Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

If you can't out-think the competition, out-work the competition

A brief thought here, before Thoughts on Translation goes on hiatus for Spring Break! It’s a crossover thought from another area of my life, playing the lute (my mid-life crisis obsession!).

I don’t have a ton of musical talent; actually way, way less than a ton. I can carry a tune and clap to the beat of the music, but that’s about where it ends. But in the two and a half years that I’ve been playing the lute, I’ve found a compensatory mechanism: practicing more than most people do. Having trouble with the rhythm in a tricky piece? Practice more. Can’t play the hard part fast enough to keep up with the rest of the group? Practice more. Can’t play chords without sounding like a dying cat? Practice more. Practice doesn’t totally overcome a lack of talent, but it’s a good all-purpose solution. You up your practicing from 15 minutes a day to 20, to 45, to 75, and suddenly things get a little easier.

Let’s apply this to translation. When I started translating, I had a Master’s in French, some translation experience (internships, pro bono), but essentially no contacts in the industry, and no experience running a business. So, when experienced translators said, “You could apply to lots of translation companies…like 75 or 100,” I figured that 400 was a better target. If experienced translators said, “You could try asking potential clients for informational interviews,” I started asking any potential client in Colorado for an informational interview. I pretended that I would “be in their area” as an excuse to have coffee with them and ask about their business. If people suggested, “Add a personal touch,” I started sending a handwritten thank you note to everyone who responded (in any manner) to my inquiries. My sense was that if I couldn’t out-think the competition, I could at least out-work the competition, and that might turn out better in the end.

I’m not saying there’s no place for talent, or working smarter instead of harder, or for strategizing and optimizing. In our industry for example, if your language skills are poor, there’s no way to compensate for that: you just have to improve your language skills. But assuming that your basic skill set (the language equivalent of carrying a tune and clapping to the beat of the music) is solid, I’m inclined to follow NBA player Kevin Durant‘s advice, “Hard work beats talent, when talent fails to work hard.”


Corinne McKay

Thoughts on managing your e-mail

In the age of Information Overload, it seems to get harder and harder to maintain any semblance of control over the volumes of e-mail we receive. But, there’s hope, and there are strategies…let’s take a look at a few, and feel free to add your own in the comments.

Let’s start with e-mail management techniques I use and find helpful

  • Mercilessly unsubscribe and filter. I have trouble ignoring an e-mail once it lands in my Inbox, so I need technology to help me prioritize. My goal: limit the Inbox to time-sensitive messages. So, as soon as I get added to a mailing list I don’t want to be on, I unsubscribe. Right then, without guilt. Perhaps more importantly, I set up filters to send non-time-sensitive e-mail to somewhere other than my Inbox. For example I don’t want to unsubscribe from my neighborhood e-mail list, or my ATA division e-mail lists, but I don’t necessarily want to read those messages the second they come in. So I set up a “skip the Inbox” filter to immediately put those e-mails in specially-labeled folders. This saves a ton of time and distractions.
  • Shut off as many notifications as you can. If you’re present on social media sites, you are likely to get a lot of notifications from them: someone followed you on Twitter, someone replied to your Facebook post, someone on LinkedIn has a work anniversary, etc. These sites (especially LinkedIn, in my experience) generate so many notifications that it’s worth spending 10 minutes to dig into the Settings labyrinth and shut them off.
  • Make peace with brevity. I’m a wordy person. I talk a lot, I write a lot. But between my own translation work, my teaching and consulting work and my ATA-related work, I get a ton of e-mail. I’ve forced myself to accept that a polite but very brief response (“Great! Thank you so much for letting me know.” “Wednesday at 1 PM works best for me; talk to you then.” “I’m not interested in this right now, but thanks for thinking of me!”) is OK. I’d like to say more, but this kind of response does the trick in a pinch.
  • Accept that reading and answering e-mail takes a lot of your time. When I started freelancing 13 years go, “let me just clear out the Inbox before I shut down for the day” was still an option. But that option (for me, and I’m guessing for many of you) is long gone. When I do a little benchmarking to find out how long I spend on various work-related tasks, I find that I spend one to two hours reading and answering e-mail on an average day. Of course, some of this involves actually doing work over e-mail–for example critiquing a student’s resume and cover e-mail. But the point being that even on a day when I “just take care of e-mail,” that’s a good number of hours.
  • Hit the low-hanging fruit first. When I open my Inbox on an average morning, I have probably 15-30 unread e-mails waiting (and that’s the time-sensitive ones that make it into my Inbox; not marketing stuff or e-newsletters). By scanning the preview lines, I can tell which ones can be knocked off with a quick response (pick a meeting time, how much do you charge to translate a marriage certificate, where is the 2018 ATA conference). So I do those first, then go back to the ones that require more thought.
  • Don’t let e-mail rule you, but don’t let it get away from you either. I try not to be enslaved to my e-mail; I don’t think that someone’s going to die if they don’t get a response from me within five minutes. I have a smartphone but I don’t spend a ton of time answering e-mail when I’m not actually working. However, failing to respond to e-mail generates more e-mail (did you get my message, we’re waiting on you to schedule the meeting, should I ask another translator to work on this if you’re too busy). So in a way, letting e-mail pile up can exponentially increase the amount of time it takes to manage it.

