It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at the Thoughts on Translation wordface, with the end of school, the start of summer and a couple of very large (and interesting!) projects. Since I’ve been short on time and creative energy, here are some blog posts that I highly recommend:
- Lisa Carter of Intralingo on Advice on how to price a book translation. This is a tricky topic even for experienced translators, and Lisa does a great job of mixing the business mindset (actually needing/wanting to make money from translation) with other factors, such as wanting to get a publication credit, and even the fact that literary translators don’t generally produce 2,000 or 3,000 words per day. Lisa also reports that she discusses compensation issues at length in her online course Next Steps in Literary Translation.
- Judy and Dagmar Jenner of Translation Times on The 50% success rate, or how to make your peace with not winning all the projects you quote on. This post includes some excellent insights on the work that goes into quoting on projects at the high end of the market.
- Walt Kania of The Freelancery on No more self-inflicted discounts, or how to stop negotiating on behalf of your clients, rather than on your own behalf. We’ve all been there: somewhere deep inside, we feel that our rates are too high, so we’re offering discounts, comps and freebies before the client even asks for them. Also make sure to read the comments for more excellent tips, such as bidding high on projects you aren’t very interested in.
- Riccardo Schiaffino of About Translation on Simple regular expressions for Trados Studio filters. Riccardo is a translation technology guru and is great at simplifying seemingly complex topics; in addition, I’m the poster child for “people who just don’t get regular expressions,” so I loved this post. Riccardo includes a great example of a regular expression used to find segments that contain “topcoat” “top-coat” and “top coat” with one search. Great tip!
Happy translating to everyone!
Thanks for mentioning my post here, Corinne! I’m glad it’s proving useful. Questions/follow up questions are always welcome.
Thanks Lisa! Your site is such a great resource for book translators (literary and non-fiction!)
These all look great! I read Lisa’s already! And, will add the others to my list. I am also super excited about Riccardo’s discussion of regular expressions too! Woo hoo! (Wow, are we translation nerds or what! 🙂
Seriously, that’s how you know you’re a translation nerd…when you get all excited at the thought that you could search a document for “tea cup” and “teacup” at the same time. We need a life 🙂
Thank you, Corinne, for the recommendations! I have already read the one written by Judy and Dagma! The other three are now in my wish list.
It’s good to know that you have been very busy with interesting projects!
Best of luck!
Thanks Fernando…I also try to work more before vacation season so that I can take a break later!
Thanks Corinne! All these links are very useful.
Thanks; glad they were helpful!
Excellent recommendations Corinne! Thanks for sharing! I really liked them all! I just need more time!!
Thanks again! Happy Summer to you there!
Thanks Dolores! I know, don’t we all need more time! But these posts are really good.
Thanks for including us, dear Corinne. I can’t believe summer is upon us again. It seems like yesterday that we came to Boulder at the end of our summer vacation, but it was 10 months ago. Wow! I am sure you have some amazing things planned.
Reblogged this on translatorpad.
First of all, want to say thank you to you Corinne for this site-it’s a fantastic resource! I’ll introduce myself real quickly: I’m a Chinese-English translator, and a (relatively new) translation service with my fiancee and translation partner (English-Chinese).
The 50% success rate article really struck a nerve with me as we have yet to be turned down due to my translation fee being too high, and I think this is something that I’ll have to change! I’m not ashamed to say (because it was my first client, and the work was more to gain experience than anything else) that my first translations a couple of years ago were performed at a rate of about .01 USD per Chinese character. For those of you unfamiliar with Chinese, there are usually about 1.5 Chinese characters for every romance language word, and so this is the equivalent .015 USD per word-yes, really, really low. Only when we recently made the decision to go full-time with translation did I really begin to consider the possibility that rates could go much, much higher; I’m glad to say they are much higher today, but I think, that as the author pointed out, if we still haven’t been turned down on account of pricing, there may be some more price-raises in order!
And excuse me, somehow that posted too quickly and it seems I can’t edit it, the post should read “and I run a (relatively new) translation service with my fiancee and translation partner (English-Chinese).”
Thank you for this introduction to four great blogs coming at translation from four very different perspectives. I am now following all of them.