Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!
January classes open for registration! Thanks to all 1,700 people who registered for T4T’s offerings in 2025! Actually not 1,700 people, 1,700 registrations, many of which were one person taking multiple classes. I’m glad you find these classes helpful; now onward to 2026. Here’s what’s open for registration now, and opening soon: Open now: January’s master class, Introduction to content marketing, for your business, or for your clients. Registration is $75 and includes the recording. Learn how to use a blog, podcast, e-mail newsletter, lead magnet, or social media posts to market your freelance business, or offer this service (as a translator or writer) to your clients! Open now: March Marketing Madness challenge group. Back for year eight (!), MMM has become a T4T tradition and our biggest offering of the year. Twenty days of business challenges that will take you 15-30 minutes to complete, and this year I’ve added three live sessions. Registration is $90 (last year’s price) until February 1. Opening soon: Check the T4T upcoming classes page on December 20 for the next session of Direct client research lab, my personalized direct marketing class. Registration is currently open only to people on the wait list, and will open to everyone else on December 20 at $175. |
| This week’s topic: A software sampler This is the final newsletter of the year; I’ll take two weeks off, and the newsletter will be back on January 6. Thanks to my friend and colleague Eve Bodeux for suggesting this topic! Over the holidays or in January, maybe you have some time to research new software tools that could be helpful in your business. There are tons of options out there, but here’s a starter list. Most of these are free; if not, I’ve indicated the pricing for them. Asana and Notion: These are online workspace/project management tools. I don’t use either of them, but I have a lot of students who are raving fans. I would recommend checking them out if you’re planning an active marketing campaign, because they can automate reminders, follow-ups, etc. Audacity: A really useful, completely free audio editing program. With starting the T4T podcast this year, I decided to try editing the recordings myself in Audacity, and it’s totally doable. I feel like Audacity makes it pretty easy to use the basic features, and ignore the complicated stuff that you probably don’t need for simple projects. Calendly: I have mixed feelings about Calendly, which is an online scheduling tool. To me, it always feels a little like, “You’ll need to check with my secretary if you want to book time with me,” but it definitely saves a lot of the back and forth and time zone juggling when you need to meet with someone. Canva: I’m the world’s worst graphic designer, and even I can make decent stuff in Canva, and the free account is sufficient for my needs. Check out their LinkedIn banner templates if you’re still using the default blue-grey thing that LinkedIn puts there. Doodle: I love Doodle, a polling tool for scheduling meetings. It’s really great when you need to find the best time slot among a group of people; for example I coordinate an informal professional group that has about 85 members all over the world, and I use Doodle to find the best time slot for our online sessions. HappyScribe: Another interpreter introduced me to Happy Scribe, a very helpful subtitling and captioning tool. I find it more accurate and easier to edit than the Zoom captions, so I now use it for my online course videos. I have the basic paid plan which costs about $100 a year. HubSpot: HubSpot is probably best known for their customer relations management tool (I have some students who use the free version and like it!). I don’t use that, but I love HubSpot Academy, their free online learning platform. HubSpot must be doing well financially, because these classes are quite high-quality and are completely free, and they’re not a sales pitch for HubSpot’s software. I’ve done their SEO and Content Marketing certifications, and I’ve signed up for their Content Strategy class. iLovePDF: I switched from Adobe to iLove when Adobe started charging to rotate a PDF (seriously??). I actually kind of hate PDFs (Jost Zetzsche’s joke: “It stands for Pretty Darn Frustrating”) so I’ll have to forgive this company for their slogan, “Online tools for PDF lovers,” but the tool itself is great. It merges, splits, compresses, edits, signs, converts, I really haven’t found any PDF-related thing that it can’t do, and the $60 per year plan suits my needs. Loom: Loom is a screenshare video tool that makes it really easy to create video messages for other people. Personally I just use Zoom for this, but I’ve had a few people send me Loom messages, and I like them, especially if the person is showing me a software tip or something I need to watch on their screen. LSP.expert: An accounting, invoicing, and project tracking tool just for translators and interpreters. My accountant requires QuickBooks (just about my least favorite piece of software and it’s also expensive), but everyone I know who uses LSP.expert, loves it. Their prices range from EUR 12.50 a month to EUR 45.00 a month (I’m not even going to tell you what I pay for QuickBooks, but it’s a lot more than that!!). Slack: I know, just what you need, another messaging platform, right??? But I will say that if you want to create an online discussion group where people can scan the threads instead of getting every single message (as opposed to WhatsApp and Signal), give Slack a try. I use it for some of my classes, and to me it combines some of the positives of Facebook without the invasive creepiness; for example you can even create a dummy Gmail address that you only use for Slack, then just delete the account if you no longer want it. Todoist: Meghan McCallum introduced me to Todoist a couple of years ago, and it’s now my go-to productivity app. In many ways it’s just an online to-do list. I keep mine on my phone’s home screen so it’s right where I can see it. But I love the more advanced features, even in the free account. You can have it remind you to do a specific task on a specific repeating frequency (i.e. remind me to reconcile my accounting on the 5th of every month), and you can set reminders for as far in the future as you want. You can also keep lists (I keep a list of books I want to read, movies and shows I want to watch, and potential newsletter topics). Toggl: Time tracking is something I should do more of, and I still can’t remember to turn Toggl off most of the time (so it thinks I’ve been working on accounting for 19 hours…pretty much my worst nightmare). But it’s probably the best tool out there if you want to see where your time goes. WeTransfer: A really helpful tool for sending enormous files, like if you want to send someone the actual file of a one-hour video call. Zoom: I mean, Zoom is, well, Zoom, and a lot of us would like to spend a lot less time on Zoom. But I will say this: Zoom works. I do a ton of remote interpreting in Zoom, the features are good, they keep adding new things (most recently: relay interpreting) and it’s very stable. So at least there’s that: we’re not chained to a horrible, buggy program! That’s it! Thanks for a great 2025, and here’s to a healthy and lucrative 2026 for all of us! |
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