Training for Translators: Blog - Page 39 of 245

Mar 05 2024
Corinne McKay

The real question to ask about AI/MT

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope you’re all doing well, and happy March!

First off, I wanted to alert you to a Chinese<>English interpreting class being offered by my friend and colleague Rony Gao. You cannot go wrong with Rony’s offerings, and he’s leading a Chinese<>English consecutive interpreting class, online, starting March 18. Here are the details (not an affiliate deal).

Next, on to this week’s topic: What’s the real question we need to be asking about artificial intelligence and machine translation (AI/MT)? This topic came to me when I responded to Joachim Lépine’s LinkedIn post about whether AI is a threat to human translators. It’s an excellent question, Joe gave excellent examples, and it sparked a lively discussion! Here’s my take:

What’s different about the current AI/MT boom, when we’ve been leveraging technology in the form of translation memory for a really long time? Everyone knows about it. You know how you get the best information from clients? Being copied in on an e-mail that you weren’t supposed to see. This happened to me a while ago (pre-AI boom) when one of my direct clients accidentally included me on an e-mail saying to a colleague, “I think that the translator has a way to compare last year’s version of the document with this year’s, and then she only translates the new stuff.” This client had no idea what translation memory was; he described it pretty accurately, but the point being that, just as many of us probably don’t know or care about the details of the software used by our accountants, web designers, graphic designers, etc., many translation clients (and here I’m talking about direct clients, obviously agencies knew about TM) and the general public had no clue what translation memory was. Things are really different now, because everyone knows about the new technology; I’ve even had clients (and I’m talking labor unions, not hard-core word people) tell me that they use DeepL for informal translations.
The issue is, most of us are asking the wrong question. We fixate (and I mean, fixate) on AI/MT’s real and perceived weaknesses, of which there are many. It doesn’t get cultural contexts, humor, subtlety, political references, literary references, sarcasm, and the list goes on. I had a client ask me to review a translation in which their MT engine “translated” the name of the Swiss town “Aubonne” as “Augood.” Like, where to even begin? I honestly believe that most professional translators can identify an AI/MT-generated translation in about two sentences.
The problem is, our fixation on the quality of the translation is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go about this. The real question (which I posted in response to Joe’s question) is, how do we find clients who perceive this difference and are willing to pay for it, or who have other reasons for not wanting to use AI/MT, and are willing to pay for those?

I definitely have clients who have moved to AI/MT-generated translations that are then edited by humans. I don’t do machine translation post-editing, not because I have anything against it, but because I find it mind-numbing. And in some cases, I actually don’t think the client made the wrong decision. If you just want to know, “What does this French thing say in English?” DeepL in many cases does a decent job.

But, I have an equal number of clients who ask me, “You don’t use AI-generated translations, do you??” They ask this for various reasons:

They’re afraid, probably correctly, that confidential documents uploaded to an online AI/MT system may end up on the AI provider’s servers. I know that the paid versions of most MT engines promise not to do this, but I still think that it freaks clients out, particularly in certain sectors.I translate for a couple of international family law firms, and here we’re talking about evidence documents that contain people’s most personal information: the details of why their kids were taken away, transcripts of phone calls between them and their abusive ex-spouse, the details of their investment portfolio and how it might be divided in a divorce, etc. etc. Those clients want as few eyes as possible on their documents.
They, too, are word people. “Clients who care” are the best clients, right?? It’s true that every profession has its thing. I’m consistently surprised by interpreting clients who tell me (not being sassy, just being honest), that they don’t perceive any audio quality difference between someone using a laptop microphone and someone using a headset. Whereas to interpreters, this is a huge thing; the other day, my boothmate actually said to the client, “That’s funny, because I can even tell the brand of headset you’re using from the warm tone of the audio: it’s a Jabra, right?.” (And she was correct!) We can’t expect all clients to care about words the way we care about words, but lots of clients do care.
They’ve been burned in the past. Another “best client” category is clients who want a personal relationship with a translator (whether you use AI/MT or not) because they’ve been burned by a different model. I don’t hate agencies, I actually would love to translate for more agencies if more agencies would pay my rates, and I think agencies fill an important role in the language services market. And it’s also true that clients who want consistency, a single point of contact, someone who’s going to know the right questions to ask and the right advice to give, are better off with a freelancer. As an example, I was translating some materials for one of my French university clients (they have “international programs” that are taught in English, into which they accept students who speak zero French). And I asked them, had they thought about any services or programs for their international students’ parents? Parent relations are pretty much nonexistent in the French university system, and I think they thought I was joking, until I gave them the example of my own daughter’s university, which hosts welcome events for parents, a family weekend, and maintains a parent Facebook group. This is a high-priced private university, and I told them that many American parents funding their kid’s education would be looking for this type of thing. AI doesn’t know this!

