaries allowing WMG members to participate in any CPD event, online or face-to

Visiting Coventry Cathedral  On 27 June 2018, a good dozen of us came together for a tour of Coventry Cathedral, followed by coffee and cake. More pictures can be found here . Winter Walk 2018 Some pictures of this year's winter walk you can look at here . It was cold, rainy, snowy and most of all muddy. Photos and videos from the workshop "Translation in Opera, Music Theatre and Pop", held at the Birmingham Conservatoire on 9 June 2016 Here are some photos and videos from the day: The choir worked wonders with our translations, from Italian:        From French:      And from German (ufortunately, the other German video files were too big to upload.):

A report on our June workshop by Jacinta Kal On the 11th of June, several interpreters, translators and students gathered at Aston University for an interpreting workshop. Because I exclusively translate and have no experience with interpreting, I decided to attend so I could learn more about the different modes of interpreting, and of course also to meet some colleagues! The day started off with a talk by Eva Lohwasser on retour interpreting and its implications for CPD. Eva Lohwasser In her talk, Eva discussed the different points of view on retour interpreting, which is where an interpreter interprets from their A language (mother tongue) into their B language. This A>B interpreting was (and still is) frowned upon in some institutions and by some interpreters. Eva then went on to pose the question: if someone is equally at home in their A and B language, do the users of the interpreting really perceive a non-native accent as bad quality? And what IS quality anyway

Translating & tweeting at Aston A report by Amanda Wilson, photographs by Charlie Gobbett Friday 20 th March 2015. Not your average Friday because of the partial eclipse forecast for the UK. Everywhere people flocked outside in their droves to catch a glimpse (from behind ‘eclipse glasses’ or using pinhole projectors, naturally!) and outside the Main Building at Aston University was no different. Thanks to Emmanuelle Jeannot who brought some glasses along, members of the West Midlands Group were able to safely view the eclipse before getting stuck into their Translation Workshop and AGM. Who said that AGMs are dull and boring?! For me the eclipse was overshadowed by the WMG event! The day was lively with a festive atmosphere , ‘partially’ due to the eclipse but probably more to do with the opportunity for networking with colleagues old and new. Once everyone had made their way inside for coffee and the welcome, groups were formed for the translation workshops;

Bookings are coming in for our translation workshop on 20 March. If you've never been to a translation workshop before, please do come and try it out. They're always interesting and fun! We work in language-specific groups on short texts, attempting to produce a collaborative translation - if only of the first sentence! There will be fascinating discussions of tricky aspects (and we're hoping to have some extra-tricky ones this time, including puns and rhymes) and plenty of insights into other people's approaches. This time the workshop is split into two halves, with an introduction to Twitter by Lloyd Binham in the middle. This means that tweeting will be permitted - and even encouraged, but not enforced - in the second half of the workshop. At 5pm we will be relocating to the Bacchus Bar for a tweet-up (non-tweeters also welcome!) For more details and to request a booking form, please see the Events page.

There were eleven of us at the WMG committee meeting in Birmingham yesterday. Appropriately, we met in the Edwardian Tea Room of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which is where, ten years ago, four translators met for coffee and decided to revive the West Midlands Group of ITI. It was wonderful yesterday to see that there are still so many people - from founding members to newcomers - happy to take an active part in running the group! I'll be posting some memories of the past ten years on the new WMG history page over the next few days and weeks. Feel free to comment and add your own to this post. Bärbel McCloskey, Jakub Sacharczuk, Liz Smith, Rekha Narula, Mike Hanson, Charlie Gobbett, Ros Mendy, Juliet Hammond-Smith, Ulrike Nichols, Shelagh Rothero and Jean Darvill Happy 10th anniversary, everyone!