On Wednesday, January 25 at 12 noon US Eastern/New York Time (you can use The World Clock to convert to your time zone), Eve Bodeux, Michelle Bradley and I will be doing a free half-hour question and answer conference call about translation and the business of translation. You can connect to the call by phone using a US toll number or by Skype for free. Ask us anything! Well, at least anything related to the translation industry. To read more details or to submit a question, please see the Speaking of Translation website. We’ll select some of your questions to answer during the live call. To receive the call instructions, send a blank e-mail to speakingoftranslation@gmail.com and you’ll receive an auto-response with the call-in number and the Skype instructions. Hope to see you there! We’ll also post a free recording of the call, so feel free to submit a question even if you cannot make the live session.
No, not the Sheryl Crow song, the Newsweek/Daily Beast Column. Maybe I just love reading about other people’s mistakes, but the last-page “My Favorite Mistake” essay is my favorite part of the redesigned Newsweek. Written by famous people of various flavors, these columns just reinforce the fact that whether it’s Madeleine Albright wearing her “three monkeys” pin for a meeting with Vladimir Putin, Ricki Lake doing online dating or Dennis Quaid using cocaine, we are, as my yoga teacher would say, all on the path.
This week’s essay, by violinist Joshua Bell, particularly grabbed my attention. Although I’m not a rabid fan of Bell’s music, he’s the subject of one of my favorite newspaper articles ever, Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pearls Before Breakfast, in which Weingarten chronicles Bell’s incognito performance in the Washington DC subway at rush hour. Bell’s “My Favorite Mistake” column tells the story of his first international violin competition performance, in which he flubbed the opening of his piece and decided to stop, apologize to the audience and start over rather than soldiering on through the performance. This got me thinking that we translators and interpreters, who by nature thrive on being right about everything, could also benefit from hauling our favorite mistakes out of the archives. Here’s mine. I told this story during the “Smart Business” panel at the Boston ATA conference so it’s not totally fresh, but this is its first time in writing!
I started freelancing in 2002, right after my daughter was born. I had a Master’s in French and had done a translation internship, but I really had no clue about the conventions of the translation industry. Plus, I was very, very hungry for work because I knew that my goal of working from home to be with my daughter was completely dependent on my success as a freelancer: if I didn’t make it, it was off to full-time daycare for her and off to a cubicle for me.
One of the first assignments that I received was from an agency, a very simple birth certificate translation, maybe 100 words total. I think that my minimum charge at the time was $30, and the agency didn’t give me any special instructions, just asked me to “translate the birth certificate.” So there I am at my computer, thinking that this is the easiest $30 I’ve ever made. I mean, for 100 words, why even put the translation in a Word document? Why not just type it into an e-mail to save the client some time dealing with the attachment. Obviously the missing link here is my lack of knowledge of the conventions of translating an official document: the big time investment isn’t translating the 50 or 100 words, it’s re-formatting the translation to look as much as possible like the original. So off I go, typing the translation into an e-mail and firing it off to the client, feeling really proud of myself (aren’t I efficient?!).
I have to say that the client was fairly understanding; probably more understanding than I would have been had I been on the receiving end of that e-mail. In any case I think they paid me the $30 we had agreed on, which was more than generous on their part since they ended up hiring another translator to do the job. But when I think back on this Favorite Mistake, I think that it really helped me. Obviously I learned something about official document translation, but I also learned a few larger lessons:
- Knowing how to translate and knowing how to run a freelance business are completely different things; to succeed as a freelancer, you need to know both.
- Try as we might to forget it, we were all new, inexperienced freelancers once. Maybe someone else’s stupid mistake wasn’t quite as stupid as mine, but we’ve all made them.
- When translation newbies ask uninformed questions (Why doesn’t my TM tool spit out a translation after I type something into it? How much do I have to pay to get work from an agency? I charge 2 cents a word, is that about the industry standard? I’m looking for a business that’s easy to run in my spare time, would conference interpreting be good?), it’s hard not to be condescending, but it’s important to at least try. Whenever I answer a question like these, I think back to my “this is the easiest $30 I ever made!!” moment and try to give a thorough and non-condescending answer. Although these questions (and my birth certificate mistake) are completely off the mark, I also think it’s fair to ask how someone who’s never worked as a translator would know that TM and MT are two different things, or that agencies don’t charge up-front fees, or that the highest-paid freelancers make 40 or 50 cents a word, or that conference interpreters go to school for years just to learn the basics of the job.
Readers, any other Favorite Mistakes out there?
Posted in Freelancing, Getting started as a translator, Productivity, Professional development | 13 Comments »
The next session of my online course “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator” starts on Wednesday, January 25. This is a four-week “quick start” session for any new translators who want to get a jump on their business goals for 2012. During the session, we focus on four assignments: a translation-targeted resume and cover letter, a marketing plan, a rate sheet and sample terms of service and an online presence plan and elevator speech.
