ATA's 61st Annual Conference Held Fully Online for the First Time

From October 21 to 24, 2020, the American Translators Association (ATA) held its 61st Annual Conference entirely online — the first fully virtual edition in the conference's sixty-year history. Originally planned for Boston, Massachusetts, the event moved to the cloud due to the pandemic and drew thousands of translators and interpreters from around the world.

The virtual conference preserved the core elements of its in-person predecessor: topical education sessions, continuing-education courses, a job fair and networking events, all streamed live through the conference platform. For many linguists in developing countries, an online conference without visas and travel costs dramatically lowered the barrier to participation, making the attendee base more geographically diverse than ever.

The session topics at ATA61 mirrored the industry's concerns: remote interpreting workflows and equipment, client communication during the pandemic, and pricing models for machine translation post-editing were among the most discussed subjects.

The virtualization of the industry's own flagship conference mirrors the remotization of conference interpreting itself: when the translation profession's own gathering happens in the cloud, "face-to-face" is no longer a prerequisite for a professional community to function. The experience laid the groundwork for hybrid language-industry events in the years that followed.