There are lots of pros and cons to AI, but I honestly think that, “Is there a difference between AI and human translation?” (yes, of course there is!!) is the wrong question, and that we’re better served by asking, “How do we find clients who perceive this difference and are willing to pay for it?”

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!

Feb 27 2024
Corinne McKay

Who’s doing well as a freelancer these days?

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I hope you’re all doing well!

The March Marketing Madness challenge group kicks off on Monday (March 4); we already have 100+ people signed up, and the Slack group is hopping with activity. You can read the full description and/or register (US $90) here!

This week, let’s talk about who’s doing well as a freelance translator or interpreter, these days. We hear a lot of doom and gloom about the language professions, some of it warranted, and some of it unwarranted. Not that I know every freelance translator or interpreter on earth (I definitely do not), but I do talk to a lot of people in our professions, so here’s my take on what types of translators and interpreters are making good money and doing interesting work. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s my take, and it may provide some inspiration if you’re looking for more work, more interesting work, or better-paying work:

Freelancers with loyal clients whose main concern is not price. In my mind, this is probably the best “job security” that exists for freelancers. You have clients who know (at least in a vague sense) that they could find someone cheaper or faster, but they continue working with you because other factors are more important to them. Hopefully they value the quality of your work; they probably also value confidentiality, responsiveness, the fact that you know their requirements, and that you carve out time for them when they really need you. A successful freelancer recently commented to me, “I have a good direct client who sends me a document with a one-sentence e-mail, like, ‘We need this as soon as you can get to it.’ We don’t have to discuss price, or formatting, or terminology, because we’ve already hashed those things out. The last thing they want to do is call an agency project manager they’ve never worked with before, and have to start from scratch, even if it would be cheaper.”
Freelancers with “captive audience” clients. By this I mean, clients who have to use you, whether or not they really want to. Examples of this include court systems that are required or at least strongly encouraged to use court-certified interpreters; individuals who have to use an ATA-certified translator for their official documents; interpreting clients who work in a market (i.e. Canada) where they are legally required to provide interpreting. I do some of this type of work myself, and I think it’s a factor to consider if you’re thinking about a new service offering. The downside of “captive audience” clients is that they sometimes don’t appreciate your work, or even make it totally clear that they’re only using you because they have to. But having clients who have no choice except to use your services isn’t the worst thing in the world. I honestly kind of feel that way about my accounting firm: I like them as people, I would be thrilled to spend the money I pay them on something else if there were another option, but there really isn’t, because I don’t want to do my own taxes.
Freelancers who have followed the money to a specific niche. I feel like this is becoming more common as AI and MT hollow out the middle of the translation market, which is where most freelancers want(ed) to work. I’ve talked to freelance translators who have started providing highly specialized copywriting services to the types of clients they translate for, at good rates. I’ve talked to interpreters who have started providing translate/transcribe services to law firms with high confidentiality needs. I’ve talked to subtitlers who are doing high-end corporate video subtitling work, in addition to their regular subtitling jobs. The key here is to focus on the intersection between what you are good at, what you enjoy doing, and what clients have the budget to pay well for.
Freelancers who do one specific thing, very well. We talk a lot about diversification, and how it can be a really good thing in a freelance business. Diversification has really helped me; my business is basically a triathlon (translation, interpreting, teaching/writing/consulting), which I enjoy and which I think has been a significant business advantage. However, the same is true of narrowing down and doing only one, very specialized thing, whether that’s translating for German-speaking doctors who want to get their work published in American or British scientific journals, or translating audio guide scripts for museums and then recording the voiceover, or translating thriller novels, basically becoming “the” person for a very narrow specialization.
Beginning freelancers who are creative and persistent. I think that starting out as a freelancer in 2024 is not necessarily harder than it used to be, but it demands a more creative and persistent approach. When I started out in 2002, things were a lot more straightforward: most people started out by translating for large agencies that hired anyone who passed their tests, then moved up to more discerning agencies and maybe direct clients. Today, you could still take that approach, but you’re likely to spend the bulk of your time editing machine-translated texts. That’s not objectively bad or wrong, but it’s a lot different than starting out as a pure translator. The beginning freelancers I talk to who are making decent money and enjoying the work have two qualities in common: they are creative, and they are persistent. They accept that they have to do a lot of marketing, whereas mid-career freelancers are more likely to express frustration at that (“I want to be a translator, not a translation salesperson”). They might be pursuing a certificate or graduate degree in an area they’d like to specialize in (genealogy, forensic linguistics, paralegal) because they know that specialization is the way to go. I think that successful beginners are also more likely to experiment and see what sticks: “I started offering tours of my city in Spanish on AirBnB experiences;” “I volunteered for TED Translators and found out I love subtitling;” “I sent out postcards to 200 immigration law firms offering certified document translation services.”

