Compiled by Amy Wang
Asking around to find out who should next be interviewed for our AUSIT Stalwarts series, several people mentioned David Connor (Davo). When contacted, David replied that he was unable to participate in an interview due to declining health, but when his potential interviewer, Xiaoxing (Amy) Wang, offered to work with David’s contemporaries to put together a piece on his career, he agreed to review it for publication. The following article was put together by Amy with the assistance of Annamaria Arnall, Adolfo Gentile, Barbara McGilvray, Ilke Brueckner-Klein, Ludmila Berkis, Mary Gurgone, Moreno Giovannoni, Sarina Phan and, of course, David Connor himself.
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… despite his great skills, David is among the humblest of high achievers …
David Connor is one of the most talented polyglots in Australia. He is certified to translate from more than a dozen different languages into English, is literate in many more, and in 1995 was one of the first three AUSIT members to be made an AUSIT Fellow (alongside Mary Gurgone and Barbara McGilvray).
Yet despite his great skills, David is among the humblest of high achievers – he never brags about his accomplishments. As a result, many latecomers are not fully aware of the scale of David’s devotion to his beloved profession, so it’s high time he receives due acknowledgment for all the contributions he has made – and continues to make – to our beloved T&I industry and AUSIT.
David’s journey as a translator more-or-less mirrors the evolution of the Australian translation and interpreting (T&I) industry. In 1971, not long before NAATI was established to standardise the quality of T&I services in the late 1970s, David started working for Telecom Australia (later known as Telstra) as a technical translator.
Employing David must have proved a bargain for Telecom, for he was able to singlehandedly translate technical and general documents written in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and Bulgarian – there was hardly any need for the company to hire another translator!
During his tenure at Telecom Australia, David was exposed to materials on various topics, including biomedical science, physics and chemistry, but most importantly, technology and telecommunications, which might help explain the impressive abilities which saw him managing nearly all aspects of technology for AUSIT later on (with the help of Kim Bastin, who also worked in the translation section of Telstra and was a member of AUSIT).
As a dedicated translator, David showed a strong interest in further developing his language skills and expanding his already large knowledge base. With his thirst for knowledge, it’s hardly surprising that when Telstra closed its translation section in 1996, David arranged to purchase their collection of 540 multilingual technical and general dictionaries, and took this collection home with him to undertake casual work from private clients and the Department of Immigration Translation Service, where he got to know and established a longlasting camaraderie with another AUSIT great, Moreno Giovannoni.
Moreno found David to be ‘a steady, hard-working, nose-to-the-grindstone and shoulder-to-the-wheel kind of person’ and was awed at David’s ability to ‘translate any language you threw at him’.
While David was working for the Department of Immigration, the NAATI accreditation system was launched, and began to gradually gain recognition within the industry. As a language enthusiast, David jumped at this opportunity to put his translation skills to the test, progressively working towards getting NAATI accreditation / recognition for translating more than a dozen languages into English.
David’s passion for translation didn’t stop there. He became increasingly concerned about the professionalism and working conditions of the language service sector. This concern is rooted in the fact that even though NAATI had been established as the gatekeeper, it was the first of its kind around the globe, so there was little precedent as to how a professional translator or interpreter should behave, and what working conditions were appropriate to ensure the quality of the translation or interpreting.
David’s high-level organisational skills were also much needed in AUSIT’s infancy.
Driven by his passion for promoting the professional image of – and adequate working conditions for – translators and interpreters (T/Is), David joined the State Institute of Interpreters and Translators (SIIT) in Victoria. He worked tirelessly with his close workmate Moreno in trying to turn the institute into Victoria’s professional association for T/Is. Such was their zeal to fight for a better future for the T&I industry that Moreno still fondly recalls ‘impromptu committee meetings around my kitchen table’.
Back then, SIIT was one of a handful of professional bodies representing T/Is in Australia, while similar organisations also existed in other states. To unify the voices and establish a national peak body for the profession, NAATI eventually facilitated a conference in Canberra. At this conference representatives from different states gathered and joined forces as a new organisation, the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT). Representing the Victorian peak body, David’s decades-long devotion to AUSIT started right then and there.
Looking back at the history of AUSIT, countless volunteers came and went, but David stayed and served in various capacities. AUSIT founding member and Fellow, Dr Adolfo Gentile, points out that David’s involvement in ‘the tumultuous periods of AUSIT’s first few years of existence’ brought new perspectives to early discussions, as David was ‘one of the few people in AUSIT who worked for an organisation not involved directly with migration, namely Telstra’.
David’s high-level organisational skills were also much needed in AUSIT’s infancy. Past national president Annamaria Arnall admires David as the ‘one-man secretariat’ of AUSIT in the first few decades after the organisation’s establishment, while another past president, Mary Gurgone, marvels at David’s ability to ‘always provide practical solutions to overcoming the challenges of an organisation that had to do the groundwork to develop policy, professional ethics, invoicing systems, communication systems and so on, all “on the smell of an oily rag”’.
Many more remember how David, as AUSIT’s inaugural national treasurer, took matters into his own hands to ensure the new organisation would survive and thrive. As the first treasurer, he managed AUSIT’s finances and volunteered countless hours to collect membership fees and prepare reports for the National Council.
