As part of an upcoming overhaul of my professional website, I decided it was time for Thoughts on Translation to get a nice custom header image instead of the stock photos I’ve been using for the past two and a half years. Thanks to Brandon Kellogg of Denver-based Superfluent Design for this beautiful (in my opinion!) design inspired by the image on the cover of my book, and to Beth Hayden and Michelle Panulla of Blogging With Beth for managing and executing the website redesign!
Summer always brings great opportunities for travel, especially in our internationally-minded industry. And along with those travels come some great vacation photos from colleagues! Here (reprinted with Jiri’s permission) is one that made me laugh out loud: former ATA President Jiri Stejskal having trouble getting any work done during his vacation to the Czech Republic, because…
In his blog entries about this photo, Jiri reports that the sign (at Karlstejn Castle near Prague) actually says Interpreting Prohibited in the original Czech, and is posted at tourist attractions so that non-Czech speakers have to book a (more expensive) tour for foreigners rather than having someone interpret the Czech tour for them. Anyone else out there with some amusing translation-themed vacation photos?
Posted in Humor, Nubbin | 4 Comments »
Congratulations to the hardworking ATA members who have successfully launched the ATA Science and Technology Division. This division isn’t language specific, it’s open to translators in any language combination who translate science and technology materials. The new division is under the leadership of Acting Administrator Karen Tkaczyk and Acting Assistant Administrator Steven Marzuola.
Back in 2008, I wrote about Jost Zetzsche’s then-new website Translators Training, which offers side-by-side comparisons of 20 different translation tools (and shows how they translate the same Word document). I’ve always thought this website was a great idea, and Jost just announced that all of the Series 1 videos on the site are now free! If you want to go beyond the basics, the site offers a Premium Content subscription for 41.99 euros per year.
Posted in Translation industry news | 2 Comments »
My good friend and colleague Eve Bodeux is gathering input from freelancers and translation agencies for her upcoming presentation “Vendors and You: A Positive Partnership from the Start.” She’ll be presenting this session at the upcoming Vendor Management Seminar in Las Vegas.
Whether you’re a freelancer or you work for an agency, what factors are most important as you start a new business relationship? Here’s your chance to suggest ways that “the other side” of the industry (whichever side you’re on!) can get things off on the right foot. You can submit your input here.
Posted in Nubbin | 3 Comments »
In the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with a few freelancers who would like to work with direct clients but are afraid that they won’t get paid. One commented that she really enjoys working with agencies because of being able to check Payment Practices or a similar resource in order to determine the client’s creditworthiness. Although there is no Payment Practices for direct clients, I think that you can take some steps to ensure that direct clients will pay you, or to at least minimize the risk of nonpayment. I think that it’s useful to apply some or all of these steps depending on who the client is and how paranoid you are!:
- Get full contact information from the client, including their phone number, mailing address and physical address.
- Note whether the client is a member of any associations such as the Better Business Bureau to which you could report the client if they don’t pay you.
- Google the client; see what kind of information about them is floating around the Internet
- Ask for references from other freelancers or suppliers the client works with; ask those people about the client’s payment practices.
- Clearly state your rates, payment terms and acceptable payment methods. Ask the client to issue a purchase order confirming that information and listing the name, e-mail address and phone number of their accounts payable person.
- If you have doubts about the client or you are doing a large project for a first-time client, ask for partial or full payment in advance. I require 100% advance payment from anyone who is not an established business.
- Accept a variety of payment methods. For example, I accept checks in dollars, euros or pounds, wire transfers, ACH transfers and PayPal. This gives clients a few payment options, and I always stick to the arrangement that they pay their banking fees and I pay mine.
Obviously, not all of these ideas apply to all situations, and some people are just more trusting than others. Personally, I like to believe that clients are fundamentally honest but I always ask for a PO and for the accounts payable person’s contact information, and I always require individual clients to pay in full in advance. Also, out of curiosity: agency owners, how do you vet your clients’ creditworthiness?
Posted in Clients, Money | Leave a Comment »
Here at Thoughts on Translation, I’ve been working on a loosely organized series of posts inspired by summer. A few weeks ago I wrote about ways to handle summer as a freelancing mom or dad; now let’s talk about the importance of down time in our freelance lives.
In the not-so-distant past (I’m 38 and I can remember this), we didn’t really have to schedule or even think about down time because there were many fewer technological intrusions into our lives. For example, I was in high school when my family first purchased an answering machine and in college before I ever used e-mail. I even remember going to visit family friends in Canada who still had party line telephone service in the 1980s.
With all of our 21st century opportunities to be working/on call/plugged in at all times, it’s important to think about the importance of down time and how to schedule it so that our businesses remain viable but we don’t burn out. Here are a few suggestions, and feel free to add your own!
- Allow yourself to exclude certain types of technology from your life. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided that I just don’t want a smartphone, largely because the boundaries between my personal and work life are already so blurred. I respect (and even agree with) the reasons that people have and love smartphones, but I’m sticking with my prepaid cell phone that just makes phone calls.
