Will Computers Replace Translators? – tranfree 73 – 15 Sept 2010

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Sep 142010
 

Will Computers Replace Translators? tranfree 73

Editorial

I received some feedback about last month’s “email reliance” article. Some good points were raised, so I thought I’d share them.

  • Skype and Yahoo Messenger can be used for direct peer to peer file sharing. This is a useful backup if email systems are misbehaving.
  • Sites like yousendit.com can also be used for delivery of large files.

Thanks to Marie-Hélène Hayles for raising these points. smile

Touch Typing

I’ve been helping my son to learn to touch type over the summer. He’s 8 now and I felt it a good idea for him to learn properly now before he learns, the “wrong” way. It’s been hard work, but worth it. He’s now the proud owner of an Acer ONE netbook.

I also got interested in the idea of touch typing and I went through the program as well (http://www.kaz-type.com/). I’ve managed to get myself up to 23 words per minute and 98% accuracy. But it still feels really slow. So, for a bit of fun, I decided to do the speed test my “normal” way.

I was a bit blown away by the results. I managed 82 words per minute and 99% accuracy typing my way, using about three fingers on each hand. I didn’t know I could type that fast. To be honest, it makes me wonder whether it’s actually worth persisting with the touch typing? I don’t really feel like giving up, but that’s a short-term potential productivity cut of over 75%. 82 words per minute is good enough for most applications. But it would be nice to be able to type that fast without looking – and that’s why I hope to persist.

I hope you enjoy and benefit from tranfree smile

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –
How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web



Will Computers Replace Translators?

By Alex Eames

It seems that, every year, our lives become increasingly enmeshed with our computers. Unless we rebel by going to live in a swamp somewhere with no electricity, that looks set to increase rather than decrease.

Last week I renewed our house insurance policy. One of the items covered in the accidental damage section was £2500 GBP worth of electronic downloads – that’s a sign of the times.

After my brief review of GT4T in the last tranfree, it seems clear that some translators feel threatened by the existence of free machine translation (MT) in the form of Google Translate.

Computers Acting Up?

It looks as if professionals in other areas are also feeling threatened by the ever-increasing proliferation of advanced computer software. A recent BBC article about animation and motion capture (a way of recording and simulating human and animal movement) had this to say…

“Some of the biggest movies of the last few years haven’t
actually featured any actors in the flesh.
Is technology stealing their limelight?”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11025543

Having said that the results of computerised motion capture are not good enough, the technical director of DreamWorks said…

“You want expressiveness, you don’t want
literal translation. It’s come a long way but in terms of using it for animated films it’s not what we’re looking for.”

And this gives a very interesting parallel with human versus machine translation. In the main, the results of MT simply aren’t good enough.

Human Threats?

We are living in interesting times. Virtually everyone has a computer and access to the internet. Add to that the fact that many people find themselves out of work in these economically challenging times of the “post greed” era. It’s not surprising that many people with language skills hit upon the idea of earning some money doing translations. So there are more human providers entering the marketplace.

Add in the global economic squeeze and you find companies trying to minimise costs, either to stay in business or make (more) profit.

So it’s hardly surprising that some companies might be sorely tempted to cut their short-term costs by using Google Translate. It’s human nature. They will try this. And let’s be honest with ourselves, for some applications, it is perfectly appropriate. Human translation is expensive – that’s the point of translatortips.com after all – to help you juice the full worth out of your translation skills. You can’t have it both ways. You want human translation to be expensive!

MT Has Its Place.

Some of you may not like this, but machine translation definitely has a place in the mix.

MT might be useful for assessing which portions of a large document need translating properly, or for getting the gist of what’s written. But unless the documentation has been written for MT in the first place, it’s unlikely to be usable for any other purpose.

But now for the good news. I hope you’re listening…

The kind of clients who would be looking at cost cutting in this way are not the kind of clients who would want to pay you decent rates, on time, and treat you well. Yes. These are not the clients you want. So don’t worry about the lost opportunity. Just as you can’t compete with 2 cent per word translators in low wage economies, you can’t compete with MT either. So don’t even try. Forget about that market segment and concentrate on clawing your way up to the top end.

You Don’t Want To Work For Idiots Do You?

