ATA is a waste of good money

by JM Leger
(DeKalb, IL, USA)

I was a member of the ATA for 20 years. I was even accredited. Then they changed the certification rules. In order to retain your certification you had to participate in ATA sanctioned events. Participating twice in three years to the national conference would allow you to maintain certification for those years.

So you registered to the Conference, showed up to pick up your credentials and took a plane back home and you were deemed certified... and the ATA pocketed your registration fees. Everybody was a winner... except no continuing education had taken place at all, but that's a mere detail.

As soon as I realized the new certification process was nothing short of a scam, I raised the question on translator forums internal to the ATA (I was a member of the French translators section). I was set upon by what i will call the minions of the Board and was the butt of Ad Hominem attacks, I asked to publish an article in the ATA Chronicle and found out that no letters to the editors were accepted or published, except those which waxed laudatory about the certification process which was being sold to the membership with a heavy hand because of the money it was and would be bringing in.

The certification/continuing education process sold by the ATA is an institution-building scheme, not a translators skill-building one. If I accept to pay for a Spanish-language pharmaceuticals seminar in Puerto-Rico, I can get credit points... even though I am not even a Spanish translator. Who cares? The ATA makes money, that's what's important.

Young translators feel they have to belong so they can find their way in the profession. On day on Proz.com will teach them more than a lifetime in the ATA. As to myself, the year the new certification process was implemented, I left the ATA withoout a qualm after 20 some years of membership, and I have not looked back once.