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2022 OSTI Board Election Nominees
This year, OSTI members will be voting for 3 board positions - President, Director, and Secretary. Current OSTI members will receive the ballot via email in early September, 2022. The voting will be done electronically. The election results will be announced on September 18, 2022 during the OSTI 2022 Virtual Conference.
OSTI 2022 Nominating Committee: Svetlana Ruth, Natalia Grabovski, Christina Pfister
Here are the nominees:
| President Lois Feuerle |
Bio:
Lois Feuerle, PhD, JD, a founding member of OSTI, earned her law degree from NYU School of Law and her Ph.D. in German and Applied Linguistics from the U of Kansas. She attended university in Germany for 3 years, studied theater and art history in Vienna and completed a seminar for goldsmiths at the art school founded by Oskar Kokoschka, winning a purchase prize from the City of Salzburg. She is ATA certified for German>English, passed the US government test to translate for the Joint Publications Research Service and is approved by the IMF. She served as the coordinator of Court Interpreting Services for New York State and later for Oregon. She has taught German>English translation at NYU and Legal Translation at the University of Chicago. Currently she translates, develops curricula and trains interpreters working with victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. She co-chaired the Work Group on Vicarious Trauma at Interpret America 3 and has presented on the topic at NAJIT and interpreter trainings in NJ, Ohio and Alabama. She previously served on the Oregon Governor’s Commission on Health Care Interpreters and was recently appointed to the Oregon Council on Health Care Interpreters.
Statement:
It has been an honor and great privilege to serve as the President of OSTI, and I would like to continue to make use of the experience that I have gained during that time.
We can be very proud of our achievements during these past 8 years. OSTI began in 2013 as an ad hoc group advocating for an increase in the rate for Oregon Court Interpreters -- a rate that had been established in 1995 but had remained unchanged since then. Our success led to the formation of OSTI as a formal group and after becoming more established and building a track record, the ATA Board of Directors voted to officially accept the Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters as an ATA-affiliated group.
From the get-go OSTI worked hard to establish a multi-day annual conference, a regular schedule of CEU –bearing workshops, presentations, and learning opportunities, monthly Board meetings and social events, and even the Pandemic was not able to slow OSTI down – for the past two years we successfully maintained our active schedule remotely.
OSTI works hard to ensure that it offers a wide variety of events of interest to all our members -- court, medical, educational and conference interpreters as well as translators active in a wide range of subfields. I invite all OSTI members to share their ideas and join us in helping to make OSTI even better.
| Director Mika Jarmusz |
Bio:
Mika Jarmusz, M.A.Ed. is an ATA Certified Translator, Oregon Judicial Department (OJD) Registered, and Oregon Health Authority (OHA) Qualified Interpreter. Born and raised in Japan, her seed of inter-cultural awareness germinated when she attended Sonoma State University in Northern California, as she quietly observed the daily parent-child-teacher interactions at its Children’s School towards her M.A. degree. In recent years, she has served as board of director for the National Button Society, Oregon State Button Society (Educational non-profit), and other related organizations. She is a licensed Associate Trainer of THE COMMUNITY INTERPRETER® professional training program. Her experience and current scope of freelance work include digital marketing translation into Japanese, inter-cultural human relations, ISO-related global compliance communications with attention to bilingual transparency. She also provides Video Remote Interpreting on general topics for better understandings between her clients and their Japanese speaking stakeholders.
Statement:
Providing opportunities for the T&I professional colleagues in Oregon and beyond with the OSTI leadership team of volunteers has been a rewarding learning experience. I look forward to enriching our connections and expanding our mutual understandings through serving another term as its director.
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Secretary Sylvia Benner |
Bio:
Sylvia Benner is an ATA-certified translator from English into German. She specializes in the life sciences and has more than 25 years of experience as a full-time freelance translator. Her work gives her an opportunity to combine her interest in science with her passion for languages, and she enjoys knowing that she is making a small contribution to the advancement of medical science by enabling research across international borders. A particular professional interest of Sylvia's are computer-aided translation tools, which she adopted early in her career. Sylvia holds a BA in Social Science from Marylhurst College and has extensive experience in volunteer non-profit administration. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, four cats, and a chat line to her son, who is going to college in Germany.
Statement:
After a two-year tenure in the role of Secretary for the Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI), I have developed a greater appreciation for the work that goes into providing the varied programs and opportunities offered by the organization. It has been a pleasure to work with my very professional and creative colleagues on the board who make OSTI one of the busiest and most productive local professional organizations in our field, and I would welcome the opportunity to continue this collaboration to support OSTI's success in the coming years, especially its role in providing educational opportunities to its members.