Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Technology


Corinne McKay

Why you need your own domain name

What’s in a domain name (corny, I know, but too obvious to pass up…)? A lot, as it turns out. As freelancers who are dependent on e-mail to keep our businesses running, domain names are very, very important. The three basic options when it comes to e-mail are:

  • Use a domain name provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), for example yourname@comcast.net, @earthlink.net, etc.
  • Use a domain name provided by a free or fee-based e-mail service, for example yourname@gmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc.
  • Use your own domain name, for example yourname@yourdomain.com

Having your professional e-mail attached to a domain that you don’t own has a few disadvantages:

  • You are at the domain owner’s mercy. When I first started freelancing back in the days of dialup Internet, I learned this the hard way after moving cross country. I kept the ISP I had used in Boston and several months later, they stopped offering dialup access in Colorado *on one day’s notice,* and there went a good bit of the effort I had put into my nascent freelance business. As cable companies merge, similar things can happen if your cable provider changes its name and thus its domain names.
  • Your own domain looks more professional. Not to point fingers, but when I receive a professional e-mail from a Hotmail address, I have the same reaction as when I see the “Get your free business cards at…” imprint on the back of someone’s card. It makes me think that this person will not even invest $25-$50 in their business to create a professional image.
  • You risk having to change your e-mail address at some point. When you work in a business where probably 90%+ of your contact with clients is by e-mail, having to change your e-mail address is something you want to avoid at all costs, especially if the old address becomes inactive at some point

After doing some unscientific research, I’ve come to the conclusion that many freelance translators just don’t know how easy it is to purchase and use your own domain. So, here’s a short lesson (now you have no excuse to keep using Hotmail!).

  • Do your homework *before* you determine whether your desired domain name is available. Do not assume that just because there is no website at a given web address (URL), that means that the domain name is available. First, read this article on Important Precautions to Take When Buying a Domain Name from The Site Wizard. Be a little paranoid and follow the advice there: make a list of domain names before you ever log on to a registrar; pick the registrar you want before you search for your domain name; never run your potential domain name by anyone you don’t trust completely and when you find out that your desired domain name is available, purchase it immediately.
  • Buy the domain name from a domain name registrar. Thanks to The Site Wizard for another excellent article on How to Register Your Own Domain Name. This doesn’t mean that I endorse the domain registrars that are listed there, but they’re a good place to start. Your ISP may also provide domain name registration services (just make sure you really trust the ISP!). Domain name registration should cost you about $10 a year; don’t go with a fly-by-night registrar just to save a dollar or two. In my case I register my domain through my ISP because I trust them more than I trust myself, and they will automatically renew my domain name and bill me for it (more on domain name renewals below).
  • If necessary, purchase an e-mail hosting package so that you can use your domain name for e-mail. If you want to put a website at your domain, e-mail access will probably come with your web hosting package. If you just want to use your domain name for e-mail, you need an e-mail hosting package. For example (and again, I’m not endorsing them, this just gives a good example), GoDaddy has e-mail hosting packages for as little as $1.19 a month. Even the most expensive package, which gives you 10 e-mail addresses and unlimited storage is $2.50 a month.
  • Don’t forget to renew your domain name. Of anything you need to remember about having your own domain, this is the most important. Especially if you purchase your domain for only one year at a time, make sure you’re clear on how the domain name registrar is going to contact you to ask you to renew; a cut-rate registrar may “forget” to remind you to renew, then one day you go to check your e-mail and you’re locked out. You can semi-circumvent this problem by purchasing a multi-year domain name subscription, but you should still make sure you don’t forget to renew it.
  • Follow the domain name registrar’s instructions on how to use your e-mail. If you purchase a hosting package with unlimited storage you can probably use your registrar’s web mail if you want to, or you can use an e-mail program on your computer. Your domain name registrar should be able to give you instructions on how to do this.

Now, what are you waiting for? Go to it!


Corinne McKay

Personal software training: a niche waiting to be filled?

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of giving a seminar on “Beyond the Basics of Freelancing” for the Northern California Translators Association. At the end of the seminar, I did a short overview of ways to diversify your freelance income stream. All of us are familiar with the basics such as editing, proofreading, voiceover, copywriting, but I wanted to generate a few new ideas. I’ll write more about these in the coming weeks, but one sideline business that really jumped out at me is personal software training for other freelance translators (i.e. going to people’s houses and helping them learn a new piece of software or improve their computer skills).