Now let’s move on to e-mail management techniques I don’t use, but that I think are a good idea

  • Only answer e-mail at set times. The top of the hour, four times a day, etc. If you work on long-deadline projects like books, this could be a great idea.
  • Have totally separate work and personal e-mail addresses. Only check the work e-mail during the work day, only check personal at night and on weekends. I just find that my work and personal friends are so commingled that this doesn’t work.
  • Practice a one-touch rule. Once you open an e-mail, don’t close it and let it sit there: respond to it, delete it, file it, or mark it as unread. I like to mull things over, so this doesn’t really work for me, but it’s certainly efficient.
  • Create an auto-responder that eliminates the expectation of an immediate response. I recently e-mailed someone whose auto-response basically says “I’ve received your message and I’ll get back to you within the next few days. If this is really urgent, call me.” Personally I don’t have the guts to do that, but I thought it was an interesting technique!
  • Purge e-mail more than a month (two months, etc.) old. Another technique I don’t have the guts for but ultimately kind of admire; if someone’s e-mail has sat in your inbox for six weeks, a) you’ll probably never respond, or b) it’s probably no longer relevant, or c) the sender probably forgot about it. Pick a date, click the tickbox next to every message older than that, and get rid of them. The blackbelt form of this would be “e-mail bankruptcy,” where you delete everything and start from zero. If you’re in really dire e-mail straits (I recently talked to someone whose Inbox contains over a thousand unread e-mails), a radical step like this is worth some thoughts.
  • Have an e-mail-free portion of your day. I can’t do this in the morning because I’m already eight hours behind my French and Swiss clients, but sometimes I do it in the afternoon when most of my clients are already out of the office. Shut down your e-mail and just work for two hours, and watch how much you get done.

Readers, over to you!


Corinne McKay

Marketing to Direct Clients: reserve your spot

The next session of my online course “Marketing to Direct Clients” starts on April 11, and registration is open on my website. This is a four-week, fully online course for translators who want to market to and work successfully with direct clients. Your registration fee ($320; $305 for ATA members) includes four sets of weekly slide shows with audio tracks, eight live question and answer sessions (recordings provided if you don’t attend live), four sets of weekly readings, and 20 daily tasks.

By the end of the course, you’ll have direct client marketing materials, a marketing plan, and a financial plan for the direct client component of your business.

A recent participant in one of my online courses commented that “This course is an absolute must for anyone looking to jump into the freelance world. Whether you’re an absolute beginner or someone returning to freelance work (like me), you absolutely must make time for this class! It is the best investment you’ll make in yourself.”

If you resolved to ramp up (or launch!) the direct client component of your business this year, let’s get you going on that goal.


Corinne McKay

Tips for translators in small languages

There are languages like Spanish (tons of work, lots of translators), and languages like French and German (good amount of work, not a surplus of translators), and then there are languages like Tagalog, Nepali, Bulgarian, Amharic, Icelandic, and so on. What are some pathways to a viable freelance business if you do one of those languages of lesser diffusion?

