Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Choose your hard

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of choosing your hard, and I think it can be really useful to us as freelancers.

Too often, we know what we need to do, but we struggle to force ourselves to do it, partially because we frame this as a choice between an easy thing and a hard thing. Like:

  • I’d love to make more money and work for clients who appreciate me, but the easiest thing is to keep working for my current clients
  • I keep planning to make a new website and be more proactive about marketing, but the easiest thing is to stay in the rut I’m in
  • I really want to do work that I enjoy and am good at, but the easiest thing is to keep translating what lands in the inbox

But here’s the problem: being chronically unfulfilled isn’t easy, it’s hard. Living off very little money is hard. Doing work you don’t enjoy is hard. Dreading turning on the computer for work is hard. Working for clients who don’t treat you like a professional is hard.

Staying stuck in a sub-optimal situation is hard. Making daily positive changes is hard. Choose your hard.

This thought helps me a lot, and I hope you’ll find it useful!


Corinne McKay

Copywriting and Official documents: early bird rate ends Friday

Training for Translators has two great four-week classes starting on November 10, and the early bird rate for both of them ($365, minus any discounts for which you qualify) ends on Friday.

–Copywriting for your business and for your clients, taught by Madalena Sanchez Zampaulo, is for anyone who wants to write better copy for their own website or marketing materials, or offer copywriting as a separate service to clients. A past participant says, “A great opportunity to learn more about the most important aspects of copywriting and the copywriting services/products. The course was lively and well-structured, and I really appreciated the personal attention and feedback. The knowledge I gained will definitely be helpful in improving my own marketing efforts and growing my business.” The course includes four slide presentations, four question and answer/bonus material sessions (recordings provided), and individual feedback from Madalena on four homework assignments.

–Translating official documents, taught by Jennifer Nielsen, is for anyone who wants to make official documents a profitable part of their freelance business. A past participant says, “Jennifer is a great teacher. After taking her course, I am confident that my official document translations are much better and reflect greater expertise. This course was really worth taking.” Spanish to English examples will be used, but the course is open to translators in all languages. The course includes four slide presentations, four question and answer/bonus material sessions (recordings provided), and individual feedback from Jennifer on four homework assignments.

I hope to see you there!


Corinne McKay

Legal concepts and terminology: early bird rate ends today

The early bird price for Paula Arturo’s course on Legal concepts and terminology for translators and interpreters ends today! The last session of this course sold out and earned rave reviews from participants, praising Paula’s teaching skills and her legal knowledge. The course starts October 26, and you can secure your spot and save some money by registering today!


Corinne McKay

First month as a Master’s in Conference Interpreting student

Life for me took a big turn in August; I’ve been contemplating going back to school for a Master’s in Conference Interpreting for at least five years, and I’ve looked at all of the AIIC-listed Master’s in conference interpreting (MCI) programs in the US, Canada, and Switzerland (because my husband is a citizen there). But it’s complicated: we’re not prepared to move to Europe right this red-hot second. There are only five AIIC-listed MCI programs in North America, and for my purposes only four (MIIS, U. Maryland, Ottawa, and Glendon/York), because the Wake Forest program doesn’t offer French.

August 2020: A major pivot

In August of this year, I participated in the two-week Cambridge Conference Interpretation Course (CCIC; held online this year), because I thought it would give me some insight into whether to forge ahead with my MCI goals. And just a few days into the CCIC, I found out that the Glendon College/York University MCI program–which typically holds the first year online and the second year in person in Toronto–would be entirely online this year, and that they were still taking applications to start in September. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, the CCIC gave me the confidence to try the advanced entry exam, to be admitted directly into the second year of the program. I took it and passed, filled out all of the paperwork to formally apply to to the program, and was accepted just in time for orientation day at the beginning of September.

This was a major logistical whirlwind, but I felt that being able to do an MCI program in one year, mostly online (we will hopefully be in Toronto for part of second semester, but the details are up in the air due to COVID) was too good to pass up. Essentially I decided that if I ever want to do this, now is the time. The Glendon/York program has the advantage of being extremely affordable (about US $16,000 per year), mostly because Canadian public university tuition is very affordable by US standards, and additionally because the Canadian dollar is trading at about 75 US cents right now. So, in the space of less than a month, I went from not even seriously considering an MCI program to being enrolled.

The structure of the Glendon program

Glendon offers an MCI for students who have English paired with French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, German, Portuguese, and Turkish, but this year there aren’t any German, Portuguese, or Turkish classes. Year 1 of the program focuses on court, conference, and healthcare interpreting, and Year 2 exclusively on conference interpreting. In my Year 2 group, we have about 20 people, and French is the largest language group.

