Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Upcoming ATA webinar

I’ll be posting a wrapup of last week’s ATA conference soon; in short, it was fantastic. Enlightening sessions, enlightened colleagues and that unmistakable Colorado energy. I feel like the French sessions get better every year, and every year I come away with a long list of new ideas to improve my translations and my business skills.

Lots of people at the conference were very enthusiastic about ATA’s ongoing series of educational webinars. The first two (Judy Jenner’s The Entrepreneurial Linguist and Mary David and Naomi Sutcliffe de Moraes’ Getting the most out of your ATA membership) sold out, and people seem really pleased with the technical setup. I’m up next, with Getting started as a freelance translator from noon-1 PM U.S. Eastern Time on Tuesday, November 9. This webinar is directed at people who are just starting out in the industry, and we’ll talk about writing a translation-targeted resumé and cover letter, finding and retaining clients, developing specializations and setting your rates and payment terms. The cost is $35 for ATA members and $50 for non-members (limited to 100 participants) and you can register here.

It was great fun to meet so many other bloggers and blog readers at the conference! Back soon with more in-depth reporting.


Corinne McKay

Tips for a successful translation conference presentation

Here in Colorado, excitement about this week’s ATA conference is reaching a fever pitch and I’m spending today putting the finishing touches on my preconference seminar, “Beyond the Basics of Freelancing.” I’ve read a number of good posts about how to get the most out of a translation conference, so here are a few tips on how to deliver an effective presentation! In my experience, presenting at an ATA conference or another translation industry conference is a great way to increase your name recognition, share your knowledge and force yourself to learn about some new topics; give it a try!

  • Pick a topic with which you feel very comfortable. At a conference with 1,500 attendees, there will be experts in the audience, so you should be one too!
  • Prepare, prepare, prepare. There are gifted public speakers and adequate public speakers, but it’s excruciating to watch a speaker who’s fumbling through papers, trying to ad-lib without much success or doesn’t really know which slide is coming next. The first few times I presented at an ATA conference I wrote out a script with nearly every word I was going to say, and I still do this when I present in French.
  • Don’t be afraid to run the show; after all, you’re the presenter! I used to be more flexible about answering questions during the presentation, but I found that it was easy to become bogged down in the process. Now I ask people to hold their questions unless they are purely factual, i.e. “what does CAT stand for.”
  • Repeat the questions. This is something that’s hard to remember to do because it’s not instinctive. Yet it’s very frustrating to be sitting in the back of a large conference room while the speaker carries on an energetic dialogue with someone you can’t hear.
  • Engrave the presentation’s ending time on your wrist. OK, it’s a small exaggeration, but when you’re nervous it’s very hard to remember how much time you have left. If I’m giving a long seminar, I write BREAK on the notes for the slide before the break, and I do actually write the end time on my hand!
  • Give your audience a way to contact you. I leave a large stack of my inexpensive business cards out on a table at the front of the room. I try not to promise to answer individual questions, but I do answer some questions on my blog.

Also, I will say that as a speaker, it’s incredibly gratifying to get e-mails from people who enjoyed a presentation. After the ATA conference, think about writing two or three quick e-mails to the presenters whose presentations you really enjoyed. See you in Denver!


Corinne McKay

Making translation easy versus making translation cheap

When you’re inquiring about a professional service, let’s say taxes, computer help or marketing consulting, which is more attractive to you: a service provider who seems ultra-competent and gives the impression that the process will be easy for you, or a service provider who charges low rates and gives the impression that the process will be cheap? While few clients are completely price-insensitive, I think that it’s important to always be looking for ways to make your clients’ lives easier and avoid bogging them down in the complexity of what you do.

For example, let’s say that you need a really good small business accountant. You know that accountants charge fairly high rates; upwards of $100 an hour and maybe as much as $200 an hour, so you have a ballpark figure in mind. You call CPA #1 and explain your situation. His/her response: “Well, switching accountants at this time of year is complicated. If only you had called me in January. I need your personal and business returns for the past 3 years, don’t give me the originals, you’ll have to copy them and drop them off. I’m only here 10-4 outside of tax season so you have to come during those hours” and so on. At that point, do you even care how little this person charges? Even if this accountant’s rates were below what I expected to pay, I would be turned off. I hate accounting, I hire an accountant to make my life easier, and this person has already bogged me down with too many details and too many hoops through which I have to jump.

