Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Social networking


Corinne McKay

A few LinkedIn tips

On Monday evening, Eve Bodeux, Riccardo Schiaffino and I presented a professional development session on “Social Media: Web 2.0 for Translators” for the Colorado Translators Association. I covered LinkedIn and Facebook, Riccardo handled Blogging 101 (you can download Riccardo’s excellent presentation from his website link above) and Eve wrapped things up with Twitter. Given that we covered all of this in an hour and a half, it was a very brief introduction to these topics. However, as one attendee commented, “I feel like for now I can get away without using these technologies but I can’t get away without knowing what they are,  and now I know,” which I thought was a good observation.

My overview of LinkedIn was just that (an overview) without any power-user tips, but I thought I’d share a few suggestions for sprucing up your LinkedIn profile and controlling who can view your information. Feel free to add your own tips too!

-To create a customized link for your LinkedIn public profile (the view of your profile that other people see), click “Profile” and then in the blue shaded box
at the top, look for the line that says “Public Profile.” Then click the “Edit” link at the end of that line. This allows you to change your profile URL from www.linkedin.com/pub/abunchofrandomcode to www.linkedin.com/in/yourname , for example.

-To see how many people have viewed your LinkedIn profile and how many times you have appeared in LinkedIn search results, click “Home” and then look down the
right sidebar for the blue “Who’s viewed my profile” box. If you have the basic (free) LinkedIn account, you can’t see much information about the people who viewed your profile but it is interesting to see how your profile views increase or decrease over time. On a side note, Viadeo (a LinkedIn-esque site directed at Europeans) shows you the identity of everyone who views your profile even if you have a free account.

-To control who can see your profile photo, click “Settings” (this is not in the main navigation bar, it’s in the small grey type in the upper right hand corner
next to where it says “Welcome, Your Name”. Once you are in “Settings,” click “My Profile Photo” and then select either “My Connections,” “My Network” or
“Everyone.” A few people at the session were concerned about the general public being able to see their photo. If this applies to you, I would either restrict your photo to only your connections or upload something other than your photo (i.e. make a .jpg of your company name or create a professional-looking avatar of yourself).

-To control who can see your status updates, do as above but click “Status Visibility” and then select an option. Personally, if you are using LI for networking/marketing purposes, I would recommend making your status visible to everyone on the site. I do this, and I am just careful never to say anything that I would not want the whole world to know, such as my physical whereabouts, client gripes, etc. In my experience, more people view your profile if they can read your status updates (and of course if your status updates are interesting).

-To add various outside elements  such as your blog, presentations, travel schedule, etc.  click “Profile” and then scroll down until you see “Applications.” Click that link and you will see a bunch of options; I use the WordPress application to feed my blog into my LinkedIn profile. I think that this keeps my profile looking fresh without much effort on my part.


Corinne McKay

What weather balloons teach us about social networking

If you listened to today’s episode of Science Friday on NPR, you already know this, but it’s still very cool! To mark the Internet’s 40th anniversary, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held a contest, offering a US $40,000 prize to the first team to correctly submit the physical locations of 10 weather balloons moored in public places around the U.S. DARPA correctly surmised that teams would rely on various Web-based strategies, from iPhone apps to Twitter to Facebook, to find the balloons.

The winning team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (disclosure: my husband’s alma mater, although he had nothing to do with the balloon-finding contest) Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, combined a social networking and financial incentives system to obtain the coordinates of all 10 balloons in just nine hours. The team, made up of post-docs and grad students, took just four days to devise and implement their strategy of trackable, personalized referring URLs and financial incentives ($2,000 to the person who  submitted the balloon’s coordinates, $1,000 to the person who referred that person into the network, $500 to the person who referred the referrer, and so on down the line). You can read all about it here.

Obviously for those of us who proudly bear the “geek” label, this contest has a lot of interesting implications. Not least of these is the ways in which this collective problem-solving method could be applied to other “hunting” problems, such as finding missing people, locating rescue equipment needed in natural disasters, etc. Definitely worth a Friday-afternoon read!


Corinne McKay

Utilizing your local World Trade Center

If you’re interested in expanding your international business contacts, the website of the World Trade Centers Association is an excellent resource. The World Trade Centers Association reports that it has 300 centers in 100 countries; most medium to large cities in the U.S. have a World Trade Center. Here in Colorado, we’re fortunate to have the incredibly dynamic WTC Denver, which has a dizzying array of international business events that cover topics such as international letters of credit, import/export opportunities with various regions (China, Indonesia, the Middle East, etc.), pan-European networking happy hours and more. The Denver WTC also partners with local business organizations, and Colorado Translators Association is sending some representatives to their upcoming international business happy hour, sponsored jointly with the Boulder Chamber of Commerce. Membership in local WTC associations can be somewhat expensive; the Denver WTC’s individual membership is $250 per year. However, you can normally either pay a non-member price to attend the events you’re interested in, or as we do with Colorado Translators Association, you can look into purchasing an organizational membership that allows your members to attend WTC events at the member price.


Corinne McKay

Using Facebook friend lists

Social networking websites are becoming a crucial arrow in a freelance translator’s quiver of marketing tools, and it’s important to decide how to use these tools wisely. When I entered the social networking world, I decided (somewhat arbitrarily)  to use Facebook for friends and family and LinkedIn for business contacts. Lately, I’ve noticed some changes in how people are using Facebook; I’ve been receiving more requests to sign on to my friends’ business-related Facebook pages, and I’ve been receiving more Facebook friend requests from business contacts.  Colorado Translators Association now has a Facebook page and we’ve gotten a good response to it. I’ve also started posting some business-related items on Facebook because my network there is much wider than my LinkedIn network, and the response has convinced me that Facebook is a worthwhile business tool.

Still, even if your life is about as far from sordid as it gets, there are some things that you might not want your business contacts to see (I swear, that’s not me lip-synching to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in the high school talent show, it’s my secret twin…).  In addition, you have little control over what your Facebook friends post on your page, so you may fall prey to someone else’s offbeat sense of humor through no fault of your own. Or, you might inadvertently post something (“Great freelancing strategy session last night; can’t wait until you give notice!”) to someone else’s page, not realizing that you’ve just “outed” that person to his or her boss and co-workers on Facebook.

The answer (sent courtesy of a friend of mine who’s a Maryknoll Lay Missioner in Brazil) is Facebook friend lists. Here’s a great article on how to use them. Basically, you can set up different categories of Facebook friends and give them access to different parts of your Facebook profile so that some people can see everything that’s there and some people can see almost nothing. Once you set up your friend lists, you can go into your Privacy settings and set up customized permissions for each friend list by excluding some of the friend lists from seeing certain elements of your profile (i.e. Photos of You, Videos of You, Status Updates, etc.). It seems to me that judicious use of friend lists can really help translators make effective business use of Facebook.

Does anyone out there have positive/negative stories about using Facebook for business?