Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Some interesting links

I’m working on a more substantive post on “what makes a translation sound like a translation;” if you have any suggestions, feel free to submit them here or on Twitter. In the meantime, here are some interesting links from the rest of the web. Have a great weekend! The Thoughts on Translation world headquarters will be closed on Monday for U.S. Presidents’ Day.

  • First, here’s a random thought that I keep forgetting to mention: what ever happened to The Masked Translator? MT’s blog has been dormant since August of 2009, although I still think of her/him often! MT, if you’re out there, come back! We need our regular dose of your acerbic, “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” wit!
  • Michelle Rafter, one of my favorite non-translation bloggers, has a couple of excellent new posts that apply to translators too: What should I pay a proofreader? and Update your office technology to minimize clutter.
  • Completely OT but just interesting: Get Rich Slowly on Redbox vs. iTunes vs. Netflix; a nice comparison of at-home movie viewing options. I’d add that if you don’t care about Netflix Instant Watch, you can purchase the very basic Netflix subscription (one movie at a time, two movies per month), for $4.99.
  • On-topic: Jill Sommer has a great post entitled What is your gut telling you?. Lots of food for thought there: remember the last time you knew you should turn down a project, but for some reason (money, guilt, inertia) you took it?
  • For those who read French, Sara Freitas-Maltaverne’s blog is running a really interesting series of posts on website critiques and makeovers. Sara has a web design expert give his assessment and suggestions about various (courageous!) freelance translators’ websites.
  • Two of my favorite translation resources are now in one place: Sarah Dillon joined eCPD webinars and will now be organizing webinars for linguists from her base in Australia!
  • Finally, speaking of webinars: recordings of Speaking of Translation’s two most recent webinars are available for purchase online. They’re both a little over an hour long and the recording includes all the slides and audio. Topics are “Beyond the Basics of Freelancing” (presented by me) and “Introduction to Social Media for Translators” (presented by Eve Bodeux and me).

Thanks and happy Friday!


Corinne McKay

Reader question: LinkedIn strategies

Recently I’ve received several questions from readers about connecting with people on LinkedIn. Most of the questions are something like this: “I receive connection requests from people I don’t know at all, with no explanation of who they are or how I might know them. Is it rude/unwise to just ignore these?” This brings up the issue of one’s personal LinkedIn strategy, so I think it’s worth exploring.

I don’t invest an enormous amount of time on LinkedIn, but I do think that for purposes of findability, every freelancer should have a profile on LinkedIn or a similar site. These sites rank very highly on search engines, so if clients are scouring the Internet for a translator, there’s a good chance that they will come across your LinkedIn profile. In addition, I use LinkedIn as a virtual business card file; it saves me from keeping track of the e-mail addresses of all of my business contacts. I also belong to several LinkedIn groups; I lurk more than I participate, but I still find them valuable.

People seem to have a variety of feelings about LinkedIn connections, ranging from:

  • only wanting to connect with people who they know personally and work with, resulting in a potentially small but very high-quality network
  • being willing to connect with new people, if those people provide an explanation of why they want to connect
  • actively connecting with anyone, also known as the LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) strategy

I can see rationales for all of these strategies, but in general I think I take the second option most often. One reason I’m an active social media user is that my local client base is very small. Colorado is not as international business-oriented as the coastal states in the U.S., and the major industries here (mining, agriculture, renewable energy) are not areas in which I translate. So, I have to broaden my horizons if I want to keep finding new clients. For that reason, I’ve done some active cold-contacting on LinkedIn, mostly in the form of sending contact requests to people who are in some of the same LinkedIn Groups I’m in (with a free account, you cannot cold-contact just anyone on LinkedIn). I’ve explained that I’m a US-based French to English translator specializing in law, international development and corporate communications and that I’m interested in expanding my contacts in that person’s country/industry. In general I’ve found people to be very receptive to these types of contacts. At the same time, I am reluctant to accept contact requests from people whose names I don’t recognize, and who provide no explanation beyond the pro forma “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” message.

Readers, any thoughts on your LinkedIn strategy and your rationale for it?


Corinne McKay

Registration for social media webinar closes tonight

This month’s Speaking of Translation webinar is an introduction to social media for translators. My colleague Eve Bodeux and I will give the business case for using (or not using) Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs, then we’ll give a brief overview of how to get started on each of these platforms. The one-hour session will be broadcast live at noon U.S. Eastern Time this Thursday (February 10) and everyone who registers also receives a link to a full audio and video recording of the webinar to view at your convenience. The cost is $40 and you can find complete information and the registration link here.


Corinne McKay

Neat product: Moo mini-cards

We all know that one of the primary rules of freelance marketing is “always have business cards with you.” However, this can be harder than it sounds: first, you have to have a good location for the cards. The positive impression you’re trying to create is definitely ruined if you have to rummage through your bag for ten minutes to find where you put the cards, or if you extract a card that’s been folded and mutilated beyond all recognition. At networking events, I often struggle with the best place to put cards; loose in my pocket, they’re likely to get messy. In a holder in my wallet, they take too long to remove. Second, many freelancers have several styles of business cards. My business is fairly streamlined and I still have three kinds of business cards, which are tough to fit into my wallet-sized card holder.

Enter a suggestion from Portuguese and French to English translator Zoë Perry, who suggests solving all of these problems at once with miniature business cards from Moo and a mini-card holder that you can put in your pocket or on your keyring. I’m not easily sucked in by marketing swag, and I thought this was a really neat idea. Moo allows you to get multiple designs in one pack of mini-cards, and the card holder can accommodate 12 cards at once. At $25.00 for 100 mini-cards and a holder, this seems like a good marketing investment for 2011 (and this is not an affiliate deal!). This tiny card holder would be easy to carry in your pocket at a networking event, and with it on your keyring you could even network in the supermarket checkout line.

One thing: I just might have to wait to purchase these cards until Moo removes the cardstock accolade “We chose it for it’s [sic] thickness…” from their website. This is one of those errors I’m tired of seeing, especially from a media company! Moo, please fix this, because I really want a set of mini-cards and I can’t in good conscience support that misplaced apostrophe!

Readers, any other ideas for fun and useful new marketing tools for this year?


Corinne McKay

Giving clients advice: how far to go?

I gave some thought to titling this post “Should translators encourage their clients to be more gay-friendly?”, but the issue I’m mulling over is really about whether we should encourage our clients to be more inclusive in general. I should also say that although I’m not gay, I have a close family member who is, and I live in one of America’s most gay-friendly cities, so I might be more aware of this issue than some translators are.

With the identifying details removed, here’s the story: I’ve recently translated several corporate communications pieces (one was a questionnaire for a medical study and the other was a marketing piece for a line of luxury goods) that were written in a way that assumed that the target reader was straight. For example these pieces used expressions such as “his and hers,” “the patient’s mother and father,” etc. As mentioned above, I think that this type of phrasing jumps out at me because of the English documents that I’m used to reading. Case in point: the forms that my daughter’s school sends home now say “Parent or Guardian #1″ and Parent or Guardian #2” instead of “Mother” and “Father” because so many students have two parents of the same gender. But then again here in Boulder we can’t even refer to pet “owners”:  we’re legally required to say pet guardians, so maybe it’s just us!

At any rate, when I went to prepare my page of client comments for each of these projects, I wondered how to phrase this issue. My objection to language such as “his and hers” when referring to an unidentified couple isn’t political; it’s based on my impression that the client risks offending some of their potential target market. Here in the U.S., it seems to be more common for mainstream companies to either produce gay-targeted ads, or ads for the general public that happen to include gay themes. This undoubtedly makes good business sense since gay men are some of America’s highest-spending consumers. When even mainstream companies like Johnson and Johnson (“for the go-go boy in all of us”…who knew?) and Campari are producing gay-targeted ads and American Express has a directory of gay and gay-friendly travel agents, it seems counterproductive not to alert a client to the potential business implications of assuming that all of their clients are heterosexual.

Unfortunately I can’t go into the specifics of the solution that I suggested for each client without saying more than I want to about the specifics of these projects. But I’m interested to hear from other translators about this topic in general: when a client has you translate a communications piece that makes assumptions about the target reader’s religion, race, sexual orientation or other “sensitive” characteristics, do you offer advice or leave it to the client to decide?

Another interesting point: when doing some research for the projects referenced above, I found that mainstream companies are producing gay-themed ads in other countries, and some of them are more overt than what we’re used to seeing in the U.S. market. For example this gay-themed ad for French McDonald’s (which uses the English slogan “come as you are” and even references the tension between a gay teen and his father) struck me as something we’d be unlikely to see on U.S. television.