- Schedule down time in various increments. For example, I think that most people need at least an hour of mental down time a day. In fact, I think that an unplugged hour can actually increase a freelancer’s productivity. Likewise, I think that one fully unplugged day a week is really beneficial. Here’s an interesting New York Times article on the concept of a “secular Sabbath,” in which the writer unplugs completely for one day a week; and if a die-hard New Yorker can do it, I bet you can too!
- If you can manage it financially, take at least one week of unplugged vacation time each year. For example, we took a family camping trip for a week at the beginning of this summer, and I made a deliberate decision not to take a laptop and to only turn my cell phone on once a day to check my work voice mail. In past years, I’ve gone as long as two weeks without checking e-mail at all. If you’re going to do this, I think it’s important to accept that there will be some opportunity cost; clients are not going to wait two weeks to hear back about their rush project. However, I find that this time to focus completely on my family is so valuable that it’s worth the loss of income.
- Spend at least some of your down time doing simple activities that you enjoy. It’s debatable whether down time is good for you if you spend the whole time trying not to think about who you want to be calling or texting or who might have e-mailed you. Instead, let yourself enjoy the kinds of activities that people did before the advent of high-speed Internet. Grow some of your own food; bike or walk somewhere that you would normally drive; sleep late or go to bed early; write a real paper letter to someone you care about; read magazines at the library for a couple of hours; find a nice patch of grass and just lie on it and look at the sky!
I really love the point that this article makes (it’s from the journal Science). The author, Irene Levine, closes by saying “Consider how many of your most creative thoughts occur not in front of a computer screen or at the bench but while you are showering, golfing, lying in bed, or taking a jog in the park?” Don’t you think she’s right? So this summer, make sure that you get some time away from work so that you can start the fall feeling rested and recharged!
Posted in Productivity | 3 Comments »
Happily for freelance translators everywhere, Alex Eames has revived his free ezine Tranfree. The current issue (71), features two excellent articles, one on “Getting the balance right: preventing and coping with staleness” by Alex himself, and “Tools that have brought smiles to my face, cheer to my heart and success in the mind-over-matter department (in no particular order)” by ever-popular translation technology guru Jost Zetzsche. I have to say that I love not only Alex’s writing style, but the fact that this ‘zine arrives in one’s inbox just as it did in the pre-RSS feed days. I’m glad to see Tranfree back in action!
Posted in Announcements | 3 Comments »
If you’re looking to move up in the translation market, more effective proofreading is critical. If you’re the type of person who cringes at the sight of an error in print, make sure that your translations aren’t contributing to the problem, and give your clients that extra quality step that marks your service as above average! Here are a few tips I’ve gleaned over the years, and feel free to add your own!
- It’s hard to proofread your own work, but sometimes you have to do it. A cross-editing partner is really invaluable if you work for direct clients. If you work for agencies and can’t afford to hire out your proofreading, try to do as thorough a job as possible on your own work.
- Proofread in a different format than the original. I prefer to proofread from a hard copy; I print the target document, then proofread in front of two computer monitors with the target document in one window and the source document in the other, so that I can make corrections as soon as I see the errors. If your work (i.e. Flash animations, graphics, etc.) doesn’t lend itself to being printed, at least try to change the size, font, color, anything to make the target text look different enough that you have to pay attention to it.
- Pay particular attention to easily-botched numbers and words. Check every digit in every number. Check every letter in every name and place name. Check every negative expression to make sure that you wrote the correct version (i.e. always versus never).
- Realize that the majority of errors consist of the wrong word, not a misspelled word. The spell-checker saves you from cracking a dictionary to remember whether recommendation has one m or two, but it doesn’t save you from typing fat instead of fact, or asses instead of assets, or any other number of mortifying blunders. So force yourself to slow down; when I took editing classes with Alice Levine, she advised pointing at each word with a pen, and also never proofreading when you’re tired.
- Watch out for your typical errors. For some reason, I habitually put the space in the wrong place when I’m typing two small words in a row, such as “tot his” instead of “to this.” Sometimes the spell-checker saves me (“thi stime” instead of “this time”) but “tot his” slips through!.
- While you’re at it, mark the errors in the source document. The client may or may not be concerned with these, but you can add a little value and it’s not much extra work. Also, I think it’s almost easier to find errors in your non-native language because you spent so many years drilling the correct spellings and conjugations!
Posted in Translation quality | 9 Comments »
This is a small tip but it really helped me on a recent project. Normally, OpenOffice Writer doesn’t allow you to wrap text around a table. So if you have a table on the left side of the page and text on the right side, it ends up looking like this:
This can be a problem when you’re translating something like an official document, and you need to reproduce the source formatting exactly.You can work around the problem by inserting your table into a frame (Insert>Frame) and making the frame’s border invisible (in the Frame dialog box, click the Borders tab and then set the border to None). Then, you get this:
It would be great if OpenOffice would just enable text flow around tables, but this seems like a fairly painless solution in the meantime!
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
- Kwintessential for including Thoughts on Translation in their top 10 translation blogs for 2010! And congratulations to the other winners, they’re all in my feed reader!
- Jonathan Goldberg for interviewing me on his blog “Le mot juste en anglais.” And thanks to Marianne Reiner for the French translation!
Posted in Links | 1 Comment »
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