This afternoon I was driving home from having lunch with a colleague when I turned on Colorado Public Radio. Public Radio International’s The World was on, with a lead-in to a segment on the recent decrease in pay for court interpreters in Nevada. And at that moment I just knew I’d be hearing the voice of my friend and colleague Judy Jenner…and I was right! The piece features very well-done interviews with Judy, her colleague Álvaro Degives-Más and Nataly Kelly of Common Sense Advisory. All three of them sounded great and gave some compelling reasons why saving money on interpreting can end up increasing costs to taxpayers in the end. You can listen to the segment or read a transcript of it here, on The World’s website.
A change of heart about Trados
For as long as I’ve been using translation memory tools (about 9 years), I’ve been using Wordfast and OmegaT. In general I’ve been happy with both of these tools; I love open source software in general so OmegaT has always had a special place in my heart, and I’ve always enjoyed Wordfast’s ergonomic features, excellent support and no-hassle upgrade system. For the majority of my work I do not use TM tools, both because a lot of my work is PDFs and because I feel that TM tools squeeze the flow out of my writing style, but I do have a few large recurring projects that require TM.
I’ve never been a big fan of the Trados concept: high price, lackluster support unless you buy a separate support contract, expensive upgrades, and so on. However I’ve also talked to a number of translators who I really respect, who are not in the high volume-low margin market and who are enthusiastic Trados users. So a few weeks ago, along came the perfect storm of circumstances: a client I really like approached me about a large (50-60K words) project that would require Trados Studio, I needed a new Windows computer anyway because my old XP machine was starting to die a slow death and my translation partner Eve Bodeux offered to take the Trados plunge with me. So rather than hemming and hawing about it for a year as I normally do with major decisions, in the space of a week I bought a new Windows computer, bought Office 2010, bought Trados Studio 2011 and Eve and I hired a colleague who was a Studio 2011 beta tester to give us an all-day orientation and training session before the big project started.
Now here’s where you need to sit down. Ask me what I think of Studio 2011. Go ahead, just ask. I love it. Hopefully this is proof that I’m not yet too old to change my mind, because after years of railing against the Trados business model and all things associated with it, I have to say that Studio 2011’s features are incredible, and that it was much easier to learn to use than I had anticipated. On the down side, I do still think it’s a little nutty that a piece of software that costs circa $1,000 doesn’t come with any human support unless you buy a contract, but here are some of my takeaways from about three weeks of using Studio 2011:
- If you’re going to spend the money on this thing, learn to use it correctly from the start. I dove into Wordfast in the middle of a huge project and my abilities stalled out at using a TM, using a glossary and using the concordance feature. In 9 years of using Wordfast, I never really put in the effort to learn more, so I stayed stuck with the limited features I knew how to use. Whichever TM tool you use, don’t make that mistake: either teach yourself slowly, one feature at a time, or (my recommendation) hire a very knowledgeable colleague or Trados trainer to teach you how to use it.
- Filter, filter, filter. The filters in Studio 2011 are fabulous. You can filter for all of the duplicate segments and translate them first, you can filter for all of the segments with a certain word in them, you can insert comments right in the segments and then your editor can filter for just the commented segments, and so on. Don’t underuse this feature!
- Take some time to work on your settings. Here again, Studio 2011 has some really great features (see Tools>Options) that can save you a lot of hassle. For example you can blacklist your typical typing errors; for some reason I often type “tot he” when I mean “to the,” and the spell-checker doesn’t catch it because tot and he are real words. Now I’ve blacklisted that expression so that Studio alerts me if I type it. Ditto with naughty words whose non-naughty counterparts often appear in the documents you translate (i.e. pubic/public).
- Whatever TM tool you use, or if you use no TM tool at all, just make sure that you’re making an objective decision rather than an emotional one. Definitely, when I work on something that needs to be really well written, I prefer to just open up a Word document and write. But I realized that for projects that require TM, I was resisting trying Trados for no particular reason other than that I insisted on resisting, if that makes sense.
Any other thoughts on selecting and learning to use a TM tool? Anyone tried anything new lately?
Kindle edition of my book!
