Classes for translators

Training for Translators has two great four-week courses (small groups, individual attention) coming up in June, and the early registration rates end on Monday (May 18). Both courses run from June 1-26 with two live sessions per week (recordings provided if you can’t attend live) and weekly homework assignments with individual feedback.

Andie Ho will be teaching Microsoft Word skills for translators, a class for anyone who’s ever battled (wasting time and thus money) with MS Word features. Andie will dig in to tables, automatic numbering, headers/footers, section breaks, text boxes, and generally finding ways to avoid spending hours on formatting when you’d rather be translating. Note from Corinne: I asked Andie to teach this class based on a conference presentation I attended, that immediately solved many of my longstanding MS Word formatting headaches!

Paula Arturo will be teaching Legal concepts and terminology for translators, a “mini law school” for anyone who wants to improve their specialist knowledge of tort law, contract law, constitutional law, and property law. The materials will put a particular emphasis on how to solve translation problems across the world’s two dominant legal traditions. A participant in Paula’s most recent course for Training for Translators commented, “Paula’s plain language course was enjoyable as well as highly informative. In addition to learning how to use plain language in my translations, I found the concepts very helpful in interpreting source texts. I started seeing results in my work even before the course was over!”

I’m excited about both of these courses and I hope to see some of you there!

Hello, blog readers! I hope that you are all doing as well as can be expected in these crazy times! At my house we are more or less fine (no one is sick and we still have jobs), so we are trying–with more success on some days than on others–not to complain.

I’m happy to report that the 900-person MOOC-style session of Getting Started as a Freelance Translator wrapped up on Friday and we all survived, mostly thanks to the 18 very generous mentors who answered my panicked call for help! We had participants from all over the world, from high school students to translation instructors, and it was a fun way to connect during this disconnected phase.

Also on Monday, the next Training for Translators challenge group will kick off–translator and productivity expert Dorothee Racette will lead Tackling Task Management, a timely challenge group if there ever was one! If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list right now (and who isn’t??), you don’t need a longer to-do list, you need a better system. Dorothee has customized the group’s activities for life in the time of COVID, when we have tons of unstructured time but also a lot of anxiety and distractions. The group runs for the whole month of May with daily challenges and motivational videos, and the cost is just $75. I hope to see some of you there!

The Training for Translators mini-course on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) taught by Madalena Sanchez Zampaulo starts Tuesday, and we have room for as many people as want to participate. This is a pre-recorded course, using the videos from Madalena’s highly successful SEO September Strategy challenge group (which ran in…you guessed it…September!). The course includes 20 doable challenges that will help you get more traction from your existing website, and these are things you can do yourself, even if you don’t have access to your website’s source code.

Since a lot of people are using COVID downtime to work on their back-burner projects, we’re offering this mini-course for $50. If you don’t have time to do the course now (or if you’ve already signed up for the Tackling Task Management challenge group with Dorothee Racette in May, and you don’t want to double up…) you can sign up for the SEO course and just save the e-mails for when you have time.

We’ll have 20 daily challenges with videos from Madalena and an optional Slack group (just skip that part if it feels like one more thing you don’t have time for). Thanks to Madalena for offering this, and I hope to see some of you there!

March Madness–most commonly associated with the NCAA basketball tournament, or, this year at my house, college application decisions–is upon us! How about getting your own March Madness on, with the Training for Translators March Marketing Madness challenge group??

I launched this group last year, and many participants had major breakthroughs in their marketing. Feedback included:

• “I found my first direct client, after convincing myself that that would never happen.”
• “My business is transformed and will never be the same.” (Yes, someone actually said that…I was amazed too!)
• “I realized that major progress is possible with even a small amount of daily marketing effort.”

What’s more, I think it’s safe to say that the group was even fun. There’s a challenge each day, plus a motivational video, then everyone posts their progress in our Slack group. All together, you’ll spend about 30 minutes each weekday on this effort, and I feel confident that you’ll see some results if you stick with it for the month.

We kick off on Monday, and there’s room for everyone who wants to join! The cost is only $75, and I’d love to see some of you there!

Also: the April session of Medical concepts and terminology for translators and interpreters, taught by Michele Hansen, is already sold out (!), so we’re looking at scheduling another session. Send me an e-mail at corinne@translatewrite.com if you’d like to be on the wait list!

This month’s Training for Translators master class is coming up, and it’s sure to be a good one! Following the success of Dagmar Jenner’s master class on German commas, she’s back to present Capitalization in German, this Friday (February 7) at 12:30 PM New York time (recording provided if you can’t attend live.

The master class will run about 90 minutes; the cost is just $75 and German translators are sure to learn valuable tips from Dagmar, a translator and German orthography expert. Hope to see some of you there!