I’ve been threatening to compile a book of my blog entries for some time, and it looks like it’s finally going to happen! I just ordered the final proof copy of Thoughts on Translation, and here’s the cover, designed by the incomparable Sue Campbell. Sue is a fellow Coloradoan and I found her through our local freelancers’ group, Boulder Media Women. I have a hard time working on the design aspects of any project, because I’m not a very visual person (hence the reason I live in a house with white walls and frequently wear jeans with black t-shirts!). Sue “got” my project right from the start and gave me a buffet of beautiful and creative designs to choose from. Here’s the one I went with…can you tell that blue is my favorite color? And Sue even reworked my 2 Rat Books logo–sentimental to me because my husband drew it–into a “real” logo that I can splash on all kinds of things. The print edition of the book should be available in about a month, and the Kindle/iPad/Nook/etc. versions will follow shortly after that.
Seven books, up for grabs
The books have all been claimed; thanks to everyone who responded. The response (over 50 people) was much greater than I had anticipated, so I’m sorry that I don’t have more than 7 books to give away!
Off-topic: baking your own Swiss walnut bread
Ever since my family returned from our summer in Switzerland, I’ve been meaning to try some Swiss baking techniques. Swiss baked items are often simple but delicious, relying on excellent ingredients rather than complicated techniques. Almost every bakery in French-speaking Switzerland seems to make a version of this bread: a whole wheat loaf with lots of walnuts baked into it, and I really got addicted to it while we were there. After combing the web and taking suggestions from a few different recipes, I’ve come up with a pretty decent approximation of pain aux noix. A couple of disclaimers before we start:
- My sense is that part of the Swiss bread mystique lies in the enormous variety of flours that they use, and I’ve simplified this down to just whole wheat and white flour. If you have access to European bread flours, go crazy with them!
- I use recipes more as an inspiration than an exact formula, so these directions are written in that spirit. I’ve described some of the more intuitive concepts (i.e. how moist the dough should be) for those who prefer a more precise approach!
Yeast mixture ingredients
Another disclaimer: I would assume that most Swiss bakeries make this bread with sourdough instead of yeast, so that’s an option too. My husband is a sourdough baker but I’m too impatient for the time it requires (normally including an overnight rising). If you use a good, energetic yeast, you can produce a completed batch of this bread in under 4 hours.
- 1/4 cup very warm tap water
- 1 packet (approximately 2 teaspoons) active dry baking yeast. I use Hodgson Mill single-serving packets, available at Whole Foods for about 25 cents each.
- A pinch of sugar
Dough ingredients
- 2 cups whole wheat flour. I use Whole Foods organic whole wheat flour. Whole wheat bread flour is hard to find, but if you have some, I would use it.
- 2-3 cups cups white bread flour. I use King Arthur unbleached white bread flour.
- 1 teaspoon salt (adjust to taste)
- Between 1/2 and 1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts, depending on how walnutty you want the bread.
- 1 1/4 (one and one quarter) cups warm tap water
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
Directions: feel free to modify if you have a preferred dough-making technique!
First, make the yeast mixture. Pour the 1/4 cup very warm tap water into a bowl, the sprinkle the yeast and sugar on the water and stir to combine. Wait about 10 minutes and the yeast mixture should be frothy and bubbly.
To make any bread, you can either use a heavy-duty mixer like a Kitchen Aid (that’s what I do) or mix it by hand in a large mixing bowl, using a dough whisk (that’s what my husband does). If you have strong arms, the $15.00 dough whisk is a pretty good substitute for a stand mixer! Here’s a dough whisk on the King Arthur website.
While the yeast mixture is starting to bubble, pour the 1 1/4 cups warm water and the 2 tablespoons olive oil into your mixer/mixing bowl. If you are using a mixer, use the paddle attachment (not the dough hook) for this phase. Stir to combine, then dump the bubbly yeast mixture in and stir some more. Add the salt, the 2 cups of whole wheat flour and the walnuts, and beat/stir vigorously for a minute or two to combine all of the ingredients.
Then start adding the white bread flour, about 1/2 cup at a time, mixing continuously. The exact amount of flour will vary, depending on the humidity level, temperature, etc. You want the dough to be fairly wet as bread doughs go. Add just enough flour so that the dough does not stick to your hands when you squeeze it. If you’re using a mixer, at some point during this process the dough will become too heavy for the paddle attachment and you’ll want to switch to the dough hook. If you’re mixing by hand with the dough whisk, just keep using that.
