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Corinne McKay

Goals for 2012: are you halfway there?

Shockingly enough, June 30, and with it the end of the second quarter of 2012, is on Saturday. It’s a great time of year to evaluate your progress on your 2012 goals, while you still have six months left before December 31. Before you panic and refuse to think about any goals at all, give yourself some slack. You still have six months, maybe your goals have changed since January 1, and now is a good time to refocus. So ask yourself:

  • What exactly were you planning to do this year? Did you write down some goals in January or just formulate some ideas in your head? Were some of your goals more critical than others? Have you achieved something that you hadn’t set as a goal but that felt good nonetheless?
  • How are you doing on your critical goals? If you haven’t made any progress on them, why? If you’ve branched out in other directions, why?
  • What’s your plan for the next six months? Keep chipping away at your general 2012 goals? Set some new ones? Take a break?

I know it’s always hard to go first, so I’ll go first! Overall, I feel good about the first half of 2012. In terms of work volume and income, the first quarter was slow-ish; not scary slow, but slow enough that I wanted things to pick up for the rest of the year. After finally getting my act together to do a direct client marketing campaign that had been on the back burner for approximately forever (one goal achieved!), the second quarter roared along at almost double my target income. So from the financial standpoint, things are looking good. My family is spending the summer in Switzerland for my husband’s job and I don’t have to stress out about how much I work while we’re here, which is a good feeling.

I also did a bit more marketing for my online course and my book, and three consecutive sessions of the class were full. Another goal achieved! My next book, a compilation of entries from this blog, is ABC (all but cover) and just today I updated my professional website for the first time in about two years. My super colleague Eve Bodeux motivated me to buy and learn Trados Studio 2011 and whaddaya know, I love it.

Not that 2012 has been all roses and kittens. During the past few months I’ve been largely in survival mode, working nearly every evening and barely keeping up with my non-translation tasks. On the day before we left for Switzerland, I answered 97 backlogged e-mails and my Inbox still wasn’t empty. In addition, I put a fair amount of time into some direct client bids that didn’t come to fruition; of course we all know that this is just part of the ebb and flow and freelancing, but it’s still a downer when it happens. So, my primary goal for the second half of 2012 is to try to achieve a better balance between sanity and income by continuing to work on marketing, finding new sales channels for my book and having specific tasks that I want to work on when I’m not translating.

Readers, how about you?


Corinne McKay

Speaking of Translation call recording

On June 13, Eve Bodeux and I broadcast the latest installment in our series of Speaking of Translation conference calls. This call focused on “taking your freelance business on the road,” and we talked about issues related to working while you’re in another country for an extended period of time. With some great input from Tess Whitty of Swedish Translation Services, we answered questions related to technology, mobile communications, choosing a location for your freelance sabbatical, including your family in the sabbatical and managing your money while overseas. You can listen to the recording (it’s about 45 minutes) without downloading anything; just hop on over to the Speaking of Translation website!


Corinne McKay

Webinar on remote interpreting

On January 25 at noon New York time (the same time as the Speaking of Translation question and answer call), my good friend and colleague Cris Silva is presenting what looks like a fabulous webinar for ATA, on webcast and telephone interpreting. Cris does a lot of remote interpreting for high-profile events, so I’m sure that this webinar will be an excellent learning opportunity!


Corinne McKay

Update on communication tools

Back in March, I wrote a post about my search for a different office phone setup. I had been using a custom ring number (inexpensive but doesn’t allow separate outgoing messages for the home and office numbers) and had excluded the option of a business cell phone, simply because I dislike carrying and talking on a cell phone (there, I said it!). After much hemming and hawing and gnashing of teeth, I decided to switch my office phone line to Vonage’s minimum VOIP (Internet phone) plan, and around the same time I purchased a WebEx Event Center account for my translation webinar business.

