Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Freelancing with baby: the first year

This is a guest post by Rachel Sinn, a Spanish to English medical and pharmaceutical translator based in Colorado. I asked Rachel to write a post on her experiences managing her freelance business since giving birth to her first baby eight months ago. Specifically, Rachel has managed to juggle motherhood and freelancing while using little to no non-family child care. I get lots of requests from freelancing moms looking for real-life information, so I think you’ll enjoy this!

“So what are you guys going to do about child care?”

My friend smiled politely as my husband and I gave conflicting and somewhat vague accounts of our child care plans, because we hadn’t thought about it much. I was about five months pregnant. Later that night, that well-meaning question from a friend making small talk became a sleep-killing monster. What were we going to do about child care?

Of all the language-related trades, I chose translation at the tender age of 22 because I wanted to stay home with my future kids. At 30, with my first child kicking me on a daily basis, and with five years of translation work under my belt, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t going to be that easy. Cue several days weeks of panicked googling and calling around, only to encounter the dreaded daycare waitlist over and over again (30 months???).

After discouraging searches through hundreds of profiles on Care.com, endless daycare calls, and long talks, we decided to wing it. And I’m happy to say that I am still at home with my now eight-month-old daughter, and working close to full time. It has required a little creativity, and a reexamination of how we do life, but it’s possible and even enjoyable. Here are a few ideas if you’re looking to do the same.

Take a maternity leave
Childbirth is hard. Sleep deprivation is harder. As full-time employees, many women have the option to take 12 weeks of FMLA leave. I decided to give myself that amount of time as well. I notified all of my clients several months ahead of time, periodically reminded them nearer to the due date, and did so again the month of the due date. I also stopped taking projects with long deadlines the month of the due date. I took same day or next-day turnaround projects only (the opposite of what I did after my daughter was born!). I have two kinds of clients: giant translation agencies with hundreds of project managers and smaller, independent companies where I’ve been working with the same people for years. The former didn’t notice I was gone, and I had a good enough rapport with the latter that they happily congratulated me and told me to email them when I returned.

Ease back into it
When I decided I was ready to start working again, almost exactly three months later, I had to strategize how to do it. What worked for me was to “go back to work” for my best clients, a select few with whom I had a great relationship. You could call them my “A” clients. Great deadlines, interesting work, on-time payment, etc. Great deadlines were the key to the whole thing. I knew my schedule would be completely erratic for the foreseeable future (teething, sleep regressions, growth spurts, colds, the list goes on), which meant no same-day or next-day deadlines. I stuck with deadlines of two days or more at all times, and tried not to take more than one job at a time. I did this for about a month before going further. I’m happy to report that I was able to resume work with my “A” clients at about three months, and the rest around four to five months after my daughter was born. I didn’t lose a single client from going on maternity leave.

Rethink your schedule
My husband works full-time, so finding the time to get work done was tricky. I ended up translating during naps (an hour here, an hour there), and then in the evenings as well, when he or my mother-in-law could take the baby. I also ended up rearranging my workweek so that I worked over the weekend and took days off during the week. Far from being a handicap, this practice actually enabled me to take work other translators often refuse, thereby expanding my earning potential, and when I wanted to take the baby to story time at the library on a Wednesday morning, I didn’t feel like I was skipping out on work.

Beware the Mom-brain
Sleep deprivation is hard, and mom brain is real. You will put your phone in the fridge. You will find that your jeans have been inside out literally all day (how is that even possible?). I am fully aware that I might miss a deadline or make a serious error at any moment, simply because the baby was up five times the night before. I combat this problem by making the most of my productivity software. I set multiple reminders on my phone for each deadline (two days before, one day before, 4 hours before), I use Translation Office 3000 to track my projects and invoicing, and maybe most importantly, I use Google Assistant as my short term memory (e.g. “Ok Google, remind me to check on the term “X” in 10 minutes). Another tactic that has served me well is setting aside my translation for a good period of time, even overnight, and coming back to it with fresh eyes to edit and proofread. This is a good practice at the best of times, but as a new parent, it’s vitally important. A quality assurance tool like Xbench or Verifika may also be useful to check for number errors and consistency issues.

Working from home with an infant is an exercise in flexibility, but then so is parenting. By giving myself the time to recuperate and get to know my little one, starting back to work slowly, and putting plenty of safeguards in place to ensure my clients still benefit from my best work, I’ve been successful. Best of all, I get to be with my daughter for most of the day, and we don’t pay for child care. We are at eight months now, and still going strong!


