Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Recording of Jost Zetzsche interview is online!

This past Wednesday, I had the pleasure of interviewing translation technology guru Jost Zetzsche during a question and answer conference call. If you missed the live call, you can listen to the recording on the Speaking of Translation website (it streams from the conference call provider, so you don’t need to download anything unless you want to!).  Lots of people submitted great questions for Jost to choose from, and on the recording you’ll hear his answers to:

  • Are TM tool developers paying more attention to the editing process and how to support it?
  • What’s the best terminology management tool for freelancers?
  • Are translation management, content management and machine translation systems becoming more integrated?
  • Does Déjà Vu support terminology blacklists?
  • What is the best quality assurance tool for freelancers?

We also learned that Jost has co-authored (with Nataly Kelly) a new book called “Found in Translation,” which includes 90 stories of how translators and translation affect almost every aspect of our daily lives. It’s forthcoming from a Penguin imprint in the fall and will be available at the ATA conference (can’t wait to get a copy!). Thanks to Jost for so generously donating his time, and if you don’t yet subscribe to his Tool Box technology newsletter for translators, you should!


Corinne McKay

April session of "Getting started as a freelance translator"

The next session of my four-week online course Getting Started as a Freelance Translator starts on Wednesday, April 4. I’ve been teaching this class for about five years, and it covers the basics of launching and running a freelance business. It’s open to translators in any language combination, and lately I’ve also had a number of students who are already professional translators but are “re-launching” their businesses to target different specializations or higher-paying clients. We’ve also started doing 2-3 conference calls throughout the course so that the course participants can get to know each other and ask questions about working as a freelance translator. The course tuition is $250 ($50 discount for ATA members) and includes a copy of my book, How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator.

Here’s a comment from a student in the last session of the course: “Simply put, this is one of the finest resources for any translator. No matter what your specialization is, I guarantee you will take something away from Corinne’s online course. For those just starting, it will instruct and guide. For veterans, it can remind and reaffirm. In either case, you’ll definitely enjoy the experience!”  Hope to see some blog readers there! Registration is open on my website, at this page.


Corinne McKay

Q&A call with Jost Zetzsche

Next Wednesday, the 21st, I’ll be hosting a free question and answer conference call with Jost Zetzsche, the translation industry technology guru! Jost is the author of the ultra-useful Tool Box translation technology newsletter and the popular “Geek Speak” column in the ATA Chronicle.

The call will start at 12:00 noon New York time and will last about half an hour. It’s free, and you can connect by phone (toll call if you pay by the minute for long distance) or by Skype (free). To submit a question for Jost or to view the call connection instructions, please visit the Speaking of Translation website.


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on ATA certification

On the Colorado Translators Association e-mail list, we recently had a lively discussion about ATA certification, which got me thinking about some of the pros, cons and issues associated with the ATA certification exams. In the spirit of disclosure, I am both ATA-certified (failed the practice test, passed the real exam) and an active volunteer for ATA so I’m not entirely impartial, but I’ll try to give a balanced view of the topic.

For those unfamiliar with the ATA certification process, here are some of the roots of the controversy

    • ATA certification exams are still handwritten and no electronic reference materials are allowed. Candidates have to bring their own (paper) dictionaries and reference books; when I took the exam, the woman next to me brought a rolling suitcase full of dictionaries.
    • The only feedback that you receive from the ATA exam is a letter notifying you whether you passed or failed; you don’t receive your marked-up exam unless you pay a separate review fee.
    • In order to refer to yourself as ATA-certified and to use the CT designation, you must remain a member of ATA. Technically, your certification lapses if you don’t renew your ATA membership, and ATA could require you to retake the certification exam.
    • ATA does not release pass/fail rates for specific language combinations, only an approximate overall pass rate of “less than 20%.”

To open the discussion, here are some gripes about the exam that I disagree with:

      • “It’s too expensive.” At $300, the exam certainly isn’t cheap. But ATA actually loses money on the certification program; and when you consider that the $300 fee includes the exam sitting plus having your exam graded by at least two reviewers (and a third reviewer comes in if the first two disagree on your result), I actually think it’s amazing that ATA doesn’t need to charge more.
      • “The grading process is unfair.” I agree that the grading process is a little opaque (we’ll get to that later…), but if you fail, it means that at least two reviewers agree that you failed. You can never fail the ATA exam based on only one person’s review.
      • “The passing rate is ridiculously low.” The passing rate on the ATA exam is, according to all of the published statistics I could find, roughly equivalent to the passing rate on the Federal Court Interpreter written exam, and *much higher* than the 4-5% pass rate on the Federal Court Interpreter exam as a whole.
      • “No one cares if you’re certified anyway.” I think that certification is not a must, but it’s certainly a plus. I do a brisk business translating official documents for individuals, and most of that work requires a certified translator. If a client is blindly searching the ATA directory, I think that they’re likely to contact the certified people first. And I think that clients in general feel safer when they use certified translators because they feel that there’s some guarantee of competence there.

