Business and Fun: mixing it up in San Antonio

It’s the last week of April and NAJIT’s Annual Conference is just around the corner. Before we know it, we will be in San Antonio, polishing skills, learning what’s new in the field, catching up with old friends and making new ones. And although I know that keeping my skills honed and knowledge updated are critical components of my professional development, the best part of that weekend for me is spending time with my very extended NAJIT family.

All work and no play is never good, believe me! But the good news is that in our world, no play time is ever a waste. Whenever NAJIT members get together, we know very well how to mix it up, and even when we are singing or dancing, someone will find a way to turn it into a discussion on some obscure term and what would be the best way to translate it.

The challenges we face day in and day out are never far from our minds, and being with colleagues from all over the country—sometimes from other countries as well—is a great opportunity to bounce ideas off each other and find creative solutions to common problems we would not have thought of on our own.

NAJIT’s Annual Conference has been the petri dish for many innovative ideas that have contributed to the professionalization of judiciary interpreters and translators, such as the Code of Ethics developed in our organization’s very early stages, or the position papers developed later on, all of which have brought with them greater respect from those other professionals with whom we interact on a daily basis. NAJIT has also nurtured ground-breaking projects that have contributed to our collective growth as we transitioned from the “Dark Ages” of judiciary interpreting and translating to our current status as a widely recognized profession.

Of course, if we did not need to do any more work to improve the relative status of some members of our profession in certain geographic pockets where the “Age of Enlightenment” has yet to arrive, we could spend the whole weekend partying and forget about all the other educational sessions included in the conference. But the truth is we still have a lot of work to do, and we need to do it together. So if you have not yet registered for the conference in San Antonio, there’s still time. We all need to be there. We all have a responsibility to keep our profession vital and current, to uphold and promote the highest competency and ethical standards, and to forge bonds of professional solidarity that will further strengthen the standing of our organization and our chosen professions in the United States and beyond.

And, of course, we all need to have a little fun every once in a while, too. So I hope to meet all of you there, in San Antonio, by the River Walk, maybe with some mariachi music in the background and a heart full of joy because I will be hugging old friends and embracing new ones that will last me a lifetime.