Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Technology


Corinne McKay

Translator, unplugged

Credit for the new header image: “Cambodian Sanskrit in the temples of Angkor” by iStock member Yangshuo.

Michelle Rafter has a great post this morning called Time Out, on the merits of unplugging from your computer. In the post, Michelle references another blog post from a writer who takes a “technology sabbath” from Friday evening to Saturday evening, during which time he doesn’t use his computer or cell phone for work-related purposes. Michelle writes that she likes to get out of the office and go for a hike to decompress.

I will say that I agree wholeheartedly with this advice. There are times when being immediately available has its bonuses; if a client needs to call at a specific time with an update or question, it’s nice to be able to take the cell phone to the park, answer the call and then continue with the hike. But I do feel that more often, being “always on” is more a result of our own fantasies of indispensability than anything else, and that the vast majority of the time, we actually can afford to unplug for a few hours and get out from in front of the screen. In my own case, I take at least one computer-free vacation a year (and by vacation I mean ten days to two weeks, not a long weekend) and make sure to get outside and away from the computer for part of every day. Lately, my family has been experimenting with growing a lot of our own food, and I’ve found that there’s nothing like an hour of pulling weeds to really clear the brain!

Interestingly enough, many freelancers don’t seem to feel this way. Last year I was talking to another translator at the American Translators Association conference in San Francisco and the subject of vacations came up. When I told the other person that my family would be taking a two-week “beach and wildlife” trip to Baja over Christmas and punctuated it with “Two weeks without phone or e-mail, can’t wait!,” this person paused for a moment and then said “I didn’t know people still did that.” Granted, this vacation was during a time of year when many people take time off and business often slows to a crawl, but I have to say that my business didn’t suffer any ill effects, I really didn’t check e-mail or phone messages for two weeks, and best of all I was excited to get back to work at the end of the trip.

Unplugging: try it, you’ll like it!


Corinne McKay

Tracking your freelance income

After reading Jill Sommer’s post on job tracking systems for freelancers (for what it’s worth, I used to use a white board, then I switched to post-it notes, now I use a paper planner, but I agree that some sort of system is imperative), I thought I would write something about income tracking systems.

As with job tracking systems, there are various ways to track your income and outstanding invoices. I used to use a white board to write down the details of every invoice I issued. I liked this system because it kept everything in front of my eyes, and it was easy to see when invoices were overdue. There are also various programs like Translation Office 3000 that will track your invoices and income as well. TO3000 isn’t cheap (150 euros), but I think I might buy it if they produced a Linux version (yes, that’s a hint!). I’ve always used the open source accounting software GnuCash for my business accounting, and I’ve been quite happy with it.

I abandoned my white board invoice tracking system because I wanted a way to track my total outstanding invoices. Although this is obviously possible using the white board system and a calculator, it’s much easier if you use a spreadsheet, because you can just write a sum formula for the upper (or lower) cell in the column where you record the invoice amounts. My thought on this was that by tracking my total outstanding invoices (and assuming that clients pay on time, which most of mine thankfully do!), I would have an objective data point on which to base my project acceptance decisions. For example, if I want to earn a gross amount of $5,500-$6,000 a month and I see that I currently have only $4,500 in outstanding invoices, I know that I can’t be picky about accepting new work. On the other hand, if I have $7,000 outstanding, I know that I have at least a week of wiggle room and I can afford to either plan some days off or work on non-paying projects such as my blog, book and translation-related volunteer work.

I use a simple OpenOffice.org spreadsheet (like an Excel sheet) and record the invoice number in the A column, the issue date in the B column, the client in the C column, the invoice amount in the D column (and the top cell in the D column is the sum of all of the D cells below it) and the date paid in the E column. In the E column I also record follow-up to any overdue invoices i.e. “first reminder sent 6/5” or “certified letter with request for payment within 30 days sent 5/5.”

I find this system useful because it’s easy; every time I issue an invoice, I just record the details in the spreadsheet, and when I receive checks I delete the amount of that invoice so that it’s no longer included in my outstanding total. Also, this system makes it very easy to see whether I’m reaching my income goals; “no paid vacation” is one of the elements of freelancing that’s quite different from a salaried job, and often the major cost of a vacation is not the trip itself but the loss of income associated with it. I find that using an income tracking system helps me objectively decide when I need to hit the grindstone and when I can afford to spend an afternoon outdoors!


