Sarah's Archives

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

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Time to chuck in the day job?!

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Oh grrrr-eat. Memo to self: write a blog on how rubbish and potentially self-serving these quizzes are 🙂

You Aren’t a Natural Entrepreneur

But you could be an entrepreneur with some work.
You’ve got the vision and guts to make it happen.
You just need a little more practice in the business world.
Find out what you truly love to do, and the money will follow.
Are You a Natural Entrepreneur?

But a prize to the first self-styled entrepreunarial or job-searching blogger who claims to have got this result 😀 :

You Are a Natural Employee

You definitely aren’t cut out for running your own business.
For you, a paycheck is just a means to an end.
You rather punch a clock and not think about what you’re doing.
Risking everything for more money is not worth it to you.

Integrating our real life and virtual networks

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How exciting – as if train travel in France wasn’t glamorous enough, they’ve now come up with a way to meet real people along the way too. A great development in the move towards integrating our real-life and virtual networks.

But would this work in good old Blighty? I just don’t think it would measure up. Nursing a paper cup of luke-warm tea on the draughty London – Birmingham Silverlink train service, or knocking back an espresso on the Paris – Lyon TGV – I know where I’d rather have my real-life social networking encounter!

If you think translation is expensive…

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I love this quote, which I found over at Rowan Manahan’s Fortify your Oasis:

“If you think competence is expensive, try incompetence.”
(From a training brochure)



I can see myself paraphrasing this to clients in future – something like, “If you think translation is expensive, try a bad translation…” 🙂 Very in line with the kind of client education stuff that Chris Durban preaches.

Payscale

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I signed up for Payscale.com to get a free profile of the salaries and conditions of a translator employed inhouse in the UK. Thought it might be interesting to see if I’d made the right choice in going freelance 🙂

Payscale.com works by asking a couple of basic questions, then drawing conclusions based on what it claims is the largest database of online employee salary data in the world. Despite being an American site, I was initially impressed that included UK data too.

I was pretty disappointed with the results at first glance however, especially when I discovered that they were based on a tiny sample of only 3 people. After thinking about it a bit though, I realised that the site still had plenty going for it.

The three translators sampled earn £18,609, £22,375 and £27,560 respectively. All work in London. Based on this, a translator with an MA and 4 years of experience was quoted an average salary of £23,600. (So I won’t be quitting the freelance work anytime soon then…)

This is obviously a massive generalisation given there was no mention of working languages, etc. etc. but it would be hasty to dismiss it entirely. A quick job search shows that this is about average, if not a little optimistic, at least for inhouse translators based in the UK and working into English (out of English are more in demand and have higher earning potential as a result; the same way a native English speaker would earn more working inhouse in their soure language country).

Best of all, you can see the sanitised profiles of the three professionals, which gives an interesting if rather brief glimpse into the kinds of companies these professionals work for. The translator on the highest salary actually works for a media monitoring company and gets paid an hourly rate for overtime on top of their basic pay, so this may explain the higher salary.

I’ll definitely check back in a few months to see if this sample has increased.

Your CV says a thousand words

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While I’ve not yet had the good fortune of being involved in recruiting translators, I’ve made a point of examining as many translator CVs as I possibly could over the past 5 years. When I first considered becoming a freelance translator, I spent hours and hours surfing websites of translation companies, going to the About Us pages to glean what information I could about the people running the company. Then I moved on to translation communities such as Translators’ Cafe or ProZ, where I found I could download CVs of literally hundreds of translators.

Now, bear in mind that most freelance translators first contact their clients by email these days, especially when first starting out. Remember too that our clients may not be in a position to assess our language abilities, and you may start to understand the method behind my madness. Quite simply, a CV is to a freelance translator what a headshot is to a model.

So I’d keep the ones I especially liked, making adjustments to the format of my own CV in light of these. I made lists of the areas I thought I might want to move into in the future, and wrote notes to my future self, “Keep the references to XYZ to a minimum!”, or “DO NOT do this unless you want to look like an oddball!”.

I did all this for several reasons – to get an better idea of the routes other translators had taken to get into the profession, to understand how other people sold themselves and to see what I was up against. Mostly though, I did it because I’m quite nosey and I got a bit of a kick out of it 🙂

Several years in and I still occasionally review my CV hall of fame, or go on the hunt for a few more. (Of course I call it a “business profile” now, but it’s much the same thing). But one thing that still surprises me is many translators’ apparent lack of regard for the things that really matter to their clients.

Rowan Manahan, aka The Irish Independant’s Career Doctor, had a very interesting post over at Fortify Your Oasis recently. He reckons that while many people appear to understand the concept of fine-tuning a job application to the needs of the recruiter, very few actually have the EQ (as oppsoed to the IQ) to adjust their behaviour to reflect this understanding. I think this is also applies to freelance translators and the CVs (or business profiles) they send out to potential clients.

