
Gode Medal: Georganne Weller
Outgoing ATA President David Rumsey presented the ATA Gode Medal to Georganne Weller at the association’s Annual Meeting of All Members on October 27, 2017. The award is given in recognition of an individual or institution for outstanding service to the translation and interpreting professions.
Georganne has been a conference and legal interpreter (Spanish/Portuguese>English), educator, author, researcher, and staunch advocate for the interpreting and translation professions for more than 30 years.
Through her interests in translator and interpreter education, she has been instrumental in the development of numerous training programs, including the design of a master’s degree program at the Universidad Anáhuac in Mexico. She has also lectured and published extensively in the fields of sociolinguistics, language politics, bilingualism, and indigenous languages at regional, national, and international levels.
Over the course of her career, Georganne has championed the preservation of Mexico’s indigenous languages As the director of linguistic policies at the Mexican National Institute for Indigenous Languages, she has promoted professionalization, training, and the certification of interpreters in these languages—work she continues to this day.
Georganne’s accomplishments have had a tremendous impact on the translation and interpreting professions. ATA is honored to have her as a Gode Medal recipient.
She was my simultaneous interpreter instructor at University of Delaware back in the early ’80s. A great teacher–respectful, high standards, and utterly friendly and approachable. It took a while, but she gave me the confidence to go on to (eventually) be a translator (sadly, not interpreter).
I hope she remembers Klondike Kate’s fondly and that cohort of wannabe interpreters.