Thoughts On Translation

If you’re looking for a quick reference sheet of proofreaders’ marks (and I promise, using them is so much faster than doing the corrections in longhand), here are two that seem useful: one from Merriam-Webster and one from Espresso Graphics. Both of these can be printed on one page, and they include helpful examples for each mark.

Like many independent professionals these days, I’ve started using a few social networking tools such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn and MySpace. My experience with them is fairly limited, but I’ve been thinking about some of the positives and negatives of using these websites for networking and marketing.

To me, the primary advantage of social networking sites is that they make it very easy for someone to find and contact you, especially if you don’t have a very visible website for your business. Rather than having to have your e-mail address, or searching for your website and then finding your contact information, the person who’s looking for you can simply type your name into the social networking site’s search box and contact you right from your page. In addition, social networking sites make it easy to find “friends of friends” who you might want to contact or work with, and you can also easily search for people who share a certain characteristic with you, like your alma mater, profession, home town, etc. Social networking sites also eliminate the need to keep an updated e-mail address book for people who you contact infrequently, since you can just contact them via the site.

Social networking sites are also a good way to cross-promote your blog if you have one. Facebook and Ning both allow you to feed your blog directly onto your page on their site (other social networking sites may offer this feature too, I just haven’t tried it!).

Of the sites listed above, LinkedIn is, to me, the most “professional” and also the most controllable. There is almost no room to include personal information, and other people can’t post anything to your page without your approval; for example if someone writes a recommendation about you, it doesn’t appear on your page until you approve it. On Facebook, you have to adjust your privacy settings quite carefully if you don’t want all of your “friends” to be able to see photos, comments, etc. that people have posted of and about you. Even if the most sordid moments of your life are far from tabloid fodder, you might not necessarily want your clients to see photos of you with 80’s hair or comments from your friends asking for your lasagna recipe, so this is something to consider when setting up your profile.

Ning is interesting in that it allows you to create your own social network for a group of people. Recently, the all-women freelancers group I’m in, Boulder Media Women set up a Ning site, and I also joined Office Walkers, a Ning group for people who use treadmill desks.

Overall, LinkedIn is my favorite of these networking sites; I don’t have to wade through a news feed about who’s playing online Scrabble or deal with flashing ads for weight loss products, and LinkedIn allows me to easily browse for people who I’d like to add to my network. So far, I’ve gotten many more business contacts through my blog than through LinkedIn or Facebook, but I think that these sites are worth joining in order to make yourself more visible on the Web.

Recently I’ve been taking some copy editing classes with Alice Levine, a Boulder-based editor and trainer whose praises I’ve sung here before. In the translation industry, I think it’s not uncommon that translators who earn a client’s trust are often “promoted” into the role of a translation editor, although very few of us have extensive training in editing in our target language. These classes have brought me to a few realizations about editing and how it applies to translation.

• I should have paid attention in 11th grade journalism class when we studied proofreaders’ marks. Now that I’ve spent six years writing longhand corrections on my own and other translators’ translations, I’m completely sold on the value of proofreaders’ marks. They’re much faster than crossing out and rewriting all of the corrected words, they fit better on a single-spaced page and they make the editing job a little more interesting too!
• Target language editing skills are critical to our work as translators. In my case, I’ve invested a great deal of my professional development time in maintaining and improving my source language skills, but very little time in improving my English language skills, which are critically important to the quality of my work.
• We translators get complacent about our target language skills. It’s rare that I hear into-English translators really get into the nuances of effect versus affect, insure versus ensure, that versus which, and in which cases you need or don’t need serial commas. Again, concepts such as these are critical to the quality of our translations and shouldn’t be ignored.

Another great tip I picked up in Alice’s class is the variety of correspondence courses offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Grad School. It’s an unlikely location (or maybe not!) for affordable (about $355 each) graduate level correspondence courses on topics such as Editing, Proofreading, Project Management and Business Law, but this looks like a true gold mine of topics that relate to the work that most freelance translators do. Many of these are traditional/offline correspondence courses where you complete the work on paper and mail it in to an instructor who gives you feedback before you progress to the next lesson. Has anyone out there taken one of these courses? And if so, what were your impressions?

When asked how their work load is these days, most translators I know and work with will respond, “Never busier.” This seems, not surprisingly, to have led to a situation where translation buyers are having an increasingly difficult time recruiting qualified translators, so I’ve put together a few pieces of advice on best practices for contacting translators. We’ll assume that the translation buyer has already reviewed the translator’s credentials (i.e. on the translator’s website, translation association directory or through a word-of-mouth referral).

