Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Links: video interview and code talker cartoon

Hello and happy 2010 to everyone out in the blogosphere! After some much-enjoyed vacation time spent skiing, cooking and relaxing, Thoughts on Translation is ready for another year of posts. To start things off:

  • At the ATA conference in New York this fall, French>English audiovisual translator Alexander Totz did video interviews with Judy Jenner of Twin Translations and with Eve Bodeux and me, focusing on our translation-related blogging. Appropriately enough (since the conference was held in Times Square), Alexander posted the results on New Year’s Eve. You can watch the videos here on Alexander’s blog.
  • Maybe I’m just in the mood to laugh or maybe I really love things having to do with Navajo code talkers, but when my husband showed me this cartoon, the mix of geek and language humor was too good not to share!

All the best for a healthy and lucrative 2010 to all of Thoughts on Translation’s readers! Back this week with some new posts!


Corinne McKay

Name the new ATA client outreach newsletter

The American Translators Association has just announced a naming contest for the new translation client outreach newsletter. The winner receives free registration to the 2010 ATA annual conference in Denver and an acknowledgement in the first issue… go for it! Here’s the text from the ATA announcement:
Calling All Wordsmiths: Name ATA’s New Client Newsletter and Win Free Registration to Denver Conference

In early 2010, ATA will launch a complimentary e-newsletter designed for consumers of translation and interpreting. Building on the success of Getting It Right and Translation: Buying a non-commodity, this new publication is expected to appear four to six times a year and will be available by subscription and on ATA’s website. Each issue will feature practical tips and best practices on a specific aspect of translation or interpreting – planning ahead, listening to your linguist, budgeting wisely and using computer translation tools safely, to name just a few.

Like ATA’s Client Outreach Kit, the newsletter is designed to score a triple win, benefiting you, your clients, and the translation and interpreting profession as a whole.

By offering lively, accessible content to current and prospective clients, the newsletter will make the profession more visible and help consumers avoid common pitfalls, leading to more successful translation and interpreting projects for all involved. Over time, you’ll benefit from a more sophisticated clientele—and you’ll be able to use the newsletter right away to strengthen your position in working with your clients. (“As a matter of fact, the American Translators Association just published a newsletter on this very point. Let me e-mail you that PDF: it’s only one page, it’s very readable, and it may help solve our problem.”)

Sound good? It gets better: put on your thinking cap, come up with a suitable name for this exciting new publication and you could win free registration to ATA’s annual conference in Denver.

Here’s how to enter:

The contest: From December 16 to January 15, ATA will hold a contest to name the new client outreach newsletter.

The goal: The ideal name will be clever, punchy and memorable.

The prize: The winner will receive free registration to ATA’s 51st Annual Conference, slated for October 27-30, 2010 in Denver. The winner will also be acknowledged in the first issue of the newsletter and at the Annual Meeting of All Members in Denver.

The deadline: Entries must be received no later than midnight Eastern Standard Time on Friday, January 15. ATA reserves the right to extend the contest deadline. Send entries to pr@atanet.org or to ATA at 225 Reinekers Lane, Suite 590, Alexandria, VA 22314.

The competition: Any member of ATA may enter. You may submit as many entries as you like.

The fine print: No late entries will be accepted. If multiple entrants propose the same winning title, the earliest-dated entry will win. ATA will have sole discretion in naming the client outreach newsletter and is under no obligation to select any of the entries received. All entries become the property of ATA. The winner will receive no compensation other than acknowledgement in the first issue of the newsletter.


Corinne McKay

YouTube clip: Peter Less on interpreting at Nuremburg

Here’s an interesting YouTube clip (it’s short, just over a minute) of interpreting legend Peter Less talking about remaining impartial while interpreting at the Nuremberg Trials. Less, who won the ATA’s Gode Medal (one of the translation world’s highest honors) in 2006, fled to Switzerland as a teenager but his mother, father, sister and grandmother remained behind and died in the Holocaust.

