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If you missed the webinar that I presented for SDL last month on “Breaking into the direct client market,” here’s the link to the recording. About 800 people attended live and the feedback was positive; as I mentioned in the Q&A section, I’ll be writing a blog post to answer some of the questions that we couldn’t get to during the live session. Thanks to everyone who attended!

Have you submitted? Thanks to Carolyn Yohn for creating this badge! What, you haven’t submitted yet? Here’s the form!

As has become my family’s summer tradition, we headed off on a bike trip for the month of July. Last year’s trip took us from Lake Geneva to Salzburg; this year we started in our very own driveway and wound our way through the Colorado mountains for three weeks, visiting Aspen, Crested Butte and Telluride, and ending with a visit to Mesa Verde National Park. As with any outdoor trip in the Rockies, combine equal parts of challenging and gorgeous, add in some good food and a few apocalyptic storms, and you’ve got the picture. The conditions ranged from pushing our bikes across snow fields:

…to lounging in the aspens next to beautiful mountain streams, to cranking over the formidable Cinnamon Pass, which at 12,600 feet, was the highest pass that any of us had ever biked. I remember it as being stunningly beautiful, but that may have just been the lack of oxygen!

As I’ve written about previously, I highly recommend a real vacation at least once a year as a way to remain enthusiastic about your job, recharge your creativity and give your family and friends some of your undivided attention. As opposed to last year’s completely computer-free trip, I purchased an iPod Touch for this trip in order to remain somewhat connected. Although I did not do any actual translation, I did really enjoy having the Touch along as a way to monitor my work e-mail. Also, I felt that the Touch was “just enough”–if I had taken my netbook, I think I would have felt compelled to work, and I knew that I really needed a break.

In the interim:

• Registration for the 2013 American Translators Association conference is now open! Check out the conference website here. I’m excited to present about time management with fellow ATA Director David Rumsey, and I’m also really looking forward to the excellent lineup of French sessions at the conference. Make your plans now to be in San Antonio, Texas from November 6-9!
• If you translate French to English or English to French, I also highly recommend Translate in Quebec City, which is this year’s edition of Chris Durban’s highly successful Translate in the Catskills conference. These are small conferences for premium-market translators, and they focus on very specific translation and writing skills. Grant Hamilton of Anglocom is organizing this year’s conference, to take place from August 29-31 at the Loew’s Le Concorde hotel in Quebec City.
• At this past weekend’s ATA Board meeting, the Colorado Translators Association was unanimously approved as ATA’s newest local chapter. Huge congratulations to CTA’s current Board for this successful application!
• The August session of my online course Getting Started as a Freelance Translator is full, but I’ve opened a new session that will begin on September 18.

I just updated the Speaking of Translation recordings page with a new recording: French to English orthopedics translator Joanne Archambault’s interview on finding direct clients through translation industry conferences. It’s the same recording that I ran in this post on my blog, just in a different location. But while you’re over there, you can also check out the Speaking of Translation archives, chock full of recordings on freelance sabbaticals abroad, all of your translation technology problems solved, insider tips for a thriving freelance business, and more!

Wondering how to find direct clients by meeting them in person at industry conferences? I recently interviewed a translator who did just that, and I think we can all learn a lot from her experiences:

Joanne Archambault is a French to English translator based in New Hampshire; she grew up fully bilingual in Canada and then earned a PhD in biology and an MBA from universities in the U.S. After a 15 year career in the medical research industry, Joanne was ready for a career and lifestyle change and decided to explore translation. She initially focused on general medical translation, but soon found an untapped niche in the orthopedic implants industry–the people who make artificial knees, hips, etc. In just over three years, Joanne has developed a booming business as the go-to translator for her target clientele: French orthopedic and trauma surgeons and small to medium-sized orthopedic implant companies.

I first met Joanne when she took my Getting Started as a Freelance Translator course a couple of years ago, and I recently interviewed her about her main marketing strategy: attending the annual convention and trade fair for orthopedic and trauma surgeons in France. This interview is fantastic if you’re looking to break into the direct client market using this type of strategy. Joanne describes exactly how she found and prepared for this conference, what she did while she was at the conference, and how she followed up with contacts afterward. As Joanne says in the interview, attending this one event (in 2010 and 2012) has taken her base of orthopedics-related direct clients from zero in 2010 to three in 2011 to twelve in 2012, with these clients now representing 45% of her total freelance income. I got a ton of new ideas from Joanne’s answers to my questions, so don’t miss this if you want to target direct clients by attending their industry conferences.

Here’s the link to the interview I recently did with Joanne. Just click the arrow and the recording (about half an hour) will stream directly off the site:

And some links that Joanne mentions in the recording:
Joanne’s French website: Traduction Ortho
Antidote, the French editing software that Joanne uses when e-mailing French clients

Also, here’s the French postcard that Joanne brought to the orthopedics conference: