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Corinne McKay

Some interesting links

I’m working on a more substantive post on “what makes a translation sound like a translation;” if you have any suggestions, feel free to submit them here or on Twitter. In the meantime, here are some interesting links from the rest of the web. Have a great weekend! The Thoughts on Translation world headquarters will be closed on Monday for U.S. Presidents’ Day.

  • First, here’s a random thought that I keep forgetting to mention: what ever happened to The Masked Translator? MT’s blog has been dormant since August of 2009, although I still think of her/him often! MT, if you’re out there, come back! We need our regular dose of your acerbic, “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” wit!
  • Michelle Rafter, one of my favorite non-translation bloggers, has a couple of excellent new posts that apply to translators too: What should I pay a proofreader? and Update your office technology to minimize clutter.
  • Completely OT but just interesting: Get Rich Slowly on Redbox vs. iTunes vs. Netflix; a nice comparison of at-home movie viewing options. I’d add that if you don’t care about Netflix Instant Watch, you can purchase the very basic Netflix subscription (one movie at a time, two movies per month), for $4.99.
  • On-topic: Jill Sommer has a great post entitled What is your gut telling you?. Lots of food for thought there: remember the last time you knew you should turn down a project, but for some reason (money, guilt, inertia) you took it?
  • For those who read French, Sara Freitas-Maltaverne’s blog is running a really interesting series of posts on website critiques and makeovers. Sara has a web design expert give his assessment and suggestions about various (courageous!) freelance translators’ websites.
  • Two of my favorite translation resources are now in one place: Sarah Dillon joined eCPD webinars and will now be organizing webinars for linguists from her base in Australia!
  • Finally, speaking of webinars: recordings of Speaking of Translation’s two most recent webinars are available for purchase online. They’re both a little over an hour long and the recording includes all the slides and audio. Topics are “Beyond the Basics of Freelancing” (presented by me) and “Introduction to Social Media for Translators” (presented by Eve Bodeux and me).

Thanks and happy Friday!


Corinne McKay

Neat product: Moo mini-cards

We all know that one of the primary rules of freelance marketing is “always have business cards with you.” However, this can be harder than it sounds: first, you have to have a good location for the cards. The positive impression you’re trying to create is definitely ruined if you have to rummage through your bag for ten minutes to find where you put the cards, or if you extract a card that’s been folded and mutilated beyond all recognition. At networking events, I often struggle with the best place to put cards; loose in my pocket, they’re likely to get messy. In a holder in my wallet, they take too long to remove. Second, many freelancers have several styles of business cards. My business is fairly streamlined and I still have three kinds of business cards, which are tough to fit into my wallet-sized card holder.

Enter a suggestion from Portuguese and French to English translator Zoë Perry, who suggests solving all of these problems at once with miniature business cards from Moo and a mini-card holder that you can put in your pocket or on your keyring. I’m not easily sucked in by marketing swag, and I thought this was a really neat idea. Moo allows you to get multiple designs in one pack of mini-cards, and the card holder can accommodate 12 cards at once. At $25.00 for 100 mini-cards and a holder, this seems like a good marketing investment for 2011 (and this is not an affiliate deal!). This tiny card holder would be easy to carry in your pocket at a networking event, and with it on your keyring you could even network in the supermarket checkout line.

One thing: I just might have to wait to purchase these cards until Moo removes the cardstock accolade “We chose it for it’s [sic] thickness…” from their website. This is one of those errors I’m tired of seeing, especially from a media company! Moo, please fix this, because I really want a set of mini-cards and I can’t in good conscience support that misplaced apostrophe!

Readers, any other ideas for fun and useful new marketing tools for this year?


Corinne McKay

Everyone's talking about work/life balance

It must be something about the holiday season that makes bloggers’ thoughts turn to the work/life balance or lack thereof. Here are some excellent posts from around the blogosphere:

  • Jill Sommer’s post ‘Tis the season for no work/life balance points out what many of us are experiencing: clients who have tons of work for us at the end of the year. I have vowed not to complain about having too much work until the unemployment rate falls back to a reasonable number, but I agree with Jill. Especially if you have clients in countries where the holiday vacation season lasts from about December 15 until January 6, it’s a very busy time to be a freelancer!
  • Penelope Trunk, one of my favorite non-translation bloggers, has a great post entitled Maybe no moms are working moms, focusing specifically on the work/life balance issues that moms face. Much of this post rings true for me; I think that many of the moms at my daughter’s school think that because I come in to frost gingerbread houses and shelve library books, I’m a stay-at-home-mom. However, I do think that some of the issue is location-dependent. Here in Boulder where the cafés are full at all hours of the work day and signs in store windows read “Mondays and powder days: closed,” working 30 hours a week from home as a freelancer is definitely considered “having a job.” This post made me realize that because I live in a community where I have a lot of freelancing mom friends, I don’t really identify with the “scared, lost and lonely” stereotype in Penelope’s post. So here’s one solution to the work/life dilemma: move to a town where people don’t work that much!
  • Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. Roth posted In Praise of Work-Life Balance, discussing his current situation and the freedom that it affords him. One key tip here: once you hit the sweet spot of work/life balance, resist the urge to add more commitments. J.D. describes his decision to indefinitely delay a planned project because he can’t add another task to his list right now. In the past, I’ve implemented a similar strategy and declined all new (non-paying) requests for my time for two weeks, or a month, or however long I need to feel sane!

Feel free to add your own work/life tips, and have a great holiday season!


Corinne McKay

Some interesting links

As Thoughts on Translation wraps up for the holiday week (U.S. Thanksgiving is Thursday), here are some websites and blog posts that you might enjoy looking at:

  • Eve Bodeux is giving away some SmartPlay language-learning products for kids on her blog; see the end of the post for how to enter.
  • Writer Michelle Rafter has a fantastic blog post (applicable to translators too!) called When it comes to writing, economize. As someone who has a tendency to ramble, I printed out Michelle’s tips and posted them above my desk.
  • Is there any German, Spanish, French or Portuguese translator out there who’s not yet using the terminology site Linguee? I’m not quite sure how to pronounce this website’s name (Lingwee? Ling-oo-ee?) but I have come to love its features. Linguee searches huge amounts of bilingual texts on the web, then displays sentences that contain the source term you enter and the target term that other translators have used.
  • There’s an interesting discussion on Jill Sommer’s blog about ATA certification and why so few people vote in the ATA elections .
  • And finally on a non-translation note, here’s a Get Rich Slowly post on inexpensive Christmas gifts and another one on DIY gifts. And here’s my own suggestion: I like the “memory drawing” idea described in the second post, but I am totally (totally; believe me) un-artistic.  I recently stumbled upon the idea of using Wordle word clouds to make gifts for friends. You can type in whatever words remind you of that person, i.e. “runner, mom, Brownie~leader, lawyer, likes~her~coffee~with~a~splash~of~cream” (put the tildas between multiple-word phrases that you want to appear as one “word” in the cloud) and then create a word cloud that you can frame, give as a card, etc.