Corinne McKay

An open letter to One Hour Translation: stop lifting my blog posts

Thanks very much to readers of this blog who have recently informed me about thinly-veiled rewrites of my blog posts appearing on the blog of One Hour Translation. This dates back to the summer of 2017, when OHT’s CEO responded to me about this issue, blaming outsourced writers hired by OHT and assuring me that it wouldn’t happen again (which it did). In at least two cases, OHT’s blog featured posts presented as their own work, which were substantially similar to posts that had appeared on my blog several years earlier. They’ve since taken these posts down (don’t worry, I have screen shots) but will not respond to my inquiries about how this happened, other than to say “We have forwarded your request to the Relevant department for the investigation” [sic].

Let’s be clear, One Hour Translation. When you publish thinly-veiled rewrites of an independent author’s work, you are not taking advantage of “the man” or some other anonymous entity. You are taking advantage of that person’s hard work, reputation, and expertise. You may blame outsourced writers hired on an online platform, but ultimately you published these posts; you took credit for them, and therefore you’re responsible for them.

Let’s be clear about something else, and this “something” makes me sad and angry for a variety of reasons. I talked this over with my lawyers. Yes, One Hour Translation, when I told you (in perhaps the fifth or sixth e-mail to which you didn’t respond, other than to remove the posts in question from your website, so I was sure you were reading my messages) that I was discussing this with my legal team, I was being honest, not bluffing. And in talking this over with my legal people, I found that in these types of copyright infringement cases, “playing dead,” as OHT is doing, is actually a pretty effective defense, because nothing other than a court complaint can compel them to respond. If OHT wanted to operate in an ethical manner, they could do something like:

  • a) respond, and apologize to me directly
  • b) negotiate a financial settlement with me that would reflect the fact that they claimed credit for my work
  • c) publicly apologize for claiming credit for my work

That would be a responsible way to acknowledge that they made a mistake and that they’re doing what they can to make it better. However in the absence of that, my only potential recourse is to file a legal complaint and threaten to sue them. Were I to do that, they would be legally compelled to respond. But in the end, I don’t want to do that. It’s expensive, and time-consuming, and I’d rather put my energy into constructive projects rather than into suing people who claim my blog posts as their own. But I also realize that’s part of the reason these things keep happening: big companies that stuff their blogs with lifted content think that small-time authors will make a big fuss and then ultimately go away, because…well…the vast majority of the time, that’s what happens. So I’ll just say this: One Hour Translation, despite your assurances that my request has been forwarded to the relevant department, it most assuredly has not been, and I would venture a guess that this is not an isolated incident. Note that One Hour Translation is suspended from the American Translators Association until 2021 due to violations of ATA’s code of ethics and professional practice.


Corinne McKay

What to do if your business stagnates: interview with Translators on Air

Things have been hopping here at the Thoughts on Translation world headquarters (also known as my desk in the co-working office…); I’m deep in a couple of large but enjoyable translation projects, my first translation skills class (Translation Workshop: French to English) is humming along in its fourth week with a wonderful crew of instructors, and this morning I was the guest on the weekly talk show Translators on Air. Hosts Dmitry Kornyukhov and Elena Tereshchenkova broadcast their show live every week (!), and for this episode they sent me a question from one of their viewers, asking what to do if your freelance business stagnates. The audience submitted a lot of other really interesting questions and we covered a range of topics, including:

-What does stagnation mean? Not enough work? Enough work, but not enough money? Feeling sick of the job?
-What about feeling guilty if you’re not working every second of the day?
-How worried should all of us be about MT and the increasing number of freelancers entering the translation market?
-How can we cope with factors we can’t control in our business?
-How can we take action toward our business goals, instead of just thinking about them?
-What role does networking play in a freelance business?
-How can a complete beginner market to agencies?

You can watch the whole episode here (warning: I talk a lot and it’s an hour and a half long…what can I say, people asked great questions!). Thanks to Dmitry and Elena for inviting me!

powered by crowdcast


Corinne McKay

Getting Started as a Freelance Translator starts Monday

The next session of Getting Started as a Freelance Translator, my flagship course for aspiring and beginning translators, starts Monday. Over the past 13 years, this course has helped over 500 translators learn how to launch and run a successful freelance business; join us for four weeks of self-paced video lessons, live question and answer sessions, and individual feedback on your resume and introductory e-mail, marketing plan, rates and billable hours, and online presence.

Registration is $380, with a $15 discount for ATA members (use coupon code ATA at checkout). A past student in this course commented, “This course was exactly what I needed – it offered a structured, bite-sized and realistic approach to topics every potential full-time freelancer needs to consider. Corinne’s honest and unbiased feedback helped me to focus on my goals and plan the next steps in my freelance career.”

We’ll dive in to the foundations of freelance translation on Monday; read the full description or register on my website.


Corinne McKay

Translating in Lilt: one translator’s experience

This is a guest post by Suzanne Rietveld (suzarieve@gmail.com). Suzanne translates between Dutch and English; she has a background in horticulture and has worked in women’s health—these are her primary translation specializations. She is also an expert reviser and editor and is available for work in these areas.

