This is a guest post by my colleague and friend, French to English translator Karen Tkaczyk. Thanks to Karen for submitting it, and she’ll be looking forward to your comments.
The Case Against Blogging
I don’t blog. I don’t aspire to, and I don’t think most of you reading should either. I hear all the time that we should be blogging to build our brand. I disagree. We should only be blogging if it will actually build our brand. Please don’t start yet another mediocre blog with infrequent postings on topics covered by many other people. I speak from the point of view of a freelance translator, but most of these points are equally applicable to interpreters, translation companies and those who provide services to our industry.
My complaint
Not being first to your niche is a problem. If you would love to have a blog, but your ideal blog would imitate one of the successful T&I blogs, then I suggest you don’t bother. Let’s assume I think the ‘business practices for freelance translators’ market for blogs written in English is saturated (I do). Therefore your new successful blog needs to be narrower.
If you blog just because you find it personally satisfying and you don’t care whether anyone reads it, then fair enough. Someone may discover you one day, like other great artists, and laud you in the future. You may bring our profession glory. I salute you. But the goal of most of the translators and interpreters I know when they start blogs is to bring in business through networking. Many even start blogs hoping that it will bring in customers. Personally, my customers are not reading about translation. They read about their subject and want me to handle the translation so that they don’t have to think about it.
In defense
I should answer some of the arguments people give for blogging. First the strongest one for translators: the argument that translators are writers and should show off their writing skills. I say write anyway. Write for the numerous chapter, affiliate and division newsletters and blogs. Offer guest posts to bloggers you admire. Write for The Chronicle or T&I association publications in other countries. Editors usually need good content and often actively seek new authors. Some publications even pay for articles.
Another factor arises for the content of a blog showing off how good a translator you may be. I am a technical translator. The technical writing I use for almost all of my translation work is very different than the style required for a blog. There is no persuasive writing, wit or gentle humor in technical translation. That’s all dry, clear instructions and analysis. So in my case, producing well-written blog articles would be practicing a style of writing that differs from the one I need every day, the one I take pride in as I work.
One substantial advantage to writing ad hoc for many newsletters or online outlets is that you don’t have to stick to one topic. Taking detours into fascinating ideas that crop up occasionally may not be in the best interest of your blog’s niche. However, it may well be ideal content for a regional association newsletter or someone else’s blog. Think broadly and opportunities open up. However, if you prefer to think narrowly, then maybe a highly specialized blog is for you and you will be the first in your field. If you’re the first, and you can have twenty posts drafted, then I wish you well. If you are not first, and you would essentially be trying to creep into a market that is already well served, then I think there are more effective ways to improve your visibility.
For the record
I have considered the bigger picture. Should I discourage people from blogging at all, as posting articles in the ether that build up our profession may raise awareness and respect? Indeed, this is a strong point. If you’re in it for the greater good, may you thrive.
The observant among readers will have spotted that I said bloggers should have twenty posts written before they start. It seems to me that if you can produce and edit that much material, arrange it into an appealing order, and post regularly over a few months, then you may be set for success. I find that blogs with infrequent posts or that appear to have died slowly make the authors look disorganized or to have failed in their goals. It would have been better not to raise expectations.
In conclusion
Please take piece this in the spirit that it is intended, to help us make the most of the time we have as we run our businesses. I’m not trying to be a stick-in-the-mud, just a realist. Not all of us can be that blogger we aspire to be.
The verdict
A successful blog will be:
- Uncommon (be the first in its field)
- Regular (have a predictable posting pattern)
- Novel (give me something new)
- Entertaining or Instructive (make me laugh or teach me)
I too agree.
Why do people blog? Trying to talk to other people makes no sense at all.
I must pull the plug on my stupid blog ASAP. I have better things to do with my time.
Thanks for letting me see the way.
Hey, patenttranslator, don’t do that! You are positively light relief for translators in the post-translation exhaustion stage. You had me laughing ten days ago. I needed that. Thank you.
Steve,
You fall into the ‘first in your category’ type of blogger, don’t you. One whose sarcasm we patent translators enjoy reading.
Regards.
My excuse for making my blog look as if it has died (not a translation blog, but how I am supposed to be training myself to write nice short sentences like Karen) is that I have prepared a guest blog for someone else, but have been so inundated with work that I have not been able to edit it yet. I shan’t post on my own blog until I have.
If I had twenty blog posts all lined up, I would not be blogging; I would be self-publishing.
P.S. Karen: My complimments to you on your mostly uniform paragraph lenghs!
Thanks Alison.
@Allison Wright
Yeah, I was so deliriously happy when my post about Translator’s Dementia got 8,000 views and 1,400 Facebook likes in less than 3 weeks. I am assuming this is the one that made you laugh. It even made my wife laugh which almost never happens, except when I make a really stupid mistake in my Japanese.
