Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Translation Journal is for sale

Hopefully you’re familiar with Translation Journal, the online translation magazine that industry veteran Gabe Bokor has been publishing for (get this…) 16 years. It’s a wonderful source of information about our industry, featuring the legendary Fire Ant and Worker Bee column, plus many interesting feature articles in every issue. Gabe is an incredibly smart and energetic person, but after 16 years at the helm of TJ, he is interested in retiring and passing the magazine on to a new curator. You can read the full announcement on the Translation Journal website, and with Gabe’s permission I’ve included the text here as well. I would hate to see Translation Journal fade away, so please, please, someone else who is smart and energetic, take it over! You can contact Gabe via his site if you’re interested in more information

_______________________

Time to Change the Guard
by Gabe Bokor

For more than 16 years, this e-zine has been published regularly without interruption, becoming, in the process, the best-known and most prestigious on-line publication in the international language industry. It has provided free useful and interesting information to translators and interpreters, novices and veterans, full-time professionals, and people simply interested in languages and translation. It has also provided translators and interpreters, regardless of their nationality, religion, or the politics of their country, with a forum, enabling them to showcase and share their unique expertise with colleagues all over the world.

The editor reached retirement age more than a decade ago, and now he is wondering for how much longer he’ll be able to put out a new, content-rich issue every three months. Also, while the TJ is the oldest and considered the best on-line publication for translators and interpreters, it could make better use of new technologies and new trends in the industry. A new management could give it a facelift to make it more attractive aesthetically and add new features to enhance its functionality.

In other words, we’re looking for a new home for the TJ, so it can continue to fulfill its mission, while possibly benefiting from the prestige of a solid institution. While this has not been the focus of its editor for the past 16 years, it could also generate substantial revenues by waging an aggressive campaign to sell advertising on its pages and possibly by adding features to make it even more useful to its readership. A professional editorial team could upgrade its contents and polish the style of its articles.

If you’re seriously interested in taking over the TJ, I’ll be glad to provide you with the information you’ll need to make a decision.


Corinne McKay

Agencies and direct clients: not better or worse, just different

I spend a lot of time explaining the merits of agencies to translators who work with direct clients, and explaining the merits of direct clients to translators who work with agencies. So, I thought I’d offer my explanation to the whole translation blogosphere and solicit your thoughts! Here we go:

Translation agencies are great, because:

  • If the agency does its job right, you just translate. You are freed from such tasks as explaining to the client why the words aren’t in the same order in the translation as they are in the original document, or explaining to the client that words like “software” and “information” are not pluralized as “softwares” and “informations” in English.
  • If the agency likes you, they will keep you busy. They will fill your inbox with requests, rather than the other way around.
  • They have a sense of what you do, and what the constraints of your job are. They know not to ask whether you could translate 25,000 words for 3 days from now, or whether you charge “for the little words.” By the way, that was an actual question I received from a potential client. I apologize if my answer, “Only if you want them translated,” sounded rude or glib.

But translation agencies have their drawbacks, such as:

  • In the agency market, a translator can only compete on quality to a certain extent. It’s in an agency’s best interest to use the cheapest translator whose quality and reliability fit the agency’s purposes. An agency that really likes you might pay you 10% more than what they pay their other translators, but they’re not going to pay you 100% more, whereas a direct client might.
  • They can’t afford to be loyal to you. A direct client might shuffle deadlines, pay rush printing charges or have their own staff work on a weekend in order to snag a translator who they really love. But agencies rarely will: if you’re not available within a reasonable amount of time, they’ll call the next person on their list.
  • Many agencies are not transparent about their teams and processes. When you work on a large project for an agency, the agency may refuse to let you communicate with the other translators. They may decline to tell you whether your work is being proofed a) by another translator in your language pair, b) by a speaker of the target language only or c) not at all.

