Sarah's Archives

an archive of content from ≈ 2005 - 2015, relating to international business, translation, freelancing, and working online.

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Is Skype overrated for business use?

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UPDATE: One year on from writing this post and I’ve renewed my SkypePro service. I had no issues at all with the service in the year following this post, and while I still wouldn’t recommend relying on them 100%, I am impressed with the flexibility the service has offered me. Here’s hoping Skype have upped their game for good.

Skype is running an advertising campaign with a difference. They’ve kitted out Rebecca, their 26-year-old Australian travel nomad, with some mobile Skype gear. She has to remain in perpetual motion for 33 days while travelling around the world, using Skype to blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace her way into our hearts and minds. And she’s a copywriter, so we should expect some readable writing too (Twitter constraints aside).

Now, I know translators are a crazy bunch of early adopters when it comes to technology (ahem), so before anyone gets too excited, I feel it’s my duty to sound a cautionary note: Be sure you know what you are letting yourself in for before relying on Skype for your business needs – and always have a Plan B!

Let me explain. I’ve been using Skype in a non-work capacity since early 2006, but as a handy-to-have novelty, rather than a key part of keeping in touch. There were a couple of things I didn’t like about it in the early days which stopped me throwing myself whole-heartedly into the revolution. But hey, it was a reasonably cheap way of making calls to my many family members and friends overseas, and Skype never pretended to be a fixed landline replacement (you can’t use them to make emergency calls, for example).

Technology moves on, of course, so in view of my pending move to Australia in February this year, I decided to upgrade to the paid service to give it a more serious (read: business) try. I’d heard some horror stories, but I’d also spoken to a few people, including other translators, who use it in a work capacity to great success. I signed up for a package which allowed me to set up a fixed UK line-land number and a voicemail service in a couple of very quick and easy steps. Skype is not always the cheapest way to make or receive calls when you involve landlines or mobiles, so it wasn’t really about saving money (although that’s always welcome, of course). But I figured the benefits of having a local number for my clients to call would be enormous, especially as I’ve had a couple of jobs on the go over the move, and given the time change of 10 hours, a voicemail service was definitely a welcome service too. The set-up cost for this particular package was only about €20 a year. So far, so good.

A couple of months in and I have to say, I still have my reservations. Calls out (i.e. me making calls) are great – no complaints there. I’ll certainly continue to use Skype to make business and personal calls.

But the call-in service (i.e. me taking calls) is still not reliable enough for my liking. The fixed-line numbers are occasionally down and my voicemail is frequently out-of-service. And that’s just the times I’ve “caught” it. Realistically, I’ll probably keep the landline numbers until my subscription runs out, given the lack of alternatives that suit my needs, but I’ll be withdrawing the numbers from circulation in the meantime. And I definitely won’t be having them printed onto my new business cards.

I’m not complaining, mind you – I was aware of the pitfalls before I signed up and I knew not to rely on their non-existent customer service to bail me out either. It’s just that personally, I’d rather not have the hassle of wondering if it is or isn’t, so I’ll do without until the next best thing comes along. Fair enough. With all this in mind, my little trial has not had too much of an impact on my business either – I’d given clients some other non-Skype numbers to reach me just in case, and we tend to communicate mainly via email anyway.

So is Skype worth giving a go within your business? Definitely – in fact, you’d be crazy to ignore it. But just don’t say you weren’t warned.

I’d love to hear about your Skype experiences – please leave a comment and let me know.

HT to WebWorkerDaily for the Skype Nomad story.

Beware the dreaded office-worker disease :)

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… and no, it’s not RSI. How many of these do you find yourself suffering from?!


I’m not sure I agree with the diagnosis, mind you – I suspect they’re ailments common to all office workers in this day and age!

H/T to an anonymous comment on Rowan Manahan’s excellent Fortify Your Oasis blog.

RSS readers may have to click through to view, but trust me, it’s worth it.

The mixed blessing of regular gigs

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Translation jobs which repeat or need regular attention are a great source of regular income. Indeed for many translators, especially those establishing themselves as freelancers, they are the holy grail of translation jobs and something to aspire to. That’s all well and good, but more experienced translators might want to consider this advice getting sucked into a repeat-gig rut:

…if you’re not careful, you could be accepting a regular gig for the wrong reason—and create work that will do nothing for your freelance career.

The prospect of regular money is always very tempting, especially for freelancer who has nothing to fall back on. That makes it easy for freelancer to accept a regular gig only for the money. A contract worker trapped in such a situation will find himself going through the motions, finishing the work for the sake of getting things done.

