Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Technology


Corinne McKay

Choosing your translation specializations

About 11 years ago, I went on my first informational interview with a translation company. The project manager’s first question, “What are your languages?” was one that I expected. Her second question, “And what are your specializations?” caught me completely off guard. Specializations?? You mean it’s not enough that I speak another language? Well, as it turns out, language skills alone are not enough to make a successful career as a translator, so here are some thoughts on identifying and pursuing translation specializations.

First, here’s a tip from veteran translator Jill Sommer. Pick an area that you enjoy researching. You’re going to be doing a lot of reading in your specialization, so make sure that you find it interesting. You also want to make sure that your target specialization generates enough paying work for you to have a viable business. Lots of people start out focusing on their avocational interests: weaving, violin-making and the like. There’s undoubtedly work in those areas, but it’s probably not enough, or not well-paying enough, to keep you busy full-time. If you want to work with direct clients, there’s work in pretty much any specialization you can imagine. If you want to work with agencies, you really have to target one of their core areas, for example financial, medical, legal, pharmaceutical, IT, patents, etc. It’s also helpful to identify some of your non-specializations: areas in which you definitely do not want to translate.

It seems to me that some specializations are increasingly dominated by people with significant work experience in the domain. For example in the US, I meet more and more lawyers who either hated practicing law or couldn’t find a satisfying job and thus turned to translation as an alternative. For dense medical texts, you really need a strong medical background to produce a good translation. But many translators are self-taught in their areas of specialization: they pick an area that looks interesting, start with work that isn’t too technical, and learn as they go along.

In some sense, you also want to follow the money. I tell all of my translation students that somewhere, there is an intersection between what you want to translate and what clients will pay good money for. If your passion is art, there may be a well-paying niche translating for art museums that loan and borrow works of art internationally. If your passion is weaving, maybe you can work for textile companies that want to sell their products overseas. In one sense, it’s smart to focus on an industry (law, pharmaceuticals) in which clients have to translate in order to do business. But in another sense, it’s smart to focus on an industry (corporate communications, hospitality) in which clients hope that a really good translation will bring them more business.

Finally, if you’re interested in working with direct clients, don’t fear niche markets. As French to English chemistry translator Karen Tkaczyk will tell you, all you need is enough work for one person! I’ve met successful translators who specialize in horses, philately, fisheries and recycling. And if you want to expand your knowledge in your specialization, a MOOC provider such as Coursera is a good place to start. You can read about my experience in a Coursera epidemiology class here.


Corinne McKay

Translation tool interoperability: your input needed!

As the Chair of ATA’s Translation and Computers committee, I meet over lunch at the ATA conference with the translation software vendors who are exhibiting at the conference. It’s a good chance to talk about issues in the industry; last year I asked for readers’ input on what you’d like to tell the translation tool vendors, and then I wrote a follow-up post on the software companies’ responses.

This year’s lunch discussion topic is translation software interoperability, and I’m looking for your thoughts once again. Specifically, I’d love to know:

  • If you exchange files between translation memory programs (i.e. you have Trados and the client has memoQ, or you have DVX and your co-translator has Wordfast, etc.), how well does the process work? What could be improved?
  • What interoperability features would you like to see in future releases of the tools that you use? What would help streamline your workflow?

Here’s what happens to your comments: I compile them into a PDF and hand that out at the vendors’ lunch. Then we talk about your comments and the vendors respond. I take notes on what they say and then write a followup post. Thanks in advance for contributing to this dialogue!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on MOOCs

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are the hot new trend in online education (at least in the US). I’m one week into my second MOOC through Coursera, and here are some thoughts on the experience.

In general, I think that MOOCs are a great option for motivated learners with a specific goal. The course offerings are far more specialized than what you’d find at a local adult education center or community college, and the price (most often free) is certainly appealing. You can work on your MOOC anywhere with an Internet connection, at any time of the day or night. Many MOOCs consist of online video lectures: great because you can pause the video, rewind it, look up a quick Wikipedia entry of a concept you don’t completely get, and so on. For example my MOOC goal is to learn more about the science behind the international development documents I translate, so I’m currently taking Epidemics: the dynamics of infectious diseases, offered by a team from Penn State.

The range of MOOCs is really staggering: right now on the Coursera home page, you can sign up for courses ranging from Jazz Improvisation (taught by professors from the Berklee College of Music), to Bioinformatics Algorithms (UC San Diego), to a French course on business valuation (HEC Paris). The schools that offer these courses are top-notch, and thus they present an opportunity to take a course that is logistically and financially out of the reach of many people. MOOC providers are also getting more savvy about what their students want: in the course I’m currently taking, you can get a certificate of completion (for getting at least an 80% on all assessments) or a verified certificate with distinction (for getting 100% on all assessments). Coursera’s newly launched signature program has already earned over $1 million, focusing on students who want to earn a credential from their MOOCs.

