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Corinne McKay

Insider tips for working with individual clients

I love working with individual clients, and in 2020 I earned about 15% of my income from translating for individuals. Lots of freelancers hate working with individuals, so I’ve assembled some tips that might help you work more successfully with these types of clients.

My one-liner advice for working with individuals is: set up e-mail templates to respond to inquiries, and make individual clients pay in advance. Those two things go a long way toward making this kind of work appealing.

I enjoy working with individuals because it’s lucrative and rewarding. It’s gratifying to work with people who really need a translation for immigration, education, or family purposes, and it’s some of my most lucrative work in terms of a per-hour rate. I generally charge US $50-$75 per page for official document translations, and because I have templates for a lot of common documents from French-speaking countries, a one-page translation often takes half an hour or less. I wouldn’t want to translate birth certificates and educational transcripts 40 hours a week, but I really enjoy it as a smallish component of my freelance business. Here’s what I’d suggest if you’d like to do the same:

Be easy to find

The vast majority of my individual clients find me through my website or a personal referral from someone I’ve already worked with. A few years ago, I had my web designer do some SEO work on my site, targeting the search term “certified French to English translator.” Most days, I’m the first result after the ads for that search, so it’s a big boost in terms of findability. I also recommend telling every translator know that you like working with individuals, because a lot of freelancers don’t want to work with individuals at all.

Another good source of individual clients is credentials evaluation agencies. My most lucrative official document jobs are for people from French-speaking countries who are trying to transfer their professional credentials to the US system. So they went to veterinary school in France, or nursing school in Senegal, or physical therapy school in Quebec, and they’re trying to obtain the corresponding professional certification in the US. These projects can be very lucrative, because often, the person has to have not only their transcripts translated, but their course descriptions as well. It can be a good idea to get in touch with some credentials evaluation agencies and ask whether they maintain a list of translators for their clients to use, and if so, how you can get on that list.

It’s also good to remind your happy clients that referrals are always welcome. Expats from a certain country or region tend to know lots of other expats who came from the same place, and everybody needs translations!

Have a streamlined process

Earning $50-$75 for a project that takes half an hour is appealing, but that hourly rate can quickly go downhill if you spend an hour on the phone with an anxious client. And a lot of individual clients are anxious, because something important: a university application, a Green Card, an adoption, a marriage, etc. is riding on the translation. French to English translator Sam Mowry also does a lot of official document translations, and I’ve heard her say, “Official document translation clients ask a lot of questions, but always the same questions,” which I completely agree with. It’s easy to set up e-mail templates to respond to general inquiries (“I need something translated; how much do you charge, and how long does it take?”) and specific questions that individual clients tend to ask. I find that many specific questions are about certifications, and submitting the translated documents. My official document clients commonly ask:
-Can you (the translator) submit the translations directly to a university, credentials evaluation agency, etc. for me? Answer: Yes, no problem there.
-Will this translation be accepted by…(the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles, the University of Nebraska, etc.)? Answer: The client needs to research the certification requirements of the entity to which they’re submitting the translation and send them to you (the translator) so that you can review this.

Taking payments

I use PayPal for all of my individual clients, and most people are fine with it. PayPal charges a commission, but it’s a percentage of the fee, not a flat rate, so it’s often less expensive than something like a bank transfer, and I refuse to take checks from individuals. I allow international clients to pay by Transferwise (now changing its name to Wise) because it’s free. You could also accept Square, Stripe, Venmo, or any other similar electronic payment service.

A word about certifications

In the US, there is no standard definition of “a certified translation,” partially because we don’t have the “sworn translator” designation that many countries have. I always tell clients that I’m ATA-certified, and many official document clients prefer that, but it’s not an absolute requirement for many jobs. Interestingly enough, basically anyone can certify a translation that’s submitted to USCIS, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. They state that, “USCIS requires that the translator certify that they are competent to translate and that the translation is complete and accurate. The certification language must include the translator’s name, signature, address, and date of certification together with a statement of fluency and accuracy.” Not only do you not have to be certified, you don’t even have to be a professional translator: you just have to certify that you’re “competent” and that the translation is complete and accurate.

Lots of clients ask about notarized certifications. I find them problematic, for two reasons:
-They can be a bit of a pain to obtain; notaries tend to prickle at the mention of notarizing a translation, so you need to clearly state, “it’s just to notarize my signature on the certificate of accuracy.”
-The client may not be able to use the translation after the notary’s commission expires, something over which you have no control.

