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Listlessness, thy name is Saturday...
Feb. 27th, 2010 12:07 pmYesterday, in addition to end-of-month invoicing - and there really ought not be any such animal - I finally got down to taking care of filing my "continuing education" paperwork with the American Translators Association.
CE is a relatively new association wrinkle that is touted by some as a valuable tool to maintain high levels of professionalism, etc., among translators, as is the case in other professions, but something else suggests itself if one looks at the way the system is structured.
Attending a conference, and specifically, picking up one's registration materials is sufficient to earn 10 of the 20 points required over a three-year period. Theoretically, one could turn around and actually go home after picking up the registration package and still log the 10 points.
Writing a book on translation, on the other hand, earns you 6 points. That seems wholly disproportionate, to me, having both attended conferences and written a couple of programming books.
In my opinion, CE is probably of marginal utility for regulated professions, such as real-estate agents and engineers, where a case can be made for making sure practitioners are up to date on the ever-expanding and detailed rules that regulate how one does work, but even there, I've been to enough such sessions to know that quite a number of attendees snooze through the curriculum.
However, without the CE, one cannot retain one's certification, and without certification, there really isn't much point in belonging to the ATA, at least not for me. So one does what one must, not forgetting to enclose $30 for processing of one's paperwork.
Talking about going through the motions, my former best client sent me an email recently, informing me on very short notice that I had to take a mandatory on-line course on safety to satisfy an annual requirement. Each year, this course increases in "volume" without actually adding any information that, in my opinion, will make one safer in one's work.
By "volume" I refer to the amount of text in the slides (I capture the text of each slide, then refer to the resulting document when taking the quiz at the end); by safer, I mean that knowing the cute nickname of that part of the CFR that covers industrial safety doesn't contribute a whit to improving my safety or that of others.
To add insult to injury, my former best client sent a work authorization order for this activity, allowing me to charge five minutes for this task. That's barely enough time to prepare an invoice, much less log in, navigate to the right start page, click through about 75 slides (assuming 1 kilobyte of text per slide) and then take a 22-question quiz.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, yeah, I'm not feeling too energetic today, which is not good because I need to be energetic enough to do a couple of thousand words at least. Part of what's holding me back may be the prospect of another dog's breakfast of a PowerPoint presentation, 50+ slides, that officially shows 500 or so words, but is studded with embedded Word and Excel objects (and goodness knows what else).
I think I shall have another bowl of taco soup (prepared using Natalie's recipe) and prepare myself mentally for the ordeal.
Cheers...
CE is a relatively new association wrinkle that is touted by some as a valuable tool to maintain high levels of professionalism, etc., among translators, as is the case in other professions, but something else suggests itself if one looks at the way the system is structured.
Attending a conference, and specifically, picking up one's registration materials is sufficient to earn 10 of the 20 points required over a three-year period. Theoretically, one could turn around and actually go home after picking up the registration package and still log the 10 points.
Writing a book on translation, on the other hand, earns you 6 points. That seems wholly disproportionate, to me, having both attended conferences and written a couple of programming books.
In my opinion, CE is probably of marginal utility for regulated professions, such as real-estate agents and engineers, where a case can be made for making sure practitioners are up to date on the ever-expanding and detailed rules that regulate how one does work, but even there, I've been to enough such sessions to know that quite a number of attendees snooze through the curriculum.
However, without the CE, one cannot retain one's certification, and without certification, there really isn't much point in belonging to the ATA, at least not for me. So one does what one must, not forgetting to enclose $30 for processing of one's paperwork.
Talking about going through the motions, my former best client sent me an email recently, informing me on very short notice that I had to take a mandatory on-line course on safety to satisfy an annual requirement. Each year, this course increases in "volume" without actually adding any information that, in my opinion, will make one safer in one's work.
By "volume" I refer to the amount of text in the slides (I capture the text of each slide, then refer to the resulting document when taking the quiz at the end); by safer, I mean that knowing the cute nickname of that part of the CFR that covers industrial safety doesn't contribute a whit to improving my safety or that of others.
To add insult to injury, my former best client sent a work authorization order for this activity, allowing me to charge five minutes for this task. That's barely enough time to prepare an invoice, much less log in, navigate to the right start page, click through about 75 slides (assuming 1 kilobyte of text per slide) and then take a 22-question quiz.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, yeah, I'm not feeling too energetic today, which is not good because I need to be energetic enough to do a couple of thousand words at least. Part of what's holding me back may be the prospect of another dog's breakfast of a PowerPoint presentation, 50+ slides, that officially shows 500 or so words, but is studded with embedded Word and Excel objects (and goodness knows what else).
I think I shall have another bowl of taco soup (prepared using Natalie's recipe) and prepare myself mentally for the ordeal.
Cheers...