Once you have the dough at the right consistency (repeat: don’t make it too dry; add flour just until the dough does not stick to the bowl or your hands), knead it for about 10 minutes, either by hand or using the dough hook on your mixer. Then, form the dough into a ball, roll it in flour (you don’t need to grease the bowl if you do this), place it back in the mixer/mixing bowl, cover it with a plastic bag or a thick towel and let it rise until doubled in size, approximately 2 hours.
When the dough ball has doubled in size, punch it down, knead it a couple of times and shape it into a loaf, multiple loaves or rolls. Roll each loaf or roll in flour before putting it in a pan or on a baking sheet. I cut my dough in half and make two balls which I put into two greased, 7-inch springform pans. I am Teflon-phobic and use Kaiser bakeware tinplate pans, but you can also just put parchment paper on a baking sheet and not use a bread pan at all. Once the dough is shaped into a loaf/loaves/rolls, let it rise until doubled in size again, approximately 45-90 minutes.
During the last few minutes of the second rise, preheat your oven to between 435 and 450 degrees fahrenheit, depending on how crusty you want the finished bread to be. If you like a softer crust, go with the lower temperature. If you like it really crusty, crank the oven up. Baking time will vary depending on the size of your loaves: rolls could be as short as 20 minutes and one big loaf could take 50 minutes. My springform loaves take about 35 minutes. To tell if the bread is done, you can either stick a knife into the center and see if it comes out clean, or (to feel like a real Swiss baker), rap the top of the loaf like you’re knocking on a door. If the loaf sounds hollow, it’s done.
Here’s a finished loaf that I made to take to a friend’s house. Mmm!
Getting it done: managing your time as a freelancer
As freelancers, we wear a lot of hats. Some days, I feel like translation is the easy part of my job: the harder parts being my roles as an accountant, marketing director, customer relations manager, office ergonomics expert, and so on and so on, not to mention the rewarding but time-consuming gigs as a wife, mom, daughter, friend, chef and suboptimal housekeeper. Based on my own experiences and some ideas that I shared during a previous Speaking of Translation conference call, here are some tips. These range from quick-and-dirty to big-picture, so just bear with me as I jump around! And of course, feel free to add your own ideas too.
Prioritize what really matters to you
This involves accepting that you simply cannot do everything you want to do and remain sane, unless you only need 45 minutes of sleep a day. But you can make time for the things that are critical to your happiness and/or to the success of your business. For example, I find that when my e-mail inbox is backlogged, I feel panicky about work. So I make that task a priority, and I really try to end every weekday without pending items in my inbox. In my personal life, I know that if I don’t exercise for about an hour on most days, I start to, for lack of a better way to put it, go crazy. So even if that means doing a YouTube yoga video at 10 o’clock at night, I do it. In the same vein, no matter how busy my family is, we really try to cook a real dinner and eat together almost every night. Other things (see above reference to suboptimal housekeeping) might slide, but we try to maintain our family dinner routine. Also, I absolutely do not do all-nighters or really even work past 11 PM. I feel that this is important to my mental health and my family harmony, so I force myself to avoid really crazy deadlines that require this kind of work.
Create as much uninterrupted work time as you can
The reality of life in the 21st century is that our attention is constantly pulled in 127 different directions. And in order to produce good translations, you need some mental space and some time that is free of distractions. Here are a few of my strategies to carve out this time:
- Keep a running to-do list next to the computer. When, as seems to happen about every 12 seconds, a to-do item (“buy cat food;” “can I make electronic deposits into my retirement account?;” “did Southwest announce when they’re starting flights to Hawaii?”) pops into my head, I write the item down instead of interrupting what I’m doing to perform that task. Then, when I need a mental break, I go through a few to-do items at once. I try to do the same with phone calls: write the item down, then book the snow tires, the dentist and the furnace cleaner all at once.
- Avoid inbox alerts. “You’ve got mail” almost all of the time, and if you read it as it arrives, you’ll spend your entire day doing that. So, shut off the alerts and just check e-mail every so often. I say “every so often” because ideally, I’d like to check e-mail only a few times a day and answer it all at once. But realistically, clients sometimes need a quick answer right away, so I’d say I check e-mail about every 15-30 minutes.
- Find a time of day when you can catch up. For many people, this is the early morning. I’m getting my family out the door at that time, so although I don’t love it, I often work from about 9-10:30 at night. This slot has the added advantage that neither my US clients nor my European clients are normally at work at that time, so I can send e-mail without generating an immediate response that then requires another response from me.