I recently ran into a situation where a client absolutely had to have a notarized certification; both of the banks in my neighborhood were closed (sadly, because they’re in the shopping center where a mass shooting recently occurred), and the individual notary I’ve used in the past had let her commission expire. So I experimented with notarize.com (after explaining the situation to the client and getting their OK) and was pleasantly surprised. The whole process took about 15 minutes; you upload your documents, then you’re immediately bumped to a video call with the notary (who is located in Nevada, one of the only states that allows online notary services). It cost $35 to notarize two documents ($25 for the first, $10 for additional ones) and was very easy and painless. I would definitely use this service again, as long as it meets the client’s requirements.

Readers: any other thoughts on translating for individuals?


Corinne McKay

Medical terminology and Online presence roadmap: Classes start Monday!

Training for Translators has two great four-week classes starting Monday. Both courses include eight live sessions (recordings provided), individual feedback on four homework assignments, and ongoing access to the Training for Translators monthly alumni question and answer sessions.

There is one spot left in Michèle Hansen’s More medical concepts and terminology for freelance translators. Each week focuses on a different topic: the musculoskeletal system, the endocrine system (with a focus on diabetes), the immune system, and cancer, for translators and interpreters who work with medical topics, but didn’t got to med school!

Six spots are left in Madalena Sanchez Zampaulo’s Online presence roadmap for T&I professionals. This course is for translators or interpreters who already have a website, but want a broader online presence or a more targeted marketing strategy. It’s a great time to take this class, since online is the only presence we have right now!

American Translators Association members, use the coupon code ATA for $15 off. If you’ve never taken a class with Training for Translators before, use NEW for an additional $10 off. If you have taken a class with Training for Translators before, use ALUM for an additional $15 off. Hope to see you there!


Corinne McKay

A month of LinkedIn Premium: the results

I set a goal for this year to experiment with some different marketing methods and see how they work. I can’t promise that this will be a series, but I do have a pilot project of at least one other method–Google Display ads–in the works. So, first up is LinkedIn Premium…here we go!

Since forever, I’ve been wondering whether LinkedIn Premium is a worthwhile investment. I have a number of former students who’ve used it successfully, so I wanted to do my own experiment and test it for myself. I signed up on August 25 and decided to send around 100 contact requests and as many InMails as the system would allow me to send, and see what happened.

Not much. There you go! That’s my two-word summary of the month, but of course there are a number of caveats that I’ll go into in this post. In sum, I sent 10 InMails, of which two responded with the name of a different contact person at their organization, two responded with “Thanks!” and six didn’t respond at all, and I sent 75 connection requests with a personal note attached, of which 40 accepted the request but didn’t respond to the note, four accepted the request and did respond to the note, and 31 didn’t respond at all. I found this to be a pretty lackluster result as compared to warm e-mails, but I think it could be a good building block for a broader LinkedIn strategy.

What is LinkedIn Premium?

If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ve likely seen the ads for LinkedIn Premium, offering you a free month. On the positive side, I will say that the free trial is actually free and is easy to cancel. You do have to enter your credit card information, but it’s quick and obvious how to cancel. Of course you have to go through multiple layers of, “Before you go, LinkedIn Premium offers…” pop-up windows, but cancelling is really not that bad.

LinkedIn markets Premium in many different ways: by prompting you when you’re on the site, by reminding you that you could unlock all of your profile views if you had Premium, etc.

At present (September 2020) Premium costs between $29.99 and $99.95 a month, depending on what level you pick. For a freelancer’s purposes, I think the main advantage of Premium is the number of InMail credits (InMails are LinkedIn private messages that you can send to people you’re not connected to), so I should have chosen the highest level of Premium with the most InMail credits. Why not…it’s free! But instead, I signed up for “Premium Career,” which offers the fewest InMail credits (three, as compared to 30 for the Recruiter Lite tier).

Another appealing feature is LinkedIn Learning. A while back, LinkedIn bought Lynda.com and added all of their courses as a benefit of LinkedIn Premium. I didn’t take any of these courses, but this could be worth the basic membership alone, if the courses (there’s a massive library) interest you.