But Karen made me see the truth. Out of earth we have come and to earth shall we return.
There are better things I can do with my times, such as proofread my translations a second time, and then a third time.
I would encourage you to keep blogging as I highly enjoyed your article on Translator’s Dementia. Your sense of humour is what makes reading your blog worthwhile!
I thought it was my dementia.
Couldn’t have said it better myself and I do agree on all points! I am NOT a writer, I am NOT a blogger. I am a translator and an interpreter.
Not being the first in a field you’re interested in shouldn’t be a deterrent. The fact that someone is already doing it doesn’t mean it can’t be done better. I say blog and if you’re not very successful with it then you’ll have learnt something along the way. That’s never a waste of time!
I do love and benefit from Corrine’s blogs and the other main ones in the field–as the author said, they are/ have been the ‘firsts.’ But I totally agree with the author, and would extend the same argument to Twitter and FB–after working in social media for a publishing company, I saw the ins and outs, and being good really does help, but the investment in money, time, and ideas to make it the best are usually not worth it in many cases….That said, I do encourage the ‘firsts’ out there to continue! 🙂
Karen makes a lot of great points, and I think many people would do well to mull them over thoroughly before starting a blog. However, I find her assessment a bit harsh. There are plenty of overlapping products in every industry: McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s all sell burgers and fries, but all three are thriving.
I do agree that it looks bad to start a blog enthusiastically, only to let it trail off, but then again it’s better to have tried and failed than to not have tried at all.
Thank you, everyone, for your comments. I rarely post anything controversial in public. New departure for me.
So you are blogging about how blogging is a bad idea ? I don’t quite get that. I blog because it let’s me control my public image. When people google me, they don’t see as the first hit, my rant about the Iraq War, they see a very professional blog about the translation industry. Also, I practice my writing by blogging. I also learn things by writing. It is like a Socratic dialog. People comment and I learn from them. Blogging helps my brand. If you choose not too, fine, but I think that blogging has a lot of positives.
Established bloggers don’t belong to any kind of members-only club. I wouldn’t discourage any colleague from starting up another translation blog. I know that there are tons of blogs out there, but as long as people have their own story to tell and are willing to make an effort, I say go for it. Even if they are not pioneers. Even if they are still students. Even if their blog is “mediocre”; their blogging will get better with practice.
If someone’s new blog is totally dull, just don’t subscribe to it. But I wouldn’t advise translators, especially new translators, to close the door on blogging before they have even tried.
I don’t believe Karen is against blogging per say. Instead, Karen is pointing out that blogging may not be the most efficient marketing tool for new business unless you can make it uncommon, regular, novel, entertaining. Note that success here is being defined as the ability to pull in new business. I think she’s right about that.
There are other reasons to blog, of course. As Karen wrote, if you find it personally rewarding, or want a platform for your thoughts, then success (again, here defined as the ability to bring in business) is irrelevant.
A blog can have other practical uses. I blog about the island where I live. When a local client visits my website, they can navigate to my blog and see that I am familiar with their island – its history, culture, landscape, etc. This might not be relevant to the translation job they want done, but it does begin to build a relationship between us. Personal relationships are important here. New clients almost always ask to meet me in person, for example. I also use my blog for SEO purposes: the name of my blog can help to direct specific internet searches to me, and new posts help to keep my website high in page rankings.
I think you have to define who you are blogging for. It is critical. If you define that incorrectly, blogging will be a waste of time. For instance, if you are trying to get business as a finance translator, blog about finance, and picture your ideal reader – the person reading your blog – as a potential client, for instance, a manager at a finance firm. It is a great way to put yourself in front of potential clients. Sure, if you get that part wrong, your blog will be a waste of time.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that Karen has already made her name in another sector of the translation industry and her freelance reputation is already quite well-established and intact. Perhaps these two factors together reduce the sense of urgency to blog.
With respect to Karen’s comments.
1. “Not being first to your niche is a problem.” This is actually quite wrong (sorry). Yahoo was first, Google was later, but better. Today Google is printing money, while Yahoo is begging for it. There are dozens of examples of the better outstripping the first. It’s practically a law of the Internet age.
2. “Write for the Chronicle or newsletters instead.” I was one of the few to argue that all ATA publications should be moved online where they are indexed, searchable and uniformly available. It makes a lot more sense as a writer to post your content on a blog or in discussion groups or on your own website where everybody can see it immediately and it is readily indexed and linked for future reference. Writing original content to be published first in the Chronicle or the newsletters makes no sense. The content flow actually runs in the other direction: Blogs/website posts -> ATA presentation -> ATA Chronicle article.
3. “Customers are not reading about translation.” You’d be surprised (for example, your visibility due to your blog or website or other online content strongly influences what appears when potential clients search for you looking to hire you.) But let’s assume anyway that customers are not reading the blogs. Who is? Other translators, interpreters and language professionals are. How much of your work comes from referral from other translators? Surveys on these subject suggest that a very significant percentage of many freelancer’s work comes from colleague referrals.
I’ve started reading the blogs again after some time away, and I think there’s an urgent need for new blood. For one, too much is written about one corner of the translation industry, with all the others being neglected. There’s nowhere near enough “real” fact-based client education, and nowhere near enough information on why clients hire translators, at what rates and for what purposes. Also, a lot of what is written by freelancers is simply dead wrong. I’ve been shocked and surprised to read statements that are not just untrue, but are dangerously untrue, such as “no translator has ever been sued.” Really? Want to hang your livelihood on that?
It takes a great deal of time to learn this industry (decades) and even longer to see all your blind spots, usually with the help of colleagues, editors and others with a financial interest in your success or failure.
I feel this urgent need suddenly to write up a Top 10 List of What’s Missing in the Blogosphere. 🙂 But first I’ve got to complete the current project: Where David Bellos (Is That a Fish in Your Ear) went all wrong. 🙂 It’s actually a great book in many respects, but he slips some jaw-droppingly false arguments into the narrative that caused me to burst out laughing. He’s a very smart, creative, thoughtful guy, but he’s got a massive blind spot on commercial translation and almost no sense at all of what technical translation means. None. Zero.
So if a guy with his credentials still has things he Gets Massively Wrong, there will always be opportunity — or some would say an obligation — to continue the dialog by whatever means necessary.
Kevin,
This is great. I love the dialog. Thank you for your response (and to everyone else too).
For the ‘first to niche’ point – yes there is often room for a second or third entrant – but a seventeenth or forty-first? I’m just trying to encourage people to be specific and realistic if they are thinking of starting a blog that doesn’t have special characteristics that will make it stand out, or if they don’t have enough material to sustain it.
What you say about indexing is indeed very important. I expect that when I next Google myself, this post on Corinne’s blog will show up.
Thanks, Karen; very kind of you to reply so quickly.
On the “first to niche” point, you asked rhetorically whether the seventeenth entrant on the scene, for example, makes sense. In my example of search engines, Google was the 18th search engine used on the web, and it came about at a very late stage in the search engine game — 1998 — long after Alta Vista and Excite and Dogpile and Ask Jeeves and all the other names we thought would be around forever.
Blogs seem to go through an even more rapid rise and fall, and the ever- increasing emphasis on “What’s New” favors that process.
So here we are, two people without blogs discussing whether they are worth creating and maintaining. 🙂
Even if none of my points were persuasive, the fact that cyberspace behaves like some kind of Big Bang inflationary outlaw — expanding to create spacetime in every direction, but randomly, without the emergence of prevailing laws, and in fact sort of comically rejecting them as it barrels through the void — would in my view be compelling argument enough to ride the wave and see where it takes you.
@Karen
I am sorry, but you are missing the point completely.
If you go to my blog, you will see that a Brazilian woman asked me to marry her today because she loves my blog so much.
That is why people blog …. to be adored by hot Brazilian women and have generally harmless fun.
I am burried under an avalanche of Japanese, French and German patents right now, and I have 3 other translators working on patents from languages that I don’t know. I don’t need to blog to get more work.
I think that you should start a blog, Karen. You definitely have something to say and I for one would love to read your blog.
One more thing, please don’t tell my wife about this. She tends to get really pissed off about things like that, I am not sure why.
That’s a funny post you wrote that got that response. You blog for harmless fun and you’re good at it. Some people blog earnestly, without success. Those are the people I was writing to.
As for your wife, all the best with that. 🙂 I told my husband the other day that someone tried to pick me up on Facebook. His response (with a straight face) was that he gets that all the time.
Well, I was kind of shaken by the experience.
The last time somebody said to me “I love you, will you marry me?” was when I was 18.
I agree! I recently posted a blog post about this same subject (in particular against student translator blogs) and I’ve been under fire for the last couple of weeks.
I’ve posted this on my FB page and hope the message sinks in somehow.
I’m quite sure that you don’t need a blog to be a successful translator, in fact it can even be counterproductive. In addition to wasting a lot of time, you can get a lot of negative feedback if people disagree…
However, I count myself in the category of “like doing it and don’t care what they think” so I intend to continue writing the odd controversial post :))
Thanks for the article! I entirely agree with you, you made some really good points.
