After a rather busy ten days I am trying to catch up on my reading. As Murphy’s Law goes I stumbled on another little article that talked about the EMT Network (I wrote in one of my earlier postings about this network and the fact that no Greek university had been included).
The head of the Ionian University made a cockamamie excuse on why the University could not participate; you can read his excuse in this newspaper article ? Kathimerini; I don?t understand how the smaller, even non-EU, countries could in one year make the necessary amendments to their programs, while this university ? which boasts to be the only source of ?official translators? ? was not able to cope. Of course other European universities were thrilled to join, like the Dublin City University (DCU), which happily stated, ?We are delighted to be part of this initiative. Our success puts DCU?s MA in Translation Studies in the top flight of postgraduate translation programmes in Europe. It?s good for our current students, our graduates, and the whole translation profession.?; you can read their statement here. For a moment there I stopped and thought of giving the Ionian University a second chance; I thought they might have published something on their own website. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. They just copied/pasted the FIT announcement for the International Translation Day (Χρόνια πολλά μας! by the way) and they proudly were boasting about using teleconference for the deposition of a British national (I had a very clever comment on this but I would completely digress so I’ll let it go… for now).
Of course someone could tell me that I should equally complain on why the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, or the University of Athens did not try to participate in this network. It is my firm belief that exactly because these universities do not try to rule the field that they are not interested in that direction. Their programs (postgraduate level) are not regularly funded so I am sure that this fact alone would make it impossible for them to enter any bids. On the other hand the Ionian University is trying to corner the actual market by brainwashing its graduates that they are the only ones entitled to work as translators (so I guess this makes me, a full blown natural bilingual and philologist, a child of a lesser God).
I think with this small note I will conclude my looking into the EMT network for this year. As Giorgos Androulidakis mentioned in a forum posting, we will wait to see what happens next year. Thanks for putting up with my rantings on this subject!
