Happily for freelance translators everywhere, Alex Eames has revived his free ezine Tranfree. The current issue (71), features two excellent articles, one on “Getting the balance right: preventing and coping with staleness” by Alex himself, and “Tools that have brought smiles to my face, cheer to my heart and success in the mind-over-matter department (in no particular order)” by ever-popular translation technology guru Jost Zetzsche. I have to say that I love not only Alex’s writing style, but the fact that this ‘zine arrives in one’s inbox just as it did in the pre-RSS feed days. I’m glad to see Tranfree back in action!
How to be a better proofreader
If you’re looking to move up in the translation market, more effective proofreading is critical. If you’re the type of person who cringes at the sight of an error in print, make sure that your translations aren’t contributing to the problem, and give your clients that extra quality step that marks your service as above average! Here are a few tips I’ve gleaned over the years, and feel free to add your own!
- It’s hard to proofread your own work, but sometimes you have to do it. A cross-editing partner is really invaluable if you work for direct clients. If you work for agencies and can’t afford to hire out your proofreading, try to do as thorough a job as possible on your own work.
- Proofread in a different format than the original. I prefer to proofread from a hard copy; I print the target document, then proofread in front of two computer monitors with the target document in one window and the source document in the other, so that I can make corrections as soon as I see the errors. If your work (i.e. Flash animations, graphics, etc.) doesn’t lend itself to being printed, at least try to change the size, font, color, anything to make the target text look different enough that you have to pay attention to it.
- Pay particular attention to easily-botched numbers and words. Check every digit in every number. Check every letter in every name and place name. Check every negative expression to make sure that you wrote the correct version (i.e. always versus never).
- Realize that the majority of errors consist of the wrong word, not a misspelled word. The spell-checker saves you from cracking a dictionary to remember whether recommendation has one m or two, but it doesn’t save you from typing fat instead of fact, or asses instead of assets, or any other number of mortifying blunders. So force yourself to slow down; when I took editing classes with Alice Levine, she advised pointing at each word with a pen, and also never proofreading when you’re tired.
- Watch out for your typical errors. For some reason, I habitually put the space in the wrong place when I’m typing two small words in a row, such as “tot his” instead of “to this.” Sometimes the spell-checker saves me (“thi stime” instead of “this time”) but “tot his” slips through!.
- While you’re at it, mark the errors in the source document. The client may or may not be concerned with these, but you can add a little value and it’s not much extra work. Also, I think it’s almost easier to find errors in your non-native language because you spent so many years drilling the correct spellings and conjugations!
Tech tip: wrapping text around a table in OpenOffice
This is a small tip but it really helped me on a recent project. Normally, OpenOffice Writer doesn’t allow you to wrap text around a table. So if you have a table on the left side of the page and text on the right side, it ends up looking like this:
This can be a problem when you’re translating something like an official document, and you need to reproduce the source formatting exactly.You can work around the problem by inserting your table into a frame (Insert>Frame) and making the frame’s border invisible (in the Frame dialog box, click the Borders tab and then set the border to None). Then, you get this:
It would be great if OpenOffice would just enable text flow around tables, but this seems like a fairly painless solution in the meantime!
Thanks to…
- Kwintessential for including Thoughts on Translation in their top 10 translation blogs for 2010! And congratulations to the other winners, they’re all in my feed reader!
- Jonathan Goldberg for interviewing me on his blog “Le mot juste en anglais.” And thanks to Marianne Reiner for the French translation!
Handling summer as a freelancing parent
Here in Colorado, school has been out for a couple of weeks. Elsewhere in the U.S., summer vacation is fast approaching. If you’re a freelancing mom or dad, it’s both the best of times and the worst of times! Each morning in the summer, I wake up and have a little gratitude moment: I’m grateful for a job that is so flexible; I’m grateful for a husband who supports both my work and my parenting; I’m grateful for a child who enjoys spending time with me; I’m grateful that I have a wonderful group of friends with kids of similar ages; I’m grateful that I enjoy what I do for work. On the flip side, if it’s hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the regular school schedule, it’s really hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the summer, no-school schedule. What’s a freelancing mom or dad to do?
As I see it, there are a few basic options: pay for child care in the form of a babysitter or summer camp, try to work while your kids are at home with you, work less or take the summer off, trade or barter child care or find a source of free child care, or patch together some combination of these strategies. As with all things parenting-related, I think that the ideal solution depends on how much you need or want to work, how many kids you have and how you get along with them, what financial resources you have available and how your spouse or partner (if you have one) can pitch in.
Here at the world headquarters of Thoughts on Translation, we tend to use the patchwork strategy and so far it has worked out well. Out of a 10 week summer break, we’ll be away for 3 weeks, my daughter will go to half-day or full-day camp for 5 weeks and we’ll have 2 free weeks at home. I feel that this gives me a good balance of uninterrupted work time and extra time to spend with my daughter and our friends, but I can also see that I’ll be working at night a lot more than I normally do. In addition, I think that the patchwork strategy works best if you only have one child. For example, the total tab for our 5 weeks of day camp was $1,500. Not bad as a percentage of my income, but if you are enrolling 2+ kids, the enrollment fees start to add up.
In mulling over how to plan our summer, here are a few creative solutions that I came up with; feel free to add your own!
- Enlist your kids in the planning. This summer my daughter wanted more unstructured time, so we struck a deal that when she’s not at camp, she will read or listen to an audio book for at least an hour a day while I’m working.
- Steal an hour here and an hour there. If your kids sleep later in the summer, get up as early as possible and work then. Maybe there’s an hour between when your spouse gets home and when you eat dinner; maybe you can get a netbook or small laptop and take it to the pool, park, playdates, etc. I have an Asus Eee netbook and I make a habit of always having it with me in the summer in case I get some unexpected work time.
- Get your spouse on board. Maybe your spouse can arrive early at work and then leave early, so that you can have some extra work time in the afternoons.
- Barter child care. You’re not the only one in the freelancing parent boat; maybe you could even form a child care co-op with other freelancing moms and dads. Maybe you have a friend who’s a stay at home mom or dad and wouldn’t mind watching your child (either for pay or as a trade or favor) some of the time.
- Use a less expensive babysitter while you work at home. For example, we know several neighborhood middle-schoolers who will babysit for $3-$5 per hour while a parent is home. This is a significant savings over the $10-$15 per hour that “full-fledged” babysitters in our area charge.
When my daughter was really little, a wise older woman in the supermarket line said to me, “When they’re that age, the days are long and the years are short.” I find that in the summer, that advice is still true; the days often go slowly, but when school starts I’m always amazed at how fast summer vacation went. So, the last piece of advice for freelancing moms and dads with a long, hot summer ahead? Enjoy it!!