There’s nothing wrong with meeting deadlines or working promptly through your pending items. But if you find yourself working solely for the paycheck, you’ll probably do some sub-standard (by your standards) work, for the sake of having something to submit. This does nothing for your freelance career, because you will not be pushing the limits of your creativity, while prospective clients who see what you’re doing will wonder if you have anything distinctive to offer.

Excellent advice from Rico over at Contract Worker. Of course, that also means that the sourcing-work roundabout never ends… 🙂

The value of professional organisations: Another view

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When it comes to freelancing it’s always worth considering a range of opinions, because each freelance experience is as different as the person who has it. So, as it’s basically the polar opposite to mine, I was really interested to read The Masked Translator’s advice to start-up translators regarding professional associations recently. We’ve clearly had very different experiences here and I don’t agree with all the views expressed in this post. In particular, the following point stood out for me:

If you’re just starting out and you want to be a translator, be sure you don’t take peoples’ advice too seriously without analyzing their motives in giving you the advice. [my emphasis]

Now, I’m all for assessing the value of advice and weighing things up to suit your own particular circumstances. And there’s no doubt that it would be pretty foolish to accept all claims made by vendors, for example, without digging a little deeper (caveat emptor applies to B2B too). However, I’m not (yet?) quite as cynical as the MT, so would probably modify this statement slightly: instead of getting hung up why someone is giving you advice, accept their advice and try to analyse the translation profession from their perspective instead – what is the reasoning behind their beliefs? Why might they feel the way they do? Taking this tack might mean you gain a better understanding of the industry overall and maybe even feel less bitter about it too.

For example, when I first started mixing with translators with a view to going freelance, at first it felt like a lot of translators I spoke to were trying to put me off. Many said there was little or no work due to globalisation and a flood of “bad” translators, that it was no longer possible to earn a decent living because of new translation technologies, or that you had to have many years of inhouse experience under your belt before going freelance. It would have been easy to draw a range of conclusions based on all of this – translation is a bad area to go into, translators are unsupportive, translators don’t want more translators in the profession, I won’t be able to earn an living, and so on.

But I didn’t really believe that any of these conclusions were true – partly because of my own sense of cynicism, but also partly because it just didn’t make sense to me. Surely globalisation would mean there were more opportunities for translators, not fewer? If there were so many “bad” translators out there, couldn’t I differentiate myself by being “good”? Couldn’t translation technologies benefit me as a translator too, as well as agencies and clients? and so on.

So I started to think about what must be happening to make them say and apparently genuinely believe these things, and this helped me get something from even the most negative of advice. Like this:

Yes, new technologies have meant a massive change in the way translators work on a daily basis – but as a newcomer to the profession, I don’t know how it was before, so I can more easily accept these changes. Yes, it used to be that the only route to freelancing was via many years of inhouse experience – but the world of work is changing and there are no traditional routes or roadmaps into anything anymore. And yes, globalisation is having an impact on how translators work and interact with clients – but I’m comfortable with this kind of change and believe I can make it work for me… etc. You get the idea.

Because whether we like to admit it or not, the chances are that any person who helps you has something to gain from it. And why shouldn’t they? Maybe it’s money, or an inflated sense of self-importance, or just a warm fuzzy feeling or a sense of having paid it forward. You might never know the reason, so why beat yourself up about it? Why not accept the advice that’s being offered and, instead of wondering why someone has tried to help you, put your mind to trying to understand *why* that person believes what they do instead.

Putting aside our differences of opinion around professional associations, I think The Masked Translator raises some other very good points in this post. So I’m going to finish with these words of advice, which are worth bearing in mind the next time you get advice:

Being a translator isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of profession. Some freelance translators work only half time, some work way more than full time. Some work from home, some work from rented office space, some work from the beach or the café. Some only translate big projects like novels or 300 page technical manuals. Some only do small projects like diplomas and certificates. Some work in-house for companies or translation agencies. Some work on a contractual basis, doing documents for the government or a research institution. Some just dabble in translating poetry from languages they don’t even really speak. There are as many ways to be a translator as you can think of.

Here’s to being the same, but different!

Not just acceptable in the 80s

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Remember these?

teledex.jpg

I was charmed to find one just like the burgundy at a car boot sale this weekend, and amazed to find no-one had written in it. Wow, I thought. Imagine being part of a family for, what? at least twenty five years – pre-mobile phones, pre-online address books – and never being used. I ignored the funny looks from my in-laws and bought it, because it reminded me of one we had at home when I was a child. And retro is so in now, right?