My preconceptions about LinkedIn

I’ll admit that I’ve never really “gotten” LinkedIn as a tool for freelancers. In certain ways, I get it:

  • If you do a hard-to-find language or specialization
  • If you don’t have your own website
  • If you’re open to/looking for full-time or long-term contract work
  • As a way to keep in touch with people you meet at conferences, etc. without having to keep track of their e-mail addresses
  • As a “touch point” with current and potential clients

But in general, I’ve always felt that LinkedIn is more suited to people who have, want, or are looking for in-house jobs than it is to freelancers looking for new clients. Even the LinkedIn profile structure is relatively un-suited to freelancers; when you write someone a LinkedIn recommendation, all of the suggested “ways in which you know this person” are geared toward in-house roles, and so on.

I think everyone should be on LinkedIn; like not having a website, I think that not being on LinkedIn makes you look a bit invisible/unprofessional as a freelancer. But I wanted to dig in and see if Premium is useful as an outbound marketing tool.

My goals

Mostly, I wanted to see how LinkedIn Premium compares to my tried-and-true outbound marketing technique, which is e-mail. I work almost exclusively with direct clients, and I find them or they find me in a variety of ways:

  • Through referrals from other translators or from existing clients
  • By me reaching out to them by e-mail
  • By me sending them a paper letter or postcard
  • By them finding my website or an online directory profile

There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Ed Gandia’s warm e-mail prospecting methods (there’s a testimonial from me in his book but it’s not an affiliate deal). Years ago, I took Ed’s warm e-mail prospecting class, mostly to get better at teaching other translators how to do e-mail marketing. But then, I thought that I might as well try the technique for myself. Admittedly, luck and striking at the right time have a lot to do with it, but on the third warm e-mail I wrote, I landed upon a US-based publisher looking for a translator for a French non-fiction book that was basically my dream project. That went well, and they hired me to translate another book. That one warm e-mail yielded two book contracts and almost $20,000 of work. It’s definitely possible that I’m biased toward e-mailing for that reason. However, LinkedIn says that, “InMails have a 10-25% hit rate when it comes to soliciting a response from prospects, 300% higher than emails with the exact same content.”

Essentially, I wanted to see how LinkedIn InMails or connection requests (with a note attached) compare to locating those same people on LinkedIn, but then using a tool like Hunter.io to contact them via e-mail.

My admittedly haphazard approach

I should start by saying that I took a very non-strategic approach to this experiment. I contacted people in a variety of sectors

  • People who work with Africa or Haiti programs at US-based NGOs
  • People who belong to some of the same international development groups on LinkedIn that I belong to
  • People who work at US-based credentials evaluation services (I do a lot of official document translations for people from French-speaking countries who are trying to get a US professional credential through a credentials evaluation service)
  • Heads of in-house translation departments at US and European companies
  • Heads of translation services at translation companies that work in the specializations I work in

I guess I’d call this “deliberately haphazard,” in that I wanted to see whether people in different sectors/industries are more or less likely to respond. The answer to that is yes: the NGO people were much more likely to respond with a note, and the translation company people were much more likely to accept the connection request. I’m still musing about the reasons behind those, but there you go!

What I did

Over the course of my free month, I devoted about half an hour a day to researching and contacting people. When I had InMail credits, I contacted them by InMail, because it allows you to write a lot more. You can send a note with any connection request, but you’re limited to 300 characters.

The InMail system is a little confusing in that you start out with a certain number of InMail credits, but you can recoup credits when people accept your InMail. So in my case, I was able to send 10 InMails even though I only started out with three credits.

My InMail text was the same as what I send over e-mail, and my connection request text was just an abbreviated version. Along the lines of, “Hello X, I’m a French to English translator specializing in the international development sector. I see we’re both members of several international development groups on LinkedIn, and I also noticed that (insert NGO name) does quite a bit of work in French-speaking countries in West Africa. I’d love to connect; would you be the correct person to speak with about offering my freelance translation services to (NGO name)?”

Several people who responded were very helpful and gave me the name of the correct contact person at their firm. No one was at all unfriendly. And this did give me some good ideas of how to expand my LinkedIn network in a more targeted way, rather than just accepting connection requests from other people, which is what I mostly do now.

