Continuing Professional Development

Like many other professionals, I have a strong commitment to continuing professional development (CPD), also known as continuing education.

A lot of CPD happens informally: reading books relevant to our fields, following newsletters and magazines, and even scanning our Twitter feeds for posts by colleagues. Some of it is more formalized, though. If you’re a client or colleague who’d like to know what formal classes, presentations, and webinars I stay fresh with, here’s a listing.

Designed for translators:

 

Business:

  • Integrity in the Workplace: A.C.T.! (2012) – an ADP TotalSource University webinar. Description: “Maintaining business ethics and compliance standards is important to any organization. This course builds employees’ skills in how to recognize the most common business ethics and compliance issues within organizations. Learners are given real-world scenarios and gain knowledge on how to do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way.”
  • Business Writing for Employees (2012) – an ADP TotalSource University webinar about how to write more effective emails. Some tips were quite simple, but I still use them: for example, being sure to put your name at the bottom of the email to reinforce who you are in an email chain where many people are weighing in, so no one gets confused.
  • Communication: Basic Skills for Clear Messages (2012) – Though this ADP TotalSource University webinar with Tania Mora was geared toward general company employees wanting to communicate better with each other, I attended because I wanted to ask the instructor how to best talk about sensitive topics like sex, religion, etc. in cases where that actually has to happen for work reasons. Since I do quality control at FUNimation, I make myself available to other translators for questions, idea-bouncing, etc., but working in television means that things like sex and religion come up, so I wanted HR advice on how to best talk about those topics in a work environment.

 

Other:

  • HHP100: OpioidX: The Opioid Crisis in America (2017) –  Public health is a core interest of mine. The opioid crisis in the U.S. becomes deadlier every day, and was recently declared a national emergency. Although I saw it evolve from the sidelines, I’d been wanting to learn more for a long time, and this course provided a good opportunity.
  • ER22x: Justice (2013) – This was my first edX course. It’s an ethics/philosophy course not directly related to translation, but I found out about it through a fellow translator at Words to Deeds, and it turned out to be what I focused most of my continuing ed brainpower on in 2013 (“Sorry guys, I have to go read Kant now!”). It was a great supplement to my overall education, and Professor Sandel of Harvard is an excellent lecturer.

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