As I said above, this is totally unscientific, but these are some trends I’ve been thinking about, and I hope they are helpful to you!

Feb 21 2024
Corinne McKay

What’s the best way to increase your income?

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers!
–March Marketing Madness kicks off in two weeks; have you signed up??

Lately, a few readers and online course alumni have sent me questions about increasing your income as a freelancer, particularly if you’ve been through a period of stagnation, where your income (even if you’re satisfied with it) has stayed the same for a period of years.Their questions included:

Is stagnation negative, as long as you’re happy with your income?
Is it better/easier to make a significant income leap, or to gradually “creep” your rates up?
What’s the best strategy if you want to make a significant income leap?

This is exactly where I was from 2019-2022. As I described in my 2023 year in review post, my income was stagnant at about US $100K for those three years. While better than an income decrease, I wasn’t happy with it, for all of the reasons that the people who contacted me mentioned:

With inflation, a stagnant income means that your actual purchasing power is declining
A stagnant income may also mean that other things in your business are stagnant: maybe you aren’t working on your own skills as much as you should be, or maybe you aren’t marketing as much as you should be

Increasing your income is a really individual thing, but I did do it, raising my income (which I define as gross income, minus what I immediately pay out to subcontractors) from 110 to 145K in one year. A few observations, based on my experience:

Ideally, we’d all “creep” our income up, a bit at a time, by raising our rates maybe 5-7% each year, similar to the raise we might request in a salaried job. But in reality, this is relatively uncommon in the translation and interpreting professions. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea; I actually think it is a good idea. I just mean that it’s not the norm. Lots of other professions do this: when I get the first invoices of the year from various professional service providers in my life (accountant, web designer, etc.), they’ve often raised their rates by around 5%, often with no notice. I simply see that the invoice is a little higher than the year before. This “creep” model has lot to recommend it, because the increase is small enough that it’s hopefully not a deal breaker, and because it avoids the phenomenon of, “haven’t raised my rates in five years, now here’s a huge increase.” Yet, very few of us do this. I think there are a few reasons: a) our perception (whether right or wrong) that clients, especially agencies, are very price sensitive and may send us less work if we raise our rates, b) our desire to just avoid thinking about rates in general because we’d rather translate or interpret, and c) the fact that, particularly if we bill by the word, an increase of something like 5% is a tiny amount. If an agency is paying us 15 cents per word, are we really going to raise our rate by half a cent, or does that seem ridiculous?
The most common, and in my opinion, the worst way to increase your income is by working more at the same rates. Honestly (trust me, I see under the hoods of a lot of freelancers’ businesses!), this is what most translators and interpreters do. They want or need to make more money, so they just take on more work from their existing clients, or clients who pay around the same rates.

