No, not the Sheryl Crow song, the Newsweek/Daily Beast Column. Maybe I just love reading about other people’s mistakes, but the last-page “My Favorite Mistake” essay is my favorite part of the redesigned Newsweek. Written by famous people of various flavors, these columns just reinforce the fact that whether it’s Madeleine Albright wearing her “three monkeys” pin for a meeting with Vladimir Putin, Ricki Lake doing online dating or Dennis Quaid using cocaine, we are, as my yoga teacher would say, all on the path.
This week’s essay, by violinist Joshua Bell, particularly grabbed my attention. Although I’m not a rabid fan of Bell’s music, he’s the subject of one of my favorite newspaper articles ever, Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pearls Before Breakfast, in which Weingarten chronicles Bell’s incognito performance in the Washington DC subway at rush hour. Bell’s “My Favorite Mistake” column tells the story of his first international violin competition performance, in which he flubbed the opening of his piece and decided to stop, apologize to the audience and start over rather than soldiering on through the performance. This got me thinking that we translators and interpreters, who by nature thrive on being right about everything, could also benefit from hauling our favorite mistakes out of the archives. Here’s mine. I told this story during the “Smart Business” panel at the Boston ATA conference so it’s not totally fresh, but this is its first time in writing!
I started freelancing in 2002, right after my daughter was born. I had a Master’s in French and had done a translation internship, but I really had no clue about the conventions of the translation industry. Plus, I was very, very hungry for work because I knew that my goal of working from home to be with my daughter was completely dependent on my success as a freelancer: if I didn’t make it, it was off to full-time daycare for her and off to a cubicle for me.
One of the first assignments that I received was from an agency, a very simple birth certificate translation, maybe 100 words total. I think that my minimum charge at the time was $30, and the agency didn’t give me any special instructions, just asked me to “translate the birth certificate.” So there I am at my computer, thinking that this is the easiest $30 I’ve ever made. I mean, for 100 words, why even put the translation in a Word document? Why not just type it into an e-mail to save the client some time dealing with the attachment. Obviously the missing link here is my lack of knowledge of the conventions of translating an official document: the big time investment isn’t translating the 50 or 100 words, it’s re-formatting the translation to look as much as possible like the original. So off I go, typing the translation into an e-mail and firing it off to the client, feeling really proud of myself (aren’t I efficient?!).
I have to say that the client was fairly understanding; probably more understanding than I would have been had I been on the receiving end of that e-mail. In any case I think they paid me the $30 we had agreed on, which was more than generous on their part since they ended up hiring another translator to do the job. But when I think back on this Favorite Mistake, I think that it really helped me. Obviously I learned something about official document translation, but I also learned a few larger lessons:
- Knowing how to translate and knowing how to run a freelance business are completely different things; to succeed as a freelancer, you need to know both.
- Try as we might to forget it, we were all new, inexperienced freelancers once. Maybe someone else’s stupid mistake wasn’t quite as stupid as mine, but we’ve all made them.
- When translation newbies ask uninformed questions (Why doesn’t my TM tool spit out a translation after I type something into it? How much do I have to pay to get work from an agency? I charge 2 cents a word, is that about the industry standard? I’m looking for a business that’s easy to run in my spare time, would conference interpreting be good?), it’s hard not to be condescending, but it’s important to at least try. Whenever I answer a question like these, I think back to my “this is the easiest $30 I ever made!!” moment and try to give a thorough and non-condescending answer. Although these questions (and my birth certificate mistake) are completely off the mark, I also think it’s fair to ask how someone who’s never worked as a translator would know that TM and MT are two different things, or that agencies don’t charge up-front fees, or that the highest-paid freelancers make 40 or 50 cents a word, or that conference interpreters go to school for years聽 just to learn the basics of the job.
Readers, any other Favorite Mistakes out there?
My favorite mistake as a beginner was to rely on the rates found at price-dumping websites like Proz. Such sites are very misleading because most experienced translators don’t publish their rates (I have to admit that with the exception of my absolute minimum rate, I don’t publish them either), so the only information you find comes from the peanut monkeys or from the low-paying agencies. And some translators do indeed react with condescension as soon as anybody whispers their low rates. But how would they ever find out if nobody told them?