Corinne McKay

And just one more tip…

During Jamie Lucero’s computer seminar that I mentioned below, he gave a small but incredibly useful tip that very few of us had ever seen. In Microsoft Word, highlight some text and then press Shift+F3. The text will toggle between CAPS, no caps and Initial Caps. This prompted such a “wow” from the audience that we made Jamie run through it several times on the projector. It’s little moments like these that keep technology interesting!


Corinne McKay

Dealing with tags in OmegaT

I’m still very, very happy with my recent switch from Heartsome to OmegaT, but one thing I’m still mastering in OmegaT is the use of tags in formatted documents.

Tags in OmegaT aren’t a big issue if your translation work consists of documents that don’t have much formatting, or in which the formatting isn’t very important. However, most of my clients want their translations to look exactly the same in English as they do in French, so the formatting tags are critically important. If you’re used to working in or at least looking at a markup language like HTML, the tags that OmegaT inserts don’t look that odd. When you’re translating in OmegaT, you have to reproduce these tags in the target segment in order for it to be formatted like the source segment, and OmegaT has a handy “tag validation” feature that lets you know if you’ve missed any tags.

The issue that I have is that, as OmegaT’s user manual says, “Tags are usually not taken into account when considering string similarity for matching purposes.” My problem is that I get a lot of fuzzy matches where the text in two segments is identical or very similar, but the tags are completely different. For example, the segment “1.3.1) For ongoing needs” would come up as a fuzzy match for “<f0>1.3.1) For ongoing</f0><f1>needs</f1> “. So far, I haven’t found a way to deal with this other than either a) going character by character through the suggested match and inserting the tags into the text or b) inserting the tagged source segment into the target segment field and then copying and pasting in the matching text from the fuzzy match box. If anyone has suggestions on how to deal with this, I would love to hear them!

Another option that OmegaT’s manual suggests, and on some documents I think this might actually save time, is to remove all or most of the formatting from the source document in order to minimize the number of tags that appear in the source segments. Then, the translator could go back and re-format the document after the translation is finished. I also find it helpful to keep an OpenOffice.org document open with the source text so that I can refer to it when I can’t easily see what the tags’ purpose is.


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on social networking tools

Like many independent professionals these days, I’ve started using a few social networking tools such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn and MySpace. My experience with them is fairly limited, but I’ve been thinking about some of the positives and negatives of using these websites for networking and marketing.

To me, the primary advantage of social networking sites is that they make it very easy for someone to find and contact you, especially if you don’t have a very visible website for your business. Rather than having to have your e-mail address, or searching for your website and then finding your contact information, the person who’s looking for you can simply type your name into the social networking site’s search box and contact you right from your page. In addition, social networking sites make it easy to find “friends of friends” who you might want to contact or work with, and you can also easily search for people who share a certain characteristic with you, like your alma mater, profession, home town, etc. Social networking sites also eliminate the need to keep an updated e-mail address book for people who you contact infrequently, since you can just contact them via the site.

Social networking sites are also a good way to cross-promote your blog if you have one. Facebook and Ning both allow you to feed your blog directly onto your page on their site (other social networking sites may offer this feature too, I just haven’t tried it!).

Of the sites listed above, LinkedIn is, to me, the most “professional” and also the most controllable. There is almost no room to include personal information, and other people can’t post anything to your page without your approval; for example if someone writes a recommendation about you, it doesn’t appear on your page until you approve it. On Facebook, you have to adjust your privacy settings quite carefully if you don’t want all of your “friends” to be able to see photos, comments, etc. that people have posted of and about you. Even if the most sordid moments of your life are far from tabloid fodder, you might not necessarily want your clients to see photos of you with 80’s hair or comments from your friends asking for your lasagna recipe, so this is something to consider when setting up your profile.

Ning is interesting in that it allows you to create your own social network for a group of people. Recently, the all-women freelancers group I’m in, Boulder Media Women set up a Ning site, and I also joined Office Walkers, a Ning group for people who use treadmill desks.

Overall, LinkedIn is my favorite of these networking sites; I don’t have to wade through a news feed about who’s playing online Scrabble or deal with flashing ads for weight loss products, and LinkedIn allows me to easily browse for people who I’d like to add to my network. So far, I’ve gotten many more business contacts through my blog than through LinkedIn or Facebook, but I think that these sites are worth joining in order to make yourself more visible on the Web.