How the results compare to warm e-mailing

Whenever I’ve done a warm e-mail campaign on this scale, I’ve always landed at least one new client right away. It seems like the, “As luck would have it, we have a French to English project in the pipeline that we could use some help with” response always comes in at some point, if I send out 70-100 warm e-mails.

In this campaign, that response never came, but I have a hunch that all of this activity made my profile more visible to people on LinkedIn, which resulted in two connection requests (sent by them to me) from people who work for translation agencies in Europe that look very good. I’m in the process of applying to them.

Takeaways and the broader strategy

As I mentioned above, I was a bit underwhelmed by this experiment as compared to the results I usually get from a similar number of warm e-mails. However, there are a few important caveats:

  • Several people did respond with helpful, encouraging information. It was far from a total bust.
  • I may need to change my mindset. For freelancers, LinkedIn may be more of a relationship-building/maintenance tool than a client acquisition tool.
  • I’ve realized that I need to be way more proactive about making LinkedIn connections with people I don’t know. I mostly restrict my connection requests to people I’ve met at conferences and whatnot, and I need to branch out.
  • I’d actually like to work for more agencies; LinkedIn strikes me as maybe a way around the industrial-scale “resource procurement” process that a lot of agencies use. One of the agency people I met on LinkedIn even told me, “just e-mail our translation services director your resume,” which is a lot better than going through their application process just to find out if we’re potentially a good fit for each other.
  • I don’t subcontract work to other translators or sell translations as an agency. Perhaps Premium is more helpful for those kinds of things.
  • Most importantly, I think that LinkedIn doesn’t really lend itself to a “hit and run” strategy which is basically what I was doing. For example, I probably should have focused on connection requests first, then perhaps written a LinkedIn article that would be of interest to those new connections and maybe sent them the link once we were already connected. In reality, I could still do that!

Bottom line, the response rate I got to InMails was about the same as to warm e-mails, and the roughly 50% response/lack of response to connection requests really surprised me. In terms of cost, I’d say that Premium falls into the category of “expensive or not expensive,” depending on how you look at it. The least expensive Premium membership costs about $360 a year. If you compare that to sending e-mails (free/already paying for it), that’s a decent chunk of money. But if you landed even one moderate-sized translation job from it, Premium would be well worth the money.

If I want to do more with LinkedIn on the client side–because I do post lots of stuff for other translators there–I think I need to sink a good deal more time and effort into it, and do things like write LinkedIn articles, send interesting pieces of content to my connections, etc. I can’t say I was dazzled by the results of this experiment, but I was also using it for a purpose (active prospecting rather than relationship-building) that may not have been realistic.

Readers, over to you: anyone love or hate LinkedIn Premium? Other suggestions on how to use it?


Corinne McKay

I want to translate a book NOW!

The right time to translate a book?

Lots of us have more time on our hands during the pandemic. Maybe your work volume has dropped, or maybe there are other factors at play. My work volume has been fairly steady, but many of my non-work activities have been cancelled, or take up much less time than they used to because they’re happening via Zoom. Whatever the case, it seems like book translation is in the air; lots of former students have contacted me during the pandemic, looking for book translation advice. It’s definitely a good time to dive into one of those, “If only I had the time” projects, but book translation can also be daunting. If you don’t want to go through the lengthy process of identifying a book you’d like to translate, seeing whether the rights to your language are available, looking for a target-language publisher, waiting for the rights transfer to happen, etc., what are the options? There are actually a few!

What’s your goal?

Book translation is very different from commercial translation. Specifically, most people’s primary reason for doing commercial translation is to make money. Perhaps there are some people out there who would translate shareholder agreements and real estate leases if they weren’t getting paid for it…but I’m guessing that’s a tiny minority in our profession! But when it comes to book translation, money may be your primary motivation, or no motivation at all. Before you dive into book translation, ask yourself (and be honest), “Is my goal to…”

  1. Make money
  2. Pursue my own intellectual enrichment
  3. Bring a specific work or author to light in my language
  4. See my name in print
  5. Something else

Answering those questions before you get going will save you a lot of pain. Attitudes toward money in the book translation world are all over the place. For you, maybe it’s a labor of love that might happen to pay something. Maybe it’s an addition to your commercial translation business. Maybe you’ve just always wanted to translate a book. Whatever the case, identify your goal before you go any further, and specifically answer the question of how much you care about earning money from your book translation.