• Realize that in this market and in this industry, recruitment is sales. This may sound a little harsh, but a colleague who is a former recruiter of translators really drove this point home to me. Translators who are highly qualified and are already working full time or more than full time for their regular clients have little incentive to work with new and unknown clients merely because the client is offering work. When you are recruiting a new translator and you know or assume that that person is very busy already, acknowledge that you are in effect selling that person on the idea of working for you.
• Introduce yourself. Although the translator may be fully booked at that time, you don’t want to create a negative impression of your company. At a minimum, I like it when a project manager says, “My name is … and I work for …; we found your contact information in the ATA directory and wondered if you might have some availability for an upcoming project.” Personally I find it very off-putting when an potential new client opens the conversation with, “Hi, I work with a translation company in … and we wondered if you could translate 25,000 words in the next 10 days” or something similar.
• Choose a negotiation point. Among the main parameters of a translation, such as rate, deadline, payment terms, format, close collaboration with other translators, being required to use special software, etc., a translator may be able to make some concessions in one area, but certainly not in a number of areas at once. If you need rush work or if you need a translator to be willing to work in a team with other translators and exchange glossaries multiple times a day or to wait two months to get paid, make this your main negotiation point rather than asking for rush work using non-standard software and at a discount rate and payment terms of Net 60.
• Expect to offer complete details in order for the translator to commit. Given the nature of the industry, most translators work on very tight deadlines and accept work on an ongoing basis, so an in-demand translator’s schedule may change quickly. To smooth the process, be prepared with the key details of the project: rate, deadline, number of words, subject matter, format, etc. and provide these to the translator during your first contact.
• Confirm everything in writing. I don’t use a lengthy terms of service agreement or freelance services contract, but I do think that it helps when a client confirms everything in writing. A simple e-mail such as “As we discussed, you will translate the 7,500 word document we sent and return it by 9AM Eastern Time on Friday. You will be paid X cents per source/target word” can go a long way toward avoiding misunderstandings between translators and clients.

When a translator and a translation client are located in different countries, the usual issues that have to be resolved with payments (rate, payment terms, etc.) are joined by an additional question, that of the payment method. From the perspective of a U.S.-based translator, here are a few international payment method options and some of the pros and cons that I’ve found:

• Check in U.S. dollars. Some larger agencies have either a branch in the U.S. or an account denominated in dollars. No problem here!
• Wire transfer into the translator’s U.S. account. Pro: Relatively uncomplicated, each party can pay their own fees. Con: Fees for incoming and outgoing fees vary by bank. I have my business account with Washington Mutual and they charge $12 for an incoming foreign wire transfer. Some credit unions don’t charge at all, and I’ve seen fees as high as $50 for incoming foreign transfers.
• PayPal. Pro: Easy to set up, can bill the client in various currencies, various ways for the client to fund the payment. Con: Fees vary dramatically from zero for a domestic eCheck to up to 5% for foreign credit cards. I learned this the hard way when I ended up paying $150 to receive $3,000 from an overseas client. I had been chasing them for the money for a while and didn’t want to reject the payment, but the size of the fee really turned me off using PayPal for large transactions since you sometimes can’t control how the client funds them.
• Overseas bank account. Pro: Easier for the client, can allow the translator to hold the money in a country he/she visits, gives the translator more control over how and when the money is transferred into a U.S. account. Con: Can be difficult to set up if you need a business account and are not a citizen of the non-U.S. country. After lengthy negotiations with two international commercial banks, I decided that this option was simply too complex and costly to be worth pursuing for the amount of European clients I have.
• Depositing foreign currency checks into a U.S. account. Pro: Easy for the client, no fees. Con: Some banks (including the WaMu branch I deal with) absolutely won’t accept foreign currency checks; checks may be sent back to the country of issue for collection before being credited to your account. Some translators I’ve talked to have worked out a relationship with their U.S. banks where they can deposit a foreign currency check and have it credited immediately as long as they have enough money in the account to cover the check.

I’m sure that other people out there have other ideas for international payments, feel free to contribute them!

I will go back to writing translation-specific posts, but here’s an update on the treadmill desk based on my (admittedly still limited!) experiences this week.