But how about this: you call CPA #2 and explain your situation. His/her response: “No problem at all, thanks for calling. If you’re interested in switching to us, you’ll just need to sign a release form and then I’ll call your current accountant and ask them to fax us your past returns. Our hours are shorter outside of tax season but we do everything electronically with password-protected files so you can scan and submit your documents whenever you want. Also if you’re interested we could review your previous returns for errors or missed deductions and there’s no cost to you unless we find something.” At that point, I would be willing to pay the high end of the rate range I was expecting, because this person conveys the impression that my life will be immeasurably easier and I will save time (and therefore be able to work more and earn more money) by using his/her services.

Think about applying these types of scenarios to your own business:

  • When you receive an inquiry from a client, assume that the client wants you to solve their problem, not give them a deal.
  • Don’t get pedantic. Think: do you really care about the minute details of your service providers’ jobs? Right. Stick to the information that your client really needs.
  • Think of simple ways to streamline things for your clients. If you always translate their quarterly newsletter, can you contact them on a predetermined date to talk about the next issue? Can you set up a secure file transfer site so that your clients can access their translations whenever they want? Can you send them a short survey to ask how you can better meet their needs?
  • Try to frame things positively. Not “I can’t finish it by Thursday morning unless you can get it to me by Wednesday noon,” but “If you can get that to me by Wednesday noon, I could definitely have it back to you by the time you get into the office on Thursday.”
  • Don’t make translation sound easy (we know: it’s not!), make the client feel that you will make things easy for them.


Corinne McKay

Some industry news

International Translation Day seems like an auspicious time for new translation-related ventures; here are a few to check out:

    • Congratulations to Chris Durban on the launch of her book The Prosperous Translator: Advice from Fire Ant & Worker Bee. If, like me, you eagerly await Chris and Eugene Seidel’s monthly advice column “The Bottom Line” in Translation Journal, you won’t want to miss this compilation of over a decade of stingingly good advice in question and answer form. As the book’s website says, you should take FA&WB’s advice because “…the downward spiral in prices and stressful working conditions decried by Chicken Littles on many continents are not inevitable — far from it! If you are an excellent (or even good) translator, you shouldn’t be there. And if you apply the business advice in this book, you won’t.” And did I mention that many of these questions and answers are downright hilarious? For example, here’s one of The Prosperous Translator’s promotional postcards:
      Prosperous Translator Postcard
      You can purchase your copy now from Lulu, or wait until the ATA conference and purchase a signed copy (or pick up some of those cool postcards!) at the InTrans Books booth. Disclaimer: I provided an advance review of  The Prosperous Translator, but I was not paid for the review nor do I have any financial connection to the book.
    • And more publishing congratulations, this time to English>French translator Marianne Reiner on the publication of her translation of David Grann’s  Trial by Fire: Did Texas execute an innocent man. That’s a link to the original article, and here is the listing for Marianne’s translation, also entitled Trial by Fire. Kudos to Amazon France for including Marianne’s name alongside the author’s; maybe Amazon US could follow suit? Trial by Fire started out as a New Yorker article about Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for allegedly murdering his three young children by burning down his family’s home. This case has sparked a great deal of discussion in the U.S. because Willingham went to the death chamber insisting upon his innocence, to the point of refusing to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison. Editions Allia has published the French version of Trial by Fire as a small book; it’s 128 pages, fits in the palm of your hand and will set you back all of 3 euros so I highly recommend it. Even as a non-native French speaker I was riveted by Marianne’s translation, and the book has already gotten some nice press in France. Here’s the cover image:
      Trial by Fire cover
    • And finally, although it’s a much smaller publishing achievement than the previous two mentioned here, I launched my newly redesigned professional website. After using the same homegrown website since 2002 I decided it was time to take my own oft-repeated advice and call on a team of professionals, and I’m thrilled with the results. Huge thanks to Brandon Kellogg of Denver-based Superfluent Design for the banner, Michelle Panulla and Beth Hayden of Blogging With Beth for the site design and WordPress theme customization and Cameron Weise of Colorado Photo for my new photograph. It took a village to get this website up but I think it was worth the wait!

And with that, Thoughts on Translation wishes you a happy International Translation Day and another year of good health and prosperity!


Corinne McKay

Happy International Translation Day 2010

Here it is September 30 again, and time for another celebration of International Translation Day! FIT‘s theme for this year is “Translation Quality for a Variety of Voices” and their press release focuses on the critical role that translators and interpreters play in preserving multilingualism in the world. In a case of professional synchronicity it’s also my birthday and my husband’s birthday, so I’ll be celebrating by translating as little as possible! Happy International Translation Day everyone!