My take on the money question

I love translating books. My dream job would be to translate books, teach classes, and interpret. However, there’s no way I could live off book translation alone. Theoretically, my agency clients pay 15-16 cents per word, but that’s only in theory, because these days I find very few/almost no agencies that are willing to pay those rates. So in practice, my standard translation rate is now what my direct clients pay–generally 20-25 US cents per word. By contrast, my book translation clients generally pay around 10 cents per word, and the work is a lot more time-consuming than much of my commercial translation work. More rounds of revisions, more going back and forth with the author, suggesting text for the cover, the title, and on and on. I love it–but/and it’s too low-paying for me to live off until I’m semi-retired.

I generally try to translate one or two books a year on long deadlines, so that I’m not turning down commercial translation work to work on them. For me, this is a good compromise between waiting until I’m semi-retired, and trying to live off 10 cents a word. Everyone has to find their own balance here, but I think you have to be honest with yourself about how much money matters before you seek out or accept book translation work.

Be aware that in the literary world, some people think that wanting to make money from book translations is kind of an icky topic, as if everyone should be doing it for the greater cultural good. That’s a nice idea, but it’s also OK to want/need to make money from your book translations.

So you want to start right now

Translating books for traditional publishers can be gratifying and lucrative. I love the fact that when I translate for a traditional publisher, I just translate. They handle the proofreading, graphic design, and production of the book. Of course there’s a downside, in that you have to find publishers or they have to find you. I’ve translated for three traditional publishers: one was a windfall (another translator who accepted the book translation and then couldn’t finish it), two (for the same publisher) were from a cold marketing e-mail that I sent to the publisher’s acquisitions editor suggesting a French to English book translation (that didn’t work out, but they had two other French manuscripts on the shelf waiting to be translated), and one found me via my website.

It’s definitely possible to find work translating for traditional publishers. And as a beginning book translator, you may inadvertently try things that experienced translators wouldn’t do–and sometimes they work! When I sent that cold e-mail to the publisher’s acquisitions editor, I had no idea that most people don’t do that. Whoops. But in the end, it worked out really well. Moral of the story: if you have an out-of-the-box idea for contacting publishers, go for it.

If you’d rather not wait for publishers to find you, there are a few options. If you’re that translator who says, “I want to start translating a book today,” here’s what I’d suggest.

A bit about rights

Many would-be book translators don’t know that rights are the linchpin of any book translation deal. Two questions: are the rights for your language available, and is the rights-holder interested in selling/transferring them, must be answered before you can translate a book. I guess you could secretly translate the book and never show it to anyone, but if you want to make it public in any way, you, or a publisher, has to obtain the rights to the book.

Rights can be complicated. Authors often think they own the translation rights, when sometimes they don’t. Publishers don’t always respond to inquiries about whether the rights for a specific language are available. Publishers sometimes buy the rights and then never have the book translated. Rights-holders sometimes–for reasons I have yet to understand–don’t want to sell the translation rights to a book that’s still in print in the original language.

I can attest, because I’ve sold the translation rights to my own books, that making money does not get a whole lot easier than selling the translation rights to a book you already wrote. You negotiate and sign a contract with the party purchasing the rights, they pay you, and you’re done. So I find it a bit perplexing that publishers aren’t more enthusiastic about, for example, selling the translation rights to their books to translators who would then self-publish the translations. Translation rights are basically free money once the book is published in the original language, but perhaps publishers see it as too downmarket to be associated with self-publishing? Maybe someone who knows more than I do about the publishing industry has insights into this.

Translating books in the public domain

I’m somewhat puzzled as to why more people don’t do this. Public-domain book sites such as Project Gutenberg have literally thousands of books that you can legally translate because they’re in the public domain. Remember, “free” (as in free of charge) and “public domain” (as in not copyrighted or out of copyright) are two different things. If you’re going to go this route, make sure your book is in the public domain, not just cost-free. For example on Project Gutenberg, the vast majority of books on the site are in the public domain in the US, but some are not, and Project Gutenberg can’t advise you on the copyright situation in every country in the world. Here’s their page on copyright and permissions for reference.

On the Project Gutenberg site, there are 16 languages that have more than 50 books, and some very small diffusion languages (Occitan, Ojibwa, and Old English, to name a few) that have at least one book.

