Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Professional associations


Corinne McKay

ATA55: the highlights

I’m back (physically at least!) from the 55th annual conference of the American Translators Association in Chicago. By all measures, the conference was a great success. We had 1,842 attendees, which is our second-largest conference ever. It would take a lot to top the 2,400 attendees we had for our 50th anniversary conference in New York, but we did top San Francisco, which was the previous second-largest. With the huge volume of session proposals we received this year (I think over 400 for about 125 slots), conference organizer David Rumsey was able to winnow them down to the very best sessions, and many of the new features (translation Tool Trainings as preconference seminars, a business brainstorming mixer to replace the speed networking session, a Tool Bar where people could get 10-20 minutes of free, one-on-one tech support) were very well received. We also added comment cards to the annual meeting so that if people didn’t want to or didn’t have time to speak during the open comment time, they could still give feedback to the Board. But don’t take my word for it…watch this great highlights video and see for yourself! And if you’re wondering where/when ATA is meeting in 2015, 2016 and 2017, here’s the future conference sites page. See you in Miami next year!

You also might be interested in:
Jill Sommer’s wrapup post on attending and presenting at ATA55
Nicholas Sturtevant’s post on attending ATA55 as a newbie
Erin Rosales’ post on following ATA55 online
Jeff Alfonso’s post on the social aspects of ATA55
 


Corinne McKay

Off to ATA55!

I’ll be out of the office for the rest of the week, to attend the 55th annual conference of the American Translators Association in Chicago. If you’re a blog reader and we haven’t met in person, definitely come shake hands! I’ll be speaking on a panel (The Freelance Juggling Act) on Thursday morning, and one of my goals for the conference is to get lots of photos of people doing a “five five” (holding up five fingers on each hand; or two people can do it together and each hold up five fingers) in honor of 55 ATA conferences! My good friend and colleague Eve Bodeux even awarded this a hashtag, #fivefive. So, get your #fivefive on and we’ll see you at the opening reception tomorrow night!

Addendum 1: It’s sometimes difficult to write lengthy blog posts during the conference, but I’ll definitely be posting updates and photos on Twitter.

Addendum 2: I noticed today that my blog reached its one millionth view (over the course of almost seven years, but still exciting!). So, literally, thanks a million for reading!


Corinne McKay

Handling LinkedIn connection requests

I often refer to LinkedIn as the most underused social media resource out there: most of us have a LinkedIn profile, but we just “set it and forget it,” rather than using the site’s more sophisticated capabilities. At the very least, LinkedIn is a great way to connect with people in your target industries, by joining Groups that they also belong to (direct client 101: you don’t find them if you only hang out with other translators). You can also use LinkedIn saved searches–even with the free account–to keep track of business prospects. You can use LinkedIn like a virtual Rolodex so that you’re not scrabbling through your desk drawer for the business card of someone you met at a conference five years ago. LinkedIn is also really useful for doing research about your potential clients: finding out who’s hiring, who changed jobs, and so on.

But first, you have to contend with the sticky issue of how to handle LinkedIn connection requests. When I first joined LinkedIn, I was pretty liberal about who I connected with, theorizing that anyone who worked in our industry was potentially a good connection. Over the years (and many hundreds of connections later), I’ve become less of an “open networker,” so I only accept connection requests from a) people I know or b) people who personalize their connection request message and explain how we know each other or why they want to connect with me. If I don’t know the person outside LinkedIn and they don’t explain why they want to connect, I hit “Ignore” and then “I don’t know John Doe,” because I see little value in these types of blind connections.

“But LinkedIn just sends the connection request automatically!,” I hear you cry…”It’s gone before I can personalize it!” Well, not if you do it the right way. Yes, if you’re just looking at LinkedIn’s list of “People You May Know,” and you click the “Connect” button, there goes the invitation with the stock message “I’d like to add you as a connection on LinkedIn.” However if you are looking at the profile of the person you want to connect with, and then you click Connect, you’ll get this popup:
ATA_LinkedIn

Then, you can indicate how you know the person, and you can write them a personal message. Everyone has to come up with their own LinkedIn strategy: some people will connect only with people they personally know and work with, while others are open to networking with anyone who hits the Connect button. But personalizing your connection request looks more professional and will undoubtedly result in a greater success rate than mass-connecting anonymously.


Corinne McKay

ATA54 wrapup

Well, it’s Friday already, and it’s taken me the whole week to recover from last week’s ATA conference in San Antonio! Here are some thoughts on this year’s conference, and feel free to add your own in the comments!

