Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

September online courses coming up!

I hope that you’re all having a great summer, in your various corners of the world. After a fun mountain bike road trip to British Columbia and Alberta, and then a week in Toronto at the CoLab conference interpreting workshop (more on that in another post), I’m slowly getting back into work mode!

I’m teaching three classes in September, and registration for all of them is open now:

-First up, on September 8th, I’ll be presenting the 90-minute webinar How to get paid: ensuring that your freelance clients pay you for your work, for the American Translators Association’s webinar series. Registration is $70 for ATA members, $90 for non-members, and includes the recording.

-Next, on September 15th, I’ll be presenting my two-hour master class, Finding and marketing to direct clients, for Training for Translators. Registration is $60 and includes the recording. Registration closes at 10 AM New York Time on September 15.

-Finally, the September/October session of my self-paced, four-week course, Getting started as a freelance translator, starts on September 19. Registration is $190 and includes four weeks of video lessons, plus weekly question and answer videos.

I hope to see you there as the new “school year” gets going!


Corinne McKay

Hiring non-cheap service providers on Upwork

When I need a professional service provider, I prefer to go through a referral or hire someone local. But sometimes that’s not possible, because the task is very specialized, or because I simply can’t find anyone who fits what I’m looking for. I recently had a great experience hiring two services providers on Upwork, and I thought this might be helpful to other freelancers!

In the past Upwork (not an affiliate deal) had the reputation of being one step above Fiverr; a place where cut-rate professional service providers hawked their offerings. I do feel like things on Upwork have changed. I recently needed to hire someone to do a small but very specialized IT job for me (untangling two legacy GSuite accounts and transferring them to Google Workspace), and I also needed to hire an on-demand bookkeeper. After looking locally and not finding anyone who fit what I was looking for, I decided to try Upwork.

I was surprised by a) the quality and b) the non-cheap prices on Upwork. For example, the IT provider I hired charged $125 an hour (and was totally worth it). When I say “non-cheap prices,” I mean it in a positive way; I would be afraid to work with a cut-rate service provider, because I think that indicates either that they have very little business sense, very little confidence in their own skills, or both.

One annoying feature (in my opinion) of Upwork is that you can’t contact service providers and just hire them. You have to create a job posting for people to respond to, which tends to generate a ton of responses in very little time. Update: Thanks to my newsletter reader Paolo Slajmer for letting me know that there is a workaround for this. You can create a job on Upwork and then invite only the person/people who you want to apply for it. I plan to try this in the future! As a filter, I specified that I wanted someone based in the US, and who was willing to talk to me on the phone or over Zoom (no e-mail-only candidates). I was really impressed with the people I found. The IT provider resolved my Google Workspace issue in an hour and a half (which had been driving me crazy for a few months), and the bookkeeper helped me make a smooth transition from Excel sheets to QuickBooks Online for accounting. I would actually recommend Upwork for these types of services if you need them!


Corinne McKay

Getting started as a freelance translator now open for registration

The next session of my four-week, self-paced course, Getting started as a freelance translator, begins on September 19 and registration ($190) is open.

This four-week, self-paced course is for translators with little to no freelance experience, or still in the “idea” stage. The course is run on the Thinkific online learning platform, and includes:

  • self-paced video and text modules released on Monday of each week on Thinkific
  • the opportunity to submit questions for a weekly question and answer video (recorded and sent to participants)

You’ll complete the course with an understanding of how the translation industry works, and what you need to do to be successful as a freelance translator. Participants in the May/June session gave the following feedback:

-In four short weeks of taking the “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator” class, I learned far more than any other course I have taken. I had the opportunity to ask questions which where answered in great detail and the answers recorded so I can go back to re-listen. I have a clear understanding of what I need to do next to set up a successful translation business. I’m grateful beyond words for the advice and support Corinne provided. 

–It gave me the confidence boost that I needed to start, I feel far more serious and prepared now for the freelance translation field. 

-That was an AMAZING class!! Even though I ‘m not new to translation, there was still so much worthwhile information AND I got to network with other translators. Everything about it, format, setup, the way it was organized was perfect! 


Corinne McKay

Product recommendation: Dell 14 portable monitor

I’m doing some digital nomading this summer, and don’t love working on my laptop monitor alone. I have a ThinkPad T590 with a 15 inch screen, but I use a 24 inch external monitor when I’m working at my office (which is 90% of the time), so the laptop alone is pretty painful. I find it particularly hard for remote interpreting, when I need one window for the RSI platform and one for my resource materials, and for translating official documents when I often need two landscape-orientation documents open at once.

An additional factor is that when I’m working in a conference room at my co-working office and I want a second monitor (particularly for remote interpreting), I have to lug my big monitor with me. This problem will soon be solved because I’m moving to a small private office within a co-working office, but it’s a pain. I’d also like to have a fully portable remote interpreting setup, for which a second monitor is essential.