Work on long-term projects in small, daily chunks
Here’s an illustrative example. I published the first edition of my book How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator in 2006. On January 1, 2008, I shook my fist in the air and said “If I finish one long-term project this year, it’s the second edition of that darned book!” Who wants to guess the actual publication date? May, 2011 (no, really). Basically, I was waiting for a big chunk of uninterrupted work time, fantasizing that I would take a month and do nothing but work on the second edition. News flash: unless you’re independently wealthy and have no responsibilities to anyone but yourself and have someone who cooks your meals, cleans your house and does your laundry, that chunk of time is never coming. So after taking two years to accept that reality, I resolved at the beginning of 2010 that I would work on the second edition every single day, even if I only wrote one sentence. This sounds like overstating the obvious, but here it is: even if you work on a project for only 15 minutes a day, you will eventually finish it. But if you never work on it, you will never finish it. So stop waiting for that elusive block of time, and start working with the amount of time you have. This works for other goals too; I once did a training program to run a marathon, and the coach told us that we were never allowed to use the “not enough time” excuse to avoid training. His advice: “If you only have 5 minutes, do Burpees for 5 minutes and you’ll be ready to drop. If you only have 20 minutes, run sprint intervals for 20 minutes. Even these small amounts add up.”
Fit stuff in, within reason
I kind of hate the term “multi-tasking” because I like to give my attention to one task at a time. Also, I have ways in which I absolutely will not multi-task. For example I don’t talk on the phone while I’m driving, even with a hands-free device. But I do try to combine certain kinds of activities to save time. We don’t have a clothes dryer (more on that in a forthcoming freelance frugality update), so I often talk on the phone while I’m hanging laundry on the clothesline. I’ve learned that I can prep a batch of bread dough while my husband and daughter are eating breakfast and getting ready for work and school in the morning, then it can rise while I’m working. And sometimes, you can fit in extra work time in a way that works well for your family: now that my daughter has 30-45 minutes of homework per night, I make a habit of sitting with her at the dining room table while she’s working, and that’s when I work on my long-term writing projects.
Accept that your other options are worse
I admit it: there are times when I get tired of being highly effective. There are days that I wish I could just fluff off, hit the celebrity gossip websites and then go to a hot yoga class. But I try to focus on my other options: making less money, having less time to spend with my family, using after-school child care or being up until 2 in the morning to finish my deadlines. In that light, things seem pretty good!
Billing by the word, the hour or the project
This topic started out as a Twitter discussion earlier this week, and I’m hoping that the translators who contributed there will join in here too! At the recent ATA conference, there was a lot of buzz about how translators should charge; not just the actual amounts, but whether it’s better to charge by the word, by the hour or by the project. So here’s a starter post to get the discussion going! It’s also worth noting that a post on the same topic that I wrote way back in 2008 is still one of the most popular posts on this blog, so clearly it’s a timeless topic! Here we go:
- Charging by the word still seems to be the norm in our industry, at least in the agency market. On the plus side, if you charge by the source word count, everyone knows in advance exactly how much the translation is going to cost (down to the penny) before the project starts. Also, per-word billing favors more experienced and more specialized translators who are thus faster at their work, and encourages translators to incorporate productivity-enhancing technology into their work flow. On the minus side, per-word billing makes translation seem like commoditized piecework: we’re not selling a solution, we’re selling a bucket of words. Clients may argue (down to the penny) about unnecessary words, discounted words, and so on. Per-word billing also discourages translators from doing thorough and time-consuming research, because if we’re not typing, we’re not earning.
- Charging by the hour seems to be gaining steam in the industry. Translators have historically charged by the hour for tasks like editing and proofreading, but now there’s a lot of talk about charging by the hour for translation too. During her preconference seminar at ATA, respected freelance translator Chris Durban noted that most direct clients are accustomed to paying for professional services (lawyers, accountants, marketing consultants, web designers) by the hour. Billing by the hour favors translators who work slowly because they are very thorough, and allows time for reading background material or doing in-depth research. But billing by the hour has its downsides: for whatever reason, most translation agencies seem to be resistant to paying an outright hourly rate that corresponds to what translators make when they bill by the word. For example, a translator earning 15 cents per word and producing 500 finished words per hour is effectively earning $75 per hour, well beyond the hourly rate that most translators report earning for tasks such as editing or proofreading. Billing by the hour also introduces the question of what is billable…phone time? e-mail time? FedEx time? revisions? And unless you have a very good handle on your translation speed for every document, or your clients will agree to start the project without a binding quote, it can be hard to know exactly how to estimate a given job.
- Then we’ve got the third way: billing by the project. Billing by the project with no breakdown of words or hours isn’t out of the question (it’s what I do with the majority of my direct clients). This method has the advantage of allowing the translator to tweak the per-word or per-hour rate without a lot of fanfare. It also gives the client one number to focus on: no worry about words, hours, is this translator fast or slow compared to other people, etc. The obvious disadvantage is that the translator is locked in to the fixed bid; there’s no wiggle room if the project takes twice as long as expected.
Now, over to you!