I remember when I was an employee. It didn’t suit me at all. The boss was an idiot. I realised that the only (legal) way to eliminate the idiot was to become my own boss. People who want free or cheap translations of important documents using MT are idiots. You don’t want to work for them. They see you as an over-expensive bilingual typist. So, if you don’t want those kind of clients anyway, why is Google Translate a threat? Put simply, I don’t really think it is. It’s in your head. In the long term, I expect it will generate even more work for human translators.

Worthwhile Clients

At university, one of my roommates was studying marketing, which I found much more interesting than analytical chemistry. I remember commenting on a TV advertisement – saying how unappealing I thought it was. My roommate’s reply was a bit of a revelation…

“It probably wasn’t designed to appeal to you.”

…and this is a mistake many people make. Not every potential client is a client worth having. Some clients will not be profitable. Some will. Which do you want? The ones who will value your services, or the others?

So we have a few challenges in the global translation market…

  • Increasing numbers of “wannabe” translators
  • MT causing a decrease in the perceived value of translation
  • Economic squeeze causing a “get it done cheaper” mentality

So What’s To Be Done?

What can you do about it? Actually, I think there’s very little you can do about this apart from focus on your own area. But here’s a few suggestions…

  • Only accept profitable work
  • Educate clients and potential clients, but be discerning how much time you spend on this
  • Look at market trends, but don’t obsess about them.

You don’t need the whole global translation market to grow and thrive.
You only need your business to grow and thrive. (Although it will obviously be easier in a buoyant market.)

That reminds me of the two guys in the bear forest. One says to the other…

“Can you run faster than a bear?”

The other guy pauses for thought and replies…

“I don’t need to run faster than a bear.
I only need to run faster than YOU!”

Terminator Scenario

Avatar was one of the films (mentioned in the BBC article) that didn’t use actors “in the flesh” on screen. So it’s ironic that another James Cameron film – The Terminator –  paints an apocalyptic picture of a time when the computers take over and see humans as a threat. That’s a long way off. But let’s keep a cautious eye on what they’re doing without wasting  too much time watching our backs.

So let’s look forwards, get out there, find some real clients with real business needs and meet them.

Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com, editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…

How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a Freelance Translator
and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web
ISSN 1470-3866

***End of issue 73***

Translation Tools – tranfree 71 – part 2

 Business, Computer tips, tranfree, translation business  No Responses »
Jun 302010
 

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 Jost Zetzsche

Skype

I love Skype. It may not be the coolest thing to be in love with a wildly popular tool, but I can’t help myself. No tool has changed my work habits in the last few years more than this one.

Skype is primarily a VoIP (Voice-over-Internet-Protocol) service that allows you to make free calls from computer to computer if the person you are calling also has Skype installed. In addition, it allows you to make cheap calls to regular telephones, organize telephone conferences (free if everyone is using Skype, cheap if people are using telephones), send text messages, send large files, make video calls, or easily share your desktop.

True, there’s always a risk with programs like this that you’ll waste time by chatting too much with your friends, but for me Skype has been a real productivity catalyst. It’s so much easier to text message or call with Skype when you are working in teams, want to talk to a project manager, or do some consulting with a client. And because of the mind-blowing success of Skype, chances are that your colleagues and friends use Skype as well, thus circumventing the non-compatibility problems of other chat and VoIP programs.

IntelliWebSearch

IntelliWebSearch would probably be the winner of the popularity-among-translators award for the last few years.

This humble little application copies highlighted text from any Windows application with a number of user-definable shortcut keys; strips the text of paragraph marks, line breaks, or any customizable characters; opens your default browser and sends the copied text to up to 10 customizable search engines, online dictionaries, or dictionaries that you have installed on your hard drive. Once you have set up your search engines and dictionaries for your language combinations, it’s incredibly easy to use. I promise that your fingers will think in IntelliWebSearch terms from then on. (Mine automatically go Ctrl+Alt+D for the Duden dictionary that I have in my computer or Ctrl+Alt+D for the über-search engine/dictionary Linguee. I’m always terribly disappointed when I am doing something on someone else’s computer that may not have it installed.)

Teleport (or any other webspider)

Teleport is a website copier or webspider. While this is actually an “antique” tool from the early days of the Internet (people used it to download complete web sites so that they could browse them offline) it has proved very helpful for translators. It does what you would expect a “website copier” to do: it copies websites (including image or multimedia files). This is wonderful when we have to quote for the translation of complete websites. It’s important to remember to ask for the actual source files before the translation is started, but it is an invaluable tool for getting an overview of a website, including its file structure or files that you would surely miss if you were just to browse through the site or to make a word or image count.