Moving on, here are some gripes about the exam that I believe have at least a shred of merit:

    • The whole handwritten exam/paper dictionary situation. I can sympathize with the reasons behind this (exam security, expense, finding appropriate testing centers, dealing with non-Roman-alphabet languages, etc.) but it’s still a major deterrent for many translators. When I took the exam in 2002, I don’t think I had spent three hours handwriting anything since I was in college in the early 90s. If I were to take the exam today, I would have to purchase or borrow paper dictionaries just for that purpose since I’ve converted to electronic resources almost exclusively. This format just doesn’t mesh with the way most translators work in 2012.
    • The lack of prep materials. At present, the only official prep materials that ATA offers are practice exams which cost $50.00 each. Considering that you do receive your marked-up practice exam, I think the cost is very reasonable. However, I think ATA should offer more prep materials than this in order to make the grading standards more transparent. How about a book of old exams for each language combination with sample translations, including the error markings for each one? How about language-specific prep courses led by graders and including practice exam sessions with feedback? Right now, I think that if you fail the practice test it’s hard to know what you need to work on in order to pass. More prep materials could help remedy this.
    • The opacity surrounding the exam grading and release of results, which ties into the cost of the exam. To my knowledge, ATA does not publish the names of the exam graders. Many people do identify themselves as exam graders, for example on their websites or LinkedIn profiles, but ATA itself does not identify them. I think it would contribute to the legitimacy of the exam if ATA made a concerted effort to recruit graders who are seen as the top translators in their language combinations. Undoubtedly, some or even most graders already meet this criterion, but ATA could benefit from publishing their names on its website. In addition, I think that ATA should pay its graders more (in order to recruit and retain the most respected translators in each language combination), even if this leads to an increase in the exam fee. I also think that ATA should release specific pass/fail figures each year and for each language combination. Right now ATA publishes the names of newly certified members in the Chronicle, but I think it would contribute to the exam’s legitimacy if ATA published the number of people who took each language combination and the number who passed and failed.

In sum, I think that ATA does a good job of administering the certification program with the resources that it has. With a budget of $300 per candidate spread over renting an exam room, paying an exam proctor, paying at least two graders and dealing with the administrative aspects of the exam, I think that ATA does pretty admirably. However, I think that increasing the exam fee in order to finally get the exam computerized, plus offering more prep materials and possibly prep courses would help make the exam process more transparent and legitimate in the eyes of ATA members.


Corinne McKay

Two cents, or $10,000?

If you’re a freelancer, you probably conduct price negotiations with clients or potential clients almost every day of your professional life. For translators, especially translators who work with agencies, these negotiations often come down to a difference of one or two cents. Your minimum rate is 15 cents per word and the client will only pay 14, or 13.5, and so on.

Price negotiation is a difficult part of freelancing. The fact that translation is normally priced in such small increments (words or lines) makes it even more difficult; kind of the opposite of negotiating the price of a house. For example when we moved from Boston to Colorado a number of years ago, my husband and I sold our house for about $300,000. When we were negotiating the sale price, we had to remind ourselves that these seemingly huge amounts of money ($6,000 to have the siding replaced! $500 to have a hauling company come take away old furniture!) represented only a tiny fraction of the house’s sale price. Translation works the other way around: we’re talking cents here, not thousands of dollars, so declining a project because the client won’t pay one more cent per word can leave a translator feeling like kind of a petty miser.

But here’s the thing: say that most full-time freelancers translate 400,000 or 500,000 words per year.  Let’s say 500,000 because I’m not that great at math and it’s easy to multiply by five. That seemingly petty one cent per word? If you extrapolate that over 500,000 words per year, it’s actually $5,000. Two cents? How about $10,000?

Forcing yourself to think about prices by the project rather than by the word can help you avoid caving in to the “it’s just one cent” mentality. Instead of negotiating the per-word price, how about calculating how much money you’re giving up per project, or per year? Rather than seeing your negotiations as “just a cent,” you’ll have a more realistic idea of the effect on your total income.