International Conference on Language & Translation Industry of India - Opportunities & Challenges, New Delhi, April 17-18, 2009
The 1st International Conference on "Language and Translation Industry of India: Opportunities & Challenges" jointly organized by the Indian Translators Association and Linguaindia, the Indian language translation division of Modlingua successfully concluded on April 18, 2009 creating a benchmark for the language and translator community of India.
The warm-up activity to the conference began on April 16, 2009 with the pre-conference workshop dedicated to Quality Standards, Terminology Management, Professional Practices and CAT Tools, hosted by Instituto Cervantes, New Delhi. The workshop was inaugurated by His Excellency Miguel Angel Ramirez Ramos, Ambassador of Cuba in India who emphasized the need to create awareness about quality standards, terminology management, professional practices and CAT tools in translation.
The Cuban Ambassador also took the opportunity to explain about the initiatives of Cuban government in promoting language and translation activities in his country and expressed his desire to intensify co-operation with India in these areas in order to further open gateways to cultural exchange between both countries.
The workshop that witnessed presence of more than 150 participants was chaired by Ms. Ana Isabel Reguillo, Academic Head of Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi who explained about the mission of Instituto Cervantes in promoting quality education in Spanish language and culture studies in India and throughout the globe. Further, the workshop included some highly interactive sessions by experts of international repute including Prof. Roger T. Bell (University of Westminster, UK) who actually brought the otherwise hot and dull afternoon alive through his sessions on Professional Practices in Translation. The sessions were then continued by experts from Austria that included Dr. Gabriele Sauberer (TERMNET), who shared her knowledge on Terminology Management and Quality Standards in Translation; Dr. Peter Jonas (LICS) explained in detail about the EN 15038 standard; and Ms. Anja Drame (Infoterm) dealt with terminology standardization. The workshop ended with an exclusive session on CAT tools by Conference Convenor Mr. Ravi Kumar who emphasized the need to integrate with the translation technology. This was followed by a demonstration of a newly developed CAT tool called “Heartsome”: a new generation cost effective CAT tool that fully supports Indian languages.