    • I love pretty much every ATA conference, and this year was no exception. With about 1,400 attendees it was one of the smaller conferences in recent years (although larger than projected for this year!), and I find that at the smaller conferences, people are more focused on the lessons and less on the tax-deductible vacation.
    • San Antonio is a great conference town: at the French Language Division dinner, we dubbed it “The Venice of Texas,” and the Riverwalk really is a nice feature. Plus the rest of the city is very walkable and felt very safe. The FLD dinner was a lovely barge cruise, catered by an Italian restaurant right by the hotel. Because we were outside, it was quiet enough to actually talk, and for a group thing the food was actually excellent.
    • The lineup of French sessions this year was outstanding. Back in the day (actually, when I was FLD Administrator…) we were lucky if we had 3 or 4 really good French sessions *during the entire conference*. This year, nearly every slot was filled with something interesting, and the range of topics (transcreation, subtitling, legal translation, writing better in French and English, “hidden” French, etc.) was really staggering!
    • Having the conference events all on one floor was great: more opportunities to talk to people during the breaks, less route-finding, and easier to pick places to meet up with people for meals. I thought that the hotel breakfasts were really tasty, and if you were lucky enough to pounce on the Mexican hot chocolate cart during the afternoon break, it was the perfect sugar hit for the mid-afternoon lull!
    • Personally I really enjoyed this year’s focus on newcomers. I agree that it’s also important to offer something for experienced and very experienced translators, but I think that in order to get to that level, newbies have to have a good experience at their first conference. One’s first conference is always overwhelming: I think that any  veteran can recall that clutch-in-the-throat feeling of walking in to the opening reception for the first time. When I was a newbie, that feeling was exacerbated by the fact that I hadn’t done anywhere alone since my daughter was born 2 years before. But I think that the Newbies and Buddies program went a long way toward helping people make a personal connection *before* the opening reception, which is critical. Huge thanks to Helen Eby and Jamie Hartz for putting this program together! Also, although the Newbies and Buddies reception was a bit chaotic, I am in favor of continuing the “grab a partner” method rather than pre-assigning pairs of Newbies and Buddies. One, I think it’s way too much work to assign the pairs in advance; two, I think that if the pairs are pre-assigned, it creates more chaos if half of the pair isn’t there; three, I kind of like the element of surprise, but maybe that’s just me. My newbie, Olga Yuska from the Ukraine, was fabulous! I was really impressed with her ambition and business-savvy (on her first trip to the US, no less!). Here we are having breakfast together:

newbie

  • I did two presentations: assisting with Jill Sommer’s first-time attendees orientation, and co-presenting on time management with David Rumsey. I think that both of these went well, and I really think that presenting at the conference is worthwhile. It’s a huge amount of work, but it also forces you to condense your thoughts on a certain topic and put them into a useful format. I always learn a lot from preparing for my presentations, so I’d encourage you to start thinking about the topic you want to present next year!
  • This conference marked one year since I was elected to the ATA Board. Summary: I love it. Partially, I think that compared to running a local association for 4 years, the ATA Board is actually much less pressure. There’s a lot more decision-making, but a lot less logistical work than a local association, which is a nice change of pace.


Corinne McKay

Translation credentials: what are they and do you need them?

Here’s a very common question from my beginning translation students: “Do I need a…(Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, translation certificate, translator certification, etc.)” with corollaries such as “Am I better off getting a foreign language MA or a translation certificate?” “If I don’t have a Bachelor’s degree but I’m ATA-certified, is that OK?” and so on.

I can answer all of these questions with two words: it depends. There you go! That’s somewhat tongue in cheek, but it does really depend on your background, your goals, who you work for and what you do. And in this post, I’m talking about the norm, not the exception; I know a couple of self-taught conference interpreters who have tons of work, people without Bachelor’s degrees who are doing fine, and lots of people who are not ATA-certified and still make a squadrillion dollars a year. But here I’m talking in general, and I apologize in advance if this gets long!

Also, there are some very notable exceptions to these observations. For example let’s say that you want to be a court interpreter at the state level. In many U.S. states, the only pre-requisite to take the court interpreter exam is that you have to be 18 and legally eligible to work in the US. In theory, even a smart and motivated high school student could study for and pass the exam. And once you’re certified, everyone generally is paid the same rate. So in that case, and for that specific job, there may be absolutely no advantage to having a Bachelor’s degree.