• So far I still really like it, the adjustment has actually been much easier than I thought. I had planned to start by using it a few hours at a time, but I’ve found that I can use it for almost all of my work time. If I need to really focus on something on my screen, I just stop the treadmill and stand on the belt, then turn it back on. I haven’t noticed a major change in my work speed or accuracy.
• It’s worth experimenting with the treadmill speed. So far I’ve found that the recommended pace of 0.8 or 0.9 miles per hour often feels unnaturally slow. Right now (as I’m typing this) I’m using 1.2 miles per hour and it feels much more comfortable. Also, I find that if I’m just reading, for example reading my RSS feeds, I can do 2+ miles per hour.
• It’s amazing how quickly the distance adds up. Last night I checked my e-mail and almost didn’t turn the treadmill on because I thought I would only be at the computer for a few minutes, and lo and behold I walked half a mile. And we’ve all heard the health recommendations about walking 10,000 steps a day; even at a very slow pace of 50 steps a minute, you’ll reach 10,000 steps in a little over 3 hours.
• A vibration dampening mat really helps. My office has a hardwood floor and my treadmill, a ProForm Crosswalk LS, is on the loud side. In the Home Depot flooring section, I bought a thick rubber “anti-fatigue mat,” which you sometimes see in restaurant kitchens, and put it under the treadmill’s motor section. This cuts the noise drastically, to the point where it’s now at the “white noise” level. The Steelcase Walkstation promises that it’s “whisper quiet,” but for $125 for the used treadmill and $20 for the rubber mat, I’m quite happy with my setup.
• There’s a Ning group for people who use treadmill desks, Office Walkers.

As one of those translators who’s always said, “I love everything about my job except sitting at a desk all day,” I’ve been intrigued for a while by the idea of the treadmill desk. Exercising while you work has been in the news of late, ever since Dr. James Levine, an obesity researcher at the Mayo Clinic, posited the idea that most desk-based workers would lose about 50 pounds a year if they walked at a very slow (1 mile per hour or less) speed while working, rather than sitting in a chair. Levine’s research also showed that most people can do normal office work such as reading off a computer screen, typing and talking on the phone while walking slowly on a treadmill. Here is an article about it from USA Today.

Here in Boulder we’re always looking for new ways to exercise; not surprisingly the Treadmill Desk blog is written by a guy in Boulder, and after reading it I got inspired. I fall into the category that fits many home-based office workers; the flexible schedule allows me to exercise enough to stay in decent shape, but on many days, my run or bike ride gets pushed from before lunch to after lunch to the end of the work day to “now it’s time for dinner” and either never happens or is radically abbreviated.

Since I don’t have $6,000 burning a hole in my pocket, the commercially produced Steelcase WalkStation wasn’t an option. Based on the advice from the Treadmill Desk blog, I bought a used treadmill for $125 off Craigslist and with the help of two old shelving boards we had in the basement (one to hold my monitors at treadmill eye level, one to put across the treadmill’s arms to hold my keyboard, mouse and day planner), I was in business in about half an hour.

So far, I like it. Although the treadmill I bought, a ProForm Crosswalk LS, doesn’t get high ratings for snazziness, it is constructed really well for use with the treadmill desk. For me at least (5′7″), the treadmill’s arm rails are exactly the right height for use with the keyboard, and the treadmill works well at a very slow speed, 0.7 or 0.8 mph, which I turn up when I’m talking on the phone and don’t have to look at the computer screen. On the Crosswalk, I can put my cordless phone in the MP3 player holder and a cup with pens and pencils in the water bottle slot, and it has wide side rails that I can stand on if I need to stop walking for a minute. And it’s amazing how the distance adds up; even at 0.8 miles per hour, if you do that 5 hours a day, you’re already at 4 miles.

Anyone else out there using one? Here’s a photo:

It’s interesting how some linguistic issues seem to get solved and then are up for solution again, as seems to be the case with gendered pronouns in English. The first wave of gender-neutral language was inspired by the realization that many professions that had traditionally been all male (fireman, mailman) were now becoming more gender integrated, giving rise to terms like firefighter and letter carrier. Likewise, we realized that the default “he” might rub half the population the wrong way, and the proposed solution was to always include both genders, like “Every student should bring his/her own calculator.”

As gender-neutral language has evolved, he/she has fallen out of favor and been deemed clunky, and a few alternatives are floating around. The easiest end-run around the he/she issue is to pluralize the subject and use “they” or “their,” as in “Translators must bring their own dictionaries to the exam,” “When students go on field trips, they must wear sneakers,” except in situations where the subject clearly refers to one gender or the other, as in “Every egg donor receives compensation for her time.”

On the other side of the coin, we sometimes need a new term when the habitual gender of the person who holds a certain role changes. The term “maestra” is seeing more exposure as the number of women orchestra conductors increases, and the U.S. now has a number of “First Gentlemen,” the husbands of women governors.

