Sarah's Archives

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

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What to look for in a translation course

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If you are considering further study or qualifications in translation, then this little article will be right up your street! It’s been around a while, but is still very relevant: in it, Anthony Pym explains a conflict he found himself faced with given the recent explosion in courses offering training in CAT tools :

As a teacher, I want to convey the whole range of skills required by the labour market. And yet, I admit, my critical students have a point: when they sign up for translation, they should expect to translate, on the basic level of an interface between languages, the stuff of linguistics. So is translation competence really the same as it always was (as those students expect)? Or has it radically altered in the age of electronic tools (as the nature of my course would suggest)?

Pym then goes on to discuss four different models of translation competence, and basically concludes that while good CAT skills are undoutedly key to finding a job in the current market, it’s important that translator trainers remember that they are merely tools and don’t in themselves constitute a “translator competence”. Worth bearing in mind when reviewing those translation courses!

My view? Focus on getting your language and translation skills up to scratch, and keep an eye out for some hands-on sessions with different CAT tools too – the technical knowledge will follow. If you don’t remember a time before internet and email, chances are you’ll just wonder what all the fuss was about anyway … 🙂

Turn 'no' into a 'yes, but…'

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Shawn Wood over on Dumb Little Man* has some great ideas on how to say no without ever actually saying the word no. As a freelancer, saying no can be hard because you never know where your next job is going to come from, or indeed, whether it will come along at all. Shawn reckons that his way of saying no ensures you still come across with a positive and all-important can-do attitude, while still asserting yourself and controlling the situation. This round-about way of saying things may not suit everyone (it reminds me of my management consultancy days), but whether you chose to deploy it or not, it’s an increasingly important skill to master in today’s marketplace. Excellent advice for all freelance translators, newly established and long practising:

Five ways to say yes and never say no:

  • Yes. I can do this in your timeframe and in your budget.
  • Yes. I can do this in your budget but I am going to have to change the timeframe.
  • Yes. I can do this, but not in your timeframe or your budget. Let’s negotiate.
  • Yes. I can do this, but I do not think it is the best way. May I make suggestions?
  • Yes, I can have someone else do this for you.

* hat tip to Fortify Your Oasis – thanks Rowan

Forget translation sites, check out Web Worker Daily

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I’ve been reading lots of Web Worker Daily lately. If you’re serious about being a freelance translator, this blog will contain more useful information than all the translation sites in the world put together! (Oops, have I just shot myself in the foot with this recommendation?! No, just proved how genuinely I care for each and every one of my readers :)) Check it out, it’s great.

More on pricing

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I recently found this excellent article in Business Week about how translators can stay in business despite decreasing rates, etc. It’s an oldie (from 2004) but a goodie, and reinforces what I’ve said before about the importance of not competing on price alone. It’s in the form of a Dear Debbie column for small business owners, and the question is:

Q: My wife and I work as a team providing bilingual copywriting and translation services for the U.S. and Latin America. Most of our clients are PR agencies. We are finding that they are outsourcing their translation work to Latin America, where they can pay 5 cents a word, as opposed to the 12 cents that we charge. Should we shift our focus to clients not yet aware of freelance outsourcing over the Internet?

Even if you reckon you’ve heard it all before it’s worth clicking through for the advice, if only because it’s unusual to see a mainstream business journal address an issue specific to translation professionals in such a constructive way (you may have to ignore the slightly overdone heading though 🙂 ).

Are you a Grindhopper?

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Laura Vanderkam’s Grindhopping: Building A Rewarding Vareer Without Paying Your Dues is an interesting read if you’re considering moving into a freelance career to create the role that no one seems prepared to offer you.

Laura defines a grindhopper as someone who uses self-employment as way to bypass the years of slogwork that is often required to climb even a step up the ladder of many careers. She uses real life case studies, anecdotes, and labour statistics to turns the traditional school of thought upside down – the one that says you should put your time in when you’re young and wait until you’re established before striking out on your own. Most of these examples relate to more entrepreneurial style start-ups, but they contain many valuable lessons for anyone considering whether they should start out on their own as a freelance translator regardless of how many years of work experience you have behind you.

