Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Freelancing


Corinne McKay

Colo rats d'eau? Allons-y!

Yesterday, ever-observant EN>FR translator Marianne Reiner sent me a link to an article about my hometown, Boulder CO, in the online French publication Courrier International. In addition to being just plain amusing (I think I’ll start referring to Boulder as “a mini-Copenhagen with a view” as the author does!), this article struck me as illustrative of a few good lessons for translators.

  • It’s interesting to get a “client’s-eye view” of your own environment, because it helps you understand the client’s perspective. For me, it’s an everyday occurrence to see someone delivering pizzas in a Prius or to get passed on a running trail by someone who’s training for the Olympics, but it’s fascinating to see what a French person thinks of those phenomena. Takeaway: keep up with news about your country/city/political situation that’s written by speakers of your non-English languages in order to understand their perspective.
  • It’s fun and useful to keep up with neo-terms that are specific to your location/interests, etc. In this article I learned some new expressions for Boulderesque concepts such as “zero-waste policy” “bohemian lifestyle” “carbon fiber” “solar-powered heating system” and more.
  • As Marianne perceptively suggested to me, this could have an interesting business angle. A few ideas popped into my head; many of these don’t apply to what I do, but could work well for other translators: visit the businesses that are profiled in this article and suggest that since French tourists are already visiting their establishments and more (armed with this article and their extra-strength euros) will surely be coming, shouldn’t their menu/brochure/advertisement/guided tour be translated into French? Ditto with the local chamber of commerce: the U.S. is a euro-earner’s oyster, so let’s invite the French to (as the article suggests!) come bike, hike, eat organic food and meditate in Boulder. How about a French-speaking guided tour of downtown hotspots? A linguistic entrepreneur could also contact the publication where this article appeared and/or the writer, and let them know that when the French come to Boulder, we’re all set with French-language materials and services to welcome them.

Obviously, these tips have to be customized depending on the situation, but it struck me as a good moment to think about both outside-the-box marketing and ways to capitalize on new trends in the global economy.


Corinne McKay

Vetting prospective clients and job offers

One of the most frequent questions that I see from beginning translators is how to decide if a new client or a job offer is legitimate. It’s a delicate process, and it’s not an exact science. Sometimes even experienced translators get scammed, and sometimes a client that seems a little shady during the first contact turns out to be quite trustworthy. Following are a few tips on this issue.

First, always (always!) use a translation industry client rating list to see if the prospective client has been rated there. About Translation has an excellent post on this very topic, and it’s well worth a read. I belong to and swear by Payment Practices and I check it immediately when a new client contacts me. In my experience, known non-payers have generally been rated on Payment Practices or a similar list, so these services are an invaluable resource.

I also think it’s completely acceptable to ask a prospective client for references from other translators as long as you as the translator offer the same in return. Ask if the client is a member of a professional association for translators or translation companies. This is not an absolute guarantee of legitimacy, but it indicates that the client is at least willing to invest the time and money in joining such an association. In addition, never work for a client without getting full contact information including physical address, telephone number, and the name and contact information for the person who handles accounts payable.

Asking for advance payment is also an option, especially if you are not in dire need of the work that the client is offering. This type of arrangement might involve full advance payment, partial advance payment, or a partial advance payment and then another installment once you’ve submitted part of the translation. Some clients will agree to this type of payment plan and some will not, since the client then runs the risk that a translator who has already been paid either does not return the translation or returns an unacceptable translation. In my case, I ask all clients who are not established businesses to pay in advance, since (don’t ask me how I learned this!) it’s actually not very hard for an individual to disappear after receiving the translation, for example by moving without a forwarding address or phone number.

Part of the vetting process is not quantifiable, but rather involves using your intuition about a client. I’ve found that just the process of politely asking a client about some of the issues above can go a long way toward avoiding a non-payment situation before it starts. When a less than solvent client knows that they’ve landed on a translator who checks industry rating lists, asks for references from current translators and clarifies the payment terms and methods up front, they’re likely to seek another, less savvy translator.