As a beginning translator, it is quite difficult to decide which systems work and which are not helpful at all. During my Bachelor’s degree program in translation at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation in Utrecht (Netherlands), we had not been introduced to many CAT tools or other digital options at all. We all had to do an introductory course in the CAT tool Deja Vu, (DVX3) and learned how to set up a project, how to import a document, how to confirm segments, and if you were lucky, you managed to export the document as well. It took a lot of time to find the answers to my own questions, and I found out that that is not the way to learn a new system. I managed to acquire the how-to documents which were used with Deja Vu, and that is how I started to use CAT tools.

During my course, I managed to find time to start marketing for paid work as a translator. I really like the challenges that we are faced with. I registered with my first Dutch translation agency and passed their test to translate from Dutch into English, which is my preferred language combination. In the meantime, we still had to work on all school assignments; multiple translations into the two languages. I soon found out that my memory is not always up to scratch and I do not mean the translation memory in my CAT tool. It really takes me some time to think about the right word in the right place. I have always been aware of this—and there’s no chance I will ever become an interpreter—but I needed to address it in my translation business.

So, I was really focused on getting some help from machine translation and tried SmartCat for a while. I was very happy with the results because it helped me with vocabulary. In SmartCat, the source text will be translated for you with machine translation and the target text is filled in for you from the start. I found out that this had some downsides for me. With a full segment translated, the job for me as a translator had been reduced to the job of a post-editor. I am quite fond of editing – I had quite some experience as a Dutch editor-in-chief – and I did get the hang of it, but I did find out that when using SmartCat, I did not get the results that I expected, or the quality of translation that I would have translated from scratch.

That was the moment that I came across the translation tool Lilt. It is quite similar to SmartCat as a translation tool, with the biggest difference being that you will get a translation of your source text, but this appears as a suggestion and not as your target text, which you still have to type from scratch. If you choose the same word as in the Lilt suggestion, you can accept the choice by clicking Enter. If you make changes to the structure of the sentence or choose different words, the Lilt suggestion changes on the go. The system is learning while you go and that is quite apparent.

Because I was eager to use a lot of my own terminology, I started to use the translation memory options right from the start. I managed to align most of my previous translations (including a book on prostitutes in Amsterdam, a website on leadership skills and team building, and my school assignments) and uploaded them to my TM. To use your own TMs in Lilt, you have to become a PRO member, which starts at US $15 per month. With all the school work and paid jobs, this has been well worth it. I managed to translate my assignments quicker and was more confident that I used the right terminology.

It is quite easy to import different documents in Lilt, and this works great. The only thing is that documents should not be open on your screen and saved as docx in Word, but I also managed to import Excel sheets, PowerPoint slides and PDFs. Once the translation is completed, it is again very easy to export the document and save it in the place that you want. At the end of my third year in my program, I had found myself a place to gain some work experience and started to work as a translator for a publisher in floriculture. I translated 30,000 words in three months and used Lilt throughout the entire project without any regrets. In hindsight, I should have let the reviser make changes in Lilt as well. Now, I exported all my texts a little too early on in the process and still made many changes during my own revision round and afterward I accepted the reviser’s changes, also in Word. To achieve the best results, I guess the trick is to stay in your CAT tool as long as possible, but many of you probably learned this the hard way as well.

The support team at Lilt is great. There is a chat option in the right corner, and I have made use of it every now and then. The team is very helpful, and it is evident that they want to become bigger and better all the time.

There is one thing that they still have to get right: the use of capital letters and punctuation marks. In the current version of Lilt, all commas, semi-colons and periods are anchored to the target text. If you choose to use the last word (with the period attached to it) earlier in the sentence, you have to delete the period manually. This is okay-ish, but it seems to happen quite often, and with all the different types of punctuation marks, so it gets quite annoying at some point.

So, I have used Lilt during my work experience, for school assignments, and for some private customers. I trained as a horticulturist and garden designer in the past and would like to specialize as a translator in these subjects. So, I convinced myself to get some experience and translate a lot more documents on this subject into the two languages. Lilt remains a great tool to use and it is good to see how quickly it is learning and improving.

I am now in the position of having to make choices. I guess I should try my CAT tool Deja Vu again and use it with a plug-in from DeepL or something similar. At the moment, I do the odd translation job for different translation agencies. I found out that the ones outside of the Netherlands only let me translate into my mother language, which is Dutch. I do work in their web editors and do miss the help of machine translation, but during my program, it has been better for me to keep practicing without machine translation. I have stopped using Lilt for now, also because of the monthly fee and the fact that I haven’t had much use for it over the past few months.

As I said before, I am looking for the next project which will offer me the opportunity to try a CAT tool with a plugin, and I will give you all an update if this appears to be a better choice. It would be great if you can leave some feedback for me with information about other options.