It goes without saying that translation adds a whole other layer of mystique to the gender issue, especially since many of us work between English and a language that makes much more liberal use of gendered words. In French, you just can’t get around the issue that a table is feminine and a book is masculine, but at least they both become “the” in translation; on the other hand, French doesn’t have different words for his and hers, but instead uses son/sa/ses for both, which puts the issue in the translator’s lap when those words are translated. French, and other languages like it, also have the interesting issue of words that are always masculine or feminine no matter who they refer to. I have to admit that it cracks me up to see French male movie stars referred to as “une grande vedette,” (a big star), where they’re not only feminine but get an “ette” to boot.

However, this too may be changing. Last month’s issue of Champs Elysées featured an interview with Roselyne Bachelot, the (female) French Minister of Health, Youth and Sport, in which she responded to the interviewer’s first question (you don’t have to speak French to understand this!): Madame la ministre ou Madame le ministre, Roselyne Bachelot? by saying “On dit Madame la ministre, parce que c’est un mot épicène, qui suppose la possibilité de le mettre au féminin ou au masculin, comme secrétaire ou d’autres.” (We say Madame la ministre, because it’s an epicene word, which implies the possibility of making it feminine or masculine, like secretary or other words).

It’s worth noting that Bachelot’s assertion that Madame la ministre is just fine has been vigorously opposed by French academics, but who knows, maybe John Malkovich will one day be un vedet.

Here is an interesting post from the blog “Working Languages” about the EU’s shortage of qualified into-English interpreters. The EU blames the candidates’ poor English skills, characterized by overuse of the word “like,” while the blogger argues that a larger culprit is the lack of financial incentives for qualified interpreters.

What with the U.S. economy on a downward slide and the euro continuing its climb above U.S. $1.50, many translators are marketing these days. Following are some tips on writing a translation-targeted résumé that will pass muster with potential clients.

• Let’s start with the obvious but often overlooked: prominently state your language pair(s). It sounds crazy, but I’ve read many a translator’s résumé that buried this most basic information deep within the body of the document. My advice: put your language pair(s) right below your name at the head of the résumé, like “Melissa Thomas, Italian to English Translator.” I would avoid using the generic “Italian Translator;” if you are truly qualified to translate in both directions, put “Italian <> English Translator” or something equivalent.
• Include some sort of geographical information, at least your city. Although I don’t have a P.O. box myself, I think that a P.O. box is a good option for your work address since it avoids having to give out your home address.
• Use a professional e-mail address. This is one of my top five pet peeves when it comes to translator résumés. Anything @hotmail.com or an address such as “beachbabe2008,” “kittykat” or “soccergod” (and I’m barely exaggerating here!) doesn’t belong on a professional résumé and is also likely to be caught by a client’s spam filter. My advice: if you want a free e-mail address or prefer webmail, use Gmail, I think it’s the most “legitimate” of the freebies. I think that the best e-mail address is one that’s associated with a domain name that you own, so that you never have to change it if you change ISPs.
• Double and triple-check your contact information. Make sure it’s a) correct and b) information that is “durable;” don’t include a cell phone number that you might be getting rid of.
• Give specific examples of your translation work without violating client confidentiality. “Extensive experience in patent translation” is much less impressive than “Translated 100+ patents: topics include automotive components, household appliance components and packaging.”
• If you’ve been translating for a substantial amount of time (I would say three to five years, others might go longer or shorter), eliminate all non-translation work experience that isn’t relevant to what you do. If you worked as an engineer and now translate engineering documents, it’s worth leaving that information in. But if you switched careers completely, say from managing a restaurant to doing translation, I wouldn’t include it.
• Include something about your computer setup. If nothing else, this tells the client that you are reasonably technology-savvy. You can also inspire confidence by including “with daily backups,” “dedicated backup computer,” etc. If you use translation environment/CAT tools, you can also include them here, or not, depending on whether you want clients to know that you have them.
• I’ll admit to being a traditionalist when it comes to résumés, and I find fancy graphics, catchy slogans and “creative” formatting to be a turn-off. Also, I think that a photograph, which is common to include on a European-format résumé, is inappropriate on a U.S. one.
• Some features I’ve seen and liked on other people’s résumés: the date when the résumé was updated (makes it clear that the document is up to date); information about recent professional development such as conferences and courses; a few very brief testimonials from past clients.
• Remember that you are applying for language work. Although poor grammar, typos and incorrect punctuation have become commonplace in business documents, be the exception. Show your potential clients that you are worthy of their language work by making your own work error-free.
• Lastly, keep it brief. For use in the U.S., one page is best, two pages is an absolute maximum. Put the most important information first. Remember when your high school guidance counselor broke the news that after you had sweated and cried over your college applications for six months, the average admissions counselor would spend twelve minutes reading them? Have the same attitude toward your résumé and you’re on the right track!