So there’s a quick-start option at your fingertips: translate a book in the public domain, and self-publish the translation using one of the many self-publishing services out there. But how do I go about self-publishing the book, you ask? Well, if you want a super-simple option, just make a PDF and sell it from your website or a service like E-junkie. If you want to make a real book, I recommend Joanna Penn’s website to teach you all the options.

Other options

You could also…

  1. Use (with caution), sites like Babelcube that match up self-published authors with translators on a royalties-only basis. Here’s a guest post on my blog by a translator who used Babelcube. Caution: I know several translators who have had great experiences on Babelcube. I’ve also heard from translators who earned around $5 total in royalties (no kidding) from their translations, and worse yet, from one translator who thinks that the author absconded with the translation and published it somewhere else (so no payment to the translator) and from another translator who said that the book was never published on all the channels that Babelcube promises.
  2. Poke around for self-published authors who want their book translated and would give you the translation rights for free or sell them at a reasonable cost. I charged $1,500 for the translation rights to How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, because I felt it was an amount that the translators could recoup with a realistic amount of sales. Other self-published authors might charge more or less, but you might find some whose price is in the budget of a freelance translator.
  3. Other ideas? Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Other resources

Book translation is a real rabbit hole of information, so it’s good to read and study up before you get going. I would recommend:

Readers, over to you! Any other questions or comments about book translation?


Corinne McKay

The Cambridge Conference Interpretation Course: a participant’s-eye view of the 2020 remote edition

The Cambridge Conference Interpretation Course, or CCIC, is legendary among conference interpreters. Held each year since 1984 in Cambridge, England, it brings together a group of motivated, experienced interpreters and expert instructors for two weeks in August. This year was—stop me if this is starting to sound familiar—a bit different. I think many people anticipated that the CCIC would be cancelled, because the online experience couldn’t possibly measure up to the location for which the CCIC is named. However, husband-and-wife organizers Julia Poger and Chris Guichot de Fortis proved that it would take more than a pandemic to keep them down. They moved CCIC fully online, which opened up the opportunity for non-Europe-based interpreters (like me!) to participate without having to travel to the UK for two weeks. I’ve written up some reflections on my experiences here, and if you have other specific questions about the CCIC, feel free to ask in the comments! I’m a native English speaker, so I participated in the CCIC as an English A, French B student.

What the CCIC is

As mentioned above, the CCIC is a legendary professional training course for conference interpreters who work between English and one or more than one other language: French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Italian. It’s normally held at the Hilton Cambridge City Centre, and features an impressive student-teacher ratio of no more than 2 ½ students per teacher. As the CCIC’s website says, “The Course is centred on teaching simultaneous interpretation from an array of general and technical speeches delivered by video, specialist guest speakers, and members of the teaching faculty.”

You have to apply to participate in the CCIC, and you need to be able to interpret at a professional level in order to apply. Although I don’t (yet!) do much conference interpreting work, about 80% of my court interpreting work is simultaneous interpreting into French for French-speaking defendants, so I was interested in participating in the CCIC to:

-improve the accuracy and fluency of my into-French interpreting
-improve the flow and intonation of my into-English interpreting
-get an honest assessment of whether I should pursue conference interpreting
-improve my simultaneous interpreting in general, because the bulk of my interpreting studying was highly targeted at passing the Colorado state court interpreter exam

 I applied to the CCIC and was accepted! I (correctly) anticipated that I would be one of the least experienced students in the group, so I blocked out about an hour a day of practice time for two months before the class started. Fortunately the CCIC even has an article on their website on how to prepare (http://www.cciconline.net/howtoprepare.php), including some very helpful mindset tips: get ready to be a small fish in a big pond, get ready to accept feedback without taking it personally, expect the course to be really, really hard. Start day was August 1, and I was excited to get going, especially since nearly everything I had looked forward to since March had been cancelled!

The logistics of this year’s edition

Prior to the CCIC start date, we received tons of detailed information about how the logistics would work. As a course organizer myself, I found the level of information really impressive. We were set up on Slack for messaging and discussions, Zoom for presentations and a few interpreting sessions, and the remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) platform Voiceboxer for the bulk of the interpreting sessions. This sounds like a lot of platforms—and it is—but each served a different and crucial purpose, and I think it was an excellent decision on Julia and Chris’ part to use the remote edition as an opportunity to experience RSI, which I had zero experience with.