We have some non-language-specific classes all together, and then some language-specific classes, and each class meets once a week for either two or three hours. The two-hour classes run for the whole semester, and the three-hour classes are “intensives,” where normally the instructor would come to Glendon and teach a 36-hour class in one week, but this year it’s split into 12 three-hour sessions online. Right now I have six classes:

  • Two non-language-specific classes, one on general conference interpreting topics like speech prep, structural analysis, English note-taking, etc., and one on interpreting current events, where we take turns (in groups) making speeches in our A (native) languages that other students then interpret into their A or B languages for the whole class.
  • One French into English class, where we do both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, either with the whole French group or in pairs in breakout rooms
  • Two English into French classes, one a semester-long class that’s pretty similar to the French into English class, and one an “intensive” class where we meet for three hours a week and work in depth on one speech, interpreting segments for the group and then giving each other feedback.

All of our classes meet on Zoom, and we have WhatsApp groups both for our whole year, and for our language-specific groups.

How it’s going so far

In a word: great! I love it. Of course, that’s with the caveat that remote school is remote school: definitely a different experience than being on campus (an experience I’m sharing with my college freshman daughter who is also remote!). It’s a lot of screen time, and I’m really hoping that we’ll be on campus for at least part of second semester. But Glendon has the advantage of having the online learning model pretty dialed in, as their first year has always been online.

Our professors are universally excellent, and the other students in the program are very diligent and motivated. The skills we learn are very practical, with a smattering of interpretation theory and history thrown in. All of our professors are also working conference interpreters, so they give us insights from the real world of interpreting, and we have the opportunity (starting up this week!) to interpret for a lot of in-house events at York University, which I think will be a very useful experience.

It goes without saying that the program is a lot of work, and it requires a lot of self-discipline, because most of the work outside class is self-directed, meaning that no one is standing over you telling you that you’d better do your memory exercises or your half-hour of shadowing or whatever. Sort of like what I’d imagine music school students have to do, a lot of the work of an MCI program is simply putting in the practice time, and knowing how to practice in a targeted way. I practice by myself a lot of the time (and record myself), but I make a point of practicing with other people from the program as well, preferably doing a “feedback trade” with someone who is French A, where they interpret into English and I give them feedback, then I interpret into French and they give me feedback.

The Glendon program has a pretty strong emphasis on consecutive interpreting, which is really helpful for me as I have very little formal training in consecutive. If you’re a complete beginner, I highly recommend the Interpretrain self-paced online course. It helped me a lot in preparing for the state court interpreter certification exam, but it’s geared toward utterances of a few sentences (which is enough for something like a court interpreting exam), whereas in the MCI program we’re expected to interpret speeches of around five minutes in consecutive. In just one month, my consecutive has really improved because we do so much of it, and I feel that it’s had a spill-over effect (in a positive way) on my simultaneous interpreting, because I’m more systematic and less frantic. At the start of the course, I had what might best be described as a “stenographic” style of note-taking, where I frantically tried to write down almost everything the speaker said, in abbreviated words. I’ve finally made a breakthrough and started taking fewer notes, using more symbols, and using my notes to cue my memory rather than trying to note down every single word.

Also, I’m not 22 years old (hardly! I’m 49!) and I feel like I fit in well in the Glendon program. Many of the people in the program are around my age, have a significant amount of work experience, and are continuing to work at least part-time during the program. My sense (although I may be wrong) is that this is probably pretty different from a European program where the bulk of the students would be in their 20s.

My advice for other prospective MCI students

Now that I’ve gotten a taste of the MCI life, I highly recommend it, if you find a program that works with your goals and any constraints you may have. Most of all, I think it will be interesting to see whether the big-name MCI programs continue to offer fully-online programs once the COVID pandemic has resolved. But if you’re considering an MCI program, I would consider:

  • Your budget and location. With only five MCI programs in North America, it’s a big commitment unless the fully-remote offerings continue. If you decide to go to law school, it’s likely that you can find a program you can commute to, unless you live in a really rural area. With an MCI program, not so much. And when I thought realistically about the financial commitment of moving to another state or country for two years, potentially taking out student loans, etc., plus the logistics (my husband has a salaried job here in Colorado, we own a house, my 18 year old lives nearby while doing remote school, my parents who are in their 70s moved here to be closer to us, etc.), I just wasn’t sure that it was realistic. Paying $15,000, divided into three payments of $5,000 throughout the year, felt a lot more manageable.
  • Your level of self-discipline. I think this is a huge factor, especially in a remote program. Getting better at interpreting is like getting better at playing a musical instrument: it happens incrementally, over a long period of time, through targeted practice. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and how to practice is a huge part of it; being willing to give and accept feedback is a huge part of it; and just putting your rear end in the chair and putting in the time is a huge part of it. And you have to be realistic about whether you’re going to do that, or whether you’re going to just do your 15 hours of class a week and then forget about it.