Thanks to the services of BookBaby, the second edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator is now available for the Kindle!. It should also be available in the iBookstore, Sony Reader store and Nook store in the near future. I’m normally a DIY kind of author, but after battling with various flavors of Kindle creator software, I decided that BookBaby’s $200 formatting and distribution package seemed like a good deal. There were a few hiccups along the way, and maybe I’m the last person to know that most e-readers don’t support indexes (?) but I was able to send BookBaby the existing PDF of my book’s content and the e-version looks very nice. I’m excited about this new publishing platform and hoping to get the print and electronic versions of my next book, a compilation of entries from this blog, published within the next month or two.
Some thoughts on rates and quotes
I really enjoyed reading The Freelancery’s recent post on whether or not to publish your freelance rates on your website. Since my website redesign a few years ago, I’ve struggled with this same dilemma: I grow weary of preparing quotes for clients whose budget turns out to be 1/3 of what I charge, so I post my rates on my website. Then I feel like having posted rates is too restrictive and doesn’t steer the conversation toward value for money, so I take my rates down. Here’s my current line of reasoning, which is, of course, subject to change!
No question about it, handling inquiries from prospective clients who have little to no budget can be draining. Sometimes the slim to nonexistent funding isn’t mentioned until 25 minutes into the phone conversation (this happened to me recently), and sometimes it’s brought up with a tone of righteous indignation on the prospective client’s part (“If you can’t do it for $25 an hour, our marketing manager’s son who studied abroad in Belgium will be happy to do it for $15”). It’s just a bummer to spend so much time talking to prospective clients who expect so much for so little. However, I agree with The Freelancery’s suggestion that these interactions are also opportunities: maybe an opportunity to refer work to a beginning translator who charges less, maybe an opportunity to mention that professional translators don’t generally work for what the client’s budget is, etc. In the end, I do think that we perform a service on behalf of the profession when we have these types of conversations.
In terms of posted rates, I feel that I’ve found somewhat of a happy medium that works for me.
- I removed my general “Rates” page from my website and I ask prospective clients to call or e-mail for a quote. However, I don’t prepare a detailed quote until they confirm that my rates are at least somewhat within their budget. This avoids the time-suck of preparing a full quote only to find out that the client’s budget is less than half of what I charge.
- I left my rates for “fixed-price” items on my website. For example for certified translations of official documents, I always charge $50 per page for the translation and $15 for a notarized certification, and most of these clients are first-time, one-time clients. The Freelancery’s post hits this one on the head (and they mention translation in their examples!); clients who want their birth certificate translated into English don’t want to call for a quote, they just want it done fast and for a not exorbitant amount of money. My rate to translate official documents might be more expensive than some other freelancers, but I know it’s much cheaper than most agencies’ minimum charges, so I feel fine about posting it.
In closing, although I think of myself as a kind and understanding person and as someone who tries to be helpful whenever it’s possible, two aspects of rates and quoting really raise my blood pressure. I’ll admit them publicly in order to get them off my chest:
- Why do so many prospective clients seem to lose the ability to do math when it comes to translation quotes? If I give the example that at 25 cents per word, a full page of single-spaced text would cost approximately $125 to translate, why is it then a surprise that a 10-page document costs $1,250 to translate?
- Why do so many prospective clients feel that it should take a couple of hours to translate something that took months or even years to write? I get this a lot from authors: “But the book is so short! It will really take you 10 hours to translate it?” I can’t decide whether it would be helpful or nasty to ask if it really took them more than 10 hours to write the book, but I try to just answer the question objectively since I enjoy doing literary translation and working with authors.
Feel free to add your own observations on rates and quotes too (or associated issues that you need to get off your chest!). Thanks for listening, I feel so much better.
Where I've been…
I’m easing back into reality today after a glorious vacation; my translation partner and friend Eve Bodeux and I took our families on a 100 mile mountain bike camping trip through Canyonlands National Park last week. The seven of us (Eve, myself, husbands and three kids under ten years old) biked the legendary White Rim Trail which is jaw-droppingly beautiful, winding through the scenic canyons of the Island in the Sky district. We were lucky to have unseasonably warm and dry weather and perfect trail conditions!
One of the best parts of the trip was having no cell phone reception or computer access for four days; I really needed a break and didn’t think about work more than a couple of times. But Eve made sure that we didn’t forget about our profession entirely; she packed some snacks in her conference swag bag from ATA Boston, and we thought it deserved a pose in front of the Airport Tower rock formation! That’s Eve (the cute one!) on the left, and me on the right. Happy Spring Break to all of you too, wherever you’re spending it.