I guess what makes this different from any other book on entrepreneurs or self-employment is that it starts with the assumption that you have relatively few years of work experience under your belt. It also assumes that you are prepared to work hard for not very much money, and that like most Millenials, you’re looking for a bit more than a cubicle career and so are not setting out to conquer the world.

But the key distinguishing feature is that grindhoppers do not chose a route of self-employment simply for the sake of it. In fact, many of them re-enter the corporate world once they’ve spent a few years working in postions of their own creation. And as a result of working in a role with plenty of autonomy and real chances to stretch themselves, they usually re-enter at a higher level than if they’d stuck to the grind.

I was pretty relieved to read this as I’ve often wondered whether going freelance too young would spoil me forever, and I’d love to have read a bit more about how these grindhoppers cope with re-entering a workplace of someone else’s creation.

The book also offers some refreshing and genuinely useful advice on things like:

  • creating alternative revenue streams (i.e. moonlighting with panache)
  • networking (i.e what to do when you don’t have a mass of established business contacts)
  • minimising risk (i.e. how not to miss your rent/morgage payments)
  • keeping up your motivation levels (i.e. how to stay sane)

Most of all, I like the assertion that you need to be prepared to be judged 100% on results and how you deliver them. I subscribe to the idea that by allowing yourself to be distinguished in this way, you’ll never need to worry about being outsourced as you know you can deliver something no-one else can.

Of course, there are bits I don’t agree with too. For example, Vanderkam’s assertion that you should think about what you love so much that you’d do it for free, and then turn that into a career. Hmm. Maybe I’m revealing too much about myself when I say this, but there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING that I love so much I’d do it for free, every day of the week, 365 days of the year. So I’m not sure where that piece of advice leaves people like me.

There are also areas where I think she borders on the naïve. For example, her claims that the internet has abolished “all barriers” to self-employment just seem silly, and there is no discussion of the challenges created by this new, free-for-all style work culture, e.g. more competition, less face to face contact, etc.

But all in all, this is a great book. It makes an exciting and informative read for grindhoppers of all ages, or anyone interested in the motivations behind this new wave of freelancers.

The Great TM Debate

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“Which TM should I use?” It’s a question I often hear translators ask. But we’d be much better served if we asked ourselves what we needed a translation tool to do, and then worked backwards from there. That way, we know we are getting a tool that we’ll actually use and not leave sitting on our virtual shelf gathering cyberdust. Jeffrey Treem over at Inside the Cubicle put it nicely when he says:

… communicators need to be channel/tool agnostic – Stop getting hung up on names and technology and start with business goals and work backwards. Do not paint yourself into a corner where you need to fit the tools you are comfortable with into your work environment.

Hear, hear. (Of course, he was speaking about how companies are using social media as part of their communications strategy, but I reckon it’s relevant to technology adoption in any field.)

Thanks Jeffrey.

Something to celebrate… (and a little shameless self-promotion)

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Today I finally received the paper copies of my recently published article Translators and TM: An investigation of translators’ perceptions of translation memory adoption. It seems much more real to have the paper copies in my hand, even if it does mean its old news already 🙂 The article was based on research I carried out for my masters thesis in 2004, and preparing it for publication over several months in 2005/2006 with the help of my supervisor was a really fantastic experience. The whole peer-review process involved in academic publishing was a big eye-opener too!

You might spot me in this month’s ITI Bulletin too, if you’re really eagle-eyed!

Best blogs round-up: for translators

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Here’s a couple more to add to the pot. It’s a bit of a mixed bag this time (much like my metaphors). There are lots of great sites out there, but the exciting things about blogs is that they’re immediate and personal. They’re also a lot more interesting than static websites as they have the potential to become dialogues as you can chip in with a comment and add your tuppence worth.

