Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Professional associations


Corinne McKay

Obtaining your Certified Translator seal

At the beginning of August, Portuguese translator/interpreter Cris Silva wrote about her newly-obtained ATA-certified translator seal. This is an exciting development for all of us CTs (as ATA-certified translators can now call themselves!): a great addition to a certified translator’s marketing materials and official document translations.

Call me technologically disabled, but I had a hard time figuring out how to actually order my seal. Maybe you’re struggling in silence with this issue too, so let me help you! ATA has set up a very cool electronic verification system for the Certified Translator credential. If a client goes to atanet.org/verify, they can type in your certification number (included on your Certified Translator seal) and verify that you are actually certified. If you scroll down to the very bottom of that page, you’ll see some text that begins “If you are an ATA-certified member who would like to get your unique certification number…” and that’s what you want. First, make sure that you’re logged in as an ATA member using your member number and password and then click where it says “click here” (I told you I was going to help…). The system will recognize you and auto-generate your certification number and seal right there. You can then download the seal for your own use; just make sure to abide by the rules for use, including leaving the “Verify at www.atanet.org/verify” text below the seal image. A local translator who is certified in two language combinations told me that you receive a different certification number and seal for each language combination in which you are certified.


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on small conferences

In the past month I’ve attended two mid-year conferences, one organized by the ATA Translation Company Division and one that I helped organize for the Colorado Translators Association. Both of these conferences went very well, and both got me thinking about some of the differences between large conferences and small conferences.

No question about it, I love the annual ATA conference and all of its 1,500-2,000 attendees. Tons of sessions, tons of colleagues, and a great chance to see a new city. However, I’ve become increasingly excited about small conferences as well. Here’s why:

  • They generally cater to a non-beginner audience, and attract a more homogeneous group than larger conferences do. That might be people who work in a certain language pair or specialization (like Translate in the Catskills or the summer financial translation conference organized by the Swiss Translators Association) or people who are interested in honing their business skills (like the ATA-TCD conference).
  • The sessions are more discussion-friendly. Both of the small conferences I recently attended had about 30-40 attendees per session. This is enough people to create a convivial feel, yet few enough that it’s possible to have a real discussion. I really noticed this when I was presenting: my pre-conference seminar at the Denver ATA conference had 70 attendees and it was definitely tough to manage the discussion. But with 30 people in the room, the presenter can put questions out to the audience or ask experts in the audience to talk about something specific.
  • It’s easier to have real conversations with people. To me, the best and the worst part of the ATA conference is that everyone you know in the industry is there. It’s energizing, but it’s tough to fit all those people into the 3 days of the conference. At both the TCD and the CTA conferences, I was able to have more in-depth talks with people, rather than the “Great to see you! How was your year?” conversations that so often happen at the ATA conference.
  • Sometimes two sessions are better than 10. When there are two sessions at a time, you only have to make one decision: this session or that session. When there are 10 sessions, it’s easy to see something appealing and something unappealing about all of them (or maybe that’s just me being indecisive!).

I do think that there’s a large and untapped market for even more small, niche conferences. Kilgray recently held memoQfest in Budapest which sounded like a blast, so maybe other tool providers will follow suit. Chris Durban’s Translate in the Catskills is proof that one high-profile person can organize a conference and lots of people will come. Any other ideas for niche conferences you’d like to attend?


Corinne McKay

Webinar question: Preparing for the ATA certification exam

This is post #3 in my ongoing series of questions from the webinar on “Getting started as a freelance translator” that I presented for the American Translators Association earlier this month.

A participant asks: How can I prepare for the ATA certification exam?
Short answer: Order a practice test from ATA; at $50 (including return of the graded copy of your exam) as opposed to $300 for the real exam (not including return of the graded copy of your exam), it’s a good investment and a good indicator of your chances of passing the real exam.