I’ll post further updates about my experiences as the year goes on! For now, I’m really enjoying the program and learning a lot.


Corinne McKay

A month of LinkedIn Premium: the results

I set a goal for this year to experiment with some different marketing methods and see how they work. I can’t promise that this will be a series, but I do have a pilot project of at least one other method–Google Display ads–in the works. So, first up is LinkedIn Premium…here we go!

Since forever, I’ve been wondering whether LinkedIn Premium is a worthwhile investment. I have a number of former students who’ve used it successfully, so I wanted to do my own experiment and test it for myself. I signed up on August 25 and decided to send around 100 contact requests and as many InMails as the system would allow me to send, and see what happened.

Not much. There you go! That’s my two-word summary of the month, but of course there are a number of caveats that I’ll go into in this post. In sum, I sent 10 InMails, of which two responded with the name of a different contact person at their organization, two responded with “Thanks!” and six didn’t respond at all, and I sent 75 connection requests with a personal note attached, of which 40 accepted the request but didn’t respond to the note, four accepted the request and did respond to the note, and 31 didn’t respond at all. I found this to be a pretty lackluster result as compared to warm e-mails, but I think it could be a good building block for a broader LinkedIn strategy.

What is LinkedIn Premium?

If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ve likely seen the ads for LinkedIn Premium, offering you a free month. On the positive side, I will say that the free trial is actually free and is easy to cancel. You do have to enter your credit card information, but it’s quick and obvious how to cancel. Of course you have to go through multiple layers of, “Before you go, LinkedIn Premium offers…” pop-up windows, but cancelling is really not that bad.

LinkedIn markets Premium in many different ways: by prompting you when you’re on the site, by reminding you that you could unlock all of your profile views if you had Premium, etc.

At present (September 2020) Premium costs between $29.99 and $99.95 a month, depending on what level you pick. For a freelancer’s purposes, I think the main advantage of Premium is the number of InMail credits (InMails are LinkedIn private messages that you can send to people you’re not connected to), so I should have chosen the highest level of Premium with the most InMail credits. Why not…it’s free! But instead, I signed up for “Premium Career,” which offers the fewest InMail credits (three, as compared to 30 for the Recruiter Lite tier).

Another appealing feature is LinkedIn Learning. A while back, LinkedIn bought Lynda.com and added all of their courses as a benefit of LinkedIn Premium. I didn’t take any of these courses, but this could be worth the basic membership alone, if the courses (there’s a massive library) interest you.

My preconceptions about LinkedIn

I’ll admit that I’ve never really “gotten” LinkedIn as a tool for freelancers. In certain ways, I get it:

  • If you do a hard-to-find language or specialization
  • If you don’t have your own website
  • If you’re open to/looking for full-time or long-term contract work
  • As a way to keep in touch with people you meet at conferences, etc. without having to keep track of their e-mail addresses
  • As a “touch point” with current and potential clients

But in general, I’ve always felt that LinkedIn is more suited to people who have, want, or are looking for in-house jobs than it is to freelancers looking for new clients. Even the LinkedIn profile structure is relatively un-suited to freelancers; when you write someone a LinkedIn recommendation, all of the suggested “ways in which you know this person” are geared toward in-house roles, and so on.

I think everyone should be on LinkedIn; like not having a website, I think that not being on LinkedIn makes you look a bit invisible/unprofessional as a freelancer. But I wanted to dig in and see if Premium is useful as an outbound marketing tool.

My goals

Mostly, I wanted to see how LinkedIn Premium compares to my tried-and-true outbound marketing technique, which is e-mail. I work almost exclusively with direct clients, and I find them or they find me in a variety of ways:

  • Through referrals from other translators or from existing clients
  • By me reaching out to them by e-mail
  • By me sending them a paper letter or postcard
  • By them finding my website or an online directory profile

There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Ed Gandia’s warm e-mail prospecting methods (there’s a testimonial from me in his book but it’s not an affiliate deal). Years ago, I took Ed’s warm e-mail prospecting class, mostly to get better at teaching other translators how to do e-mail marketing. But then, I thought that I might as well try the technique for myself. Admittedly, luck and striking at the right time have a lot to do with it, but on the third warm e-mail I wrote, I landed upon a US-based publisher looking for a translator for a French non-fiction book that was basically my dream project. That went well, and they hired me to translate another book. That one warm e-mail yielded two book contracts and almost $20,000 of work. It’s definitely possible that I’m biased toward e-mailing for that reason. However, LinkedIn says that, “InMails have a 10-25% hit rate when it comes to soliciting a response from prospects, 300% higher than emails with the exact same content.”

