A Petition Asking The Legislative Assembly Of Ontario To Repeal The 1989 Atio Act Is Set To Shake Up The Translation Industry In Ontario

Ottawa, Ontario, June 5, 2015 (Newswire.com) - The effort aims to break down the monopoly created by ATIO’s conduct and lack of oversight

A petition has been launched on the popular website change.org asking the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Ontario to suspend or repeal the Association of Translators and Interpreters Act, 1989 which has given the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Ontario (ATIO) the power to grant the title “certified” to translators in Ontario.

Over the years, many candidates for certification voiced their dissatisfaction with ATIO’s certification procedures. They claimed that ATIO has failed to fulfil many of its objectives as stipulated by the 1989 Act by creating a monopoly whereby few certified members reap all the benefits while other members (candidates) are left with no rights or benefits.

A year ago, a group of translators lodged a complaint with ATIO concerning its unfair and biased certification system. ATIO sought to distance itself from the whole process by claiming that it is the Canadian Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters Council (CTTIC) who is responsible for the certification exam and not ATIO. CTTIC, which is a corporation co-founded by ATIO, claims that there is nothing wrong with their procedures and therefore there is no need to make any changes to the current testing system.

ATIO/CTTIC certification exams have been of poor quality and riddled with grammatical and spelling mistakes. CTTIC maintains that this is normal as translators encounter such mistakes as part of their daily professional work.

Commenting on the system, Maroun Sayah, a seasoned translator and a candidate for certification since 2012 said, “To dodge any criticism and absolve itself from any responsibility or accusation of creating a monopoly, ATIO has assigned the task of administering the “Certification” exam to CTTIC. With this carefully-crafted certification scheme, ATIO can claim that it has nothing to do with the Certification exam because it is done by another “independent” entity.”

Yet, the conflict of interest clearly persists as the few privileged ATIO “Certified Translators” are the same persons who are marking the exams of “Certification” on behalf of this supposedly “independent” entity.

As a result, this state of affairs renders passing the certification exams next to impossible in some language pairs. As the public records available on ATIO’s website show, the success rate in the Arabic – English “certification exam” has been zero for more than 10 years. It is worth noting that ATIO has certified only two Arabic translators in 14 years through a method called “on dossier certification”. In this method, one needs to obtain the recommendation of three ATIO insiders (certified translators) to get accepted. With a 0% success rate in the certification exam, the issues of conflicts of interest and the creation of barriers to entry are crystal clear.

 “ATIO’s system is meant to keep you from getting certified no matter how much experience you have. The system is all built around protecting the interests of the already “Certified” translators and keeping candidates as candidates indefinitely and in a flagrant contradiction to its Articles of Association that stipulate that all candidates for certification have to get certified within five years. “I have been a candidate since 2008, and some of us have been candidates for more than 10 years, and I do not see any hope of getting certified under the current flawed system. So we urge the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to act swiftly,” says Mariam Darwiche, a veteran Arabic translator who has worked in the translation industry for more than 15 years with national and international private and governmental bodies, and is a fully accredited court interpreter here in Canada and the US.

Ayman Hammamieh, an experienced translator who has his work published in many of the leading media outlets around the world and who has been a candidate since 2013 said, “From the outset, ATIO tried to mask the issues, prolong the negotiations, water down our demands, wiggle out of any responsibility, and bog us down in details. For these reasons, we did not have any progress with ATIO after 12 months of active discussions.”

“I think it is about time we embark on overhauling ATIO to make it more inclusive. We must break down this system where we have a 2-tier membership with the certified members enjoying all the rights and benefits and with candidates having almost no rights at all - except the right to pay their CAD 400 annual membership fees to ATIO. We are determined to make this organization more transparent, accountable, and representative. We know our cause is just. ATIO was founded with the intent to represent us all, to be OUR association and our voice and we intend to make it as such.”

This group of translators is looking forward to initiate a major overhaul of ATIO as a result of this petition and plan to step up their efforts in order to, either force ATIO to comply with its obligations as stipulated by the 1989 ATIO Act, or have the Act repealed.