Corinne McKay

Some interesting tools

This weekend, the Colorado Translators Association brought FR>EN translator and translation tools expert Jamie Lucero out from Seattle to present his workshop “Computer Tools and Methods for Great Translation Performance.” It was definitely a day well spent, and I’ve already started applying a few of the tips that Jamie offered. He also clued us in to a variety of useful tools for translators, and I’ll list a few here:

  • Werecat, a Word template with two uses: Red Werecat extracts text from PowerPoint to Word and then re-inserts it, and Blue Werecat extracts text from text boxes in Word and then re-inserts it.
  • Complete Word Count, a Word add-in that gives a full word count including text boxes, headers, footers, etc.
  • Word MVP Macros site, where you can learn about macros, how they can speed up your work, and how to write Word macros for tasks such as changing dates from US to European format, changing the order of first and last name, etc.

Have fun with them!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on social networking tools

Like many independent professionals these days, I’ve started using a few social networking tools such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn and MySpace. My experience with them is fairly limited, but I’ve been thinking about some of the positives and negatives of using these websites for networking and marketing.

To me, the primary advantage of social networking sites is that they make it very easy for someone to find and contact you, especially if you don’t have a very visible website for your business. Rather than having to have your e-mail address, or searching for your website and then finding your contact information, the person who’s looking for you can simply type your name into the social networking site’s search box and contact you right from your page. In addition, social networking sites make it easy to find “friends of friends” who you might want to contact or work with, and you can also easily search for people who share a certain characteristic with you, like your alma mater, profession, home town, etc. Social networking sites also eliminate the need to keep an updated e-mail address book for people who you contact infrequently, since you can just contact them via the site.

Social networking sites are also a good way to cross-promote your blog if you have one. Facebook and Ning both allow you to feed your blog directly onto your page on their site (other social networking sites may offer this feature too, I just haven’t tried it!).

Of the sites listed above, LinkedIn is, to me, the most “professional” and also the most controllable. There is almost no room to include personal information, and other people can’t post anything to your page without your approval; for example if someone writes a recommendation about you, it doesn’t appear on your page until you approve it. On Facebook, you have to adjust your privacy settings quite carefully if you don’t want all of your “friends” to be able to see photos, comments, etc. that people have posted of and about you. Even if the most sordid moments of your life are far from tabloid fodder, you might not necessarily want your clients to see photos of you with 80’s hair or comments from your friends asking for your lasagna recipe, so this is something to consider when setting up your profile.

Ning is interesting in that it allows you to create your own social network for a group of people. Recently, the all-women freelancers group I’m in, Boulder Media Women set up a Ning site, and I also joined Office Walkers, a Ning group for people who use treadmill desks.

Overall, LinkedIn is my favorite of these networking sites; I don’t have to wade through a news feed about who’s playing online Scrabble or deal with flashing ads for weight loss products, and LinkedIn allows me to easily browse for people who I’d like to add to my network. So far, I’ve gotten many more business contacts through my blog than through LinkedIn or Facebook, but I think that these sites are worth joining in order to make yourself more visible on the Web.


Corinne McKay

Editing skills; the USDA Grad School

Recently I’ve been taking some copy editing classes with Alice Levine, a Boulder-based editor and trainer whose praises I’ve sung here before. In the translation industry, I think it’s not uncommon that translators who earn a client’s trust are often “promoted” into the role of a translation editor, although very few of us have extensive training in editing in our target language. These classes have brought me to a few realizations about editing and how it applies to translation.

  • I should have paid attention in 11th grade journalism class when we studied proofreaders’ marks. Now that I’ve spent six years writing longhand corrections on my own and other translators’ translations, I’m completely sold on the value of proofreaders’ marks. They’re much faster than crossing out and rewriting all of the corrected words, they fit better on a single-spaced page and they make the editing job a little more interesting too!
  • Target language editing skills are critical to our work as translators. In my case, I’ve invested a great deal of my professional development time in maintaining and improving my source language skills, but very little time in improving my English language skills, which are critically important to the quality of my work.
  • We translators get complacent about our target language skills. It’s rare that I hear into-English translators really get into the nuances of effect versus affect, insure versus ensure, that versus which, and in which cases you need or don’t need serial commas. Again, concepts such as these are critical to the quality of our translations and shouldn’t be ignored.

Another great tip I picked up in Alice’s class is the variety of correspondence courses offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Grad School. It’s an unlikely location (or maybe not!) for affordable (about $355 each) graduate level correspondence courses on topics such as Editing, Proofreading, Project Management and Business Law, but this looks like a true gold mine of topics that relate to the work that most freelance translators do. Many of these are traditional/offline correspondence courses where you complete the work on paper and mail it in to an instructor who gives you feedback before you progress to the next lesson. Has anyone out there taken one of these courses? And if so, what were your impressions?