My verdict on both of these services is: meh. Which, now that it’s been added to the Collins English Dictionary, is a legitimate expression of indifference and mediocrity. So here we go with the details:

For now, I’m sticking with Vonage, but I don’t love them. I have their “US & Canada 300” plan, which runs $11.99 per month plus taxes and fees. I set it up myself with no problems, Vonage ported my custom ring number with no problems, and the service worked as soon as I connected the Vonage box. Given the overall reputation of telcos and customer service, you have to give them credit for that! However, the sound quality on the Vonage line is far from stellar. It’s definitely not as clear as a land line or even Skype; I haven’t had any dropped calls, but the sound quality just is not smooth: lots of blips and skips and missed half-syllables, which can be irritating on a business call. And it’s worth noting that my DSL connection is fast enough that Skype, YouTube, etc. are no problem. In addition, the outgoing sound (meaning what the person I’m talking to hears) seems to cut out completely for a second or two if I’m talking on the Vonage line and my home land line rings. Still, for $16 a month including taxes, it’s workable. I mainly have the line so that my clients get a nice, professional outgoingl message, and so that I can update the message when I’m out of the office. One Vonage feature I’ve really come to love is the e-mailed .wav files of voicemail messages. When I’m away for a few days, for example at the ATA conference, I can just listen to my voicemails on my netbook and then decide if I need to respond. No more calling the office line a few times a day to check for messages! Executive summary: not a bad value for the cost, but not advisable if you talk on the phone a great deal for business.

On the other hand, WebEx proved to be a fairly crashing disappointment. Speaking of Translation purchased a subscription to Event Center 100 for $99 a month, a fairly large investment for our small venture. However, we were convinced that WebEx was the webinar platform of choice for enterprise-quality events, so we felt that the investment would pay off. It took us a few tries to get the platform working (and we’re not technophobes!) and the user interface has some definite flaws. For example when you schedule an event, the default number of attendees is “99999,” regardless of the number of attendees that your account allows. So, if you forget to change that number, your webinar can be oversubscribed before you realize the error. In addition, the interface allows you to enable both the over-the-phone audioconference option and the VOIP audioconference option, but they are not compatible with each other; and that’s before you find out that the VOIP feature is essentially unusable due to its poor sound quality. On three of the webinars we hosted, the presenter’s audio connection suddenly dropped in the middle of the session (different presenters using different phone providers) and our attendees had many problems configuring WebEx’s viewer widget to view our live webinars and our recordings. WebEx’s tech support reps were always polite and helpful, but in the end it took a huge amount of our time to resolve (or attempt to resolve) these problems and we ended up issuing a lot of complimentary webinar vouchers to make up for them. There are also some features that seem pretty basic that WebEx just does not have: no on-hold or waiting music for attendees, no way to block attendees from hearing what the presenters are saying before the session starts, etc. So, we’re all through with WebEx for now!

On a more positive note, I recently discovered a very neat audioconferencing tool, FreeConferenceCallHD. Like other free audioconference services, this one allows your call attendees to phone a toll number and participate in your conference call while you control things via a web dashboard. The dashboard allows you to mute and unmute people, record the call, etc. The very appealing feature of FreeConferenceCallHD is the option for attendees to connect by Skype, using a Skype-to-Skype contact (free) rather than a Skype-to-phone contact. For example, attendees just add “freeconferencecallhd.XXXXXXXXXX” (where the Xs represent your toll dial-in number) as a Skype contact; the contact request is automatically accepted, then the attendee initiates a call to that number and they’re placed into the audioconference. This is nice because it eliminates international access number problems; no more “I live in the Czech Republic but I have a Slovenian cell phone number, so what number should I call???”  I’ve conducted two very successful tests with this platform; at first I was honestly skeptical that a free service could provide a high-quality product, but the two calls I’ve done have honestly gone better than any of the WebEx sessions that we did. So, this looks like an attractive option for 2012!


Corinne McKay

5 things to do before 2012

Hello readers! Thoughts on Translation is back from an incredible two weeks in Costa Rica: we visited Corcovado National Park and the Arenal volcano area and it was truly amazing. I highly recommend Corcovado Adventures Tent Camp and the Sirena ranger station for a truly off-the-beaten-track experience. Think wild tapirs wandering down the beach and 10-foot crocodiles floating in the surf (seriously!). We rented a small but beautiful house in Arenal and had a lot of fun rafting with Costa Rica Descents, paddleboarding with Desafio and zip-lining with EcoGlide; I skipped their famous Tarzan Swing but my husband and my daughter loved it! And now…it’s seven degrees here in Colorado and we have eight inches of snow in our front yard. I’m not completely sure why we came back from Costa Rica but there’s plenty of translating to be done, so I’m trying to focus on the positive and look forward to ski season!