In just these two experiences, I’ve learned that all MOOCs are not created equal. The first MOOC I took was a general public health class and it was fine. It was certainly more interesting than reading a public health textbook, especially since I do not have a strong formal science background. However, the course was not really created for the online learning format: most of the video lectures were taken with a camera in the back of the room during the professor’s live lectures, and they were uploaded in fairly long segments. In addition, the fact that the in-person students seemed a little disengaged from the material (professor would ask questions and have to wait for answers, or no one would answer) detracted from the experience. By contrast, the Epidemics MOOC that I’m currently taking is outstanding. The class has a huge team of instructors and developers, and was obviously developed specifically for this purpose. The videos are short (about 6 minutes each) and have excellent animations that accompany them. The videos are narrated by a bunch of different people, so they don’t get monotonous. In addition, the staff seems to be spending a huge amount of time contributing to the online discussion boards for the class. So, a huge shoutout to the Epidemics MOOC staff!

In my opinion, here are some caveats about the MOOC experience: if, like me, you’re doing a MOOC because you realize that, uh-oh, you should have paid better attention in those “throwaway” core classes in college? You’re in the right place. I was too busy thinking lofty literary thoughts in college (and graduate school for that matter) to worry about the difference between macroparasites and microparasites. Now, I’m regretting that impulse, but Coursera has come to the rescue. In addition, I think that some of the classic criticisms of MOOCs, such as “there’s no interaction with the instructor,” “all of the assessments are multiple choice and graded by computer,” and so on, also apply to many of the courses one would take as an in-person student at a large research university. Many of my friends who went to such universities were largely taught by grad students during their first few years. If you took an in-person course with 250 students in a lecture hall, you would not get personal attention or individually-graded assignments, and you’d be paying a lot more than $0 for the experience.

Personally, I do not see MOOCs as a substitute for a solid, in-person, general education. I would not encourage my own daughter to bypass an undergraduate degree in favor of MOOCs. I agree that the human interaction element of education is important, and I even agree that grad students can be excellent teachers. But for those of us who already have that general education and want to fine-tune our knowledge, I think that MOOCs are a great solution.


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on file-sharing sites and copyright violations

I’m a big believer in sharing information: for example, over the last five years I’ve written 400+ posts that are available on this site for free. I’ve found countless solutions to my own questions on other people’s blogs, also for free. However, I think that there’s a place for copyrighted work too; when applied correctly, copyrights allow authors and content creators to earn a living, and to keep on writing and creating because of the income that their copyrighted work generates.

File-sharing sites like Scribd and Slideshare (and others; I’m just using these as examples because I’ve found my copyrighted work on them…) have a complicated relationship with copyright law. In one sense, these types of sites are a great way to get your own work out there: put up an interesting presentation, and tons of people might find it. It might go viral, and you might get a book deal out of it. But, at least in my experience, these sites do essentially nothing to prevent people from posting other people’s copyrighted work.

Case in point: this morning I got an e-mail from a kind colleague who let me know that someone had posted one of my books on Slideshare. Yep, there it was, including my copyright notice, which appears on the first page of the book. To Slideshare’s credit, they immediately removed the book when I notified them, but presumably they’re not planning to reimburse me for the 1,333 times that the book had already been viewed. A few years ago, someone posted one of my books on Scribd with similar results: it was taken down after someone alerted me, but it had already been viewed over a thousand times.

A few thoughts here:

  • I see that these types of sites have legitimate uses. But it disturbs me that they cannot take the minimal amount of time it would require to prevent these very flagrant copyright violations. Posting someone else’s entire book isn’t a grey area: my copyright notice was on the first page of the file on Slideshare.
  • It disturbs me that translators would do this to each other: I know the username of the person who posted my book, and it’s a translator.
  • Violating someone’s copyright is stealing. That’s all there is to it. Especially when you post an independent author’s book, you are not taking money from a huge corporation, you are taking money from an individual who buys groceries and pays the mortgage with that money. It’s not the new media model: it’s theft.
  • If you want free information, there is lots of it out there. Go crazy with it. If you find works that are licensed under terms such as the GNU GPL, you can even sell them, as long as you license them under the original terms. But don’t steal copyrighted stuff and think that you’re doing something noble by posting it online for free. If the author wanted their book to be freely available, they wouldn’t have to look hard for a way to make it happen.

Just for fun (!), let’s put some numbers on this situation. The retail value of 1,333 copies of my book is $26,646; certainly a decent chunk of money by anyone’s standards. But of course I don’t earn the retail value in royalties, nor would all of those 1,333 people have actually bought a legitimate copy of the book. My royalties amount to between $3.50 and $10.00 per copy, depending on where the person buys the book. And let’s say that only 10% of those people would have actually purchased the book, so I would have sold 133 copies. If we take an average royalty of $5.00 per copy, that’s $665. So, dear copyright infringer, if you’re reading this and you want to make things right, I’d say that an appropriate restitution would be approximately that amount. And Slideshare, if you want to make things right, start at least minimally vetting the uploads on your site for copyright violations.


Corinne McKay

Book review: Mats Linder's Trados Studio Manual

Whatever your opinion of Trados Studio–read about my own change of heart about it here–I think we can all agree that it  takes a while to learn to use. In the words of an SDL staffer, just as professionals in other industries don’t expect to learn Photoshop, Quark Xpress or InDesign in an hour, translators need to invest some time in learning to use Trados Studio. [Read more…] about Book review: Mats Linder's Trados Studio Manual