Webinar: Put Horse in Front of Cart: Starting Every Project with an Effective Translation Brief

Approved CEUs:  1 CE ATA, 1 CE AOC (Utah Courts), 1 CE RID, 1 CE CEAP/CCHI

When: Monday, August 1, 2022

Time: 6:00 p.m. MST

Cost: Free. Attendance/CEU certificate FREE for UTIA members

This presentation will give translation/localization project managers simple guidelines for what
information to communicate to translators when they assign them a project.

Learning Objectives:

1.   Attendees will be able to name the two most important requirements of any translation
   project.
2.   Attendees will learn how to write concise, effective translation briefs.
3.   Translators will be able to identify the crucial pieces of information that they should elicit from
   project managers.

Too often, translators are assigned a project with very little information about them. This forces
them to either guess or pester the project manager with questions. The most glaring omissions
are often the target audience and the intended purpose of the translation. Simply put, it is
impossible to write anything without a goal in mind, so we ought to make the goal for each
translation project explicit. The intended purpose, target audience, and other particulars of a
translation project should be written down in what we call a translation brief. This presentation
will outline what a simple translation brief could look like for a variety of different projects to
give project managers an idea of what they should be communicating to translators for every
single project. Likewise, it will give translators the knowledge of what information they
should be asking for to produce quality, targeted translations.

About the presenter:
Devin Gilbert is a translation and interpreting educator/researcher/practitioner from Ogden,
Utah. His working language pairs are Spanish/Portuguese-English. He has a Master’s in
Interpreting and Translation Studies from Wake Forest University, is finishing up a PhD in Translation Studies at Kent State University, and is an assistant professor of Spanish translation and interpreting at Utah Valley
University. In teaching translation, he really enjoys authentic projects that require students to
solve problems that he can’t, and he loves bringing realism and industry applicability into the translation and interpreting classroom.