While I was on vacation, I started thinking about wrapping up 2011 and setting goals for 2012. I’ve assembled a list of five things I think every freelance translator should do before 2012, and I hope that you’ll add your own in the comments! Addendum: In catching up on Google Reader, I just found this post on the same topic from Sara Freitas-Maltaverne. Excellent suggestions for those who read French!

  1. Do a searching and fearless assessment of 2011. Did you meet your financial goals or did you fall short? Did you finish the major items on your business to-do list or are they still taunting you from the sticky note on your monitor? Think about what needs to change. If you’re like me, some of the same goals appear on your goal list over and over. It took me years (literally) to realize that when that happens, it means that my current method for achieving those goals is irreparably broken. For example I had been trying to finish the second edition of my book for literally three years. Finally I decided that I just had to block out an hour a day and treat that time as sacrosanct, only to be used to work on the book. I won’t say it was easy to follow through on that, but the project got finished! So if you keep saying you’re going to… (upgrade your computer, learn a new TM tool, use your speech recognition software more, attend more client networking events, have a face-to-face meeting with at least one client a month, or whatever) and it hasn’t happened yet, don’t just write it on the list for 2012, make a new plan for actually accomplishing it.
  2. Make any end-of-year purchases or contributions. Before you make your final tax payment for 2011, it’s a good time to burn some money out of the business account if you have a surplus. If you pay your 2012 professional association membership dues before December 31, you can deduct them from your 2011 income. If you need a new piece of durable goods (printer, expensive software, office furniture, netbook, etc.), you can decrease your 2011 taxable income by buying it now. Ditto with contributions to most, although not all, retirement accounts. I have an individual 401K for my corporation, which has the advantage of having a very high contribution limit but the disadvantage that the withdrawals will probably be taxed as ordinary income once I’m old enough to take money out of the account. Other investment vehicles such as the Roth IRA work in the opposite manner: your contribution may not be tax-deducible, but your withdrawals may be. Definitely ask your accountant or financial planner about the pluses and minuses of various year-end contributions.
  3. Get your 2011 deductions in order. Make sure that if you are claiming more than $600 of subcontracting expenses to any one person or corporation, you get their tax data and send them a 1099. And make sure to claim every legal deduction that you can. I don’t like to stretch the rules, but I’m always finding new deductions that I was unaware of. This year’s: if you have kids age 12 or under, you may be able to deduct up to $3,000 of summer day camp costs per child as work-related dependent care. Make sure to get the camp’s tax ID information and make sure that you meet the requirements for the deduction; for example in most cases you cannot claim any work-related dependent care expenses (day care, summer camp or otherwise) if your spouse doesn’t work, and if your kids go to sleepaway camp, you may have to research whether the deduction applies.
  4. Decide whether you are going to raise your rates. I find that with my agency clients, it’s helpful to raise my rates a little bit every year rather than trying to impose a large increase all at once. If you’ve been thinking of raising your rates, the end of the year provides a good reason to do so. You can even prepare a rate sheet with your 2012 rates and send it out to your clients individually.
  5. And of course…start setting your goals for 2012! Whether it’s to earn more, work less, diversify your client base, upgrade your skills or attend some new conferences, now is the time to think about next year. Think about how quickly 2011 went: doesn’t it seem like a short time ago that you were setting your 2011 goals?

Overall I feel quite positive about 2011. In contrast with the larger world economy, the translation industry is still booming and I’ve had as much work as I could handle for most of the year. In terms of goals, I finally (finally!) polished off the second edition of my book, but I could have done more with my direct client marketing campaign. That’s the other advantage of reviewing 2011 in early December: still three weeks left to salvage those lingering to-do items!