The full course information and registration are on my website, and the cost is $250, with a $50 discount for ATA members. I conduct the course entirely online, so it’s open to translators in any country and you don’t have to be online at a specific time. Everyone in the course also receives a copy of the newly released second edition of my book, “How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator.” One participant in the December session commented that “Corinne McKay’s course, “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator,” and book, “How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator,” are invaluable tools for the freelance translator. Her book will be bible for my career pursuit as a translator. I would recommend the class to beginners as well as already-established freelance translators. Excellent!” That was gratifying to read! Hope to see some blog readers in the January session; the December session filled up early!
Posted in Announcements, Professional development | 1 Comment »
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Note from Corinne: I know this is a little self-congratulatory, but I actually find these annual reports interesting!! Feel free to skip this post if it doesn’t interest you.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.
Posted in Announcements | 5 Comments »
School is already out for winter break here in Colorado, and my brain is slowly winding down for the year! So, at the request of a few readers, I thought I’d post some pictures of my recent trip to Costa Rica. As with my post about llama trekking and sugar skulls, the only larger point here is to have more fun in life!
So, this trip was inspired by an American Airlines fare sale that was just too good to pass up. I’m not usually sucked in by such things but at $1,100 for three round-trip tickets from Denver to San Jose, it was just such a tempting deal! We had visited Costa Rica in 2009 (Manuel Antonio and Monteverde) and loved it, so it was time for a return visit.
After a night at the highly-recommended Hotel Buena Vista (spring for a villa!), we flew on Nature Air (circa $150 each, round trip) to the tiny airstrip in Drake Bay, the closest point of entry to Corcovado National Park. I’m not great with small planes, but this outfit seems very professional, and as my husband said “at least you can see that the propellers are still turning.”
So we land, hop out, and the only person in sight is a guy with a pickup truck. Calling my Spanish horrific is giving it a compliment that it doesn’t deserve, but I manage to confirm that he’s somehow associated with the lodge we’re staying at, so we get in. As he’s chatting away in Spanish, the only words I understand are “rio” (river) and “caballo” (horse). Hmmm. Then the pickup truck pulls up by the aforementioned river, and I get it. River very high (lots of rain). Hence the horse. Good thing we brought backpacks!!
We split our first week between Corcovado Adventures Tent Camp and the Sirena ranger station in Corcovado National Park. Both were incredible (if you really want the details, I reviewed all of our accommodations on Tripadvisor); totally wild and amazing. Here’s just a sampling of the wildlife and scenery!
That’s a scarlet macaw, a coatimundi (a little hard to see in the shadows; it’s like a tropical raccoon), a Baird’s tapir (totally incredible!!), a boa constrictor, a tree frog and the beach in front of the tent camp. We also did some nice snorkeling at an offshore island.
Then we were off to the Arenal volcano area, thanks to the excellent services of Coach Costa Rica and their shuttle vans. We rented this cute little house right in La Fortuna:
You can rent it too on VRBO! It was pretty rainy in Arenal; as the locals said, “We have two gorgeous seasons, rainy and extremely rainy!” but we did get to see the top of the volcano. Our favorite experiences were whitewater rafting with Costa Rica Descents, paddleboarding on Lake Arenal with Desafio and zip-lining with EcoGlide. I had never been zip-lining before and I have to say it was very cool; my husband and my daughter also did the infamous Tarzan swing there and loved it. Our two favorite “hidden attractions” were the El Silencio nature preserve (on the left side of the main road immediately before you get to the turnoff for the national park) and the Termales Los Laureles hot springs (on the right side of the main road, past Baldi hot springs). Both of these require a car or taxi to get to and it helps to speak a little Spanish. However we thought that the trails at El Silencio were more impressive than in the national park, and the Los Laureles hot springs were a real deal at $8 for adults and $4 for kids, as opposed to $30-$60 per person at the bigger, tourist-oriented hot springs. Just be warned that it is rainy and cloudy a lot of the time in Arenal. You do a lot of cloud-watching, saying “is there really a volcano in there???”
As you can tell, we love Costa Rica and we’re mulling over ideas for at least three or four more trips. We’ve never been to the Caribbean side (Tortuguero national park and similar) or to the arid Guanacaste region in the West, and now Nature Air also flies to the Bocas del Toro archipelago which is just over the Panama border. So hopefully I’ll have some future off-topic posts about those destinations too!
Posted in Off topic | 8 Comments »
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!
Posted in Freelancing, Professional associations, Working from home | 6 Comments »
At long last, the second edition of my book How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator is available on Amazon. I’m in the process of spiffing up its Amazon page with a Look Inside function and a Kindle edition (and of course some reviews…hint hint!) but I’m excited that it’s available in the retail chain. The first edition sold nearly 5,000 copies before I retired it this summer, and I’m looking forward to a long and happy life for this edition as well.
Posted in Announcements | 22 Comments »
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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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