Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Happy 2011: Are bad habits a form of self-protection?

Happy 2011 to everyone out there in the translation blogosphere!

To start the year off, here’s a very interesting interview I came across: sports writer Bill Simmons interviewing New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. Both Simmons and Gladwell draw some interesting parallels between sports and the rest of life, but my favorite is Gladwell’s take on why certain people (in this case athletes, but it could be translators) “don’t work hard when it’s in their best interest to do so.” Gladwell posits, and I’d agree, that failure caused by poor preparation is a way to insulate oneself from a more awful possibility: failure caused by a lack of ability. Gladwell applies this theory to golfers Tiger Woods (an obsessive preparer on the golf course, whatever his vices off the course!) and Phil MIckelson (who states that he didn’t pick up a golf club for 5 weeks before a major tournament), saying “…it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection. I swear that’s why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I’ll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating…”

Let’s apply this to the business of freelance translation. Hopefully you achieved some or even most of your goals for 2010. But as for the goals you didn’t achieve, did you fail because you didn’t follow through or did you fail because you followed through and still fell short of the target? I’m with Gladwell on this one; it’s a lot easier to tell yourself that you didn’t meet your income goal because you didn’t have time to do your marketing than it is to accept that you marketed and marketed and things didn’t pan out. Therefore, it’s a lot safer not to do the marketing so that you have that excuse in your back pocket.

So here’s a resolution for 2011: whatever your business-related goals are, give yourself permission to really, really try to meet them. Rather than protecting yourself with the usual “not enough time,” “too much else going on” types of excuses (I’m as guilty of these as the next translator!), give those goals your best, most honest and most thorough effort. Accept that you might not reach them, but try to drop the self-protecting excuses!


Corinne McKay

Reader question: cold-contacting with holiday cards

Here’s a followup to my post on What to send clients and colleagues for the holidays. This is a question that recently came up in the online course I teach, and I’d like to put it out to a wider audience. Is it appropriate to use holiday cards as cold contacts to potential clients? If not, why not? If so, what is the best method of doing this? Specifically, is it appropriate (always? sometimes? never?) to enclose one’s business card in a holiday card to a potential client? Is it appropriate to softly promote one’s own translation services, or should the card just express admiration for the potential client’s work and best wishes for the holidays and new year?

Over to the readers: I gave my students a brief opinion but I’ll refrain from commenting more fully until some readers weigh in.


Corinne McKay

Speaking of Translation goes webinar

Back in 2008, my colleague Eve Bodeux and I launched the podcast Speaking of Translation and over the years we’ve gotten some very nice feedback on it. To our knowledge SoT is the only podcast dedicated exclusively to translation and the business of translation. Breaking news: Speaking of Translation is going webinar! All of our podcasts will remain on line (free, of course!) while we branch out into a new and more interactive direction for 2011. I’m up first on January 26 at noon Eastern Time with Beyond the Basics of Freelancing, based on my sold-out preconference seminar at the 2010 ATA conference. In February we’ll be offering an introduction to social media for translators, then we’ll see where the webinar currents take us! My Beyond the Basics webinar costs $35 through January 16 and $40 after that. Hope to see some of you there!


Corinne McKay

Everyone's talking about work/life balance

It must be something about the holiday season that makes bloggers’ thoughts turn to the work/life balance or lack thereof. Here are some excellent posts from around the blogosphere:

  • Jill Sommer’s post ‘Tis the season for no work/life balance points out what many of us are experiencing: clients who have tons of work for us at the end of the year. I have vowed not to complain about having too much work until the unemployment rate falls back to a reasonable number, but I agree with Jill. Especially if you have clients in countries where the holiday vacation season lasts from about December 15 until January 6, it’s a very busy time to be a freelancer!
  • Penelope Trunk, one of my favorite non-translation bloggers, has a great post entitled Maybe no moms are working moms, focusing specifically on the work/life balance issues that moms face. Much of this post rings true for me; I think that many of the moms at my daughter’s school think that because I come in to frost gingerbread houses and shelve library books, I’m a stay-at-home-mom. However, I do think that some of the issue is location-dependent. Here in Boulder where the cafés are full at all hours of the work day and signs in store windows read “Mondays and powder days: closed,” working 30 hours a week from home as a freelancer is definitely considered “having a job.” This post made me realize that because I live in a community where I have a lot of freelancing mom friends, I don’t really identify with the “scared, lost and lonely” stereotype in Penelope’s post. So here’s one solution to the work/life dilemma: move to a town where people don’t work that much!
  • Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. Roth posted In Praise of Work-Life Balance, discussing his current situation and the freedom that it affords him. One key tip here: once you hit the sweet spot of work/life balance, resist the urge to add more commitments. J.D. describes his decision to indefinitely delay a planned project because he can’t add another task to his list right now. In the past, I’ve implemented a similar strategy and declined all new (non-paying) requests for my time for two weeks, or a month, or however long I need to feel sane!