Following are a few factors that went into my significant income increase in 2023:

I acknowledged the pattern of stagnation and set a new goal. At 110K, I wasn’t worried about where my next meal was coming from. I also wanted to aim for more like the equivalent of a six-figure salaried job, which is a lot more than 100K as a freelancer. So I set a goal of 120K, figuring that was at least a start at this goal.
I focused on my very highest-paying work and didn’t feel guilty about it. This is a simple but pretty huge thing. I just think that as freelancers, we have such a hard time turning down work that doesn’t meet our financial goals, for a few reasons: fear of being labeled greedy, fear that we won’t have enough work, fear that the client will think or say negative things about us, fear that we’re acting arrogant and entitled, or “the client is so nice, I feel bad saying no!” I decided to let go of all of these fears, and just focus on making money while doing interesting and fulfilling work.
I (mostly) let go of the fear of having dominant clients. My translation work is pretty diversified. I have regular clients but I don’t really have dominant clients. Interpreting is a different story: basically all of my work comes from a handful of conference interpreting agencies and two state court systems (Colorado and Utah). I have a few sporadic direct clients for interpreting, but mostly it’s my regulars. I’ve written before about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and I’ve decided that for now, for me, it’s OK, because I really like these clients, they have interesting work, they pay well, and they’re easy to work with. As I recommended in the blog post I wrote about dominant clients (yes, for once, I followed my own advice!), I put some protections in place, in case I suddenly lose a lot of work from one of these clients. Most importantly, I increased my business savings account to $15,000 (about three months’ salary and taxes at my current income level), and this money just sits there as a rainy day fund.
I also told myself that I don’t need to earn this much every year. That’s just a fact. I had no trouble spending the extra income: first, by increasing my business savings account, then by doing some deferred maintenance on our house, then by buying a new electric car, then by taking some really incredible vacations (Iceland, British Columbia, and Belize). And yet, I don’t want to put pressure on myself to earn 145K every single year, because I don’t need to. I think it’s important, for your own sanity, to differentiate between an income jump that you *need* to make and an income jump that you *want* to make.

I hope these tips are helpful if you’ve set an ambitious income goal for this year!!

Feb 19 2024
Corinne McKay

Life with an EV (as our only car)

Back in December, I wrote a post about our recent experience shopping for and purchasing an electric car, in which (after considering the Hyundai Ioniq, the Volkswagen ID 4, the Tesla Model Y, and the Ford Mustang Mach-E), we purchased a 2023 Kia EV6. We’ve now had the car for almost three months, so I thought I’d write a follow-up post with our impressions, especially now that we’ve taken the car on a few winter road trips.

Executive summary: We love this car!

We love the EV6, and we love the EV lifestyle in general. Our hope is to never own another gas car. The EV6’s winter and back-roads performance is similar to, or even better than our Subaru Outback wagon, charging it has been really easy and inexpensive, it has fantastic cargo capacity, and it’s hard to beat zero emissions and never buying gas again. We give this whole experience five stars, and I’ll reiterate the recommendation for our auto broker, Dustin Williams from H.M. Brown in Denver, CO.

Zero buyer’s remorse!

As I wrote in December, we had some angst over this purchase. Our 2011 Subaru was no spring chicken, but died relatively quickly and with relatively little warning, we’ve never bought a brand-new car before, and we only want/need one car, so we couldn’t do the typical “EV as around-town car, gas car for weekends and road tripping” model that a lot of people do to test the EV waters. Additionally, we do a lot of mountain sports activities (skiing, mountain biking, hiking) on the weekends, so we need a “go everywhere” car with all-wheel drive and good cargo capacity.

Really we have zero regrets. The EV6 is pretty perfect for our needs. The cargo capacity is comparable to or better than our Outback. We’ve done several ski days with four adults and four sets of ski gear in the car, and the 60/40 fold-down back seat (where you can still fit two people in the back with the other seat folded down) is way more comfortable than in the Subaru with way more leg room. The “luxurious” features of the EV6 are really great: blind spot cameras, heated and cooled seats, heated steering wheel, collision avoidance system that actually stops the car if you’re about to back into something, preferred driver’s seat settings so that you push the “driver 1” or “driver 2” button and it automatically adjusts the seat and the side-view mirrors to your preferred settings, button to open the trunk from the driver’s seat. These aren’t unique to EVs, but they’re unique to nice cars, which we’ve never owned before!