Another very helpful use for this tool is when you need to align (convert separate source and target documents into a translation memory) data from websites. For instance, you can choose to download only PDF files in all the different available languages and then continue to align them on a site such as YouAlign or NoBabel.

PractiCount & Invoice (and most other word count programs)

Since we just talked about word counts, I would strongly advise you to invest in a word count tool. Without going into the whole complexity of word counts, here’s what I think you should look for: a tool that allows you to count in a variety of formats (including a minimum of all MS Office formats, PDFs, and tagged files) while using MS Word parameters without the MS Word problems. As most of us know, MS Word’s word counts are notorious for their problems. (In versions 2003 and before, text boxes, footnotes, and endnotes were not counted; some items, such as WordArt, are still not counted in the current versions.) However, chances are that your client will still use Word to count words and check your invoice. So the tool should use the same logic for counting words that Word does while including the parts that Word blithely ignores (which we have to explain to the client). I use PractiCount & Invoice for this task and love it, but there are a good number of other tools that do very similar things.

Translation Office 3000 (and any other invoicing and accounting program for freelance translators)

Everyone has strengths, and accounting is definitely not one of mine. So it’s not too surprising that I love the program that takes care of most of my invoicing and accounting, while at the same time requiring little more than the most basic data entry. Translation Office 3000 does all that, plus job-tracking, profitability reporting, and many other things. All this can also be done with various tools such as Excel, Outlook, and Project – but why spread yourself thin over three tools when you can do it with one?

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

I like to “think with my fingers” and I’ve become a reasonably good typist over the years, but I gotta tell you, if I’m under pressure to get a translation done on a crazy deadline, or if my medical condition keeps my hands from working the way I want them to, there’s nothing like speech recognition. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, now available in most major Western European languages and Japanese, is stunningly accurate, requires little or no training, runs well on computers with fast processors (no need for superfast processing), works with essentially every Windows program, including translation environment tools, and is surprisingly inexpensive. (Windows Vista and 7 also have an internal voice recognition feature for Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and English; in my tests, these did not score much worse than Dragon.)

Translation Environment Tool (aka CAT tool)

Well, how could I leave this one out? Truth be told, my translation environment tool is by far the one tool that has given me the most joy during the past 10+ years. How else would I have accessed my translations and terminology that I stored last month, last year, or even five years ago for my project today? How else would I be able to work in virtually every file format without needing to become a master of each? And how else would I ensure that my translations are consistent, free of formatting and other errors, and adhere to my clients’ glossaries?

My main tool for many years has been Déjà Vu, but I have used many other tools in production situations, including Trados, SDLX, Transit, memoQ, Heartsome, Wordfast, Across, Lingotek, Multitrans, and others. I had good reasons for starting to use Déjà Vu in the first place, but I have come to the conclusion that it hardly matters which of the available tools you use as long as the tool can fulfill your client’s needs. It supports exchange formats such as TMX and XLIFF so you can access data that originated with other tools, and you can make the tool work for you, rather than feeling caught by the idiosyncrasies of the tool.

Jost Zetzsche is a freelance translator. He also publishes…

The Toolkit – A biweekly newsletter for people in the translation industry who want to get more out of their computers.

http://www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/

ISSN 1470-3866

***End of issue 71***

To subscribe to tranfree, visit http://www.tranfree.com/

Getting the Balance Right & Translation Tools – tranfree 71

 Business, tranfree, translation business  1 Response »
Jun 292010
 

tranfree 71 – Avoiding & coping with Staleness.

You can also download this edition of tranfree 71 as a PDF

Editorial

As I sit and type, it’s a beautiful sunny day here – perfect for the second week of Wimbledon.

We’ve got two articles for you this time. The first is about getting the balance right between work and other aspects of life. This is an area I have been constantly challenged in – having spent time at both extremes and in the middle. In the article we explore ways of coping with and avoiding staleness and burnout.

The second article is by Jost Zetzsche on the theme of translation tools. Jost is well placed to write such an article, as he publishes his own newsletter “The Tool Kit” about software tools for translators.

I hope you enjoy and benefit from tranfree smile

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –

How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

Getting the Balance Right – Preventing & Coping With Staleness

By Alex Eames

Do you ever get stale1? Do you ever find, when you’ve been working on a large project for a long time, that you just get fed up or bored with it? Does that ever happen to you?

Deadlines Can Help, But They Can Also Push You Over the Edge

It’s almost impossible to get stale on a job that’s “for tomorrow” because you’re only working on it for one day and you’ve got no choice. You have to get the job finished by the deadline date or bye-bye client.

But when you’ve been working intensely on a project for a while – burning the candle at both ends for a sustained period of time – eventually you can find yourself getting “stale”. You sit down at your computer and it feels like you are two similar magnetic poles repelling each other. It’s as if your computer says “not you again?” and the feeling is mutual.

You think to yourself “I want my life back”. That’s when you’ve got to sit up and take notice. You’ve been overdoing it! You’ve become stale and you need some time off.

You really need to listen to that, and take some time off. If you’re a “deadline junkie” – going from one adrenaline rush to another, with a string of tight deadlines – one day you might find yourself stale. You sit at your computer and you think “I can’t go on”.

So how is it possible to get the balance right? To be really honest with you, I’m not quite sure. But let’s explore a few possible solutions together.

1. Schedule Slots For Leisure Time (and protect them vigorously but flexibly).

Translation work can be somewhat sporadic – unless you’re busy ALL the time. (That can be a good problem to have, but not always. You’re more likely to get pushed into burnout if you’re too busy for too long.) Is there a way that you can schedule in some leisure activities as “Immovable Objects”?

Any kind of social, hobby or leisure activity that gets you away from your computer will work. Can you do that? Will it work for you? Can you say…

“Right! Every Friday I’m going to take the morning
off and go and play tennis”
(or whatever it is that you like to do).

Of course, you need to reserve the right to be flexible about it. If you know a job is coming in on Friday, take the time out earlier in the week. Just don’t make a habit of skipping the “time out” altogether.

2. Negotiate Better Deadlines (a lot of them aren’t real anyway).

“Sorry I can’t fit that in as I am fully committed this morning.
How about Friday early afternoon?”

OK, so you’re “fully committed” going to the gym smile, but they don’t need to know that! Quite often, deadlines are somewhat arbitrary, and if you care to challenge them, there can be a degree of flexibility.

3. Learn to say No (and resist the call of Mammon).

If a proposed deadline doesn’t offer any flexibility and threatens to rob you of your sanity…

“Just say No”

I’ve deliberately chosen that phrase from Nancy Reagan’s campaign against drugs in the 1980s. You see, I think you can get addicted and trapped in a “continuous earning cycle”, which can lead you to ignore other needs – both yours and others’. That’s a dangerous place to be. Adrenaline addiction is real and there are several different types. It’s not just people who jump out of planes and do crazy things. See adrenalineaddicts.org for details.

4. Improve Your Productivity (but share the extra spare time with yourself).

Productivity enhancing methods and tools can be a great help. But instead of always using them to earn more and more money, use them to work less hours and fit in some refreshing non-business activities. I bet you never thought you would hear me say that!
eek

5. Increase Your Rates and Work Less (yes you can).

This one might ruffle a few feathers. razz Increase rates? Impossible! You must be mad!

A big hint here is that if you want to charge more, you’ll need some (more) direct clients.

6. Predict Your Working Time Realistically.

Everyone hates wasting time looking through a document to either count words or estimate how long it will take. It needn’t take a long time. A few minutes spent really looking at a sample of the text might stop you from grossly underestimating how long a job will take you. We’ve all done it! You work on a job that looked great for the first ten pages, but the next five were a complete nightmare, taking twice as long as the first ten. Having a proper look at the job in advance can save you having to pull an all-nighter and tiring yourself out.

7. Sub-contract work and start an agency. (That’s a joke by the way).

We’re after less stress here, not more. big grin

What To Do If You Do Get Stale

Despite the above preventative ideas, there is still a likelihood that staleness will appear at some point. There is a tendency to take all the work you can get because of uncertainty over the future.

When you’re stale, you may try to force yourself to carry on regardless. Or, you can accept that you are stale and say…

“I’m not going to get anything useful done sitting at my
computer today. I’m going to take the day off and do
something fun; something I want to do; something I enjoy;
something for somebody else.”