Feel free to add your own work/life tips, and have a great holiday season!


Corinne McKay

Webinar question: Preparing for the ATA certification exam

This is post #3 in my ongoing series of questions from the webinar on “Getting started as a freelance translator” that I presented for the American Translators Association earlier this month.

A participant asks: How can I prepare for the ATA certification exam?
Short answer: Order a practice test from ATA; at $50 (including return of the graded copy of your exam) as opposed to $300 for the real exam (not including return of the graded copy of your exam), it’s a good investment and a good indicator of your chances of passing the real exam.

Longer answer: If you’d like to take the ATA exam, you need to do a few things:

  • Join ATA
  • Make sure you meet the eligibility requirements for the exam. If you don’t meet them and you do not currently work as a translator, your most expeditious route is probably to get a translation certificate from an approved program; there’s a list on the ATA website.
  • Gather (buy, borrow, check out of the library) enough paper dictionaries and reference books for the exam. At present, ATA does not allow candidates to use any electronic resources for the exam, but you can use all of the paper dictionaries that you can carry. When I took the test, the woman next to me brought a rolling suitcase full of dictionaries covering a variety of subject areas.
  • Familiarize yourself with the error marking framework for the exam, the tips for candidates and the other resources on ATA’s website.
  • Take a practice test and see how you do. The magic number is 17; with 17 or fewer error points, you’re in. If you take the practice test and get 20 error points, you probably have a chance of passing the real exam (this happened to me) but if you get 40 error points, well…

And a few random thoughts on the ATA exam:

  • I am ATA-certified and find it to be a boost for my business. At the very least, someone browsing the ATA online directory is likely to call the certified translators first. I do a pretty brisk business translating official documents for individual direct clients, partially because I’m one of only three ATA-certified French to English translators in Colorado. However, the highest paid freelancers I know, people in the 40+ cents per word market, are not certified. You can definitely earn a very healthy income as a freelance translator without being certified.
  • As was recently discussed on Jill Sommer’s blog, there are lots of issues with the ATA exam. The handwriting factor is huge; personally I don’t hand write anything except my grocery list, and I found it excruciating to hand write the whole exam. In nearly a decade as a freelancer, I have never hand written a translation other than the ATA exam. Ditto with paper dictionaries; most of us have moved over to entirely electronic terminology resources and it’s tough to translate without using them. When I took the exam, the general passage was much, much harder than the specialized passage, and I felt that the grading standards were heavily swayed toward a fairly literal, word-by-word translation; the kind of translation I try to avoid when I translate for publication. ATA is working on a lot of these issues. And to be fair, it’s hard to deal with some of them (for example the long turnaround time to get your exam graded) without raising the price beyond most translators’ means.
  • The pass rate for the ATA certification exams is very low. ATA does not release exact statistics, but the pass rate seems to be about 20%. However: a) this is comparable to, or even higher than the pass rates for similar exams such as the Federal Court Interpreter certification exam. Some court interpreter certification exams even have a pass rate around 5%. b) if you fail the ATA exam, it means that two separate graders agree that you failed. Every exam is reviewed by two graders to start out with. If they disagree on the result, the exam is then sent to another grader for a third review. So you cannot fail the exam based on only one person’s assessment of your test. c) I would be interested to see the pass rates broken down by language. Anecdotally, it seems that some languages’ pass rates are much lower than others
  • If I were to give ATA some business advice, I would advise them to start producing preparation materials for the certification exams. I think that this would serve the twofold purpose of making the exam and the grading process more transparent and of generating revenue for ATA. For example, ATA could publish preparation manuals of old exams with graded example translations. They could even offer preparation courses. Hey, if people will spend several thousand dollars for a bar exam preparation course, ATA should be able to charge real money for a translator certification exam preparation course.

Other thoughts?