Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Thoughts on 2011

If you’re a freelancer, it’s time to start thinking about your business-related tasks for wrapping up 2010 and starting 2011 on a positive note. A few thoughts:

  • Are you going to raise your rates? If so, think about how to raise them effectively. Are you going to raise your rates for new clients and keep existing clients at the same rate, or raise them across the board? Are you going to approach your regular clients in advance of the rate raise and see if they’re amenable, or inform them of the rate raise and see what happens? Keep in mind: it’s easier to raise your rates a little bit each year rather than trying to impose a drastic increase every few years; some agency clients may have a rate ceiling and it’s up to you if you want to work for that rate or not; in my opinion, the more objective you are about rates (by using a rate sheet or similar tool), the better.
  • What are your tax prep plans? Are you going to prepare your taxes yourself, stick with your current accountant or use a new accountant? Whichever option you choose, start early. My accountant has gotten me in the habit of closing out my books as soon as the year ends and preparing my taxes as soon as possible after that. This saves a lot of sleepless nights and hand-wringing in April!
  • How about year-end retirement (or other) contributions? Depending on the financial instrument, you may have until April 15 to make these contributions; but plan them now! Making a year-end contribution to your 401K or similar account can be a great way to save on taxes (make sure to check with a tax professional to make sure you’re doing this legally!), but make sure you budget accordingly.
  • And as for your goals? Force yourself to cast an objective eye on 2010. Be honest with yourself. What goals did you meet, exceed or fall short of? Most importantly, how can you make a step-by-step plan for reaching your goals in 2011?


Corinne McKay

Webinar question: Does age matter?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar on Getting Started as a Freelance Translator as part of ATA’s ongoing series of online educational sessions. I think that it went well, with huge thanks to Lucy Brooks of eCPD Webinars and Mary David and Naomi Sutcliffe de Moraes of ATA. Lots of participants submitted questions, but we only got to a few of them before our time ran out. I’ve started a new blog category, “Webinar questions,” in order to answer some more of them here. Thanks to everyone who participated!

A participant asks: Can one be too old to begin a translation business (for example, as indicated by degree completion years) or do prospective employers generally not care?
Short answer: As a freelancer, I wouldn’t worry about age too much. If you’re up-to-date enough to participate in a webinar and even submit a question, I think you’re fine.

Longer answer: This worry applies to both ends of the spectrum: 22 year old new graduates and 68 year old retirees often ask “Will clients take me seriously?” In both cases, I think the answer is “yes,” if you keep a few important factors in mind:

  • As a group, freelance translators aren’t that young. Case in point: I’m 39 and have an 8 year old child, and I’m regularly referred to as a “girl” or “young lady” by elder members of the profession. The oldest freelancer I’ve heard of was in his early 90s and I know of  numerous successful freelancers in the 70+ bracket.
  • Degree completion years? For a US resumé, I’d leave them off. After all, age discrimination is illegal and as long as you can do the job, your clients really don’t need to know how old you are. Likewise, I know several translators in their 60s and beyond who deliberately do not put their photo on their marketing materials.
  • Whether you’re on the young or old end of the freelance spectrum, keep the negative stereotypes of your age group in mind and defy them. For example, take the stereotype that older workers are set in their ways and resist new technologies. Beat this image by pointing out that you’ve recently participated in a webinar (or even more than one!) for freelance translators, that you use Skype to communicate with your clients and colleagues and that you’re really looking forward to getting to know your clients’ preferences and style guidelines. If you’re in your 20s, pay particular attention to being reliable, responsible and possibly more formal than you would be otherwise. For example, a conference interpreter training program director in the UK recently attributed the EU’s difficulty in finding new into-English interpreters to the candidates’ poor skills in their native language: Many of the young hopefuls cannot speak in the appropriate “register” for the event they would be interpreting. Their only modes of speech are informal, peppered with “like”, for instance, she says. They misuse words and don’t know the subtle differences between synonyms. So, brush up on your formal speaking skills before you go for the interview!
  • For better or worse, freelance translation is a real meritocracy. On the one hand I think that most clients, at least in the US, are largely concerned with your ability to do a good job and don’t really care if you’re older or younger than they expected. On the other hand, one flubbed assignment can get you kicked to the electronic curb, so make sure to keep your focus on outstanding work.

I’ll be answering more questions from the webinar soon!


Corinne McKay

Upcoming session of "Getting Started as a Freelance Translator"

The next session of my 6-week online course Getting Started as a Freelance Translator starts on Monday and I still have a few spots left. This is a ground-up course for people with little or no translation experience; we cover topics such as writing a translation-targeted resumé and cover letter, finding and retaining well-paying clients, developing translation specializations and networking inside and outside the translation industry. From the link above, you can read more about the course, read feedback from previous students and register if you’re interested!


Corinne McKay

Why you need good web hosting: a cautionary tale

This post could also be titled “Making web hosting easy versus making web hosting cheap” (to follow up on a previous post) and it’s mainly intended to express my undying gratitude to the people at Front Range Internet (FRII).

Ever since I launched my new professional website about a month ago, I’ve been meaning to remove my old website from my hosting account (can you tell where this is headed?). On Monday morning I had a bit of unscheduled time so I decided to take care of this. I’m fairly compulsive about doing technical tasks the right way, so I logged in to my web hosting account via FTP, then called my sysadmin husband to verify that I was doing the right thing, then called FRII tech support to verify that I was doing the right thing. Here’s where the problem started: I explained my plan to the tech support rep as “I just navigate into the correct folder and then delete all of the files for the old site, right?” To which he correctly responded “Yes!” and offered to walk me through the deletion process. I declined (bad idea 1.0) because I was sure I knew what I was doing and didn’t want to waste his time.

