Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

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Corinne McKay

The software companies respond!

Ahead of last week’s ATA conference, I asked readers what you would like to tell your translation tool vendor. And with 27 comments (although some of those were me!), the post generated a lot of activity and excellent feedback. I then compiled those comments into a three-page document and presented the results at an informal lunch that the ATA Translators and Computers committee held for the software companies who were exhibiting at the conference. After giving the vendors your comments to peruse, I asked them three questions:

  • Do you really not offer these features that people are asking for, or do people not realize what you offer, or both?
  • What are your thoughts on training? (i.e. many translators commenting “I pay for the software, then I have to pay to learn to use it too”)
  • Over to you: what do you want to tell the freelancers who buy and use your software?

So first, let me say that the software company reps who attended this lunch were incredibly, incredibly forthcoming and constructive. Part of the problem is that when we freelancers rant and curse about translation software issues while we’re alone in our offices, the software companies cannot hear us. They cannot hear us unless we tell them what is wrong. So I think that this discussion was a good step in that direction. Second, let me say that in my opinion, the software companies get it. They do not think “Well, we’ve got your money, now leave us alone.” They realize that it is not good for business if people can’t learn to use their programs. And they had lots of good feedback for us. Here it is in a nutshell, from the software vendors’ point of view.

  • There are lots of training materials out there, and most freelancers don’t use them. The SDL rep commented that even when people purchase (yes, pay in advance for) an SDL premium pack that includes training, only about 10% of them follow through with the training.
  • There are training videos out there, and most people don’t watch them. The SDL Trados YouTube channel has over 100 free training videos on it. Wordfast has a YouTube channel also, and memoQ has tons of free training materials on their website. The companies are frustrated that more of their customers don’t make use of what’s already there. A couple of the reps estimated that their marketing teams spend almost half of their time developing training, and that training goes largely unused even if it’s free.
  • People want something that’s cheap, feature-rich and requires no training to learn, and that’s hard to produce. One attendee gave the example that most professional photographers and graphic designers accept that they cannot work without Photoshop and/or InDesign. The list price of those programs is about $700 each and they aren’t programs that you master in 10 minutes. Translation environment tools are the same: if you want all of those features, the software is going to be expensive and it’s going to take time to learn to use.
  • When the software companies try to attract freelancers to in-person training events such as road shows, very few people attend even if the training sessions are free, and most comment that they can’t afford to take the time off work.
  • Interestingly, many of the tools vendors commented that translation agencies put too much of the technological burden on freelancers. They feel that agencies are sending out unprepared files, then expecting the translator to return a TM (sometimes in several different formats), a clean file and bilingual Word files, and generally “expect things that translators shouldn’t have to know how to do; if the agency is earning half the money on the job, it needs to take on some of these tasks.” Interesting!
  • Some tools (like Wordfast Pro) already offer a version that can run natively on Mac. But don’t hold your breath for many of the other big guys to produce a Mac version. They don’t have plans to do this because “the large user base isn’t there and it wouldn’t be profitable.”
  • Many attendees felt that freelancers should consider the option of hiring a “personal trainer” to help them learn the software. For the record, this is what I (Corinne) did when I bought Trados Studio 2011, and I felt it was a great investment. The vendors feel that it’s important to know your own capabilities and limitations; know whether you are someone who learns best from a manual, or from another person.
  • As far as interoperability, the software companies feel that they could use more “real-world perspective,” for example having some translators on the XLIFF committee, because apparently there are none right now.

So there you have it. I found this discussion to be incredibly educational and productive. Feel free to comment further, and hopefully we can find a way to keep the discussion going! Thanks to everyone who commented on my original post as well.


Corinne McKay

ATA conference wrapup

After a fantastic week in San Diego at the 53rd annual conference of the American Translators Association, I’m back at my desk, catching up on backlogged e-mail and work. I know, I’m by nature a positive person and I say this every year, but this conference was really wonderful. The location (the San Diego Bayfront Hilton) could not have been better, the weather was perfect, and several people commented that this was the best conference of the past few, in terms of sessions. Huge thanks to conference organizer Caitilin Walsh and the ATA staff for all of their efforts! Here is a summary of what I saw and did during the conference.