As long as it’s something that changes your focus, away from your work and earning money, it will be refreshing. (Preferably something not involving your computer.)

It’s hard to be prescriptive about this, so I won’t even try. What is refreshing to one person will be a burden to another. But “a change is as good as a rest”. It really can be. Just find something that suits and refreshes you.

One of the main advantages of being a freelance is the total freedom. But, as I said in tranfree 69, you have to use it wisely. You also have total freedom to mess yourself up physically and mentally, if you abuse that freedom by working 24/7.

When you’re busy, there can be a very strong temptation not to have an abundance mentality but to be locked into the “feast or famine” mentality…

“I’ve got this glut of jobs right now so I’m going to work
my tail off, get all of this lot done, and then have a rest.”

But, the thing is, that your rest doesn’t actually materialise unless you schedule it in and stick to it. You’ll keep saying YES or agreeing to artificial deadlines to get your next adrenaline rush.

Most religious faiths recognise the Sabbath principle, which means having one day in seven free from work. I believe the underlying “earthly” reason for that is that it’s simply not good for you to work all the time. Yes you can get away with it for a while, but it will catch up with you at some point – and you’ll pay for it later!

Even if you aren’t a workaholic, adrenaline junkie (and not everyone is) I expect you know someone who is. I hope you found this useful and thought-provoking.

Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…

How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a
Freelance Translator
and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

1 Stale: having lost freshness, vigour, quick intelligence, initiative, or the like, as from overstrain, boredom, or surfeit: He had grown stale on the job and needed a long vacation. (dictionary.com)

For the second article visit http://alexeames.com/blog/?p=533

Understanding the FREE in Freelance – tranfree 69

 Business, tranfree, translation business  1 Response »
Apr 302010
 

tranfree issue 69 – 30 April 2010

Understanding the FREE in Freelance

Fed up of staring at your screen? Listen to

tranfree 69

You can also download this edition of tranfree 69 as a PDF.

 

Editorial

We had a longer than expected Easter break in Poland. Due to the Icelandic volcano ash plume in European airspace we had an extra week away. We considered driving back, but there wasn’t much point when the ferries would have been so busy with all the other people who “have to be back at work on Monday”. We didn’t fancy driving all that way in our Polish Daewoo Lanos either. It’s a good local runabout, but not so comfortable for really long journeys like that.

We didn’t have to be back at work on Monday. We had our computers with us and could work where we were if needed. So we awarded Tomek an extra week off school and elected to sit and wait in the comfort of our Polish house. This is an interesting application of the kind of freedom I will be talking about in this tranfree edition’s main article. Other people in more “normal” jobs might been forced to make superhuman efforts to get back home quicker.

(If anyone’s interested in butterflies, check out the photos in my photography blog for some recent shots).

I hope you enjoy and benefit from tranfree

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –

How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

 

 

Understanding the FREE in Freelance

There seems to be a certain amount of confusion out there about what the term freelance actually means.


Misinterpretation of freelance translator

So let’s find out where the word came from. Looking up freelance on http://www.etymonline.com/ gives…


also free lance, free-lance, “medieval mercenary warrior,” 1820, from free + lance; apparently a coinage of Sir Walter Scott’s. Figurative sense is from 1864; specifically of journalism by 1882. Related: Freelancer. The verb is first attested 1903.

So basically you are a warrior who will work for whoever pays the best. If you substitute warrior for translator, does that measure up to your reality? Are you a translator who will work for whoever pays the best? Hmmm.

 

Wrong Attitude

A lot of people have a very wrong attitude towards what it means to be a freelancer. They don’t seem to be living the part, although they probably harbour, somewhere at the back of their imaginations, the dream of somehow being FREE. But they don’t actually live it out. They feel enslaved to accept the rates and onerous terms, that anyone wielding a job tries to slap upon them.

Now it may be partly to do with fear, or inability to negotiate, but I think it’s also partly to do with not quite having grasped what the FREE in freelance actually means. Think for a moment. What are the benefits of being freelance? You are FREE to accept or reject any project which is offered to you. You are FREE to set your own rates (the client is FREE to accept or reject them). You are FREE to work (or not) for anyone you choose. You are also FREE to persuade clients to accept your higher rates and that you are worth what you are asking for.