Most translators, especially those starting out, will be selling their services to agencies. These agencies tend to be small businesses with a handful of employees. They’re used to getting a lot of CVs by email from translators all over the world, many of whom will be willing to work for rates a lot lower than you can afford. And as Jason Alba puts it, these people “already have a full-time job … where are they going to fit in the time to personally respond to 200+ unsolicited non-matches each day??”

So why make it difficult for them? There are only a few key things things that a translation agency needs to know before they decide to put you on their books. These are as follows (more or less in order of importance):

  1. your full contact details
  2. your mother tongue, including the variation of language if relevant, your working languages and the direction in which you translate. (Your nationality has no bearing on your language skills, and is of no relevance if you are applying for home work as a freelancer!)
  3. your areas of expertise, relevant to the areas the agency works in
  4. any translation-related services you offer e.g. translation, proofreading, editing, voice-overs, transcription
  5. affiliations or memberships of professional associations
  6. your qualifications and the countries in which you gained them (full titles in their original language – no creative translations of degrees. A Maîtrise does not equal a Diplom does not equal a Masters, and translation agencies know this!)
  7. your translation related experience, grouped according to relevant skill set rather than a chronological list
  8. your rates

So do them a favour, and let them know that you know what they’re looking for. They can always get back to you if they’re really that interested in your hobbies, or the exact dates you were employed on that holiday campsite in France.

You are as many persons as the languages you speak!

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I’ve just spotted some great quotes from a discussion going on over at Proz:

 

My own experience and the previous posts remind me of an old Hungarian saying: ‘You are as many persons as the languages you speak’. I came across a similar Slovak saying recently…‘The more languages you know, the more of a person you are.’…
[Elizabeth Rudin, 2006: my emphasis]

http://www.proz.com/post/299183#299183

Read the rest of the discussion on what it’s like to have different “personalities” when you speak another language here.

 

Websites for Translators

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I recently attended two training sessions run by the West Midlands Group of the ITI – one by Nick Rosenthal from Salford Translations on Sustainable Customer Relationships, and the other by Vernon Blackmore from Ambit New Media on Websites for Translators. Excellent stuff, even if I did miss a very exciting rugby match on Saturday when my radio couldn’t get reception on the train home…

Websites for Translators

Vernon gave us an excellent run down on what exactly is involved in getting a website up and running. As the second session of the day, I didn’t envy Vernon his task – it was already clear that we were a bit of a motley crew of participants with varying degrees of internet knowledge, from those who had already established professional websites to those who hadn’t yet mastered the features of a Google search. However, he really managed to hit the nail on the head.

Vernon offered practical advice and useful tips, stressing, for example, the importance of retaining control of content on your site so you can still use the text and images if you ever decide to host it somewhere else. He also touched on how to get your hands on good quality, royalty-free images and outlined the pros and cons of buying a CMS outright vs licensing it. Vernon was refreshingly upfront about cost on all the options he discussed, and despite being in the business of web design himself, his advice was admirably impartial, not at all salesy and very valuable as a result.

I especially liked the way Vernon described a “spectrum” of options available to freelance translators interested in establishing their web presence. He explained that where you stand on this spectrum depends on the resources you are willing and/or able to commit (i.e. time, money and knowledge of web design). This was such a realistic assessment of the differing circumstances that us freelancers find ourselves in, and each person in that room could have had a professional website up and running by Monday as a result. (In fact, WMG are thinking of running a follow up session for participants to discuss the progress they’ve made following the day, testimony to the power of both speakers)

Vernon reenforced Nick’s message when he reminded us that the aim of a website should not be to bring in new business, but to authenticate your other marketing efforts. Like Nick, he also thought it valuable to use images of yourself on your site, to add “warmth” and to help your clients visualise the person behind the HTML. Now, while I agree that clients are attracted by a relationship and not just a service, the jury is still out on the value of personal pics as far as I’m concerned. I think I’ve been scarred by hearing the amount of ridicule that was heaped onto translators who dared show their face on their marketing material. (It wasn’t unheard of to have those pictures attached to the office notice board for an impromptu game of darts or pin the moustache on the translator…)

Knowledge is power, but only if we can see a way to apply it in our daily lives. Many techies pitch training sessions to impress rather than to enable, maybe with the notion that this will spur us on to research the area a bit more (or give up and call in the professionals). I’ve left many sessions more painfully aware of what I don’t know rather than what I do, but not this one. Now if that’s not a great way to build client loyalty, I don’t know what is!


How big do you have to be to be running a business??

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Following on from a previous post, check out an exchange I had with my other half (OH) recently:

Me: Just because I don’t commute doesn’t mean I have more free time than you – I’m busy trying to establish my own business!!
OH: Give over, you’re not running a business, you’re freelance!

Hmmm… so what am I? I’m clearly self employed, that bit’s fine. And up until now I’d always thought of myself as a small business owner, mostly because I like how it sounds, but also because I carry out many of the day-to-day tasks required by businesses of all sizes. But at what point does a freelancer actually run their own business? Does being freelance overlap 100% with being a business owner? What about say, a freelance IT specialist who accepts a 6 month contract working inhouse, and engages a third party to carry out all their billing and other “business” tasks? Are they business owners too??