Essentially, I wanted to see how LinkedIn InMails or connection requests (with a note attached) compare to locating those same people on LinkedIn, but then using a tool like Hunter.io to contact them via e-mail.

My admittedly haphazard approach

I should start by saying that I took a very non-strategic approach to this experiment. I contacted people in a variety of sectors

  • People who work with Africa or Haiti programs at US-based NGOs
  • People who belong to some of the same international development groups on LinkedIn that I belong to
  • People who work at US-based credentials evaluation services (I do a lot of official document translations for people from French-speaking countries who are trying to get a US professional credential through a credentials evaluation service)
  • Heads of in-house translation departments at US and European companies
  • Heads of translation services at translation companies that work in the specializations I work in

I guess I’d call this “deliberately haphazard,” in that I wanted to see whether people in different sectors/industries are more or less likely to respond. The answer to that is yes: the NGO people were much more likely to respond with a note, and the translation company people were much more likely to accept the connection request. I’m still musing about the reasons behind those, but there you go!

What I did

Over the course of my free month, I devoted about half an hour a day to researching and contacting people. When I had InMail credits, I contacted them by InMail, because it allows you to write a lot more. You can send a note with any connection request, but you’re limited to 300 characters.

The InMail system is a little confusing in that you start out with a certain number of InMail credits, but you can recoup credits when people accept your InMail. So in my case, I was able to send 10 InMails even though I only started out with three credits.

My InMail text was the same as what I send over e-mail, and my connection request text was just an abbreviated version. Along the lines of, “Hello X, I’m a French to English translator specializing in the international development sector. I see we’re both members of several international development groups on LinkedIn, and I also noticed that (insert NGO name) does quite a bit of work in French-speaking countries in West Africa. I’d love to connect; would you be the correct person to speak with about offering my freelance translation services to (NGO name)?”

Several people who responded were very helpful and gave me the name of the correct contact person at their firm. No one was at all unfriendly. And this did give me some good ideas of how to expand my LinkedIn network in a more targeted way, rather than just accepting connection requests from other people, which is what I mostly do now.

How the results compare to warm e-mailing

Whenever I’ve done a warm e-mail campaign on this scale, I’ve always landed at least one new client right away. It seems like the, “As luck would have it, we have a French to English project in the pipeline that we could use some help with” response always comes in at some point, if I send out 70-100 warm e-mails.

In this campaign, that response never came, but I have a hunch that all of this activity made my profile more visible to people on LinkedIn, which resulted in two connection requests (sent by them to me) from people who work for translation agencies in Europe that look very good. I’m in the process of applying to them.

Takeaways and the broader strategy

As I mentioned above, I was a bit underwhelmed by this experiment as compared to the results I usually get from a similar number of warm e-mails. However, there are a few important caveats:

  • Several people did respond with helpful, encouraging information. It was far from a total bust.
  • I may need to change my mindset. For freelancers, LinkedIn may be more of a relationship-building/maintenance tool than a client acquisition tool.
  • I’ve realized that I need to be way more proactive about making LinkedIn connections with people I don’t know. I mostly restrict my connection requests to people I’ve met at conferences and whatnot, and I need to branch out.
  • I’d actually like to work for more agencies; LinkedIn strikes me as maybe a way around the industrial-scale “resource procurement” process that a lot of agencies use. One of the agency people I met on LinkedIn even told me, “just e-mail our translation services director your resume,” which is a lot better than going through their application process just to find out if we’re potentially a good fit for each other.
  • I don’t subcontract work to other translators or sell translations as an agency. Perhaps Premium is more helpful for those kinds of things.
  • Most importantly, I think that LinkedIn doesn’t really lend itself to a “hit and run” strategy which is basically what I was doing. For example, I probably should have focused on connection requests first, then perhaps written a LinkedIn article that would be of interest to those new connections and maybe sent them the link once we were already connected. In reality, I could still do that!

Bottom line, the response rate I got to InMails was about the same as to warm e-mails, and the roughly 50% response/lack of response to connection requests really surprised me. In terms of cost, I’d say that Premium falls into the category of “expensive or not expensive,” depending on how you look at it. The least expensive Premium membership costs about $360 a year. If you compare that to sending e-mails (free/already paying for it), that’s a decent chunk of money. But if you landed even one moderate-sized translation job from it, Premium would be well worth the money.

If I want to do more with LinkedIn on the client side–because I do post lots of stuff for other translators there–I think I need to sink a good deal more time and effort into it, and do things like write LinkedIn articles, send interesting pieces of content to my connections, etc. I can’t say I was dazzled by the results of this experiment, but I was also using it for a purpose (active prospecting rather than relationship-building) that may not have been realistic.

Readers, over to you: anyone love or hate LinkedIn Premium? Other suggestions on how to use it?