MET workshop day in Barcelona, 19 April 2024

Following on from three successful online workshops in 2024, the Barcelona in-person workshop day provided a welcome opportunity to catch up with colleagues and indulge in some top-quality CPD face to face. The venue for the day was the IEMed in Barcelona, which brought back memories of MET’s beginnings as the place where the first meetings were held.

Helen Oclee-Brown and Valerie Matarese were first up in the morning with two parallel workshops on translation theory and statistics, respectively.

Helen’s extremely practical session provided attendees with a selective history of functionalist translation approaches, from Reiss’ text types and Vermeer’s Skopos theory to Nord’s text analysis and Chesterman’s syntactic, semantic and pragmatic strategies. Translation examples and exercises were expertly threaded throughout the theory sections to make participants think about the conscious or unconscious strategies used in their own translation work. With much discussion and engaging dialogue, this workshop was a great refresher on both translation theory and its practical applications.

Next door, Valerie guided participants through statistical concepts and terminology, from data distribution and confidence intervals to significance testing, the perils of P values, and correlation coefficients. She alternated detailed explanations with practical exercises from her excellent handout, always welcoming feedback and interaction, and expertly dealing with doubts and queries from attendees with varying levels of knowledge and different subject-area expertise.

After a productive three hours, attendees split into groups for some informal networking and a well-earned mental break over lunch.

In the afternoon, Irwin Temkin was first up on the grammar pathway. He began by gauging participants’ gut reactions to examples of dangling participles and adverbial disjuncts. He highlighted how general perceptions (and his own) around usage and acceptability can, and do, change over time. From hopefully (though sadly not hopably) to the much-debated due to vs owing to, Irwin’s examples well and truly scratched the attendees’ grammar itch.

John Bates rounded off the grammar track, taking participants through parts of speech, phrases, clauses, modifiers and heads. MET’s eager grammarians then put their knowledge to the test, revising a set of sentences in small groups and explaining their choices. John’s session provided a timely reminder of the importance of knowing the tools of our trade, so we’re adept at backing up our linguistic decisions with sound grammatical reasoning when interacting with clients.

Over on the parallel track, Ralph Pacinotti deftly walked participants through the modalities involved in audiovisual translation, adding amusing and informative examples, and answering questions on the fly as only an expert can. In the second, practical part of the workshop, participants grappled with the inherent constraints of subtitling, working on a short video using the AI-driven subtitling software Matesub. The three hours flew by.

Some of the facilitators and attendees ended the day in small dinner groups, sharing thoughts and impressions about what they’d heard and learnt.

Our thanks go to the five excellent facilitators, to the IEMed for welcoming MET back to its premises, and to everyone in the behind-the-scenes workshop team who worked hard to make the day a success. We’re also grateful to the contributors to this write-up: Sara Blackshire, Kim Eddy, Mary Savage and Hayley Smith. Special thanks go to CPD chair Mary Savage and former CPD assistant Pam Barnby for their stellar efforts in putting together such a varied and stimulating workshop programme.

Photo credits: Emma Goldsmith, Hayley Smith, Mary Savage and Melissa Ratti. Thanks to Sara Blackshire for preparing the collage.