  • Assess the demand. You only need enough work for one person, but in some languages, that may be a struggle. Consider adding additional services like interpreting, editing, voiceover, etc. You may have to be a little more open to offbeat jobs than someone who translates German or Japanese.
  • Expect to be asked to translate anything and everything in your language. You don’t have to say yes; never take on anything that’s outside your capabilities. But expect that clients will think of you as “the Haitian Creole translator,” not “the Haitian Creole pharmaceutical translator.”
  • If you want to work with agencies, blanket the field. Get a membership to Payment Practices (not an affiliate deal) and sort out the highly-rated agencies; for example those rated 4.0 or higher in the two factors that PP rates. Then start cranking out the applications; aim for three to five per day. Every agency that could potentially use you, anywhere in the world, should have your resume on file.
  • If you want to work with direct clients, look for trade ties between your non-English country and the US, the UK, or other English-speaking countries. Most countries have some sort of economic development authority, foreign direct investment authority, or similar entity. Look there for ideas, then contact companies related to those industries that might need you.
  • Consider translating into English with a native English-speaking proofreader. Normally I don’t recommend going anywhere near translations into your non-native language. But for small-diffusion languages into English, I think it can work, and sometimes it’s the only option. First, there just aren’t that many native English speakers who translate from Lingala or Khmer. Second, lots of these niche countries are fairly major tourist destinations for English speakers, very few of whom speak a word of the local language. So you might find work translating for, say, resorts in Indonesia or the Philippines or Thailand that want to attract English-speakers.

Readers, especially those of you who translate in these smaller-diffusion languages…any thoughts on this?


Corinne McKay

How to make more money without having a breakdown

Among the amorphous goals that many of us have for our freelance business, “I want/need to make more money” often heads the list. It’s often joined by other amorphous goals such as “I want/need more work,” or “I need some better clients.” The problem with “I want/need to make more money” is that most translators pursue it in a brute force way: by simply taking on more of the work that’s not generating enough income to start out with. Instead of translating 3,000 words a day, many people decide to double their income by translating 6,000 words a day. In my online courses, I routinely talk to translators who are *translating* 10-12 hours per day, then doing their administrative work on top of that. That may work for a while; but it’s a grind, a recipe for burnout, and it’s not sustainable. Freelance truth: if you choose to work for clients whose primary decision-making factor is price, don’t be surprised when they drop you for someone cheaper. You knew what was important to them, right?

So, if we’re not going to bump up our income by working twice as much, how are we going to do it? A few ideas:

  • Pitch a “make this worth my while” rate to all new clients. When you’re already busy, you have nothing to lose by floating a higher rate to all new clients, especially if you have to work overtime to fit them in. And if/when the new client accepts the higher rate, you know that at least some of your target market will bear that rate.
  • Stop looking for work in low-rate places. Online job marketplaces are an entry point into the industry; they may be a good entry point or a horrible entry point, depending on your languages and specializations. But by advertising on, say, Fiverr, you’re inherently appealing to people who only want to spend $5. By bidding on online job boards, you’re inherently dealing with clients whose main decision-making point is price. Quit that. No more reverse auctions for your time, period.
  • Look where other people aren’t looking. Lots of freelancers are hanging out with other freelancers and lamenting that they never meet any good direct clients. Hanging out with other freelancers has its appeal: you can learn a lot, you can build a good network, and you can meet people who may refer work to you. Freelance translators are generally awesome people. But the good direct clients aren’t looking at online haunts for freelance translators when they want to find someone to translate their annual report. You have to go to them: join *their* LinkedIn groups; set up a website with information about *what you will do for them,* attend *their* conferences.
  • Don’t make translation cheap; make it easy. When I ask my direct clients for feedback or testimonials, I’m always hoping to hear about the quality of my translations; how they got the French message across just right, but in English. And hopefully they do that! But when I get that client feedback, it’s almost always about the ease of the process. “You always respond to our e-mails right away.” “When you say we’ll get it by 5PM, we know we’ll have it by 4:30.” “When we make suggestions, you don’t act like a diva, you give us your honest opinion.” Make your clients’ lives easy, and you’re worth a lot to them.
  • Be ready to accept the hard truths. When experienced translators tell you that good clients aren’t going to bang on your door, and you have to bang on theirs, they’re right. When experienced translators tell you that mega-agencies couldn’t get away with pittance rates if no one would work for them, they’re right. When experienced translators tell you that you have to invest in the required tools for the business, and you can’t be using a ten year-old laptop with Windows XP as your main work computer, they’re right. If you want higher-level clients, you have to be a higher-level translation professional.
  • Always have your eye on your “next out the door” client. As someone with a soft spot for nearly all of my clients, this is a tough one, but it’s necessary. Identifying the client you’ll eliminate once you get a better paying one at the top of the list is a good motivator. Be ruthless here: what low-paying client could you drop if you had a better-paying one to replace them?

Readers, over to you: best suggestions for making more money while staying sane?