After I got off the phone, I thought I had an even better plan: instead of deleting my old site page by page, I would just delete the whole folder that it was in (bad idea 2.0). So I highlighted the “WWW” folder in my account, clicked delete, clicked the “are you really sure” box and happily watched as the file names for all the deleted pages in my old site scrolled by; fantastic! A moment later, my delight turned to abject horror as file names for my new site popped up in the “deleted files” box. It took me a minute to realize what was happening, and then another minute to find the “stop” button on the FTP tool, but in that amount of time I had blown away enough pages that my new site was gone from the web. Worse, I had just sent out a bunch of links to a new article I’d written for translation clients. And I hadn’t backed up the new site since it went live. And my web designer’s programmer was on vacation and unreachable. I’m a pretty low-key person, but I literally screamed alone in my office when I realized what I’d done.

Here’s where things started to get better: in ten years of being married to my tech support, I’ve learned something. When you really mess up a tech task, your first priority is to not make it worse. So instead of following my panic-driven impulse to just click stuff and try to fix what I’d done, I went out to the kitchen and drank a glass of passionfruit juice. This calmed me down enough that I decided to call my web hosting provider (FRII) and just admit what I’d done. Hi, it’s me, the one who didn’t need you to walk me through the process of deleting the old site…well, guess what I managed to do?

And here’s why it’s worth paying $20 a month for web hosting from a really high-quality ISP. The first thing FRII tech support told me was “No problem, we’ll just restore your site from last night’s backup.” This took, no kidding, about 3 minutes. Then, they looked in their FTP log to figure out what I did to blow away the new site (hint: NEVER delete entire folders from your web hosting account unless you really know what you’re doing. Just delete the individual files in the folders). Better still, the people at FRII were totally pleasant, didn’t make me feel like an idiot (which they would have been completely justified in doing) and made the whole thing seem like no big deal. Morals of this story:

  • If you have a website for your freelance business, back it up right this second.
  • Then, call your web hosting provider and ask how often they run backups and how long it would take to restore your site if you did something terrible to it.
  • If the answer to that question isn’t satisfactory (i.e. your hosting provider doesn’t back your site up), switch hosting providers ASAP.

Thanks, FRII!


Corinne McKay

ATA conference wrapup

I know that this post will show my local bias, but this year’s ATA conference in Denver was just fantastic. I didn’t actually take any photos, but you can see a few on Jill Sommer’s blog and look at the daily conference slide show on the ATA website. Thanks to Jeff Sanfacon of ATA for the great pictures!

Judy Jenner commented in her ATA Chronicle column that the ATA conference is her favorite week of the year from a professional standpoint. I have to agree! Although this year’s conference was a bit more hectic for me than past ones (lots of volunteer roles, plus presentations, plus zipping back and forth from my house to the conference hotel), it was a real thrill to be able to show Denver off to 1,500+ translators. The conference hotel (Denver Hyatt Regency) is spectacular and the ATA team did an outstanding job carrying on positive traditions from past conferences and innovating with some new ones. Huge thanks to ATA President Nick Hartmann, President-Elect Dorothee Racette and the ATA headquarters staff for the draft horse-style work that they did to put all of this together. For all of us locals, it was a huge relief that there was no blizzard during the conference…just that sapphire Colorado sky and warm weather!

Lest you get the impression that the ATA conference is all socializing and no actual learning, I thought that this year’s sessions were particularly worthwhile. I selected a mix of speakers I’ve seen and enjoyed many times (Grant Hamilton‘s “Spot the Gallicism”), subjects I don’t see myself pursuing but about which I need to know more (Bruce Popp‘s “Making sense of French and US patent terminology”) and entirely new horizons (Katharine Allen’s “Notetaking for dialogue interpreting in all settings”). This year’s French Language Division Distinguished Speaker, David Jemielity of the Banque Cantonale Vaudoise in Lausanne, Switzerland, presented two outstanding sessions on financial translations and is one of the best Distinguished Speakers I’ve heard in the six years I’ve been attending the conference. I also had fun catching up on the translation bookosphere (can we call it that to contrast it with the blogosphere?) at Marianne Reiner’s presentation on her translation of David Grann’s Trial by Fire and Chris Durban’s signing of her new book The Prosperous Translator.

Working as a home-based freelancer in 2010, I think it’s easy to discount the value of face-to-face interactions and to assume that all the valuable networking happens online. In my experience, this is a misguided assumption. It’s amazing how lasting an impression one can make during a very short in-person interaction, and how valuable it is to simply have a visual impression of someone you only know via phone and e-mail. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the bloggers’ lunch, but it was lots of fun to talk to other translation bloggers and blog readers during the conference.

Despite Lionbridge’s untimely decision to impose a 5% rate decrease on their translators, I felt that the mood at the conference was generally very positive. Many attendees said that their business has never been stronger, others are branching out with higher paying direct clients, and I think that many translators are also focusing more on producing very high quality translations for very quality-conscious clients.

Thanks to everyone who attended my seminar on Beyond the basics of freelancing, and if you have follow-up questions, feel free to submit them and I’ll try to answer some of them here. I was also honored to present “Blogging 101” in Riccardo Schiaffino’s place, and you can download that presentation and Riccardo’s notes from his website. See you in Boston in 2011!