Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Off-topic: travel A-Z

To reward myself for finishing part of my taxes, here’s a spinoff of Jill Sommer’s post on the ABCs of traveling; a great Internet meme for language geeks! I agree with Jill that just assembling this list brought back some fabulous memories, and just for fun, it also prompted me to tally all of the countries I’ve visited (Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Brazil, France, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Monaco, Austria, Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia (when it still existed!), Hungary, Bosnia, Moldova, Romania, Portugal, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Nepal, Australia, Denmark, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates).

Age you went on your first international trip: I went to elementary school in western New York and we went to Canada frequently, but I left North America for the first time when I was 13, on a trip to France with my mom.

Best foreign beer you’ve had and where: Pass. I hate the taste of beer!

Cuisine (favorite): Tie. Anything Asian and vegetarian or anything French and pastry.

Destinations-favorite, least favorite and why: Favorite destination is a tie between Nepal and Paris, because in their own ways they are utterly unlike anyplace else in the world. Least favorite: the border crossing town between Nepal and India, which is not only “small, congested, dusty and dirty” but where you can also lie awake all night listening to the various calls to prayer blasted from the various temples and mosques on both sides of the border.

Event you experienced abroad that made you say “wow”: The Hungry Ghost Festival in Singapore. My husband and I backpacked across Asia for a year after we got married (an experience that also made me say “wow”!) and this festival was on the first night of our trip; the whole city was lit up with candles, lanterns and incense. It was my first time in Asia and a truly breathtaking experience.

Favorite mode of transportation: If I’m on a road, a bike. If not, my feet. Any place is within walking distance if you have the time! And I love how these modes of transportation bring everything down to a human scale.

Greatest feeling while traveling: Losing track of what day of the week it is. Now that’s vacation!

Hottest place you’ve ever been: Anywhere in Southeast Asia is pretty intensely hot and humid, mitigated by the fact that there’s lots of air conditioning. Honorable mention to the Arun Valley in Nepal, where it was 104 degrees and I was carrying a 60 pound backpack full of winter clothes for the higher elevations.

Incredible service you’ve experienced and where: The Gite du Mont Albert in Quebec, which we could afford only because the US dollar was worth almost 2 Canadian dollars at the time. It was the dead of winter, in the middle of the mountains and although there was only 1 vegetarian item on the menu, the chef cooked a different, totally amazing, vegetarian item for me and my husband every night.

Journey that took the longest: In actual terms, probably flying from Boston to Singapore. In terms of how long it felt, riding in the unheated baggage car of a night train between Grenoble, France and Salzburg, Austria (holiday weekend: all seats were taken and the conductor took pity on us!).

Keepsake from your travels: Sugar cubes and sugar packets. A little weird, I know, but I’m really not a knick-knack collector, so I bring the sugar home and add it to my coffee and think of the place I got it from. I also like interesting plastic shopping bags (ditto on the weird, maybe this is just me!).

Let-down sight-why and where: Not the Taj Mahal itself, but its surroundings. Before we went there, I never realized that it’s smack in the middle of a huge,  gritty, industrial city. Somehow I envisioned it in the middle of a wildflower meadow or something!

Moment when you fell in love with travel: On my first trip to France at age 13, my mom and I went to Mont Saint-Michel which is still one of my favorite places on earth. I had read a story about it in my 7th grade French textbook, entitled “Le beau paysage sauvage de Mont Saint-Michel” (The wild and beautiful landscape of Mont Saint-Michel) and I think it was one of my first experiences of seeing a place I had learned about in school coming to life.

Obsession-what are you obsessed with taking pictures of while traveling?: Animals? Mountains? My daughter? I’m not a very fanatical photographer, but I guess those are it.

Passport stamps- how many and from where?: Lots; I don’t really keep track but I do like passport stamps!

Quirkiest attraction you’ve visited and where: The ancient erotic temples in Khajuraho, India (you asked, OK!). The duty-free store in the Dubai airport, which sells Mercedes automobiles. The world’s northernmost Turkish minaret (in Eger, Hungary).

Recommended sight, event or experience: Two things I could watch all day: the astronomical clock in Bern, Switzerland and the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas.

Splurge-something you have no problem forking over money for while traveling: A truly unique experience. I’m really not a “stuff” person and I don’t do a lot of shopping on vacation, but give me a really cool boat ride or animal-watching tour or a zipline and I’m there.

Touristy thing you’ve done: I admit it, I love cheesy tourist stuff. I’m going to side with Jill here and say that the Sound of Music bus tour in Austria (where you drive around to the places the movie was filmed, and the movie plays in the tour bus) is high on the list. Dracula’s castle in Romania definitely deserves a mention.

Unforgettable travel memory: Spending my 29th and my husband’s 35th birthday camping in a stone hut at 15,000 feet in Nepal, watching the sunset over Langtang Lirung and the moonrise over Fluted Peak. Seeing wild tapirs grazing on the beach in Costa Rica. Traveling through Eastern Europe in 1991-1992 during the first wave of tourism after the Iron Curtain came down. Partying under the Eiffel tower on New Year’s Eve!

Visas–how many and for where?: French residence visa, tourist visas to India, Brazil and Laos (got the visa but never went there!).

Wine-best glass of wine while traveling and where?: I spent a summer in the Bordeaux region; pretty much anything there would qualify.

eXcellent view and from where?: Man-made: the Paris panorama from the Pont Neuf. Natural: Mt. Everest; kind of cliché but it is really amazing in person!

Years spent traveling: A year living in France, a year trekking across Asia, summers in France and Denmark, probably at least one trip a year outside the US since I was 13 and I’m 40 now!

