Translator and translation agency owner Glenn Cain recently started a blog on his Yndigo translations site. It’s a great read and covers topics ranging from the use of sic to translator certification to how to select an interpreter. Give it a look, especially if you’re inside on a snowy day like the one we’re having in Colorado!
Links
You can say it in French…
Thanks to reader Polly-Vous Français (whose blog is my substitute for a trip to Paris these days!) for sending the link to FranceTerme, the official French government site for French terminology and neologisms. Their slogan, “Vous pouvez le dire en français” (You can say it in French) gives you an idea of the theme; for francophile language junkies, this site is a true bottomless pit of linguistic education!
In addition to entries on the official terminology for 21st century terms like “low-cost airline,” “wireless Internet access” or the “at” symbol in e-mail addresses (are you hooked yet?), the site has a whole section of neologism “recommendations,” with a discussion of the various sides of the issue. For example, if you’re wondering how to express the word/concept “beach” when it concerns a sport such as le beach volley-ball, worry no more, it’s here (short answer: use “sur sable“). Or how about “gender,” as in gender neutral, gender disparities, etc? Not as simple as volley-ball sur sable, but you can read about it here. Have fun with it!
Juvenes Translatores
School outreach, the idea of getting high school students and even younger children interested in and informed about translation, seems to be picking up speed as the current generation of translators reaches out to the next. Today, 27 teenagers, one from each EU member state, will be in Brussels receiving their awards as winners of the first Juvenes Translatores (Latin for “young translators”) contest. At the risk of sounding overly casual, I have to say, how cool is that?
In reading the press release about this contest, a few aspects of it struck me as particularly intriguing. First, over 1,300 17 year-olds from across the EU participated in this contest, in which they had two hours to translate a text about sustainable tourism into one of the EU official languages. Thinking back on my own foreign language skills as a high school senior, I find it very inspirational that over 1,000 European teenagers are even capable of doing this type of test. You can read the passage on the Juvenes Translatores website, and it’s not simple!
Second, the Directorate-General of Translation used this contest as an opportunity to highlight not only the work of the young adults who participated, but also that of its own professional translators who evaluated the students’ translations and picked the winners. Leonard Orban, the European Commissioner for Multilingualism, remarked that “These young people have shown that they are the actors of their own and of the EU’s future. They have built bridges between cultures while assembling words for their translation. I am also proud that the work of our translators, often invisible but indispensable to the EU, is in the limelight today.” This contest struck me as one of those win-win PR/education/outreach events that benefits everyone involved; as part of their prize package, the student winners get to travel to Brussels for the awards ceremony and to visit the Directorate-General of Translation, where they will see the DG’s team of professional translators in action.
School outreach is happening on this side of the Atlantic too; The American Translators Association’s School Outreach Program even supplies all of the materials that ATA members need to give a presentation about careers in translation at their local schools. As the School Outreach Program’s web page says, “The linguists-to-be in America’s classrooms today are sitting next to a whole lot of clients-to-be. The more these future doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen know about our field, the more likely they’ll be to appreciate the importance and complexity of our work and compensate us accordingly.”
Strategies for sustaining a freelance business
Michelle Vranizan Rafter’s blog has a great post
entitled “Freelancers’ Strategies for Prospering in Bad Times.” Although my sense is that most translators are not feeling the hit of the economic downturn, this post has some very useful information for growing your freelance business under any circumstances; even a beginning freelance translator could apply this information to get established, and for those of us who are already in the business, it’s always good to be reminded about the importance of continuous marketing.
The advice in this blog post reminded me of an interview with noted financial translator Chris Durban that appeared on Business Week’s website in 2004. I like to hear Chris Durban’s thoughts about pretty much anything (her “Onionskin” column is the first thing I read in every issue of the ATA Chronicle), but I thought that her comments about marketing were particularly insightful. Chris’ interview and Michelle Rafter’s blog post point out what I see as critical marketing errors on the part of many freelance translators:
- Living by the computer alone. I’ll second the person in Michelle’s blog post who said that most of their best clients have come through in-person meetings or personal referrals. I actually met one of my biggest clients in the hallway at an ATA conference, and I find that I have a closer rapport with clients who I’ve met in person and cultivated a relationship with. In addition, I think that high-value clients, those who either pay very well or have a large volume of work, are much more likely to trust someone they have met in person. So, every once in a while (or even more often!), shut off the computer and talk to some live people. Attend an ATA or local chapter event, join your local Chamber of Commerce, go to a freelancers’ group potluck, attend a trade show for your specialization.
- Competing on price alone. I think that many translators do this simply because they can’t think of a way not to; they automatically assume that if they need more work and the going rate for their language is X cents per word, if they charge X-2 cents, they’ll stand out. There are a few problems with this. First, I think that many quality-conscious clients are skeptical about translators who charge low rates, feeling that there must be some reason why the person is willing to work for so little. Second, I think that most translators do a better job when they feel that they are being paid fairly, and that the reverse is true as well. Third, I think that competing on price sets up a negative dynamic between the client and the translator, where the client’s view of the translator is as a commodity provider. Lastly, racing to the bottom is a losing battle; there will always be someone willing to work for one cent less. Rather than competing on price, charge what you feel your work is worth and compete on quality and service.
- Resting on laurels. No question, the translation industry is booming, and most established translators are not hurting for work. However, many of us also rely on steady flows of work from regular clients, each of whom may provide 30%, 50% or more of our yearly income. It’s important to have a plan for what happens if one of these relationships dries up. Instead of assuming that you’ll be happily translating away for your current clients indefinitely, always be thinking of who your next clients will be and how you will market to them.
An interesting post on open source machine translation
Serdar Yegulaip wrote an interesting post entitled “Talk to Me, Openly” that is up on InformationWeek’s site, dealing with open source machine translation. While there are a number of very active open source translation memory projects out there, with OmegaT being one of the most popular among freelancers, open source machine translation hasn’t sparked the same level of interest.
Personally, I find machine translation more interesting than threatening. I think that the day when human translators will be put out of business by MT is far, far off, likely beyond the lifetimes of any of us who are working in the industry now. However, I think that MT’s use in areas where speed and cost are more important objectives than quality, or where writers are willing to use a very restricted vocabulary, is really interesting. For example, at a translation technology seminar that I attended this summer, the presenter gave an anecdotal example of MT being used to translate online knowledgebase pages for a large technology company. Apparently, when the company then surveyed people who read the machine-translated help pages (and who knew that the page they were reading had been translated by a computer rather than a human), their rates of satisfaction with those pages were only slightly lower than the satisfaction rates of people who read similar documents translated by humans. To me, that’s more intriguing than anything else, and I’m interested to see if the open source community jumps on the bandwagon.