Direct clients are great, because:

  • At a certain point, you will reach “terminal velocity” in the agency market. You will be charging as much as even the highest-paying agencies will pay, and you can’t increase your speed beyond a certain point if you want to maintain quality. So, the next logical place to look is the direct client market, where the price ceiling is much higher.
  • The business relationship is between you and them. Normally, you can communicate either with the person who wrote the source document or the person who is going to use the target document. In 11+ years of working with agencies, I’ve been in contact with the document’s writer or end user exactly zero times. To put it diplomatically, this model has its problems.
  • Quality is a major competitive advantage. I know for sure (and Chris Durban has said this as well), that some of my direct clients use me for their mission-critical translations; when they’re applying for a large grant or producing a report that will go to potential donors, they’re willing to pay my rate. But for other, less mission-critical things, they use either agencies or less expensive freelancers.
  • Questions and feedback are not only possible, but welcome. In the agency model, there’s pretty much an impenetrable membrane between the translator and the end client; in the direct client market, the back-and-forth flow is what makes the work more satisfying and the translation more accurate and more readable.

But direct clients have their drawbacks, such as:

  • Sometimes, they have no idea how you work, other than that you change documents from one language to another. 12,000 words for tomorrow? Some direct clients don’t know that that’s laughable. And while you’re at it, why don’t you translate into your non-native language? Or interpret for their upcoming conference? It’s not their fault, it’s just not their industry.
  • They may need you only sporadically, or for huge amounts of work at one time. Some direct clients only need a translator for a small job a couple of times a year, for example when they issue earnings reports or press releases. Others may have an onslaught of documents (grant applications, RFPs) a couple of times a year, and then they need 100,000 words in a month. So you absolutely must have a partner or backup person (more on that in another post).
  • Corollary: you really don’t want to turn down their work if you can help it. In the agency market, you can pretty much accept and decline projects at will. As long as you accept at least some of the time, the agency will likely call you again. But if you bail out on a direct client at a key time, your relationship with them may be over, because they have to find someone else immediately (see reference to partner/backup above).

Now, over to you! Thoughts?


Corinne McKay

Choosing your translation specializations

About 11 years ago, I went on my first informational interview with a translation company. The project manager’s first question, “What are your languages?” was one that I expected. Her second question, “And what are your specializations?” caught me completely off guard. Specializations?? You mean it’s not enough that I speak another language? Well, as it turns out, language skills alone are not enough to make a successful career as a translator, so here are some thoughts on identifying and pursuing translation specializations.

First, here’s a tip from veteran translator Jill Sommer. Pick an area that you enjoy researching. You’re going to be doing a lot of reading in your specialization, so make sure that you find it interesting. You also want to make sure that your target specialization generates enough paying work for you to have a viable business. Lots of people start out focusing on their avocational interests: weaving, violin-making and the like. There’s undoubtedly work in those areas, but it’s probably not enough, or not well-paying enough, to keep you busy full-time. If you want to work with direct clients, there’s work in pretty much any specialization you can imagine. If you want to work with agencies, you really have to target one of their core areas, for example financial, medical, legal, pharmaceutical, IT, patents, etc. It’s also helpful to identify some of your non-specializations: areas in which you definitely do not want to translate.

It seems to me that some specializations are increasingly dominated by people with significant work experience in the domain. For example in the US, I meet more and more lawyers who either hated practicing law or couldn’t find a satisfying job and thus turned to translation as an alternative. For dense medical texts, you really need a strong medical background to produce a good translation. But many translators are self-taught in their areas of specialization: they pick an area that looks interesting, start with work that isn’t too technical, and learn as they go along.

In some sense, you also want to follow the money. I tell all of my translation students that somewhere, there is an intersection between what you want to translate and what clients will pay good money for. If your passion is art, there may be a well-paying niche translating for art museums that loan and borrow works of art internationally. If your passion is weaving, maybe you can work for textile companies that want to sell their products overseas. In one sense, it’s smart to focus on an industry (law, pharmaceuticals) in which clients have to translate in order to do business. But in another sense, it’s smart to focus on an industry (corporate communications, hospitality) in which clients hope that a really good translation will bring them more business.

Finally, if you’re interested in working with direct clients, don’t fear niche markets. As French to English chemistry translator Karen Tkaczyk will tell you, all you need is enough work for one person! I’ve met successful translators who specialize in horses, philately, fisheries and recycling. And if you want to expand your knowledge in your specialization, a MOOC provider such as Coursera is a good place to start. You can read about my experience in a Coursera epidemiology class here.


Corinne McKay

ATA54 wrapup

Well, it’s Friday already, and it’s taken me the whole week to recover from last week’s ATA conference in San Antonio! Here are some thoughts on this year’s conference, and feel free to add your own in the comments!

