Last year I was scheduled to make a presentation on translator survival strategies in-person for JAT, after deflecting counter-offers to make it an online presentation, ostensibly in line with JAT’s recent approach of not having in-person events if they can be avoided. It was going to be an expanded and updated renewal of the presentation I gave at IJET-30 Conference held by JAT in Cairns in 2019. (Because that presentation has apparently been lost or deleted from the JAT website, I have preserved it on my parent website.)
After the new presentation was already approved and scheduled for July last year, and after I had already spent some hours preparing it, a former JAT board member piped up and demanded that I appear in person at a JAT social gathering as a condition for giving the presentation, because it was needed to develop a “relationship of trust” between presenters and JAT. I had been earlier told that the demand was because of things that I had said critical of the way JAT was operating, those comments being made in a JAT online forum. The demand was absolute, and it was explicitly stated that JAT would not entertain further discussion without that meeting, even after a plea for clarity and reasons from the then-President of JAT, who subsequently resigned.
Naturally, I was not going to submit to a job interview where I needed to pledge allegiance to an organization that I had at one time been the president of (back when some current JAT directors were probably not yet out of diapers or maybe not yet in diapers) in order to give a presentation that I had already spent time preparing and that had already been scheduled. I backed off, and that was a good decision.
Having experienced the above, the chances of me doing anything for the Japan Association of Translators (perhaps better named Japan Anodyne Translators) are about as good as the chance of pigs filing flight plans.
The translators and organizations that will sink are well into the process of sinking. The few translators who will survive will do it without me telling them how to do it. It’s ending for most freelance translators; the Translatanic is on its way down, and rearranging the deck chairs isn’t going to help. Nor is the approach that JAT has taken, which is to look away at all costs, perhaps in a desperate attempt to maintain the appearance of relevance. It is a lost cause, and I cannot change that.
There is no reason to pretend that the above was a misunderstanding. It was extremely easy to understand, and I have it documented.
The gloves are staying off.
