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“A powwow is a gathering, a community celebration, a time for nations to come together to share songs and dances, a chance to celebrate your gifts, your heritage, your language, your culture with other Native people.”
(Source: http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/powwow/questions-h.html)
This year, as part of an initiative started by ProZ.com, translators from across the globe did, indeed, come together to celebrate and we in New Delhi were proud to be a part of it.
Fourteen translators, working in the following languages met at my home on Saturday, 29th September:
- Hindi
- Urdu
- Bengali
- Kashmiri
- Oriya
- Japanese
- French
- German
- English
After a round of introductions, the participants soon warmed to each other and launched into a discussion on various aspects of the profession. The conversation continued over dinner (Chinese) and we exchanged business cards, phone numbers and addresses.
As the organiser, I was often caught up in other things and could only catch snippets of the discussion, but some of the points that emerged were:
-Most Indian translators get the bulk of their work from agencies, who pay them very low rates. Direct clients who pay higher rates are therefore preferred.
-There should be some way of blacklisting clients who engage in poor payment practices and fraud. Although ProZ.com does have the Blue Board for rating and giving feedback on clients, it was felt that other ways of informing colleagues about such outsourcers should also be considered.
-There was a brief discussion on payment methods such as Paypal, Moneybookers etc.
-(Good) Indian English should be more widely recognised and accepted by clients
On the whole, the mood of the powwow was informal and its main purpose was for colleagues to get to know each other and pave the way for future contact and interaction, and I think we succeeded in doing this.
I would like to thank ProZ.com staff member Romina, for proposing this powwow and giving me all the support in organising it. I hope we will have many more such events in New Delhi in the future.
Dear All !
I am sending the link to download the Unicode supported Hindi Indic IMI. Please follow the instruction and install it. There is a choice to typewriters including traditional, Ramington and transliteration typewriters.
Here is the link http://www.akshargram.com/sarvagya/index.php/IndicIME
Thank you Niraja for Organizing, conducting and concluding the gathering. I personally appreciate not only your initiative but also the cooperation of the attending prozians. The gathering- a small one, though, is to be seen as beginning of a new movement which acts as a mental bridge between different peoples. Let us hope so and wish that it does not remain a mere wish. Thanks to all for bringing up the issues for discussion . Thanks again to Niraja who served the gathering with snacks and dinner, with forebearance and for providing accomdation, as well.
It was nice to meet friends and talk about isssues that we translators face. Quickly, we realized that we all have same interests and then exchanged views freely. Hope, more and more colleagues will attend in future.
: organizer 
: photos 
: report 
: host 