This idea first came to me when a fellow freelancer in Colorado told me that she had recently hired a bookkeeper to come to her house and set up QuickBooks. This freelancer was an instant convert to the personal software trainer model; in just a few hours, she had her entire accounting system set up and was also able to ask exactly the questions that she wanted to ask. In my own case, I recently battled with setting up Wordfast Pro on my Linux computer; in that case I couldn’t get the software to work properly for other reasons, but I also looked at Wordfast’s new standalone model and thought “Can’t I just pay someone to come to my house and teach me how to use this?”

Partially, I think that there is a big and untapped market for this type of service because as freelancers become more successful, our time is more valuable. Personally, I would rather pay someone $200 to come to my house for a couple of hours and teach me exactly what I want to know (and not repeat what I already know) than sit through an all-day seminar that covers some topics I want to hear about and some that I don’t. Likewise, I’d prefer one-on-one attention to a webinar where I can’t really ask questions until a defined time if at all.

It seems to me that there are a lot of pieces of software that would lend themselves to the personal training approach. Obviously any of the big translation environment tools, Dragon Naturally Speaking, accounting software, etc.  In addition, I think that this approach could win more freelancers over to some of the less well-known translation environment tools; whenever I evangelize about OmegaT, the free (as in doesn’t cost anything) and open source translation tool that I use and love, people seem excited by the idea but intimidated by the idea of installing it and learning how to use it.

An additional benefit of a personal software trainer who comes to your house (or works over the phone and uses a VNC system to see your desktop) is that you’re seeing how the software works and looks on your computer and how it interacts with your file system. It seems to me that this system could be a win-win deal; good extra income for tech-savvy translators and a great service for busy freelancers who want to learn new applications or polish their skills.

Finally, not to send everyone rushing to the domain name registrars, but my random sample research shows that the domain name “personalxyztrainer.com” is available for all of the translation-specific software that I searched, where “xyz” is the name of the software (yes, including the market leader!). If you decide to start this type of business, let Thoughts on Translation know how it goes!


Corinne McKay

Netbooks

Thoughts on Translation is back from vacation (Costa Rica was amazing, thanks for asking!) and ready to attack some new projects. Summer always seems to be a challenging work time; I’m in and out of the office a lot doing fun things with the family and we also travel for several weeks, so I’m usually trying to fit more work into less time than usual. I haven’t yet made the leap to a smartphone, so mobile computing has been on my mind a lot this season.

I feel it’s really important to take at least one real work-free vacation a year, so on our recent two week trip to Costa Rica we took my daughter’s XO laptop to play some games and briefly check e-mail, but otherwise we were computer-free. My warhorse laptop, a factory refurbished IBM ThinkPad that I bought 7+ years ago, is finally on its last legs; first the touch pad stopped working, now the WiFi only works about half of the time, and sometimes when I boot it up it gives scary error messages that are probably its last gasps of usability!

After a lot of hemming and hawing, I decided to get a netbook; I was on the fence between an MCI Wind and an Asus Eee and finally decided to go with the Eee. The model I got, the 1000 series with a solid state drive and Linux OS, isn’t insanely tiny (unlike some netbooks that are approximately the size of the graphing calculator I had to get for 9th grade math!), but since I have pretty big hands and do a lot of word processing, I thought that a model with an almost full-size keyboard was a better bet. So far I’m really happy with the Eee. I replaced the factory-installed Linux OS with Ubuntu’s netbook-specific distribution and it’s really fast and easy to use. The whole package (the computer, cord and my flash drive) zips into a little neoprene case for easy carrying, it’s pretty slick!

Part of my rationale for getting a netbook was that in the age of ever more pervasive WiFi, it seems like a pretty good substitute for a smartphone. If I’m waiting to pick my daughter up somewhere or out doing errands for a few hours, I’m nearly always within range of a WiFi signal and the Eee Linux model uses so little battery power that I can leave it on nearly all day on one battery charge. Also, I wonder if netbooks are going to put a dent in the market for software upgrades. I paid a little under $400 for my Eee; because our office is an all-Linux shop, the cost of software upgrades isn’t an issue, but if I ran Windows, I would certainly look at the option of attaching a netbook to an external monitor and keyboard instead of purchasing OS and office software upgrades for a desktop computer. Any other netbook-using translators out there? If so, what uses have you found for your little tool?