The Masked Translator: fairly new as only started in February 2007, but is already looking to cut a dash through the translation blogosphere. I usually prefer to keep an eye on new blogs for a while before recommending them, but The Masked Translator has already covered lots of interesting topics that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere. Let’s hope it can keep tapping into those rarely discussed issues in an non-bitchy way, and without letting its masked status go to its head.

Language Realm blog*: a blog devoted to language, translation, interpreting, language learning and linguistics. So far so the same, but what makes this blog especially interesting is that Roger Chriss discusses the kind of day-to-day things that happen around and about the day of a translator but that still have an impact on our working lives (check out his Language Realm website for more static but still extremely informative info). So for example, there are posts in there about multi-language keyboards, about newly coined terms and best of all, about language learning for advanced learners. Something for everyone, but especially if you have Japanese or Chinese as a source language.

Lingua Franca: this is kind of a cheat as it’s actually a blog for a podcast which you can also listen to via your browser. Published every Saturday, this show runs for approx. 15 minutes and looks at all aspects of language through interviews and prepared talks with various experts who analyse a single topic of interest. The show is run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation so has an obvious bias to people and issues Down Under, but the topics discussed are relevent to anyone with an interest in the popular culture of English speaking countries.

Freelance Writing for Nonprofits: OK, another sideball but bear with me. Billed as a blog with tips and ideas on publications, marketing and PR, I reckon this baby has plenty of gems for the freelance translator too. Check it out and let me know what you think.

* UPDATE 08/09/07: My link to the Language Realm blog was actually incorrect (oops) and when I went back to doublecheck it, I found it’s been shut down. There does seem to be a new blog which can be linked to via the Language Realm website however, so I’ll keep my eye on that and may review that in my next blog round-up.

Naked Translations (aka The Naked Truth)

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This post was written in early 2007. There’s a postscript at the end:

So there’s a website called Naked Translations, and I’ve known it’s been there for, oh, several weeks now. That’s a long time in cyberspace. I first came upon it about a month after I changed my blogging handle to nakedtranslator. So what did I do? I ignored it. Tried to sweep it under the carpet, pretend like I’d never stumbled across it. Not exactly something to be proud of, and not at all professional, but there you have it.

You see, I was so delighted with myself when I came up with (what I thought was) the very original and witty nakedtranslator handle. I initially worried it might attract the kind of readership this particular blogger is not interested in attracting, but mostly I thought it summed up perfectly how I felt at the time. I’d just decided to give blogging a proper blast and I felt exposed, vulnerable and not quite sure why it had ever seemed like a good idea… but also kind of thrilled and liberated. So I hoped if I just ignored this more original contender then I wouldn’t ever have to face the fact that my original idea wasn’t so original after all.

But time and time again I find myself back at Naked Translations. Not deliberately, but via links in other people’s sites or discussion groups, or searches on translation-related topics that I find especially interesting. So not only has it obviously been around a lot longer than There’s Something About Translation (located at www.dillonslattery.com, and written by yours truly, the nakedtranslator), but it also makes for a fascinating read. So much so, that 2 months down the blogline, I just had to subscribe to its feed.

All in all though, I was pretty gutted. I’m uncreative in a lot of ways, and I just know I’ll never find another handle that sums me up in quite the same way. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and speaking to other people about it, and eventually decided that nakedtranslator was still different enough to hang on to without being unfair to the original (and excellent) Naked Translations.

All a bit long-winded, but I guess what I mean to say is check out Céline’s website. It’s great 🙂

Post script: May 2010: In the end, my conscience couldn’t let me do it. Despite my breezy assertions of how different nakedtranslator was to Naked Translations (really, what was I thinking?) I gradually phased out the nakedtranslator handle, although it did rear it’s ugly head again in early 2009 (mainly in initial form) as I tried on the hat of interviewer extraordinaire. Thank you Céline, for being so patient in the face of my embarrassing shortcomings as I’ve stumbled my way through building a brand online over the years. And for anybody who ever wondered why I trade under my own name instead of a business one, it’s because I’m too darn unoriginal to come up with anything better 🙂