Japanese translation here
The Board is once again planning to hold its annual meeting for all TIFI members, which we've held for the past couple of years around October. (Recordings of last year's meetings remain available on the Members-Only section of focusing.org.) These annual meetings give us a chance to let you know about us and our work, and for us to get to know some of you better. This year the meeting is being scheduled for November, so please watch for an announcement as November approaches. We'd love to see you there!
The Board and the International Leadership Council (ILC) are continuing to review documents describing the two bodies, to see if these documents still adequately describe our various functions and connections. The ILC invited the Board to send a Board member to attend its meetings in an effort to increase connection and understanding. A member of ILC already attends Board meetings every other month, which has been enjoyable and enriching for us.
Following its usual business agenda at the August meeting, the Board had several Coordinators (Salvador Moreno from Mexico, Astrid Schillings from Germany, Ceci Burgos from Argentina, and Beatrice Blake from the USA) meet with us for a second conversation regarding the challenge of automated translation of the TIFI website. (We had a conversation with a different group of Coordinators a few weeks ago.) The conversation began with the observation from the first meeting that it is sometimes useful to use the phrase “Gendlin’s Focusing” in lieu of simply "Focusing." Another idea which emerged from this second meeting was to create a glossary of specialized terms used in Focusing to be posted on focusing.org. It was suggested that providing the meanings and contexts on the webpage might help search engines, and might train artificial intelligence to recognize instances of our particular uses of these words and phrases.
The Board is grateful for the shared insights into challenges and solutions gained from years of personal experience of human translators to inform TIFI’s current challenge with automated translation.