First, note that the title of this post is not “How to do a good job on a rush job,” because often the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Realistically, no translator does her/his best work under extreme time pressure, but the nature of the industry is such that deadlines are often tight. So, when a [...]
Archive for July, 2008
How to do an acceptable job on a rush job
Posted in Translation quality, Translation technique on July 29, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Think like the clients you wish you had
Posted in Links, Marketing on July 28, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Amybeth Hale, a Sourcing Strategist (one of those jobs your high school guidance counselor didn’t know existed!) who writes the blog Research Goddess, offers some excellent advice in her post Where do I go to find people?. We translators could replace “people” with “clients” and her advice is directly applicable to our businesses. Amybeth comments [...]
Finding the time
Posted in Uncategorized on July 25, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Time management is an aspect of freelancing that many people struggle with. In one sense, a freelancer’s time belongs to her or him, which is a beautiful thing. Rather than the métro, boulot, dodo (an expression too expressive to be translated!) life of the office worker, a freelancer can make the 10-step commute from the [...]
I want to neglect the remainder of my life with you
Posted in Humor on July 22, 2008 | 2 Comments »
At some point, mocking bad machine translation will surely get old (or machine translation will improve to the point that it won’t be so funny anymore). But since that point hasn’t yet arrived, take a coffee break and hop on over to Jill Sommer’s blog for a YouTube video about machine-translated love gone wrong.
News from the ATA TCD Conference
Posted in Technology, Translation industry news on July 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The American Translators Association Translation Company Division held its 9th annual conference in Denver this past weekend. This was a high-quality conference, even for those of us who are technically freelancers and not translation companies; the presentations were very well done and it was a good chance to get an agency’s-eye view of the industry. [...]
Wordfast: seeing other platforms
Posted in Technology on July 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Today I attended the ATA Translation Company Division conference in Denver. Despite the fact that I’m not a translation company, this conference has been well worth attending due to the quality of the presenters and the opportunity to get some perspectives on the industry from the agency viewpoint. Wordfast is one of the exhibitors at [...]
Is Wordfast divorcing Microsoft Word?
Posted in Technology on July 18, 2008 | 4 Comments »
During a recent visit to the website of Wordfast, I noticed that Wordfast 6.0 (“Coming Soon!”) promises to be a “Standalone, platform independent translation environment.” There are a few things that pique one’s curiosity here. 1) “Standalone”: does this mean no more having to use Wordfast from within MS Word? 2) “Platform independent”= as in, [...]
Some thoughts on translation specializations
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on July 16, 2008 | 6 Comments »
One of the issues with which beginning translators most frequently struggle is specializing: what to specialize in, how to decide what to specialize in, what the most/least requested specializations are, how important it is to specialize, etc. While there aren’t too many hard and fast rules when it comes to translation specializations, here are a [...]
The basics of cold contacting
Posted in Getting started as a translator, Marketing on July 10, 2008 | 3 Comments »
For beginning and experienced translators alike, there is often no way around the need to cold contact potential clients. Beginners need to find those crucial first few clients, and those of us who are established in the industry may want to look for better-paying work, work with direct clients or work in a new specialization. [...]
A little bit of this, a little bit of that
Posted in Freelancing on July 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Gabe Bokor’s blog post “Specialist or Generalist” gives some excellent insights into the fact that translators need to be both specialists and generalists. Gabe gives the example of a medical translator who also needs to be familiar with electronic instrumentation, or an environmental translation project that might also include subjects like chemistry and meteorology. I [...]
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Corinne McKay is an ATA-certified French to English translator specializing in international development, law and non-fiction books. She launched Thoughts on Translation in February, 2008 as a way to connect and share ideas with freelance translators around the world.
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