On Wednesday, I presented a preconference seminar, “Beyond the Basics of Freelancing” in the morning, then attended Chris Durban‘s seminar “Working the Room” in the afternoon. Overall I was pleased with how my seminar went; I had about 35 attendees which is a nice size for a 3-hour session, and there was a good mix of beginners, more advanced people, various language combinations, etc. Chris’ seminar was, as always, outstanding. She focused on in-person networking with premium-market direct clients, and offered great tips on how to select client events to attend, what to talk about, what to bring, and even what to wear (“no flowing robes at an investment banking conference”)! I love Chris’ sessions because she is incredibly straightforward, isn’t afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom about our profession, and hey, is in favor of making tons of money while enjoying your job. So that was a day well spent. And the opening reception for the conference was truly stunning: outside on the hotel lawn, about 50 feet from the water, with the sun setting over Coronado Island. If you’re already drooling, make your plans now to attend next year’s ATA conference: November 6-9 in San Antonio, Texas! Another plus to presenting a preconference seminar: the conference hasn’t even started and you’re already done presenting, which decreases the stress level quite a bit!

On Thursday, I was honored to join five other highly qualified candidates (seriously…this was a powerful group of women!!) running for the ATA Board of Directors. And even more honored to be elected! I’m looking forward to the upcoming three years of hard work and contributing to ATA’s programs and events, and I really appreciate the support of everyone who encouraged me to run. More on that later, but thank you for your votes!

After the opening session and election, I attended “Lightning Talks: The Future of Translation and Interpreting,” a Ted/Ignite-style panel moderated by Karen Tkaczyk. This featured various well-known T&I people who work in a particular niche (interpreting, high-end translation, translation standards, webcast interpreting etc.) giving four-minute talks about the future of their corner of the market. The format was a real departure from the traditional ATA session format and I really enjoyed it! After the talks, everyone at the conference was invited to submit their own thoughts on the future of the industry, then vote on two topics to be debated during the final session on Saturday afternoon. Hopefully this format will continue next year, because I heard very positive feedback about it.

I then attended Tuomas Kostiainen‘s session, “Tools for Quality Assurance and Translation Memory Maintenance.” Tuomas is an excellent speaker who gets straight to the point, and this session was packed full of tips on using the QA features of your current TM tool, then using standalone tools to go beyond those features if you need to. Tuomas also demonstrated tools for working directly in your TMs if you want/need to. The general takeaway from this session is that most people use only a tiny fraction of the QA features of the software that they already own…so learn those first, then see what else you need.

On Friday, I attended the ATA annual meeting, which is always a fun opportunity to see the various awards that ATA and AFTI (ATA’s charitable arm) present. Special congratulations to fellow Translate in the Catskills alumna Lisa Carter, who won the Alicia Gordon memorial prize for word artistry in translation! I then moved on to Percy Balemans’ presentation “Transcreation: Recreating a Text for the Target Audience.” Percy is a very natural and engaging presenter, and she drew a large audience for this hot topic! I don’t presently do transcreation, but this session really piqued my curiosity, especially since my translation style is very “non-literal,” and transcreation is a good market for translators who live in their target language country (according to Percy!).

Over lunch on Friday, I facilitated a roundtable discussion for the various translation software vendors who were exhibiting at the conference. This was the motivation for my information-gathering post before the conference. And I have to tell you, the discussion was great. It deserves its own post because once the tool vendors got talking, they had a lot to say, and it was incredibly constructive.

The rest of Friday and Saturday were taken up with Board-related meetings and with my family, who came out to San Diego for the weekend. And of course, intermingled with all of these sessions and meetings, it was really wonderful to get together with my long-time translator friends, long-distance translator friends who I had never met in person before, and of course clients! It’s just not possible to overstate the networking and outreach benefits of the ATA conference, even for those of us who are established in the profession. As usual, I left the conference both exhausted and energized, with lots of new ideas on how to tweak and improve my own business. More posts upcoming! And feel free to share your own impressions of the conference too; I would love to hear them!


Corinne McKay

See you at ATA!

Friday, September 21 is the last day to register for the upcoming American Translators Association conference (October 24-27 in San Diego) at the Early Bird rate. If you know you’ll be attending, hop on over to the ATA website and register. You have better ways to spend money than missing the Early Bird deadline!

I’ll be presenting a pre-conference seminar: Beyond the Basics of Freelancing. I presented the same session (or at least the same topic!) at the ATA conference in Denver and it sold out, so please register ahead of time if you would like to attend! Beyond the Basics is a three-hour workshop for intermediate to advanced freelancers who want to optimize their relationship with translation agencies, pursue direct clients, raise their profile in the industry and, just for kicks, become better translators! My session is in the morning slot, and in the afternoon slot I’m looking forward to attending Chris Durban’s seminar on Working the Room!

