Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Links


Corinne McKay

Link: Sales Caffeine

I’ve been incommunicada for a few days due to the Colorado Translators Association‘s marketing seminar which we held over the weekend. Judy Jenner of Twin Translations did a fantastic job as the featured presenter, and we had a really interesting panel in the afternoon with people from various sectors of the industry: Adam Asnes of Lingoport, Japanese to English translator Chris Blakeslee and Beatriz Bonnet of Syntes Language Group.

I’ll write a more complete post about the seminar later (let’s just say that the marketing to-do list inspired by the seminar is a mile long!), but I did want to pass along a really interesting site that Adam and Beatriz both recommended: Sales Caffeine. Written by Jeffrey Gitomer, it’s a free e-newsletter featuring “fresh brew for your brain.” Admittedly the author’s material is, well, salesy. However, I really like the fundamentals of his outlook on entrepreneurship: in a bad economy you have three choices about how to handle your business. You can a) do nothing b) complain or c) do something. And he’s correct, right? The issue of Sales Caffeine that I just received (#389) focuses on how to create the best scenario for you and your clients in a down economy. Some of these tips are definitely for people who are more on the direct selling end of things, but even for those of us who are peddling words and ideas instead of siding or cars, I think that they hold true. Gitomer advises that in order to keep your business strong in a weak economy, you need to “be the person that others talk about in a positive way when you’re not there,” and “help your customers find customers and resources,” which I heartily agree with. Check it out!


Corinne McKay

A new blog on bilingualism

This isn’t specifically translation-related, but given that many translators live in bilingual households, I think it’s not OT either. My colleague and friend Eve Bodeux recently launched a new blog, appropriately titled Blogging on Bilingualism, with articles and resources of interest to bilingual families or really anyone interested in bilingualism. As Eve’s “About” page says “This is a blog discussing practical approaches and tips for parents who would like to raise their children bilingually or with exposure to two or more languages. Even if your family’s goal is not bilingualism per se, exposure to a second language has many benefits from both social and developmental perspectives. Though my main target audience is families who are bilingual or aspiring to be so, foreign language teachers will also find good ideas for encouraging their students’ international journey.” Enjoy!


Corinne McKay

Link: the psychology of passive barriers

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly, and I was particularly enthralled by a recent guest post (by Ramit Sethi, whose own blog is I Will Teach You To Be Rich). Ramit’s post on the psychology of passive barriers (subtitled “Why your friends don’t save money, eat healthier or clean their garages”) really struck a note with me. Ramit picks up on ideas promoted in some recent bestsellers like Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, and gives some powerful examples of the ways in which seemingly small barriers can lead to success or failure. As Ramit says, “I think the source of 95%+ of barriers to success is…ourselves. It’s not our lack of resources (money, education, etc). It’s not our competition. It’s usually just what’s in our own heads. Barriers are more than just excuses — they’re the things that make us not get anything done. And not only do we allow them to exist around us, we encourage them. There are active barriers and passive barriers, but the result is still the same: We don’t achieve what we want to.”

Many of his examples made a lot of sense to me on both a personal and a professional level. When I started running again after my daughter was born, I joined a running training club and the coach gave some excellent suggestions of how to eliminate passive barriers to exercising: before you go to bed, put your running clothes on the bathroom floor so that you step on them in the morning; put a list of running routes of various distances on your front door so that you don’t have to think about where to go; make a running date with a friend that is so early in the morning that you wouldn’t dare call them to cancel for fear of waking up the whole household at 5:30 AM. Passive barriers also go the other way, as in Ramit’s example of freezing your credit card  in a block of ice; if you say you’re really only going to use it for emergencies, why not keep it where it takes some effort to get at it? After reading this article, I realized that this phenomenon is one reason why our family watches very few movies; we own only a few DVDs and don’t have Netflix, so procuring a movie involves biking or driving to the library or video store. Normally when I’m confronted with that option, I just choose to do something else.

I think that we can apply these passive barrier techniques to many aspects of freelance translation work too. In my case, I habitually avoid doing banking tasks and accounting because I just despise them. Because I despise these tasks, I seek out passive barriers that are “preventing me from getting the job done.” Can’t find the calculator, don’t have any more deposit slips, etc. This habit got so bad that I came within a couple of dollars of bouncing a check from my business account at the same time that I had over $4,000 in payment checks sitting on my desk. So, I created an “accounting kit” which is within arm’s reach of my desk. In it I keep my business account checkbook, deposit slips, envelopes, stamps, a calculator and (the clincher) my favorite roller-ball pen, which I only allow myself to use for doing accounting. A little gimmicky? Sure! But it gets the job done; I find that now, I don’t enjoy accounting any more than I used to, but at least I do it.

Any thoughts on the passive barriers that you need to add to or remove from your work life?


Corinne McKay

New and interesting on the web

If you’re looking for some interesting reading, here are a few suggestions:

  • Masked Translator on the Spellchecker Conundrum and whether you should use the spellchecker to correct words that you routinely mistype. I was especially intrigued by Ryan Ginstrom’s suggestion to create a macro of your most common errors and run it on every document. For some reason, I habitually put spaces in the wrong places, for example by typing “tot his” instead of “to this,” but the spell-checker thinks that this is just fine… creating a macro could catch those errors.
  • Jill Sommer on E-mail marketing for translators and More e-mail marketing tips; one of these is a guest post at Naked Translations and one is on Jill’s own blog; they’re both great!
  • Michelle Rafter on Avoiding panic mode when you have too many deadlines. Like Michelle, I am not one of those people who thrives on stress, and I like to make my work environment (well, actually my life in general…) as chaos-free as possible. Her tips are really useful for those times when you just can’t avoid working in crunch mode!
  • Judy and Dagmar Jenner on setting up a basic website for as little as $10 per year using Google Sites. I was especially intrigued by this because it looks as if Google Sites provides a basic level of domain name e-mail (i.e. translator@yourdomain.com), which WordPress does not do if you purchase your domain name through them; I love WordPress, but I also think that domain name e-mail is the way to go if you want a permanent e-mail address.


Corinne McKay

The hash mark in Twitter

I haven’t yet started using Twitter, but I have a number of Facebook friends who feed their Tweets to their Facebook status updates (is that enough Web 2.0 references in one sentence?), and I’ve wondered about the meaning of the hash mark (#) that people include in their Tweets. For example “I was talking on my #iPhone…” or “Going to a #Boulder Media Women event…”. If you’re also wondering, here’s an easy to follow explanation from Kristine Wirth’s blog. In brief, the hash marks are a sort of keyword tag in Twitter, and if you’re willing to sacrifice one of your precious 140 characters, the term that you tag with the hash mark will then show up on the hashtags website. Once you’ve visited the hashtags website, you can then add the decidedly Web 2.0 term “real-time news community” to your vocabulary!