Being one of the organisation’s longest-serving office bearers, David was often relied upon to answer ad hoc queries, manage membership affairs, liaise with various other office bearers, and advise the National Council when needed.
Thanks to his technology skills, David (along with branch member Kim Bastin) was trusted with the responsibility of setting up AUSIT’s first membership database, as well as an invoicing and communication system. When Mary created the very first AUSIT President’s Newsletter in the nineties, each copy was ‘photocopied, collated, placed into envelopes and sent to the individual members’, and no doubt David was the one who maintained and printed out the individual address labels.
David also helped build and maintain the very first AUSIT website, and when it was due for an upgrade at the turn of the millennium, he was happy to join a small enthusiastic sub-committee (affectionately known as ‘the playgroup’) to carry on this task, using his knowledge of AUSIT’s history to help ensure the refreshed website displayed continuity.
Serving as the treasurer and membership secretary for what was then the VIC/TAS Branch, David went above and beyond what was required to ensure branch members felt well connected, including by co-coordinating the distribution of the monthly VIC/TAS e-newsletter Keeping In Touch. For many seasoned T&I practitioners, he was their first point of contact when they reached out to AUSIT, and his diligence, enthusiasm and approachable manner inspired many to join up and actively work towards building a stronger professional organisation.
AUSIT Fellow Ilke Brueckner-Klein’s account of how she joined AUSIT is solid proof of David’s influence: ‘In 1997, a few months before migrating from Germany to Australia … I found a basic AUSIT website and David Connor’s contact email address. David immediately responded to my questions, and after some email exchange I knew that I had found the right place’, and ‘shortly after becoming a member of the AUSIT VIC/TAS Branch in 1998, David encouraged me to sit in as an observer on some of the branch meetings.’
This sentiment is echoed by another past national president, Sarina Phan, for whom David is not only the person who dealt with her membership application, but also the one who introduced her to the history of AUSIT and inspired her to take the ultimate step of becoming the national president. So much was David’s contribution to AUSIT that Sarina commented that the organisation ‘probably would have died had it not been for David’.
What made David’s contributions most precious is the fact that he managed all these tasks as a volunteer. By the late nineties, it felt as if David dedicated all his waking hours to addressing various matters for AUSIT – which wasn’t possible, as he was also taking on a considerable amount of translation work at that time.
As AUSIT grew bigger and more influential, it became increasingly unfair and unsustainable for such a daunting responsibility to rest on the shoulders of a single person. Fortunately, in the late 2000s, AUSIT was at last in a financial position to offer David an honorarium for managing its administrative tasks.
However, David didn’t feel right taking money from AUSIT, and subsequently withdrew from his secretariat position – but his contribution to AUSIT was far from over. After stepping down from his long-held position, he devoted a considerable amount of time to the management of the ‘AUSIT eBulletin’, which he helped set up via the Yahoo Groups service in the early 2000s with the hope of bringing AUSIT members closer.
David’s good humour is enjoyed by all who have had any personal contact with him.
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As time went by, the forum grew to include dozens of language-specific groups exchanging experience and advice on all many topics that concerned T/Is. David, as the moderator and administrator of this online forum, would offer prompt technical support to those who experienced IT issues, respond to questions about translation and the industry, and also post job opportunities when they came in.
When the translation service model provided in Australia shifted from in-house translators to contractors, and many T&I practitioners had to adapt to the reality of working in isolation, it was David and the eBulletin that held them together, providing them with a forum for exchanging ideas and a sense of belonging.
Unsurprisingly, when Yahoo decided to discontinue Yahoo Groups in 2019, it was again David who explored alternative services, and eventually facilitated the migration of AUSIT email working groups to Groups.io. He then managed the Groups.io discussions for the National Council and various AUSIT Committees until last year, when he stepped back from these tasks due to his declining health.
As a long-term active member of AUSIT, David’s good humour is enjoyed by all who have had any personal contact with him. He strikes fellow members as a humble and proactive person who is always in the background, ready to provide a solution as soon as a problem emerges. His knowledge of AUSIT and the T&I industry was second to none, so he was constantly relied upon as a memory bank for accurately retrieving details of past events.
As a talented polyglot and seasoned translator who worked in many of the less common languages, David was always generous with his time and advice, supporting colleagues who encountered language issues, translation difficulties or even business troubles. AUSIT Fellow Ludmila Berkis fondly remembers: ‘I got to know [David] a little better in the course of collaborating with him as a colleague-translator of less common languages such as Latvian (there were never many recognised Latvian translators in Australia), where documents are sometimes partly in one language and partly in another, as is commonly the case with many of the republics of the former Soviet Union.’
To his clients, David is a reliable translator whose responsiveness, efficiency and professionalism never fail to make an impression. While to those who hold different views from David, he is always the gentleman, acting with politeness and an open mind, willing to listen and understand.
To his clients, David is a reliable translator whose responsiveness, efficiency and professionalism never fail to make an impression. While to those who hold different views from David, he is always the gentleman, acting with politeness and an open mind, willing to listen and understand.
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