Longer answer: If you’d like to take the ATA exam, you need to do a few things:

  • Join ATA
  • Make sure you meet the eligibility requirements for the exam. If you don’t meet them and you do not currently work as a translator, your most expeditious route is probably to get a translation certificate from an approved program; there’s a list on the ATA website.
  • Gather (buy, borrow, check out of the library) enough paper dictionaries and reference books for the exam. At present, ATA does not allow candidates to use any electronic resources for the exam, but you can use all of the paper dictionaries that you can carry. When I took the test, the woman next to me brought a rolling suitcase full of dictionaries covering a variety of subject areas.
  • Familiarize yourself with the error marking framework for the exam, the tips for candidates and the other resources on ATA’s website.
  • Take a practice test and see how you do. The magic number is 17; with 17 or fewer error points, you’re in. If you take the practice test and get 20 error points, you probably have a chance of passing the real exam (this happened to me) but if you get 40 error points, well…

And a few random thoughts on the ATA exam:

  • I am ATA-certified and find it to be a boost for my business. At the very least, someone browsing the ATA online directory is likely to call the certified translators first. I do a pretty brisk business translating official documents for individual direct clients, partially because I’m one of only three ATA-certified French to English translators in Colorado. However, the highest paid freelancers I know, people in the 40+ cents per word market, are not certified. You can definitely earn a very healthy income as a freelance translator without being certified.
  • As was recently discussed on Jill Sommer’s blog, there are lots of issues with the ATA exam. The handwriting factor is huge; personally I don’t hand write anything except my grocery list, and I found it excruciating to hand write the whole exam. In nearly a decade as a freelancer, I have never hand written a translation other than the ATA exam. Ditto with paper dictionaries; most of us have moved over to entirely electronic terminology resources and it’s tough to translate without using them. When I took the exam, the general passage was much, much harder than the specialized passage, and I felt that the grading standards were heavily swayed toward a fairly literal, word-by-word translation; the kind of translation I try to avoid when I translate for publication. ATA is working on a lot of these issues. And to be fair, it’s hard to deal with some of them (for example the long turnaround time to get your exam graded) without raising the price beyond most translators’ means.
  • The pass rate for the ATA certification exams is very low. ATA does not release exact statistics, but the pass rate seems to be about 20%. However: a) this is comparable to, or even higher than the pass rates for similar exams such as the Federal Court Interpreter certification exam. Some court interpreter certification exams even have a pass rate around 5%. b) if you fail the ATA exam, it means that two separate graders agree that you failed. Every exam is reviewed by two graders to start out with. If they disagree on the result, the exam is then sent to another grader for a third review. So you cannot fail the exam based on only one person’s assessment of your test. c) I would be interested to see the pass rates broken down by language. Anecdotally, it seems that some languages’ pass rates are much lower than others
  • If I were to give ATA some business advice, I would advise them to start producing preparation materials for the certification exams. I think that this would serve the twofold purpose of making the exam and the grading process more transparent and of generating revenue for ATA. For example, ATA could publish preparation manuals of old exams with graded example translations. They could even offer preparation courses. Hey, if people will spend several thousand dollars for a bar exam preparation course, ATA should be able to charge real money for a translator certification exam preparation course.

Other thoughts?


Corinne McKay

Reviewing your professional association memberships

Thanks to my friend and colleague Eve Bodeux for suggesting this timely post! Now that we’re less than a month from the new year, you’re probably receiving membership renewal notices from the professional associations to which you belong. You may also be receiving solicitations to join new associations. Following are some tips on deciding whether to renew (or not), join (or not) or invest your time (or not) in professional associations.

First, there may be an objective reason to renew some of your memberships. For example, if you are ATA-certified, you are required to maintain your ATA membership in order to use the Certified Translator credential. If you belong to any associations that have a similar policy, or that charge a late fee if you do not renew on time, pay those dues first.

Then, you might want to look at whether you made the most of your association memberships in 2010. For example, many associations allow non-members to attend their events by paying a higher fee. Did you attend enough events to recoup your membership dues investment, or would you be better off letting your membership lapse and paying the non-member fee? Is the association’s e-mail list particularly valuable? If you joined the association for networking purposes, did you actually land some translation projects through your contacts?