A day in the life

When I signed up for the CCIC, I knew that the schedule would mean an early start given my time zone. 6:00 AM, to be exact. I reasoned that if we were on site in Cambridge I’d be jet-lagged for the first week there and the first week home, so I just tried my best to go to bed early for the 5:00 AM wakeup call, and that mostly went fine.

Every day in the CCIC is packed. Over the course of the two weeks, we interpreted 27 speeches, plus various special events; we received group feedback and individual feedback (sometimes multiple times a day); we worked in language-specific groups; we had classes on special topics related to conference interpreting; we also had extracurricular events like films.  If that sounds a bit overwhelming, it is. We had over 80 instructional hours in two weeks; by comparison a typical university course involves 35-45 instructional hours per semester.

The CCIC instructors are amazing; they are all working interpreters, many of whom work in very high-level positions in international institutions in Europe. And—no pressure—they’re constantly dropping in and listening to you while you’re interpreting, so that they can give you detailed feedback later. The speeches we interpreted ran the gamut of topics: technical, non-technical, concrete, esoteric, fast speakers, slow speakers, etc.

For the actual interpreting, most of the time we worked in virtual booths in VoiceBoxer, and we were allowed to pick our own partners or sign up solo and let someone pick us. I really enjoyed that, because the instructors encouraged us to listen to our booth partners and give feedback, which I found very helpful. VoiceBoxer also has good capabilities to do relay interpreting. I had never served as a relay or interpreted from a relay, so that was a whole new experience.

Every CCIC day ran eight to nine hours; that sounds like a crazy amount of time to spend online, but I found it pretty doable. It was cognitively more demanding than a similar in-person event (keeping all of those Slack channels and Zoom links straight), but physically less demanding, because I was just going to my own office and staying there all day, as if I were working.

Absorbing all of that feedback

Interpreting is a bit like playing a musical instrument. You get better only by “performing” for people who are better than you, and having them give you honest feedback. Except…all of us know that honest feedback can be hard to take, especially when it’s about something as personal as interpreting. My advice to anyone wanting to get the most out of the CCIC or a similar course is:

  • Keep telling yourself what you know is true: You’re there to learn. And you learn from having your strengths and weaknesses pointed out in very specific ways, so that you can do more of what’s going right and less of what’s not going right. Expect it to be cringe-worthy at times. A couple of the instructors observed that I click my tongue against my teeth when I don’t know what to say. I know that I do this (because I hear it on recordings), and it was awkward to have it pointed out, but it helped me to develop a workaround (pressing my tongue against my bottom teeth when I’m not speaking, which also helps my pronunciation of the letter “r” in French, another perpetual problem!).
  • Just listen. You’ll reflexively want to defend yourself: you don’t usually make that mistake, the speaker was fast, the video was glitching, you were relaying off someone who was struggling, you were tired, you were hungry, whatever. Don’t say any of that. Take notes on what the instructors tell you and look for common threads in both a positive and negative way.
  • Have clear goals going into the course, and keep reminding yourself of  those goals so that you can measure your progress. “Getting better at interpreting” is amorphous and happens very incrementally. It’s much more helpful to ask yourself  things like, “In that last speech, was I focusing more on ideas instead of words?” “When I work into my B language, am I getting better at using shorter sentences and speaking clearly?” “When I know I can’t keep up, am I focusing on the key ideas?”

In sum

I loved (loved) my experience in the CCIC and would highly recommend it to anyone else who wants to improve their conference interpreting skills. I learned so much from the instructors and also from the other participants. As one of the least experienced people in the group, I also had the most to learn from everyone, and even when I felt discouraged, I really tried to keep telling myself that I was there to improve.

The CCIC is such an intense experience that you can expect to make measurable progress by the end. Expect some low moments; during one technical speech where I was interpreting into French, I gave the microphone back to my boothmate (who was French A), because I honestly just couldn’t do it. But I found that that type of thing was actually an advantage of the remote edition: instead of having a crash and burn moment and then having to go to dinner with everyone, I was able to chalk it up to the learning process and move on.

The CCIC organizers hope to return to the in-person model in 2021 and I’d actually be interested in attending again if that happens. However, I was incredibly impressed with the organization of this remote edition and would definitely encourage other people to participate in a future remote edition if that happens!