Leon Hunter
Thank you to everyone for your comments this week. May Corinne’s blog continue to thrive!
“We should only be blogging if it will actually build our brand.”
No. We should be blogging if we think it’ll help us learn, bond, exchange, communicate, vent, network, feel less isolated, educate… the list is almost endless. Brand-building is only one goal amongst many.
“Not being first to your niche is a problem.”
It’s not at all a problem. New translation blogs have cropped up recently that are excellent and bring a welcome breath of fresh air to our corner of the blogosphere. catherinetranslates, who commented above, is a very good example.
“Customers don’t read about translation.”
No, but they read about their industry, which we might well talk about in our blogs. I once got a brilliant job in the cricket field following a blog post in which I mentioned going to a cricket match. The client wanted someone who truly understood the game, and this showed him that I might be a good candidate. Clients also search for translators online, and our blogs contain keywords that can lead them to us.
“One substantial advantage to writing ad hoc for many newsletters or online outlets is that you don’t have to stick to one topic.”
This is also true of blogging. You’re absolutely free to write about whatever you like, without having to follow a particular publication’s agenda.
“If you’re the first, and you can have twenty posts drafted, then I wish you well.”
This actually goes against my idea of blogging, which is to react to what’s going on around me and in my work. Writing 20 posts in advance is a calculated strategy, which could be very efficient, but for me, blogging is all about sharing issues and thoughts as they happen, and this would kill any spontaneity.
“I find that blogs with infrequent posts or that appear to have died slowly make the authors look disorganized or to have failed in their goals.”
I used to post 3 times a week when I started. Now I post once a month on average. Does it mean that I have failed? I think it means that I’ve responded to the rise of other social platforms and to the availability of new tools. RSS feeds and Twitter mean that people rarely visit a blog “to check if there’s anything new”, so nobody’s disappointed when there isn’t. This means that I can now dedicate more of my time to other things, but my blog still remains at the centre of it all.
“Not all of us can be that blogger we aspire to be.”
How will you know if you don’t try?
Céline, You make some strong arguments. Not all of them convince me. 🙂 Thanks for the intelligent response though.
On one of yours: of course blogs should produce spontaneous content. My point was that if you can craft many posts in advance then you will not fall flat when nothing spontaneous turns up.
Karen, I’m pretty sure that if you do a poll of blogging translators (professional bloggers might operate differently), exactly 0% will have 20 blog posts, or even 2, ready in advance. It doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong. It’s obvious from your whole post that you’ve written this from the point of view of a blog reader, and a frustrated one at that, not of a blogger. As readers, we’ve all been disappointed by unimaginative, repetitive blog posts, but I think you have to make the plunge and start your own blog to fully realise the benefits it can bring.
Thanks Céline. I know that the benefits of having an excellent blog are substantial. I can’t imagine many benefits from having a mediocre blog that hardly anyone reads. You think everyone should try, and see how they get on. Fair enough. We’ll have to agree to differ. 🙂
Ask any SEO or internet marketer about the case for blogging as part of an integrated online marketing strategy, in translation or almost any field. Most would include a blog among the “must-haves.” It might not be Karen’s cup of tea but for anyone who’s really serious about competing online I’d encourage them to knock down every one of the listed arguments against and forge ahead.
Before starting though it would be helpful to get the advice of someone who has some internet marketing skills to ensure the blog is set up to get the maximum benefit from your blogging effort. Blogs are by no means generic and a lot of the translation blogs I’ve seen are not really supporting the bloggers’ business interests as much as they could.
I started designing my blog on client education in 2010, after Riccardo Schiaffino’s “Blogging 101” talk (presented by Corinne). I really, really tried to write 20 posts before launching my blog, but it was hard to keep them in a folder for months… so I started with about 10 posts ready to go, in March 2011. It was very nice not to worry about rushing to write other posts in order to keep the blog going for a while. I’ve been keeping some regularity in my writing, trying to post twice a month, but some months are more complicated than others (especially when you’re a full-time translator AND graduate student).
My blog may not be very popular (and I don’t know if it will ever be), but one thing is for sure: I’ve been learning A LOT along this journey. I believe I’ve been communicating better with clients. My networking and visibility have also improved. And I feel there’s always someone somewhere learning about the translation industry and how to be a better client because of the texts or the links I publish. I’ll keep blogging until I get bored or think I can no longer collaborate with new tips. 🙂
Hmm it appears like your site atte my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just suum it
up what I wrote and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.
I too am an aspirinng blog blogger but I’m still new to everything.
Do you have anyy suggestions for newbie blog writers?
I’d definitely appreciate it.
Interesting perspective! This blog offers a thought-provoking take on why blogging might not suit everyone, especially translators. A great read for evaluating your marketing strategies!