To avoid redundancy, research whether you are a member of any associations through an association you already belong to. For example, Colorado Translators Association purchases a yearly institutional membership to the Denver World Trade Center, so our members can attend WTC events at the member price. Likewise, FIT, the International Federation of Translators, allows members of its member associations (including ATA) to attend its events.

And a few pieces of unsolicited advice:

  • Be selective about how many event-based associations you join. For example, there are several great event-based professional associations in Denver that I could benefit from joining. However, when I look realistically at how many of those events I will actually attend, membership looks less attractive.
  • Consider joining the translators’ association in your non-English language country if they’ll take you as a member. Especially if these associations have active e-mail lists, they can be excellent networking venues because you, as a US-based translator, are a rare commodity!
  • Try to belong to at least one association related to your specialization(s). This does not have to be expensive; I recently joined the Society for International Development for 35 euros per year.

Any other tips on professional association memberships?


Corinne McKay

ATA conference wrapup

I know that this post will show my local bias, but this year’s ATA conference in Denver was just fantastic. I didn’t actually take any photos, but you can see a few on Jill Sommer’s blog and look at the daily conference slide show on the ATA website. Thanks to Jeff Sanfacon of ATA for the great pictures!

Judy Jenner commented in her ATA Chronicle column that the ATA conference is her favorite week of the year from a professional standpoint. I have to agree! Although this year’s conference was a bit more hectic for me than past ones (lots of volunteer roles, plus presentations, plus zipping back and forth from my house to the conference hotel), it was a real thrill to be able to show Denver off to 1,500+ translators. The conference hotel (Denver Hyatt Regency) is spectacular and the ATA team did an outstanding job carrying on positive traditions from past conferences and innovating with some new ones. Huge thanks to ATA President Nick Hartmann, President-Elect Dorothee Racette and the ATA headquarters staff for the draft horse-style work that they did to put all of this together. For all of us locals, it was a huge relief that there was no blizzard during the conference…just that sapphire Colorado sky and warm weather!

Lest you get the impression that the ATA conference is all socializing and no actual learning, I thought that this year’s sessions were particularly worthwhile. I selected a mix of speakers I’ve seen and enjoyed many times (Grant Hamilton‘s “Spot the Gallicism”), subjects I don’t see myself pursuing but about which I need to know more (Bruce Popp‘s “Making sense of French and US patent terminology”) and entirely new horizons (Katharine Allen’s “Notetaking for dialogue interpreting in all settings”). This year’s French Language Division Distinguished Speaker, David Jemielity of the Banque Cantonale Vaudoise in Lausanne, Switzerland, presented two outstanding sessions on financial translations and is one of the best Distinguished Speakers I’ve heard in the six years I’ve been attending the conference. I also had fun catching up on the translation bookosphere (can we call it that to contrast it with the blogosphere?) at Marianne Reiner’s presentation on her translation of David Grann’s Trial by Fire and Chris Durban’s signing of her new book The Prosperous Translator.

Working as a home-based freelancer in 2010, I think it’s easy to discount the value of face-to-face interactions and to assume that all the valuable networking happens online. In my experience, this is a misguided assumption. It’s amazing how lasting an impression one can make during a very short in-person interaction, and how valuable it is to simply have a visual impression of someone you only know via phone and e-mail. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the bloggers’ lunch, but it was lots of fun to talk to other translation bloggers and blog readers during the conference.

Despite Lionbridge’s untimely decision to impose a 5% rate decrease on their translators, I felt that the mood at the conference was generally very positive. Many attendees said that their business has never been stronger, others are branching out with higher paying direct clients, and I think that many translators are also focusing more on producing very high quality translations for very quality-conscious clients.

Thanks to everyone who attended my seminar on Beyond the basics of freelancing, and if you have follow-up questions, feel free to submit them and I’ll try to answer some of them here. I was also honored to present “Blogging 101” in Riccardo Schiaffino’s place, and you can download that presentation and Riccardo’s notes from his website. See you in Boston in 2011!