For a while, I’ve been considering purchasing a lightweight portable monitor, but I couldn’t decide what to buy, and I wanted something truly lightweight (a monitor that fits in my laptop case), not something “luggable.” After doing some research recently, I found that, as with most tech gadgets, options for portable monitors have gotten better and prices have gone down. I’ll be working from the East Coast for a week in August, so I decided it was time to make a purchase.

I settled on the Dell 14 (not an affiliate link) which is currently selling for US $300; it arrived a few days ago and I really love it! As the name would suggest, it’s a 14-inch monitor. The pluses are:

  • Really light and thin: weighs 20 ounces and is about half an inch thick
  • Has an integrated fold-out stand that tilts to whatever angle you want
  • Runs power and data through a single cord (USB-C to USB-C) so it doesn’t require a separate power cord
  • Has excellent resolution and a brightness adjustment button
  • Comes with a carrying sleeve

The Dell 14 is thin enough that I can fit both my laptop and the monitor in my regular laptop sleeve. Here’s what it looks like on my kitchen table, in digital nomad mode

And here’s what it looks like on my desk at my co-working office, where I put it on a small monitor riser

I honestly like this monitor so much that I’ve been using it instead of my massive Acer desktop monitor, to free up some desk real estate. The only negatives/caveats I would give it are:

  • Your computer has to have a USB-C port
  • You have to make sure to always carry the USB-C to USB-C cable with the monitor, otherwise the monitor is useless
  • The carrying sleeve that comes with the monitor doesn’t have a pouch for the cable
  • As shown in the demo pictures on Dell’s website, if you want the cable not to be curling all over the place, you need to position the monitor on the opposite side of your laptop to where the USB-C port is, so that the bulk of the cable rests behind your laptop. So if the USB-C port is on the left side of your laptop, you’re going to want the monitor on the right. This works well for me because I like the second monitor on the right anyway, but it’s something to consider.

Readers, any digital nomading tech gadgets that you’d recommend for this summer?


Corinne McKay

A year of conference interpreting

July 2 will mark one year since I received my exit exam results from the Glendon College Master of conference interpreting program. It’s been an exciting and interesting year, so I thought I’d report on how things have gone, and are going.


-My conference interpreting work volume is about what I expected: it takes a while to build up, and I’d say that conference interpreting is more networking and referral-based than cold marketing-based. But I’m happy with the quantity, type, and quality of the work that I have, and I love the actual interpreting work even more than I thought I would. Overall, I’m very happy with the decision to do a conference interpreting Master’s, and with this new career direction.

-I had originally set a goal to have my work volume be half translation and half interpreting within one to two years of graduating from the Glendon program, and it looks like that’s going to happen. I just switched from Excel sheets to QuickBooks Online for accounting (a painful but ultimately very worthwhile process that might be the subject of another post), so it’s easy to see where my income is coming from. In the first five months of 2022, the amount I earned from interpreting for agencies has almost equaled the amount I earned translating for direct clients, and it’s an amount that I’m happy with.

-I feel like the Glendon program prepared me really well for the real world of conference interpreting. I think that doing an AIIC-level conference interpreting program makes a huge difference in one’s interpreting skill and confidence and is well worth the time and money. And here, you heard me say it, a couple of my favorite assignments this year involved long consecutive, which was the source of at least one sobbing breakdown during the program. If you’re learning long consecutive, stick with it!

-In terms of professional development, I was approved as an AIIC pre-candidate (and AIIC now allows pre-candidates to publicly state their pre-candidate status), and also started participating in a couple of really helpful online interpreter practice groups, plus participated in Sophie Llewellyn Smith’s French B Atelier course, and I’m registered for this summer’s CoLab workshop in Toronto.

-I have lots of observations about the differences between translation and interpreting (I’m still translating as much as ever), but here’s a major one. I think it could be challenging to launch a freelance interpreting business if you’re not already self-employed or if you don’t have a flexible schedule. In my experience, most beginning freelance translators launch their businesses by working another job alongside their translation work, until they have enough freelance work to cut the cord. I think that could be harder (not impossible, but harder) with interpreting. As a newbie, a lot of clients are going to start you with work that is less desirable, schedule-wise: the classic example being the one-hour assignment in the middle of the day, or things that start early or end late, or “the other interpreter is having a power outage, can you start NOW?” I actually enjoy those kinds of assignments because I’m already self-employed anyway, but it’s something to consider if you’re making the leap from another job.

-On the other hand, I think that interpreting, and particularly conference interpreting, can become economically viable faster than a fledgling translation business generally does. In most cases, a minimum charge conference interpreting job is going to pay a lot more (perhaps 10x more) than a minimum charge translation job, because most conference interpreting work is going to be billed by the half day or full day, rather than by the minute or hour. When I first started translating, a lot of my translation work was minimum charge jobs paying less than $100, and it takes a lot of those types of jobs to add up to a full-time income.