By Tiina Tuominen
Today is the feast day of St. Jerome, the day to celebrate translators everywhere. I hope everyone is having a great day! SubComm is currently in the middle of a somewhat quiet period. As we mentioned in our last blog post in June, this autumn is an unusual time for both Hannah and me. Hannah is on maternity leave, while I’ve just started as a full-time professor at the University of Turku, and the new job is keeping me quite busy. That is why we haven’t set up our next Subtitle Chat yet, but fear not, there will be one as soon as I can fit it in my schedule. We would also welcome guest hosts to organise Subtitle Chats, so if you have an interesting topic in mind, please do not hesitate to get in touch! You can also contact us if you have a great idea for a blog post. We always welcome guest posts on topics that are of interest to subtitling practitioners and researchers.
ITD is a good time to reflect on the past year and think about the future.
One of our proudest achievements of the past year was the completion of our infographics project. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who took part, and to everyone who has been making use of the infographics since they were published. I also want to mention my amazing student group from the University of Turku who translated them into Finnish last spring. Last week, I had the opportunity to display the Finnish infographics at the Finnish International Translation Day seminar. We hope people will find uses for the infographics. We’d love to hear from you if you have been able to use them to spread awareness of subtitling among non-experts, or for any other interesting purpose. We are also still interested in having the infographics translated into other languages, so you can contact us if you are interested in that.
Although our activities are not very visible right now, we are constantly making new plans for SubComm. Subtitle Chats will return as soon as possible, and we are also working on the research project we discussed in our June blog post and hoping to turn it into publications. In addition, we are considering new ways to build our community, such as new events and initiatives to encourage more active interactions through our channels, such as our LinkedIn page and forum. Again, all ideas are welcome, and we hope people use our channels to network with each other and keep the community active.
International Translation Day is always a good opportunity to try make translation and translators more visible, and to bring translators together at various events celebrating our profession. I think it’s also a day that highlights the power of community. It’s always fun, educational and uplifting to get together with colleagues, either in person or virtually. Together, we can try to do meaningful things for the benefit of our profession. Research also benefits from community: people sharing and developing ideas, working on big projects together and sparring and making each other’s research better. Community and visibility are, of course, at the heart of SubComm, so International Translation Day is an important day for us. While we celebrate today, we are also making plans for the future, and we want to make SubComm a great and helpful community for practitioners and academics alike. So, we promise you will hear more from us soon, and we always love to hear from you.
Thank you to all of you for being a part of the SubComm community, thank you to all translators and interpreters for the work you do, and, of course, a special shout-out to all subtitlers out there. Happy International Translation Day 2024!
