Translation industry news

Nov 22 2010
Corinne McKay

Some interesting links

As Thoughts on Translation wraps up for the holiday week (U.S. Thanksgiving is Thursday), here are some websites and blog posts that you might enjoy looking at:

Eve Bodeux is giving away some SmartPlay language-learning products for kids on her blog; see the end of the post for how to enter.
Writer Michelle Rafter has a fantastic blog post (applicable to translators too!) called When it comes to writing, economize. As someone who has a tendency to ramble, I printed out Michelle’s tips and posted them above my desk.
Is there any German, Spanish, French or Portuguese translator out there who’s not yet using the terminology site Linguee? I’m not quite sure how to pronounce this website’s name (Lingwee? Ling-oo-ee?) but I have come to love its features. Linguee searches huge amounts of bilingual texts on the web, then displays sentences that contain the source term you enter and the target term that other translators have used.
There’s an interesting discussion on Jill Sommer’s blog about ATA certification and why so few people vote in the ATA elections .
And finally on a non-translation note, here’s a Get Rich Slowly post on inexpensive Christmas gifts and another one on DIY gifts. And here’s my own suggestion: I like the “memory drawing” idea described in the second post, but I am totally (totally; believe me) un-artistic. I recently stumbled upon the idea of using Wordle word clouds to make gifts for friends. You can type in whatever words remind you of that person, i.e. “runner, mom, Brownie~leader, lawyer, likes~her~coffee~with~a~splash~of~cream” (put the tildas between multiple-word phrases that you want to appear as one “word” in the cloud) and then create a word cloud that you can frame, give as a card, etc.

Nov 05 2010
Corinne McKay

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!

Oct 01 2010
Corinne McKay

Some industry news

International Translation Day seems like an auspicious time for new translation-related ventures; here are a few to check out:

- Congratulations to Chris Durban on the launch of her book The Prosperous Translator: Advice from Fire Ant & Worker Bee. If, like me, you eagerly await Chris and Eugene Seidel’s monthly advice column “The Bottom Line” in Translation Journal, you won’t want to miss this compilation of over a decade of stingingly good advice in question and answer form. As the book’s website says, you should take FA&WB’s advice because “…the downward spiral in prices and stressful working conditions decried by Chicken Littles on many continents are not inevitable — far from it! If you are an excellent (or even good) translator, you shouldn’t be there. And if you apply the business advice in this book, you won’t.” And did I mention that many of these questions and answers are downright hilarious? For example, here’s one of The Prosperous Translator’s promotional postcards:
  
  You can purchase your copy now from Lulu, or wait until the ATA conference and purchase a signed copy (or pick up some of those cool postcards!) at the InTrans Books booth. Disclaimer: I provided an advance review of The Prosperous Translator, but I was not paid for the review nor do I have any financial connection to the book.
- And more publishing congratulations, this time to English>French translator Marianne Reiner on the publication of her translation of David Grann’s Trial by Fire: Did Texas execute an innocent man. That’s a link to the original article, and here is the listing for Marianne’s translation, also entitled Trial by Fire. Kudos to Amazon France for including Marianne’s name alongside the author’s; maybe Amazon US could follow suit? Trial by Fire started out as a New Yorker article about Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for allegedly murdering his three young children by burning down his family’s home. This case has sparked a great deal of discussion in the U.S. because Willingham went to the death chamber insisting upon his innocence, to the point of refusing to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison. Editions Allia has published the French version of Trial by Fire as a small book; it’s 128 pages, fits in the palm of your hand and will set you back all of 3 euros so I highly recommend it. Even as a non-native French speaker I was riveted by Marianne’s translation, and the book has already gotten some nice press in France. Here’s the cover image:
- And finally, although it’s a much smaller publishing achievement than the previous two mentioned here, I launched my newly redesigned professional website. After using the same homegrown website since 2002 I decided it was time to take my own oft-repeated advice and call on a team of professionals, and I’m thrilled with the results. Huge thanks to Brandon Kellogg of Denver-based Superfluent Design for the banner, Michelle Panulla and Beth Hayden of Blogging With Beth for the site design and WordPress theme customization and Cameron Weise of Colorado Photo for my new photograph. It took a village to get this website up but I think it was worth the wait!

And with that, Thoughts on Translation wishes you a happy International Translation Day and another year of good health and prosperity!

Sep 30 2010
Corinne McKay

Happy International Translation Day 2010

Here it is September 30 again, and time for another celebration of International Translation Day! FIT‘s theme for this year is “Translation Quality for a Variety of Voices” and their press release focuses on the critical role that translators and interpreters play in preserving multilingualism in the world. In a case of professional synchronicity it’s also my birthday and my husband’s birthday, so I’ll be celebrating by translating as little as possible! Happy International Translation Day everyone!

Aug 12 2010
Corinne McKay

The ATA Compass is launched!

While Thoughts on Translation is enjoying some time off this August, the translation industry is still booming with news! I’m especially excited to announce that the inaugural issue of ATA’s new client outreach publication, the ATA Compass, is now available here. The Compass is a periodic publication for people who buy language services, and I’m excited to be part of the team that produced it. Big thanks to Andrea Ondak of Anglocom who suggested the winning name for the newsletter, and to Lillian Clementi and Chris Durban who are the real powerhouses behind this first issue!