The San Diego conference has plenty of fantastic sessions on tap: Riccardo Schiaffino of About Translation asked me to mention that the Italian Division is bringing in a pair of high-profile Distinguished Speakers. Italian bestselling author Beppe Severgnini and his English translator, Giles Watson will both be speaking at the conference. Even if you don’t translate Italian, these look like a pair of very interesting sessions!

Hope to see lots of you in San Diego!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on saturated markets

There are a lot of disparities within the translation and interpreting industry, and one of those is the difference between language pairs/specializations that are fairly rare versus those that are fairly saturated. In this post I’ll both offer and request advice, since I often have students in my online translation course who work in saturated markets (and I’d like some fresh tips to offer them!).

First, let’s look at some numbers from the ATA membership directory, in terms of the number of people who have the following language combinations listed in their profiles:

  • English to Spanish translators: 2,111
  • German to English translators: 800
  • Russian to English translators: 480
  • Japanese to English translators: 394
  • Arabic interpreters: 148
  • Burmese interpreters: 3

Obviously I selected these to prove a point. But even the number of people registered for a fairly large language pair such as German to English pales in comparison with the 2,000+ English to Spanish translators. I’ve recently begun the process of preparing for the French court interpreter exam in Colorado. French isn’t exactly an obscure language, but there are currently no certified French court interpreters in the state. By contrast, the list of certified Spanish interpreters takes up several pages. I would assume that the situation is the same for certain language pairs in other countries (for example English>French translators in Quebec).

Saturated markets have a few issues:

  • Competition among translators and interpreters is often intense and very price-based.
  • Clients, especially large clients, are often able to keep rates on the low end of the spectrum. For example, PRI’s The World recently ran a story on pay cuts to court interpreters in Nevada, and certified Spanish court interpreters here in Colorado make $35 an hour.
  • Freelancers who work in saturated markets are often reluctant to share information with their colleagues; they are afraid to disclose who they work for or how much they charge, for fear of being undercut by someone else who charges less.
  • Freelancers in saturated markets have less incentive to get new credentials or improve their skills, because they don’t feel that they can charge commensurately higher rates.
  • The sheer number of people in the saturated market creates an “anyone can do it” mentality, and the market becomes even more saturated with people whose skill levels are not up to par.

But enough doom and gloom: the real question is, what’s a translator or interpreter in a saturated market to do? Here are a few suggestions, and (please!) feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

  • First, a pep talk: remember that you do not need enough work to keep all 2,000 English to Spanish translators in the ATA busy. You just need enough work for yourself. I would venture a guess that many established translators earn the bulk of their income from their 3-5 main clients. Do you think there are 3-5 clients out there who will pay real money for your services? Right, I think so too. So let’s figure out how to find them.
  • For translators who are not restricted to working with clients in their home area, the obvious solution is to look for clients in other areas. For example, for English to Spanish translators who live in Latin America, I would definitely recommend looking for clients in the US and/or the UK.
  • In order to do that, make sure to solicit the help of a native English speaker who lives in your target market country. For example if you want to apply to translation clients in the US, your application materials must be in error-free US English.
  • Look for direct clients. I work for and enjoy working for both agencies and direct clients. But I think that many direct clients get attached to translators they like, and are also less price-sensitive than agencies are, so they are a good bet if you work in a saturated market.
  • Get some credentials. For example, of the 2,111 people registered as English to Spanish translators on the ATA website, only 484 are certified for English to Spanish. 484 people is still a lot, but here we’ve already narrowed the pool down to 1/4 of what it was. I think that any credential you can earn: ATA certification, a translation certificate, court interpreter certification (if at the Federal level, even better!), etc. is a big plus.
  • Concentrate on the advantages that you offer: familiarity with the source language culture, ability to do on-site work, ability to provide multiple services (voiceover, transcription, subtitling, etc.) all spring to mind.

And please tell me that you have some more tips too!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on ATA certification

On the Colorado Translators Association e-mail list, we recently had a lively discussion about ATA certification, which got me thinking about some of the pros, cons and issues associated with the ATA certification exams. In the spirit of disclosure, I am both ATA-certified (failed the practice test, passed the real exam) and an active volunteer for ATA so I’m not entirely impartial, but I’ll try to give a balanced view of the topic.