Zealous sports fans and where: Cricket fans in Australia. Our Australian friends even took us to have drinks at a luxury hotel in Melbourne where (no kidding) the bathrooms have a particularly good view of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.


Corinne McKay

Free Q&A conference call

On Wednesday, January 25 at 12 noon US Eastern/New York Time (you can use The World Clock to convert to your time zone), Eve Bodeux, Michelle Bradley and I will be doing a free half-hour question and answer conference call about translation and the business of translation. You can connect to the call by phone using a US toll number or by Skype for free. Ask us anything! Well, at least anything related to the translation industry. To read more details or to submit a question, please see the Speaking of Translation website. We’ll select some of your questions to answer during the live call.  To receive the call instructions, send a blank e-mail to speakingoftranslation@gmail.com and you’ll receive an auto-response with the call-in number and the Skype instructions. Hope to see you there! We’ll also post a free recording of the call, so feel free to submit a question even if you cannot make the live session.


Corinne McKay

My favorite mistake

No, not the Sheryl Crow song, the Newsweek/Daily Beast Column. Maybe I just love reading about other people’s mistakes, but the last-page “My Favorite Mistake” essay is my favorite part of the redesigned Newsweek. Written by famous people of various flavors, these columns just reinforce the fact that whether it’s Madeleine Albright wearing her “three monkeys” pin for a meeting with Vladimir Putin, Ricki Lake doing online dating or Dennis Quaid using cocaine, we are, as my yoga teacher would say, all on the path.

This week’s essay, by violinist Joshua Bell, particularly grabbed my attention. Although I’m not a rabid fan of Bell’s music, he’s the subject of one of my favorite newspaper articles ever, Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pearls Before Breakfast, in which Weingarten chronicles Bell’s incognito performance in the Washington DC subway at rush hour. Bell’s “My Favorite Mistake” column tells the story of his first international violin competition performance, in which he flubbed the opening of his piece and decided to stop, apologize to the audience and start over rather than soldiering on through the performance. This got me thinking that we translators and interpreters, who by nature thrive on being right about everything, could also benefit from hauling our favorite mistakes out of the archives. Here’s mine. I told this story during the “Smart Business” panel at the Boston ATA conference so it’s not totally fresh, but this is its first time in writing!

I started freelancing in 2002, right after my daughter was born. I had a Master’s in French and had done a translation internship, but I really had no clue about the conventions of the translation industry. Plus, I was very, very hungry for work because I knew that my goal of working from home to be with my daughter was completely dependent on my success as a freelancer: if I didn’t make it, it was off to full-time daycare for her and off to a cubicle for me.

One of the first assignments that I received was from an agency, a very simple birth certificate translation, maybe 100 words total. I think that my minimum charge at the time was $30, and the agency didn’t give me any special instructions, just asked me to “translate the birth certificate.” So there I am at my computer, thinking that this is the easiest $30 I’ve ever made. I mean, for 100 words, why even put the translation in a Word document? Why not just type it into an e-mail to save the client some time dealing with the attachment. Obviously the missing link here is my lack of knowledge of the conventions of translating an official document: the big time investment isn’t translating the 50 or 100 words, it’s re-formatting the translation to look as much as possible like the original. So off I go, typing the translation into an e-mail and firing it off to the client, feeling really proud of myself (aren’t I efficient?!).

I have to say that the client was fairly understanding; probably more understanding than I would have been had I been on the receiving end of that e-mail. In any case I think they paid me the $30 we had agreed on, which was more than generous on their part since they ended up hiring another translator to do the job. But when I think back on this Favorite Mistake, I think that it really helped me. Obviously I learned something about official document translation, but I also learned a few larger lessons:

  • Knowing how to translate and knowing how to run a freelance business are completely different things; to succeed as a freelancer, you need to know both.
  • Try as we might to forget it, we were all new, inexperienced freelancers once. Maybe someone else’s stupid mistake wasn’t quite as stupid as mine, but we’ve all made them.
  • When translation newbies ask uninformed questions (Why doesn’t my TM tool spit out a translation after I type something into it? How much do I have to pay to get work from an agency? I charge 2 cents a word, is that about the industry standard? I’m looking for a business that’s easy to run in my spare time, would conference interpreting be good?), it’s hard not to be condescending, but it’s important to at least try. Whenever I answer a question like these, I think back to my “this is the easiest $30 I ever made!!” moment and try to give a thorough and non-condescending answer. Although these questions (and my birth certificate mistake) are completely off the mark, I also think it’s fair to ask how someone who’s never worked as a translator would know that TM and MT are two different things, or that agencies don’t charge up-front fees, or that the highest-paid freelancers make 40 or 50 cents a word, or that conference interpreters go to school for years  just to learn the basics of the job.

Readers, any other Favorite Mistakes out there?


Corinne McKay

Upcoming session of Getting Started as a Freelance Translator

The next session of my online course “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator” starts on Wednesday, January 25. This is a four-week “quick start” session for any new translators who want to get a jump on their business goals for 2012. During the session, we focus on four assignments: a translation-targeted resume and cover letter, a marketing plan, a rate sheet and sample terms of service and an online presence plan and elevator speech.

The full course information and registration are on my website, and the cost is $250, with a $50 discount for ATA members. I conduct the course entirely online, so it’s open to translators in any country and you don’t have to be online at a specific time. Everyone in the course also receives a copy of the newly released second edition of my book, “How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator.” One participant in the December session commented that “Corinne McKay’s course, “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator,” and book, “How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator,” are invaluable tools for the freelance translator. Her book will be bible for my career pursuit as a translator. I would recommend the class to beginners as well as already-established freelance translators. Excellent!” That was gratifying to read! Hope to see some blog readers in the January session; the December session filled up early!