 

Your Self-Worth Really Matters

But you won’t be able to do that unless you truly believe it yourself. In sales and marketing, a lot of importance is attached to your self-worth. It’s talked about a lot in marketing courses. It’s something very personal and it fluctuates during your life, according to your levels of confidence and your (often most recent) experiences. That’s a bit like a free market. Free to rise and fall according to changing times, circumstances and situations.

One online portal has a facility letting translators apply to agencies by email. The subject line of those emails is automatically set to “application for a freelance position”. This could well be a linguistic error, but it also shows a lack of understanding of what freelance is. Freelance is a position in the marketplace, not a position in an organisation. If you look at recruitment ads in newspapers or online, they’ll often say “position of marketing director” or “position of salesperson”. When you’re a freelancer, you don’t have a position in someone else’s company. You are not in their company. You are… What are you?

You’re FREE. Remember the FREE in freelance! You are not ensnared or imprisoned or closely tied to an employer. So you don’t have a position in the organisation. You are an outsider.

You’re a freelancer, a FREE agent. You are FREE. That means you are FREE to accept or reject any terms, any payment levels, any projects – and let’s go further. You are also FREE to reject any crap from clients. If you decide “I’m not taking that” you can say “bye bye. I’m not working for you any more. Get lost!” I’ve done it before. And believe me, people aren’t used to it.

 

Real-World Example

We once did a project for a fairly large multi-national company, in the financial sector, working on press releases. It was over the weekend. It was a major announcement about the merger of two large financial companies. (I won’t give any more details in case you start trying to guess who it was). We had the chief executive of the Polish branch on the phone telling us how he wanted this translation done. To a small extent he was being helpful. But he was also being condescending, rude, arrogant and upsetting us. So in the end, one time he phoned and said “I’d like to speak to your wife please” and I said “well she doesn’t want to speak to you because you’re being rude and we don’t have to accept work on these terms. So if you want to be like that, you’re probably better off doing it yourself.” It was quite empowering to be able to say that because – let me tell you – chief execs of large multi-nationals (even the lowly national branch CEOs) are not used to being talked to like that. And it’s very good for them. 😉

I did let him speak to my wife briefly after that. He was much more polite and friendly. When we’d finished the piece we were working on we decided not to take any more work on that project. He either did the rest of it himself or found somebody else he could bark at.

What I said to my friends when I discussed it with them was “well he’s chief executive of one company, I’m chief executive of two companies.” There you go. You’ve got to think of yourself as the CEO of YOUR company, and NOT as a low-life sub-contractor. This puts you on a level with the top people in large organisations. In fact, many of them will envy your freelance status because you get to work from home. They don’t get to see their kids from the time they get up – early in the morning to beat the rush hour traffic – to the time they come back late at night, if at all (perhaps they’ll have to jet off overseas to a meeting)? They may not see their children for several days at a time, whereas YOU get to watch your kids grow up. YES. Many of them are envious of YOU. Don’t you forget it. It’s empowering.

 

Employment VS Freelance

What’s the difference between employment and freelancing? Well the difference is huge actually. Your client won’t pay you any benefits and won’t deduct any of your taxes. They won’t pay any of your insurance or pension contributions. They won’t give you any perks. You tell them how much you want them to pay. If it’s too much, They’ll negotiate or walk away.

A freelancer is a FREE agent – a separate business. You are your own person, an independent unit. That’s what the FREE in freelance really means.

  • You set your own rates
  • You accept/reject projects you want/don’t want
  • You negotiate terms
  • You are FREE to succeed or fail on your own merits
But do you know what? Not everybody can handle the responsibilities that go with freedom.

“Freedom is a battle that must be fought and won each day” (Sartre).

It’s the ultimate performance-related pay, but not everybody can cope with it alone. Not everybody is cut out to be a business person. But don’t worry, help is at hand.

 

View From The Other Side


When we were operating as an agency, we used to ask translators what they wanted to be paid. If it was too high, we wouldn’t work with them. If it was a level that we could still make a decent profit on – by which I mean selling the translation for twice what I bought it for – then we went with them. We gave them what they asked for. And they were happy to take that money. Nobody was abused, nobody felt bad about it. It was profitable for both sides and that’s how ANY business transaction should be. If both sides don’t win – and don’t profit from a transaction – that means one side is getting a raw deal, which is not sustainable and doesn’t work in the long term.


Let’s remember some of the other elements of being FREE – some of the best sides of being FREE.