Do you need a Bachelor’s degree? Yes, in most cases, I really think that you do. As with the court interpreter scenario above, of course there are exceptions. But at least in the US, I think that if you don’t have a Bachelor’s degree, you are seen as A Person Who Did Not Go to College; whereas whether you have a BA, MA, PhD, law degree, whatever, you are A Person Who Went to College. Corollary: if you’re not 18 and your parents aren’t going to fund this educational endeavor, is a Bachelor’s from an online university better than, say, a high school degree or an Associate’s, plus a certificate from a reputable translation certificate program? Honestly, I don’t really know. First, you’d need to find a reputable translation certificate program to accept you without an undergraduate degree, but that might be doable if your language skills are strong.

Are translation/interpreting MA programs worth the investment? You had to ask a tough one, didn’t you… Here’s my opinion: before you undertake a graduate degree, ask yourself, “What do I want to do, that I cannot do now, that I can do if I earn this degree?” If your answer is that you want a job as a staff translator or interpreter at a high-level entity such as the U.N., Department of State, European Union, etc. then yes, I think that a translation/interpreting MA, preferably from the top program in your country, is probably a good investment. If you are completely convinced that you want to do conference interpreting, ditto: go for the interpreting-specific MA if possible.

On the other hand, consider this: in the US, tuition, fees, meals and housing at a private university will run you about $50,000 a year; an MA will generally last two years. Schools in Europe generally charge less in tuition, but the cost of living in the European capitals will bump the total cost up significantly. And you also have to consider the issue of lost income, especially if your other option is to simply start freelancing right away. Statistics tell us that the average full-time freelance translator/interpreter in the US earns about $75,000 per year. So during those two years, you’ll forgo some $150,000 in income, giving you a total investment of about $250,000 in your degree. That’s a pretty big number by anyone’s standards, but it’s probably worth it if your heart is set on a staff position at a major international organization; hopefully you’ll get an outstanding education, you’ll be taught by highly experienced professors, you’ll make great contacts, you’ll probably have a leg up in terms of internships, and so on.

However, in my opinion, and I apologize if this verges on “rant” territory, most translation/interpreting MA programs do not offer nearly enough education in business and entrepreneurship, given the career paths that a lot of their students will take. Will some of their students work on staff at places like the UN for their entire careers? Sure. Are there enough of those jobs open every year to employ the majority of graduates? I would say not. So, realistically, a lot of people with translation/interpreting MAs, even from top-tier schools, will become freelancers.  A lot of people who earn translation/interpreting MAs want to be freelancers, whether in-house jobs are available or not. And if I invested a quarter of a million dollars in that type of degree, in an industry that is highly freelance-oriented, I would expect a top-tier education in language entrepreneurship in addition to my language skills education. Here’s an example: several top-tier music schools in the US have music entrepreneurship centers. The University of Colorado here in Boulder has one. So does Manhattan School of Music, with the lead-in, “In today’s marketplace, musicians need more than artistic excellence: they need the added edge of entrepreneurial skills to create opportunities and build successful, sustainable careers.” Substitute “linguistic” for “artistic” and I think you’ve got the idea of what our industry needs; and to my knowledge, none of the major translation MA programs in the US or Europe are really addressing this. (End of rant!)

How about certification? Being certified, by ATA or any other national translators association, will never be a negative. Compensation surveys tell us that ATA-certified translators earn more than non-certified translators.  I have also heard from several translation companies with government contracts that they are under more pressure to use ATA-certified translators whenever possible. If a client is browsing the ATA online directory, they will probably contact the certified people first. So I think that the ATA exam is absolutely worth attempting if it’s in your budget. However, translator certification, in any country, is not like the bar exam for lawyers or the CPA exam for accountants. Lots of people make lots of money without ever becoming certified. I would consider certification a definite plus, but not a must.

Translation certificate programs? Translation certificate programs are great, because they teach you how to actually translate. They’ll help you avoid the litany of mistakes that I, and lots of other beginning translators, committed early in our careers. They’re also a good deal less expensive and less time-consuming than graduate degree programs. Most translation certificate programs are taught by practicing translators and interpreters who teach in their areas of specialization, so you’ll get real-world feedback from the instructors. Caveats: expect to pay $700-$1,500 per class, and don’t assume that completing a translation certificate program will enable you to pass the ATA certification exam.

What about subject-area degrees or training? I think this is the cutting edge in terms of credentials in our industry. Subject-area knowledge has always been important, but I think it’s becoming more so. For example, translation now seems to be a popular option for career-changing lawyers: possibly because lawyers have some of the lowest job satisfaction rates and some of the highest rates of substance abuse and depression of any white-collar profession. Whatever the case, if you’re already established in the profession and want to take your credentials up a notch, subject-area training would be my pick. Whether you do free, online courses through an entity like Coursera or enroll in a full-on graduate program in your specialization, I think it would be energy well spent.