Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Hire yourself

An excellent piece of advice that I’ve seen in various places (such as the Business Smarts column in the ATA Chronicle) is for self-employed freelance translators to “think of yourself as your own employee.” Taking a third-person look at your business, as if you’re the boss and some other person is the employee, is a great way to keep your productivity and motivation up and help yourself avoid burnout. Following are a few tips that may help:

  • Emulate your best boss. If you’ve ever had a boss who you really liked, think of what made that person so good to work for and treat yourself the same way. In my case, this was a boss who held employees to very high standards at work but insisted that everyone needed a fulfilling life outside of work. This boss was uncompromising about the quality of our work, but also forbid us to work past 4:00 on Fridays, which was a good lesson in the “smarter not harder” strategy.
  • Use objective measures to review your performance. Rather than praising or lambasting yourself based on your unscientific impression of how you’re doing, gather some data. How much of your work comes from repeat business, indicating that clients are happy with your work? How often do clients contact you with questions or corrections? Have you missed any deadlines? How much of your new business comes from word of mouth, indicating that you are building a good reputation for yourself? Are you earning enough income for the amount you are working? Are you expecting too much from too little marketing effort?
  • Objectively track your commitments. As a freelancer, the temptation to take on more and more work (thus earning more and more money) is always there, but we also know that work overload leads to poor quality which leads to a lack of repeat business. To keep this impulse in check, keep a list of the number of words or hours of work that you are committed to, just as a boss would track what employees are working on. For more on this, see Jill Sommer’s post on job tracking systems.
  • Give yourself as much interesting work as you can. In surveys about what employees want from their jobs, interesting work consistently ranks above a high salary. Admittedly, a lot of what we translate isn’t scintillating to read, it’s just the documents that make up the everyday worlds of business, medicine, finance, law, etc. However, it’s worth trying to find an intersection between what you like to work on and what clients will pay for; if the specialization you really love doesn’t pay well, think of a next-best option. For example, if you would really like to translate literature, think about contacting non-fiction book publishers. If your real passion is art history, maybe a local museum could use your services to translate its art loan agreements.
  • Reward yourself unexpectedly. Books like Punished by Rewards have made the case that incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes don’t work, so when you act as your own boss, avoid setting up this type of system. Instead, infrequently and spontaneously reward yourself for good performance with an item or an experience that is really valuable to you.
  • Plan for your future. One of the most important things that a boss does is to set you up for professional, personal and financial growth. When you hire yourself, set up a fund for continuing education and professional development; contribute consistently to a retirement plan; look over your health insurance policy yearly and make sure you’re getting good coverage for your money
  • Give yourself a pleasant working environment. You would despise a boss who made you come to work in a dark and depressing office with an out of date computer setup and potato chip bags on the floor, so don’t do this to yourself. Make your office a place where you feel comfortable and where you can work effectively.


Corinne McKay

Online translation income calculator

Thanks to ATA member Dorothee Racette for sending the link to the new income calculator on the ATA website. This is a helpful tool that allows you to calculate your monthly and annual gross translation income based on how much you work and how much you charge.

The income calculator is good food for thought on a variety of fronts, because it’s always important to be thinking about translation rates. Also, I think that while of course we all want to avoid antitrust and price-fixing violations, it’s important to talk to other translators about rates too.

First, if you do an income calculation and feel that you will be earning too little, I think it’s almost always more effective to look for new and better paying clients than to try to convince your existing clients to pay you more. If you’ve been working for a client for a number of years and they are happy with your work, they might go along with a raise of a few cents per word, but it’s unlikely that they will willingly go along with a raise from 14 cents a word to 20. Likewise, if your target income level prices you out of the rate range that most translation agencies will pay, you simply have to start marketing yourself to direct clients, rather than looking for a few elusive agencies that will pay very high rates.

Second, don’t get fixated on the per-word rate when what really matters is the hourly rate. You can afford to take a lower hourly rate on a project where you produce 600 finished words per hour than on a project where you produce 400 translated words per hour, so focus on your hourly or daily earnings rather than on the per-word rate.

Third, don’t underestimate what your services are worth when you market to direct clients. A customer who wants to be your “drop everything” client should be willing to pay a “drop everything” rate. In this 2004 article from Business Week, well-known French to English translator Chris Durban comments that “The problem with most translators is that they make themselves too small. They have stuck with 12 cents a word for far too long. The top of the market is 50 cents or 60 cents a word — and it’s empty! There is very little competition at that level.” While I haven’t yet had the courage to ask a direct client for 50 cents per word, I know a number of highly skilled translators who are very busy at 25-40 cents per word.

So, however you calculate your income, make sure that you are basing your rates on objective data; the online income calculator is a great way to do that!


Corinne McKay

On vacation

Thoughts on Translation will be taking a vacation break until August 18. Thanks for reading and please visit again in mid-August!


Corinne McKay

Inserting accented characters in OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a fantastic office suite for most translators. It’s free, it’s stable, it’s localized into many languages that the proprietary companies will never touch …there’s a lot to love. For a long time, the only feature of OO.o that I’ve found problematic (other than the fact that its macros are not compatible with Microsoft Office macros, and that’s not really OpenOffice’s fault) is the difficulty of inserting special characters such as accented letters. By default, OpenOffice requires you to go to Insert>Special Character and then insert the character of your choice if you want to type something that’s not on the keyboard.

To give Microsoft Office credit where credit is due, it has very simple keyboard shortcuts for inserting an accented letter. Even if you don’t translate into a language that makes copious use of accented letters, the keyboard shortcuts are still useful. For example although I translate exclusively into English I e-mail clients in French a good deal of the time, and although I’ve created an OpenOffice keyboard shortcut to pop up the Insert>Special Character dialog box, it still takes a lot of time and keystrokes to insert those letters when I’m typing in French.

There are a couple of workarounds for this issue. You can install a US International Keyboard layout and use it as needed. If you’re lazy, (I’m ashamed to admit how often I do this) you can save some time by copying the most commonly used accented letter (in French this would be é) and pasting it when you need it. Or (drum roll) you could check out this web page by Bill Hibbert, which includes an OpenOffice macro that will enable you to assign shortcuts to all sorts of special characters that use marks such as acute accent, circumflex accent, tilde, umlaut, inverted question mark, etc. Once you install this macro, you would for example type e’ and then a keyboard shortcut you assign, and the é would appear.

From reading this extremely helpful web page I am guessing that Bill Hibbert is not a translator? Why? Because this page is in a section of his website entitled “Boring Tech Stuff,” and I’m guessing that most translators who use OpenOffice will find Bill’s page nothing short of fascinating… Thanks, Bill!


Corinne McKay

Google Translation Center

Thanks to reader Dierk Seeburg for sending the link to an article from the Washington Post about Google’s new Google Translation Center service (not yet fully launched, login seems not to work using a regular Google account). The Post article has a link to a yet more interesting article on Google Blogoscoped where one can even view some screen shots of the Translation Center.

At least to the untrained eye, this looks like an interesting combination of Google’s existing language tools, an online translator workbench including the source and target text and a column for “Previous Translations,” and on-demand access to human translators (this part looks similar to SDL’s Click2Translate service).

I think that the most interesting part of the article on Google Blogoscoped is the one in which co-editor Tony Ruscoe muses about the implications of Google’s reported plan to “match current translations with previous ones.” He points out that “This sounds like what the industry calls a Translation Memory” and brings up the question of ownership of the TMs created by the Translation Center.

At the end of the post, Philipp Lenssen says that Google has now “removed many of the pages and files in question,” but this looks like a translation website worth keeping an eye on.