So, whenever I get a chance to talk to “newbies” about their rates or sites like Proz, I’ll be happy to do so. Someone should learn from my mistakes after all. 馃檪
OK, here’s my embarrassing moment:
In the early 90s, when I had just started freelancing, I was asked to translate a letter and the instructions were, “please make sure everything is translated, headers and footers and all – except names of course!” I thought I understood the joke. After all, who would dream of translating “Pedro de la Fuente” as “Peter of the Fountain”!
I diligently translated everything else and kept Pedro sounding nice and Spanish. When I delivered the translation (by hand, of course, no e-mail in those days), the project manager had a quick look at the letter and looked up at me and said, “You’ve translated the address at the top of the letter. Since when are postmen bilingual?”
Needless to say I’ve never translated an address again…
I’m one of the newbies still making business mistakes, and I am SO glad I am starting out in the internet era— blogs are fantastic for helping me at every stage of building my translation business. I can translate, but does that necessarily mean I can write a compelling quote email? Heck no!
Thanks for understanding!
Before we had the handy-dandy TO3000 invoicing software, we managed to send the wrong invoice to a client. Everything was wrong — company name, project, amount — everything. That’s because instead of starting from a fresh template, we based this invoice on a previous invoice and somehow managed to keep ALL the wrong info in there. Ouch. The client was very understanding, and we were mortified to say the least. The awesome part of this story is that they are still our client to this day. 馃檪
A very interesting blog post Corinne and I think the point you make about “having to start somewhere” is very valid.
I started freelancing just before the Internet came into widespread use and took on a job that was beyond my capabilities. I spent ages in the library researching the topic from an ancient book (it was property law) and thought telling the agency that they had been unable to reach me on the phone (it was the days before mobiles too) because I was in the library researching the subject matter made me sound very diligent. I still cringe at the thought.
Oh my. I am just starting as a freelancer, and I find it quite difficult to avoid mistakes and in a general manner, confusion (marketing, rates, communication). At this point, I feel so dependent on potential clients…(“What do your translators usually charge?…hahha…). Hey, how am I supposed to know that 0.07/word is very low, even when you’re not experienced? Thanks god I found blogs like Thoughts on Translation or La marmite du traducteur!
Great blog, Corinne!
My naive mistake: I sent off a long translation to a client the day before leaving for France on holiday but forgot to get acknowledgement of receipt. Half way down the motorway to Antibes, my mobile phone rings and it’s my client: “Where’s the translation?” Panic stations: can I call up neighbour who has key and ask him to resend? No, he is 80 and still thinks in pounds shillings and pence, let alone use a computer. Fly home quickly to resend? No, miles from any airport. Fortunately end client is understanding and can wait a week. I have never sent off a file without getting a return receipt since. (Turned out afterwards that I HAD sent the email – no idea why it didn’t arrive at client.)
It’s not a mistake as such, but it makes a good story:
I was asked to translate a web page and the only thing they provided was the URL (never, ever accept such a thing). I was also instructed to send translation in a Word document in three columns, mimicking the look and feel of the Web page, so that the Web developer would know what to copy and paste where (waste of time for both developer and me).
Outcome: the client contact provided a URL that did not contain the most updated files. I got paid anyway, but my contact’s boss was so upset that he punished her by asking her to redo the translation.
Thanks everyone for sharing your favorite mistakes too! It takes a lot of courage to put them out in public, but in the end I think that we all benefit, if only by reinforcing the fact that we’ve all been there!
Really enjoyed your posting and will RT it to others. I am a PR professional, not a translator, but I related to your post in two fun ways. First, I also was desperate to freelance so I could be the primary caregiver for my kids (after my third was born…I worked FT out of the house betore that). Second, my favorite mistake was word related and early in my career. I wrote what I thought was a bang-up proposal for a new, big client. Very proud of it. But I hurried too much. In doing spell check, I managed (I don’t know how), to take the ‘l’ out of all references to ‘public’, so the word that was left in the document was a bit obscene! I didn’t realize it until I was sitting across the table from the client as he read it; embarrassing!
Hi Rebecca and thanks for your comment! Yes, I think that *eliminating those embarrassing words* from the electronic dictionary is a good lesson for every freelancer. I think that this would be many people’s “favorite mistake”: I used to work at a Sacred Heart school, and I can’t tell you how many cover letters we received (from job-seekers), addressed to “Scared Heart.” Honorable mention to the student who cited the great civil rights reformer “Martian Luther King” as her personal hero 馃檪 Thanks for the PR take on this issue!