For those unfamiliar with the ATA certification process, here are some of the roots of the controversy

    • ATA certification exams are still handwritten and no electronic reference materials are allowed. Candidates have to bring their own (paper) dictionaries and reference books; when I took the exam, the woman next to me brought a rolling suitcase full of dictionaries.
    • The only feedback that you receive from the ATA exam is a letter notifying you whether you passed or failed; you don’t receive your marked-up exam unless you pay a separate review fee.
    • In order to refer to yourself as ATA-certified and to use the CT designation, you must remain a member of ATA. Technically, your certification lapses if you don’t renew your ATA membership, and ATA could require you to retake the certification exam.
    • ATA does not release pass/fail rates for specific language combinations, only an approximate overall pass rate of “less than 20%.”

To open the discussion, here are some gripes about the exam that I disagree with:

      • “It’s too expensive.” At $300, the exam certainly isn’t cheap. But ATA actually loses money on the certification program; and when you consider that the $300 fee includes the exam sitting plus having your exam graded by at least two reviewers (and a third reviewer comes in if the first two disagree on your result), I actually think it’s amazing that ATA doesn’t need to charge more.
      • “The grading process is unfair.” I agree that the grading process is a little opaque (we’ll get to that later…), but if you fail, it means that at least two reviewers agree that you failed. You can never fail the ATA exam based on only one person’s review.
      • “The passing rate is ridiculously low.” The passing rate on the ATA exam is, according to all of the published statistics I could find, roughly equivalent to the passing rate on the Federal Court Interpreter written exam, and *much higher* than the 4-5% pass rate on the Federal Court Interpreter exam as a whole.
      • “No one cares if you’re certified anyway.” I think that certification is not a must, but it’s certainly a plus. I do a brisk business translating official documents for individuals, and most of that work requires a certified translator. If a client is blindly searching the ATA directory, I think that they’re likely to contact the certified people first. And I think that clients in general feel safer when they use certified translators because they feel that there’s some guarantee of competence there.

Moving on, here are some gripes about the exam that I believe have at least a shred of merit:

    • The whole handwritten exam/paper dictionary situation. I can sympathize with the reasons behind this (exam security, expense, finding appropriate testing centers, dealing with non-Roman-alphabet languages, etc.) but it’s still a major deterrent for many translators. When I took the exam in 2002, I don’t think I had spent three hours handwriting anything since I was in college in the early 90s. If I were to take the exam today, I would have to purchase or borrow paper dictionaries just for that purpose since I’ve converted to electronic resources almost exclusively. This format just doesn’t mesh with the way most translators work in 2012.
    • The lack of prep materials. At present, the only official prep materials that ATA offers are practice exams which cost $50.00 each. Considering that you do receive your marked-up practice exam, I think the cost is very reasonable. However, I think ATA should offer more prep materials than this in order to make the grading standards more transparent. How about a book of old exams for each language combination with sample translations, including the error markings for each one? How about language-specific prep courses led by graders and including practice exam sessions with feedback? Right now, I think that if you fail the practice test it’s hard to know what you need to work on in order to pass. More prep materials could help remedy this.
    • The opacity surrounding the exam grading and release of results, which ties into the cost of the exam. To my knowledge, ATA does not publish the names of the exam graders. Many people do identify themselves as exam graders, for example on their websites or LinkedIn profiles, but ATA itself does not identify them. I think it would contribute to the legitimacy of the exam if ATA made a concerted effort to recruit graders who are seen as the top translators in their language combinations. Undoubtedly, some or even most graders already meet this criterion, but ATA could benefit from publishing their names on its website. In addition, I think that ATA should pay its graders more (in order to recruit and retain the most respected translators in each language combination), even if this leads to an increase in the exam fee. I also think that ATA should release specific pass/fail figures each year and for each language combination. Right now ATA publishes the names of newly certified members in the Chronicle, but I think it would contribute to the exam’s legitimacy if ATA published the number of people who took each language combination and the number who passed and failed.

In sum, I think that ATA does a good job of administering the certification program with the resources that it has. With a budget of $300 per candidate spread over renting an exam room, paying an exam proctor, paying at least two graders and dealing with the administrative aspects of the exam, I think that ATA does pretty admirably. However, I think that increasing the exam fee in order to finally get the exam computerized, plus offering more prep materials and possibly prep courses would help make the exam process more transparent and legitimate in the eyes of ATA members.