    • I love pretty much every ATA conference, and this year was no exception. With about 1,400 attendees it was one of the smaller conferences in recent years (although larger than projected for this year!), and I find that at the smaller conferences, people are more focused on the lessons and less on the tax-deductible vacation.
    • San Antonio is a great conference town: at the French Language Division dinner, we dubbed it “The Venice of Texas,” and the Riverwalk really is a nice feature. Plus the rest of the city is very walkable and felt very safe. The FLD dinner was a lovely barge cruise, catered by an Italian restaurant right by the hotel. Because we were outside, it was quiet enough to actually talk, and for a group thing the food was actually excellent.
    • The lineup of French sessions this year was outstanding. Back in the day (actually, when I was FLD Administrator…) we were lucky if we had 3 or 4 really good French sessions *during the entire conference*. This year, nearly every slot was filled with something interesting, and the range of topics (transcreation, subtitling, legal translation, writing better in French and English, “hidden” French, etc.) was really staggering!
    • Having the conference events all on one floor was great: more opportunities to talk to people during the breaks, less route-finding, and easier to pick places to meet up with people for meals. I thought that the hotel breakfasts were really tasty, and if you were lucky enough to pounce on the Mexican hot chocolate cart during the afternoon break, it was the perfect sugar hit for the mid-afternoon lull!
    • Personally I really enjoyed this year’s focus on newcomers. I agree that it’s also important to offer something for experienced and very experienced translators, but I think that in order to get to that level, newbies have to have a good experience at their first conference. One’s first conference is always overwhelming: I think that any  veteran can recall that clutch-in-the-throat feeling of walking in to the opening reception for the first time. When I was a newbie, that feeling was exacerbated by the fact that I hadn’t done anywhere alone since my daughter was born 2 years before. But I think that the Newbies and Buddies program went a long way toward helping people make a personal connection *before* the opening reception, which is critical. Huge thanks to Helen Eby and Jamie Hartz for putting this program together! Also, although the Newbies and Buddies reception was a bit chaotic, I am in favor of continuing the “grab a partner” method rather than pre-assigning pairs of Newbies and Buddies. One, I think it’s way too much work to assign the pairs in advance; two, I think that if the pairs are pre-assigned, it creates more chaos if half of the pair isn’t there; three, I kind of like the element of surprise, but maybe that’s just me. My newbie, Olga Yuska from the Ukraine, was fabulous! I was really impressed with her ambition and business-savvy (on her first trip to the US, no less!). Here we are having breakfast together:

newbie

  • I did two presentations: assisting with Jill Sommer’s first-time attendees orientation, and co-presenting on time management with David Rumsey. I think that both of these went well, and I really think that presenting at the conference is worthwhile. It’s a huge amount of work, but it also forces you to condense your thoughts on a certain topic and put them into a useful format. I always learn a lot from preparing for my presentations, so I’d encourage you to start thinking about the topic you want to present next year!
  • This conference marked one year since I was elected to the ATA Board. Summary: I love it. Partially, I think that compared to running a local association for 4 years, the ATA Board is actually much less pressure. There’s a lot more decision-making, but a lot less logistical work than a local association, which is a nice change of pace.


Corinne McKay

Translation tool interoperability: your input needed!

As the Chair of ATA’s Translation and Computers committee, I meet over lunch at the ATA conference with the translation software vendors who are exhibiting at the conference. It’s a good chance to talk about issues in the industry; last year I asked for readers’ input on what you’d like to tell the translation tool vendors, and then I wrote a follow-up post on the software companies’ responses.

This year’s lunch discussion topic is translation software interoperability, and I’m looking for your thoughts once again. Specifically, I’d love to know:

  • If you exchange files between translation memory programs (i.e. you have Trados and the client has memoQ, or you have DVX and your co-translator has Wordfast, etc.), how well does the process work? What could be improved?
  • What interoperability features would you like to see in future releases of the tools that you use? What would help streamline your workflow?

Here’s what happens to your comments: I compile them into a PDF and hand that out at the vendors’ lunch. Then we talk about your comments and the vendors respond. I take notes on what they say and then write a followup post. Thanks in advance for contributing to this dialogue!