I’m FREE to go and do my supermarket shopping or go to the gym in the middle of the day, any day of the week if I want to. And that means I can choose the best time to go, when it’s not busy.


  • I’m FREE to organise my time and use it wisely – if I wish.
  • I’m also FREE to waste it. Isn’t that great?
  • I’m FREE to practise my hobbies whenever I want and not have to feel bad about it.
  • I’m FREE to do unusual things that other people can’t do. FREE to spend many weeks per year in another country in our second home.
  • I’m FREE to organise my life the way I want it to be.


So are YOU, but you may not have quite captured the “dream” yet. It isn’t just a dream though. It can be a reality. And for many people – many successful freelance translators – it IS their reality. It can be yours too. But it does require work, effort, sometimes a little bit of luck. But ALWAYS a lot of skill and a lot of hard application over a sustained period of time. And that’s where many people fall by the wayside. Some FREE lance warriors get defeated and captured in battle. But don’t let that drag YOU down. You can do it.

 

Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…

How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a Freelance Translator
and

Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

ISSN 1470-3866

 

***End of issue 69***






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How to Kill Your Translation Business

 Business, tranfree, translation business  6 Responses »
Mar 302010
 

tranfree issue 68 – 31 March 2010 Resurrection Edition

Fed up of staring at your screen?
Listen to tranfree 68

You can also download tranfree 68 as a PDF.

Editorial

Well hello again. It’s been a long time. I’ve called this the resurrection edition for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s been a while since tranfree was published regularly and now it’s time to end the silence and start publishing articles to help translators with their businesses again.

Secondly, it’s Easter time, so it seems an appropriate title.

The Famine’s Over

I have been quiet for a while for many reasons, some of which I may go into in my personal blog at some point. But the main reasons I stopped publishing tranfree was that I ran out of inspiration to write new material and I was unwilling to publish junk just for the sake of keeping the business going.

But the good news is that the “seven years of famine” is over and I have a fresh, more mature perspective.

I will probably be looking for a new list host as my current one doesn’t seem to let me publish in HTML very easily, which I now want to do. Plain text emails look very retro now. So please bear with me until I get that sorted out. I may well send short summaries or partial articles with links to the full text so you can see them properly formatted.

Enjoy and benefit from tranfree

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –

How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

 

 


How To Kill Your Translation Business.


There are a lot of ways to kill your translation business, but here are 18 of the best.


1) Charging low rates.


Charging low rates is a very quick way to kill your business right at the outset. You will end up trying to get too much work, tiring yourself out, working too hard for too little reward. You need to get it into your head that the only way to survive on low rates is to live in a poor country. If you don’t live in a poor country, you need to charge realistic rates.


2) Bidding low rates to get work on portals.


Why would you do that? Portals and bidding are OK right at the start of your career to build up some experience – if you need that. But why would you spend years chasing the dregs? Some people do. Oh well. They haven’t heard. Or if they have, they weren’t listening.


3) Going for the high-volume low rates model.


The only way to earn a lot if you charge low rates is to do an enormous volume of work. I don’t know about you, but I suspect the quality would suffer and you would get exhausted. It certainly doesn’t sound like the intelligent person’s choice does it?


4) Delivering poor quality product.


Obviously if your work is not fit for its intended purpose, when your clients find out, they will cross you off the list of suppliers. Getting good clients is hard, so try to deliver good quality that will meet their needs and keep them coming back to you for more.


5) Being rude to customers.


This is just plain stupid, but all too common. Give them a positive customer experience and they’ll be back. Only be rude if you are saying goodbye permanently. Even then, better not to because you never know who they will tell.


6) Delivering work after the deadline.


Just don’t do it, EVER! Unless there is an emergency, or a really credible reason. Missed deadlines can cause clients major hassles, lost business and all sorts of other problems.


7) Slagging off customers on public Internet forums.


Why would you do that? It doesn’t take much of a brain to realise that anything you type on a public forum could come back to bite you in the bum at some point in the future, does it? Assume your customer WILL find out what you said. Don’t expect to hear from them again.


8) Not having a proper credit control policy.


One of our clients, TTC Creative, went bust in 2008. We lost about £300. It’s a shame, but not a major hit. One translator on the published creditors list was owed £12,000 (~$19,000) OUCH. I would cry – literally. But how on earth was it allowed to happen? Would you extend £12,000 in credit to any client? Set a level you are happy with for each client and do not over extend it. Once the credit limit is hit, do not accept additional work from them until you have been paid for the previous work.