Everyone who rides in this car, loves it. No kidding. We’ve already had two sets of friends ask to test drive it because they’re thinking about buying an EV6. Everyone loves the EV6!

Charging!

The upside of owning an EV is never buying gas again (and zero emissions!). The tradeoff is wrapping your head around the charging paradigm. Before we bought our EV, every EV owner we talked to, told us the same thing: charging takes a little more planning than buying gas, but once you get used to it, charging is a non-issue. This has honestly been our experience. Additionally, we don’t charge the car at home (this relates to our house, not the car, more on this below) and we rarely pay for charging because there are so many free chargers out there.

EV charging has three levels: Level 1, the slowest, involves charging the car from a normal three-prong 110v outlet, using a charging cord that you can buy for under $200. We have a Megear level 1 charger and it works fine. Our original plan was to mostly charge the car off the outdoor electrical outlet that we use for our electric lawnmower. The obstacle proved to be not the car, but our house: we have a 1958 ranch with the original wiring, and although we have an upgraded electrical panel, the circuit with the outdoor electrical outlet proved not very compatible with EV charging. The lights in the house flickered when we plugged the car in, the switch plate on that circuit got hot to the touch, and if we put any other electrical appliances on that circuit while the car was charging, the breaker flipped. Ultimately we decided to stop using this method of charging, because it seemed only a matter of time before something went seriously wrong (like burning our house down or frying the car’s electrical system).

An obvious solution would be to get a Level 2 charger at home, which we will probably do at some point. Level 2 chargers are what you see at most public charging stations: they’re between the Level 1 “trickle” chargers, and the Level 3 fast-chargers that are almost as fast as pumping gas. However, regular blog readers will know that when it comes to frugality, I’m kind of a black belt, and with a Level 2 home charger install costing $1,000-$2,500, I went in search of other options. An additional factor is that I think it would be very cool to get a bidirectional EV charger, where we can use the car to power our house in the event of a power outage, but these chargers are not yet the industry standard, so I’d like to wait until we can get one at home.

Fortunately, other options proved pretty easy to find, and we are now charging the EV for free other than on road trips. Here’s how that works: the municipal chargers where we live (Boulder, CO) are free. Some of them have a time limit, but some, including a bank of chargers that are a 15-minute walk from my office, do not. So, even though I don’t need to drive to work (my office rent includes a free transit pass, or I ride my bike), I drive to work one day a week and charge the car at the free municipal charger all day. In a pinch, there’s a paying public charger at the middle school one block from our house, but we’ve only used it once in the last month. This has allowed us to delay getting a Level 2 charger at home, because a full charge (about 280 miles) covers pretty much all of our driving needs for the week.

I recommend the PlugShare app for locating chargers. It includes not only locations, but reviews of how reliable that particular charger is. Which brings me to one negative point: with our Kia, we got a freebie 1,000 kilowatt hour charging plan from Electrify America. This is about 3,500 miles of driving, so it’s well worth taking advantage of, except that there’s only one Electrify America charger in Boulder, and it’s constantly down for maintenance. So we’re hoping to use this charging plan on some road trips this summer! Otherwise, the ChargePoint network (which runs the majority of chargers in our area) is extremely reliable!

Winter performance

We did decide to get the same snow tires that we had on our old Subaru: Bridgestone Blizzaks, which are kind of the Colorado standard. They were expensive (~$1,100 with installation), but still cheaper than having the car towed out of some of the remote trailheads where we go backcountry skiing.

Otherwise, the EV6 is a great winter car. It has all-wheel drive, plus an ultra-low-torque Snow Mode for even better traction. We’ve driven it in some pretty hairy winter conditions so far with zero problems. It drives as well as, or better than our Subaru in snow, which is pretty impressive.

Road tripping

By now we’ve also taken the car on several overnight ski trips. I use the app A Better Routeplanner (ABRP) which is owned by the electric car company Rivian, and I’ve been very happy with it. If you buy a Tesla, you get their very robust route-planning system integrated into the car, so you can enter a destination and it will tell you where to charge along the way. If you have another type of EV (or at least with a Kia), you have to use a third-party app to do this. Kia has an in-car navigation app and an in-car charger location app, but they don’t communicate with each other. ABRP is very easy to use, and most importantly, it accounts for elevation, which is a huge factor when driving in the Colorado mountains. So far, I’ve found ABRP to be pretty conservative–we usually get to the destination with more battery power than the ABRP estimate.