Less went on to become one of the first trained conference interpreters in Europe and subsequently found himself interpreting for some of the people responsible for the Nazi regime’s worst atrocities. He then emigrated to the U.S. and practiced law in Chicago for over 50 years. There’s a full interview between Tanya Gesse and Peter Less here, on the website of the International Association of Conference Interpreters.


Corinne McKay

What weather balloons teach us about social networking

If you listened to today’s episode of Science Friday on NPR, you already know this, but it’s still very cool! To mark the Internet’s 40th anniversary, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a contest, offering a US $40,000 prize to the first team to correctly submit the physical locations of 10 weather balloons moored in public places around the U.S. DARPA correctly surmised that teams would rely on various Web-based strategies, from iPhone apps to Twitter to Facebook, to find the balloons.

The winning team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (disclosure: my husband’s alma mater, although he had nothing to do with the balloon-finding contest) Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, combined a social networking and financial incentives system to obtain the coordinates of all 10 balloons in just nine hours. The team, made up of post-docs and grad students, took just four days to devise and implement their strategy of trackable, personalized referring URLs and financial incentives ($2,000 to the person who  submitted the balloon’s coordinates, $1,000 to the person who referred that person into the network, $500 to the person who referred the referrer, and so on down the line). You can read all about it here.

Obviously for those of us who proudly bear the “geek” label, this contest has a lot of interesting implications. Not least of these is the ways in which this collective problem-solving method could be applied to other “hunting” problems, such as finding missing people, locating rescue equipment needed in natural disasters, etc. Definitely worth a Friday-afternoon read!


Corinne McKay

The end of year to-do list

Because you’re not doing anything else at this time of year (insert laughter here…), it’s time to review your end-of-year business checklist so that you can set some goals for next year as soon as 2010 kicks off. Here are a few things to consider, and feel free to add your own end-of-year action items in the comments!

  1. Log your business expenses. I prefer to just enter all of my business receipts for the year in one swoop, normally in late December. I log my income as every payment comes in, but I just find it easier to get into the expense-entering mindset and handle all of my expenses at once. This is much easier if you have separate business bank account (put that on the to-do list if you don’t have one!).
  2. Issue 1099s to anyone who did more than $600 of work for you in 2009. Make sure to do this promptly so that you don’t muck up your subcontractors’ tax preparation processes as well as your own.
  3. Decide how you are going to prepare your taxes. If you’re considering using an accountant for the first time, switching accountants, etc., the time to do your research is now, not on April 10. If you’re looking for an accountant, solicit recommendations from other freelancers or small businesses in your area.
  4. Purchase some durable goods if you have extra money. If you a) have money in your business account and b) need some items such as a new computer or monitors, pricey computer software (i.e. speech recognition, OCR, CAT), a desk, etc., now is a good time to buy and take the tax deduction for 2009. This applies especially if the item you want/need might go on sale after Christmas and you can purchase it at a discount just before the year ends.
  5. Review your clients. If you use accounting software, it’s easy to sort your clients by how much you earned from them in 2009. The results may surprise you! Use these results to decide who needs more of your attention next year, who you need to re-connect with and what clients can serve as models of ideal clients (so that you can find more of them in 2010!).
  6. Review and renew your professional association memberships. Whether to renew just before or just after the first of the year depends on how much money you have and which year you’d like to take the deduction for. Whichever option you choose, take a look at how much you are paying for professional association memberships and whether you need to weed out any associations or add some new ones. If you belong to an association and did not attend/participate in any of their events in 2009, consider dropping your membership.
  7. Contribute to your retirement plan(s). Here again, if you’re not saving for retirement, put that on the list too. Freelancers can use various retirement savings strategies; I have an Individual 401K (also called a Solo 401K or Super-Simplified 401K) and follow a pretty basic savings strategy. Whenever I receive a payment from a client, I immediately transfer 40% of the money into my business savings account. I use that money to pay my taxes and then deposit the rest into my 401K, investing mostly in index funds. Regardless of your retirement savings strategy, make sure to save something!