Here at the Colorado Translators Association, we’ve launched a WordPress website with Insider tips for the 2010 annual conference of the American Translators Association, which will come to Denver in October of this year. We’re excited to welcome our colleagues from around the U.S. and the world to the Mile High City and we hope that this website will help you plan a fun and educational trip!
I'll only mention this once…
I have mixed feelings about online popularity contests, but I’m flattered that Thoughts on Translation has been included in the 2010 Lexiophiles’ Top 100 Language Blogs competition. The finalists are a real who’s who of translation blogging, so whether your #1 read is Thoughts on Translation or another language blog, pop on over to Lexiophiles and vote! And I promise not to spam you with more requests for votes, you’ll only hear this once.
Marketing your services to translation agencies
Whether to work with direct clients, translation agencies or both is a personal and business decision. I work with both types of clients and I feel that this mix keeps my work volume and income up while giving me a wide range of projects to choose from. Paula Dieli’s blog has an insightful interview with Peter Berends, the primary translator recruiter at LUZ, Inc. (a medical translation company). It’s well worth a read if you’re looking for agency clients. Here are some additional tips, and feel free to add your own!
- Target your marketing. As Peter comments in the interview, there’s no bigger turnoff than a generic, carbon-copied e-mail asking for work. The more personalized your e-mail is, the better. For example, something like “Your agency’s focus on the translation of annual reports caught my eye; during the 2010 annual report season I translated all or part of five companies’ annual reports and I would love to help you with similar types of projects” is much more attention-grabbing than “Dear Sir or Madam, I would like to offer you my services.”
- Don’t lump all agencies together. Yes, in general agencies pay less than direct clients and also add a middle layer between the translator and the client (which can be a plus or a minus depending on the project and the client). However, top-quality agencies pay respectably and can save you some of the administrative overhead that comes with working for direct clients. Just as in every other business sector, there are agencies that operate on the Wal-Mart model and agencies that operate on the Mercedes-Benz model.
- Charge real money and earn it. I think that a lot of translators eschew the agency market because they think it’s all 8 cents a word and 5,000 words for tomorrow. Insider tip: it’s not. I think that quality-conscious agencies know that quality-conscious translators save them money because their work needs less editing and they help keep the agency’s own clients coming back. Give some metrics of your quality: you proofread a hard copy of every translation (no missing text, no untranslated text); you compile a list of queries and send them all at once, allowing time to get the queries resolved before the deadline (no endless stream of e-mails to the already-busy PM, no file submitted right at the deadline with queries still outstanding); you always meet or beat your deadlines (no stressed-out PM having to make excuses to the end client).
- Focus on high-margin projects. For example if you actively seek out projects on which you can produce 500 finished words per hour and you charge 15 cents per word, you’re earning $75 per hour. I think that it’s also fine to let your agency clients know that you are most interested in medium to large projects, for example $500 or more. High-margin projects can also come in unexpected places, as I described in a previous post about translating official documents. Each invoice might be small, but on most official document translations I make at least 50 cents per word.
- Use the objective data that is available to you. Don’t market to agencies as if you’re throwing spaghetti against a wall; pick some agencies that mesh with your business goals and market just to them. For example, search the Payment Practices database for agencies that are rated highly by other translators.
- In general, target small and medium agencies. Not every big agency is a sweatshop, but I think that in general, large agencies are geared toward the high volume, low margin market. In addition, you’re more likely to find small and medium agencies that work primarily or exclusively in your specializations.
Summer conference for financial translators
The Société Française des Traducteurs recently announced the program for the fifth session of its Université d’été de la traduction financière, a three-day conference for financial and corporate translators (or translators who would like to specialize in those areas). This year’s session will be held in Luxembourg and the lineup of presenters looks nothing short of amazing, with a wide variety of sessions on offer. There are financial education sessions in both French and English, translation-specific sessions for both language combinations and even a guest appearance by Robin Bonthrone, focusing on German to English financial translation. Thoughts on Translation needs a report from this conference if any readers are attending!
Misspelled words I'm tired of seeing
Like many translators and other word people, I have a low tolerance for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors in print. Thankfully it’s not just me; when I took a series of editing classes with Alice Levine a couple of years ago, she opened the class with a New Yorker cartoon (you don’t even need the picture to appreciate it) that featured a restaurant guest saying to a waiter, “I’ll have the misspelled Caesar salad and the improperly hyphenated veal osso-buco.” Needless to say, this cartoon provoked gales of laughter from the assembled crowd of editing students. A few people in the class even admitted that they refused to shop at Boulder’s only large-scale mall because of its improperly hyphenated name: Twenty Ninth Street (you’ll find the mall between 28th St. and 30th St., not at #20 9th St as the name would suggest). I’ve made my peace with Twenty Ninth Street, but here are a few habitual spelling and usage errors that drive me crazy.
- It’s instead of its. I recently received a conference announcement from a language industry professional association, proclaiming that this association’s upcoming conference would feature “education at it’s [sic] best.” I had a visceral reaction to this, similar to what I experienced on a recent trip to Ace Hardware (which at least isn’t a language industry entity) when I was confronted with an enormous sign asking, “Can’t find what your [sic] looking for?” Here’s a helpful page that explains the difference between it’s and its.
- Lightening instead of lightning. This one is everywhere too; I recently cringed to find it in a book that had done well enough to be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. The lightening/lightning confusion really befuddles me because most people seem to pronounce these words correctly, i.e. “My hair color is too dark, I’m thinking of lightening it,” versus “If you see lightning, run for cover.” I don’t feel like I hear loads of people talking about getting “struck by light-en-ing” when they’re speaking, but for some reason the spelling confusion remains.
- “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less.” I think that many people just say or write this without thinking about the connotation, for example “I could care less what time we get home, I’m not in a rush.”
- Less versus fewer. When my neighborhood supermarket did a major renovation and still didn’t correct their “15 items or less” signs in the express checkout lanes, I seriously considered shopping elsewhere so as not to reward that kind of sloppiness (but proximity won out!). Grammar Girl has a great page of quick and dirty tips on less versus fewer. Nutshell version: fewer is for things you can count, less is for things you can’t. Fewer grammatical errors on signs, less suffering.
I feel so much better now… feel free to add your own most-hated misspellings too! Alot, loose/lose, they’re/their/there, aloud/allowed… it’s OK to vent!