Corinne McKay

Running Wordfast Pro on Linux

Like many other open source software-using translators, I was really excited when Wordfast announced that it was releasing a platform-independent translation environment tool, Wordfast Pro. OmegaT is my tool of choice, but when a client wants Trados-style uncleaned files, I often find it easier to work in Wordfast than to create the uncleaned files from OmegaT’s output. For years, I’ve run the original Wordfast (now called “Wordfast Classic”) on my Linux system by running CrossOver Linux and then Microsoft Office. This solution works, but it’s a little clunky since it takes a lot of memory and since it requires upgrading three pieces of software (and in my case, I never use Microsoft Office unless I’m working in Wordfast since OmegaT supports the OpenDocument format).

Alas, the Linux-specific version of Wordfast Pro has what is in my opinion a serious dependency flaw; it cannot work with Word format files that are created or saved in a program other than MS Word. So if you, like me, use the free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org to create and/or edit files in MS Word format, you’re out of luck with Wordfast Pro, since it will tell you that your Word format documents are “not in a supported format.” Wordfast support confirmed this, when they told me that “…any .doc files not saved with MS Word 98-03 will not open in Wordfast.  OpenOffice makes a slight change to the composition of the file and we are working on resolving that.” Unfortunately this makes Wordfast Pro essentially unusable by translators like myself who run OpenOffice exclusively and do not use MS Office.

In the past, the Wordfast team has been very supportive of translators who run their software on Linux, and I do really appreciate that they have released a Linux-specific version of their program (which installs and opens just fine on my Ubuntu system). However, I feel that selling a Linux-specific program that depends on a piece of non-free software (and not publicizing that dependency)  is a little misleading; in my case, my reason for purchasing the Wordfast Pro upgrade was so that I would no longer have to run CrossOver Linux and MS Office and could use a version of Wordfast that runs natively on Linux. Hopefully this issue will be resolved in the near future, for now I’m back on OmegaT!


Corinne McKay

Resources for free and open source software users

As I’ve mentioned before, I run my translation business using free and open source software almost exclusively. I say “almost” because I have in the past run Microsoft Office and Wordfast using CrossOver Linux, a tool that allows you to run Windows software on Linux without a Windows license. In addition, although my primary computer is Linux-only (running Ubuntu Linux), I have a dual-boot laptop that can run Linux or Windows, and I sometimes use the Windows side when I’m splitting a highly formatted project with another translator, just to make sure that things like outline numbering are not disrupted by the conversion from OpenOffice to MS Word. Oddly enough, the only real incompatibility I’ve ever found between OpenOffice Writer and MS Word is highlighting; when I highlight text in OpenOffice, the person using Word often cannot remove the highlighting. Otherwise, Writer is essentially fully compatible with Word when it comes to creating or editing documents; just don’t try to run a macro-dependent program like Trados in OpenOffice!

My path to free and open source software use is definitely smoothed by the fact that my husband is a Unix systems administrator and has worked on free software development for 15+ years. However, there are a lot of resources available for people who want to learn more about using Linux and/or other flavors of free and open source software. Recently I found this page of free Linux books on various topics. “The Linux Starter Pack” looks very useful for beginners, and “Getting Started with OpenOffice.org” applies not only to Linux users, but to those who want to run OpenOffice on other operating systems.

Speaking of OpenOffice.org, Solveig Haugland, the author of the OpenOffice.org Guidebook (her website Get OpenOffice.org is also excellent!) writes a very helpful blog here. Most of her posts have screenshots to help you understand the concepts she covers, and they discuss very specific uses of OpenOffice.org, for example how to multiply two fields in OpenOffice Calc or use your Microsoft Word templates in OpenOffice Writer.

Many translators who would like to run Linux are concerned about what translation environment tool they will use when they make the switch from Windows. There are some good options already available; my favorite cross-platform tool is OmegaT, and I’ve also been happy with Heartsome other than some difficulties with very slow file conversion. With the advent of Wordfast Pro, the field is really opening up, since WF Pro is a Java-based tool that can run natively on Linux. I’ve installed WF Pro but I haven’t really learned to use it yet; but with Wordfast’s upcoming series of free 20-minute webinars, hopefully I’ll be using it soon and I’ll review it here!

The one tool that I could really use in a Linux environment and that doesn’t seem to exist is a really powerful OCR/PDF conversion tool such as Abbyy FineReader. There are a few Linux-friendly OCR tools out there and they work decently when the document plays well, for example with PDFs created from Word documents. However, I’ve found them basically unusable on PDFs created by scanning, faxing or photocopying a document, which applies to many of the PDFs I receive for translation.