EV road-tripping does require more planning than with a gas car. Whether this is fun or annoying depends on your mindset. For us, it’s often kind of enjoyable to plan a lunch stop around charging the car, rather than just grabbing snacks at a gas station. On road trips, we’ll typically plan to drive 2-3 hours (depending on the terrain), then stop for about an hour to charge the car, then continue to the destination where we can charge the car overnight. We’ve stayed at three different AirBnBs with the EV, and all of them immediately said yes when I asked if we could charge the car on their outdoor electrical outlet. We’ve also found many free municipal chargers–this seems to be a thing in Colorado, because the municipal chargers in Salida and Gunnison (both of which we recently visited) are all free, so we scoped out lodging within walking distance of a Level 2 charger and left the car there overnight.

That’s about it! We loooooove our EV!!! As with last summer, we plan on spending the month of July on a workcation in Canada, so I’ll report back on how that goes, as well as whether we end up getting a fast charger at home.

Feb 13 2024
Corinne McKay

Four sources of potential direct clients

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This week, let’s talk about a basic concept of direct client marketing: determining who might need your services. I started thinking about this because, when I teach direct client marketing classes, it’s not unusual for people to say, “I understand how to do this, but I get stuck before I even start, because I don’t know what types of clients might need me.”

Let’s take a look at four main sources of potential direct clients:

Clients similar to your agencies’ end clients. Never, never, ever (did I mention never??) market to your agency clients’ actual end clients. That’s a complete violation of your contract with the agency, and also totally unethical, because the agency did the work to land and retain that client. But, analyzing who is buying the translations you’re doing for agencies can be a good springboard. That’s how I got started with international development translation. I had no idea that it was even its own specialization, until one of my good agency clients (back in 2005 or so) offered me some NGO work. In turn, that made me think, this can’t be the only NGO or development entity on earth with the need and budget for professional translation services. I then did a marketing campaign that resulted in a couple of excellent direct clients.
Professional organizations for your specializations. These can be really valuable, both in terms of potential clients and in terms of continuing education and networking opportunities. There is literally a professional association for every industry or sector on earth. Immigration lawyers, museums, clinical trial organizations, private investigators. They all have associations! Maybe those associations have membership directories that you can use to find names of potential clients. Maybe they have a continuing education series that you could participate in, to learn more about that sector or industry. Maybe you could write an article for their journal or magazine on best practices for working with a translator or interpreter. Maybe you could attend their conference.
Job search sites. Even though we’re not looking for in-house jobs, job search sites can give us a lot of direct client leads. Let’s say that you went on Devex, “the media platform for the global development community.” And on there, you clicked Jobs, and let’s say you found a posting for an NGO that’s hiring a financial analyst who has to speak French. If you’re a French-English or English-French translator, that tells you that this NGO may need your services, because they work in English and French. You could then find some of their employees on LinkedIn and reference this ad: “I noticed that you’re hiring for a French-speaking financial analyst, and I can imagine that you might need a French to English translator as part of this project.” You can also do this with mainstream job search sites like LinkedIn or Indeed, it’s just easier if you find a job search site for your specialization.
Agencies for your specializations, but not translation agencies. When we say, “agency,” we tend to think exclusively of translation and interpreting agencies. But lots of industries have agencies. There are legal services agencies that provide freelance professionals for depositions: mainly court reporters, but they are often asked to secure an interpreter if one is needed. There are content marketing agencies that help companies create marketing-optimized blog posts and newsletters; maybe some of their clients work in multiple languages, or should be working in multiple languages? There are credentials evaluation agencies that help international professionals transfer their credentials to another country…and all of that has to be translated! There are international relocation agencies, who are often asked for referrals to translators: “We’re moving to Brazil, now we need our kids’ school records translated into Portuguese.”

Particularly if you’ve never worked with direct clients, it can be intimidating to think about who might need you, but I hope these quick ideas are helpful!