This morning, I went down to my local newsagents / stationary store to look for a cartridge pen to replace the one I seem to have cracked (nothing fancy, just the cheap plastic ones you can find in any WHSmiths, Tesco or Woolworths in the UK). I couldn’t see any, and when I asked the lady behind the counter, she looked puzzled for a minute, then said she didn’t think they were made anymore.

Then I saw the neat stack of teledexes on the shelf behind her. They were exactly the same as the eighties-style one I’d bought at the car boot sale. No, this isn’t a dusty old supply shore, it’s a fresh, modern newsgagency / stationers. They were going for $18 – clearly, a key item in any Australian SOHO.

At least I only paid $2 for my teledex… but I’m still looking for a cartridge pen.

The importance of priming yourself for answers

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I’ve hinted at my attempts to Get Organised using a (carefully edited) array of gadgets, both paper and virtual. Here’s a great perspective on this from the ever-lucid Communicatrix.

I wish—oh, how I wish—that there was one answer in one book, and that all I had to do was find that book. Instead, the maps to your map are in the books. Look at that person’s journey, and see what you can find in her struggles or his mishaps or their lightbulb moments that makes you tingly. The truth comes at us sideways, usually, and when we least expect it. Our job, I increasingly believe, is to prime ourselves for reception…and reflection…and synthesis.

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How to move countries, keep your freelance business running and live to tell the tale

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Six tips on keeping a business running while moving countries (and continents):

1. Remember that instant internet access is not an automatic right in every developed country. Even when you’re willing to pay handsomely for the privilege. Finding yourself unexpectedly “internet-less” can be a source of enormous stress when you’re trying to maintain a modicum of professionalism during a potentially turbulent period in your personal life (a clash we freelancers find ourselves grappling with far more frequently than we like to admit, I’m sure). And it’s easy to get caught up in the frustration, which doesn’t solve anything. You’ll know this is happening to you if you find yourself starting thoughts with, “It’s hardly the back of beyond. Surely, in this day and age, I’ll be able to just…?”. Surely nothing, my friend. The only way forward is to accept it, get over it, and get on with it. And make sure you plan for it the next time (bearing in mind point 2, below).

2. Be prepared to be totally unprepared. No matter how much you plan, the unexpected will still catch you out. Thankfully I learnt this lesson long before my move Down Under.

3. Forget fancy productivity tools and go back to basics. Pen, small notebook – it’s not pretty, but you’ll be glad of it when you find you’re still living out of rucksack two months after your move date. (Yes, you heard me. I lived out of a rucksack for two months 🙂 ).

4. Forget getting things done, because you won’t. If you’ve chosen to keep working while you move, then focus number one has to be work. You’ll be doing well to do much else beyond that. Even the most basic tasks take so much longer without the knowledge that comes from being familiar with your environs. Just get the basics sorted (internet, place to live… in that order) and don’t worry too much about the little things (beds, cups, curtains, blog posts, etc). There’ll be plenty of time to sort that out later.

5. They might speak your language, but it doesn’t mean you won’t find things “foreign”. Don’t let that scare you! And I mean this with all clichés and stereotypes aside. As an Irish woman, I thought I’d worked this out after 6 years in London. I had moved to the UK almost on a dare, with very little real knowledge of the country or its culture. (And it was very hard for a long time.) In contrast, I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for with my move to Australia. I’ve had close ties to a certain special Australian for ten years now, and have made several trips out here, including an eight-month working stint in 2001. But still, it surprises me how Australian society feels more foreign to me than any European country I’ve ever lived in. Language really is only the tip of the iceberg.

My advice? There’s nothing for it but to pack a set of open eyes, ears and mind, take a deep breath in and strap yourself in for the ride. Another blogger I know captures this with great wit and intelligence over here, where he blogs about his experience as a Brit on an MBA in the US.

6. Have fun! Moving countries and starting again from scratch is an invaluable albeit extreme way to gain perspective on all aspects of your personal and professional life. Keeping your freelance business running while you relocate may seem stressful, but it’s well worth it. It creates a starting point in your new life, which adds structure, opens doors and acts as an anchor to what it was you liked about the “old you”. Best of all, you’ll remember what you like about your job, and why you wanted it to be part of your new life. You may even find you enjoy working more than you have for a long time. So don’t be in too much of a hurry to get straight back into the same set-up you had before you moved, either in work or in play. Instead, make the time to stop and smell the frangipanis.

Take it all in. Make the effort to capture your experiences, impressions and feelings whatever way you can. You’ll be glad you did when you have time to make sense of it some day, maybe from your rocking chair on the verandah.