9) Not examining the work before accepting it.


You’re busy. A project manager (PM) on the phone wants you to take a job, and you just want to get on. You haven’t looked at it and you just say “yes” to get rid of them. OOOPS. You just accepted a real pig of a job. It will take you ten times longer than usual because it’s got some horrible terminology in it. It’s badly written and you’ll wish you’d never accepted it – and for a discounted rate too. Oh dear – we have got a lot to learn haven’t we?

10) Borrowing money to fund expansion.


This is the best way to go bankrupt. Borrow money, take on staff, fail to grow, bye bye business. Yes it can be done, but very few people have the business acumen to make it work. Don’t expand until you can afford to do it with real money that you have already earned.


11) Excessive Internet/Forum Usage.


Spending all day moaning about low rates instead of actively looking for new direct clients? Bleating about the latest 0.0000000000001 cent per word offer (even though it was posted by one of your “friends” to wind you up)? Try to limit your forum usage to specified periods of the day or you may find you waste the whole day chatting and getting wound up by other people with no work.


12) Accepting a large project from a new client without checking them out.


Unless you can negotiate staged payments, this is a sure-fire way to commit commercial suicide. Always check out new clients to make sure they are not known scammers. There’s enough info sharing sites out there, so there’s no excuse not to do it.


13) Not answering the phone, emails or other correspondence.


I read something on a forum the other day about not answering the phone while you’re working. Well, from the client’s point of view, if you don’t answer the phone, I will ring the next person on the list. Surely it’s not rocket-science? OK, if you’re busy working, you might not be able to take that job right now anyway, but how do you know? Can you afford to take that chance? No. If it’s a timewaster, just hang up. It could be an excellent opportunity though.


14) Poor security, breaching confidentiality.


Don’t ever post identifiable portions of a job on the internet without permission. Don’t submit your translation memory (TM) containing such jobs to a public web site (otherwise the SOAR project could become a SORE project). I’m not saying don’t submit (that’s your choice) just be VERY careful about what you submit.


15) Trying to steal your agency’s clients.


Don’t be naive enough to think you will get away with it. This is stealing. It’s unethical and you WILL most likely be caught. You will then get a bad name (don’t for a moment think that agencies don’t talk to each other about translators).


16) Working into a language in which you don’t have native level ability.


Just because you can understand a language and translate out of it, doesn’t mean you can write at an acceptably good level in it. I can always tell when English is written by a foreigner because the articles are horribly abused or simply not used at all. (The definite article THE, and the indefinite article A). If I tried to write sentences in Polish or French, the readers would be laughing their socks off before reaching the third line of text. Don’t do that to your clients. They might not be able to get the work checked until they get laughed out of a meeting.


17) Sub-contracting large jobs by splitting, without checking and unifying the quality of each submission.


Two sins in one. Firstly, splitting up a job is to be avoided if at all possible. If not possible, the whole lot needs to be Quality Assurance checked (QA) by one translator to make it consistent. Oh, and you did ask the client’s permission to sub-contract didn’t you? I thought not.


18) Taking the wrong advice.


There seems to be a large number of translators out there on the Internet, who think that the way to go is to continually keep dropping rates and chase the work all the way down to the bottom. This only works if you are in a low wage economy. If you live in a country where you can make a good wage and earn a decent living for 10% of what I need, there is never going to be a way that I can compete with you on price.


To all of you out there, who are worried about these people – STOP! There is nothing you can do about it, so spend your time on something more worthwhile. You will never get rich by chasing after the bottom end of the market. It’s simply not the way in the service sector.


Bidding for jobs might be a good way to get some experience when you are first starting. But it is not the right way to go if you want to build a successful, satisfying, high-earning business as a freelance translator.


It seems almost too obvious to state, but the secret to high earnings is high rates. There. I’ve said it now! There will always be people out there who are willing to pay decent prices to get decent service. How cheap is the translation which costs your company millions of dollars in lost business?


You need to educate clients. It takes time. It might not be easy. But it is certainly worth it. How is it possible that a company will spend thousands or millions creating their corporate communications and then let some fairly low-grade secretary “who knows a bit of the language” translate a very important document for them. It’s ignorance – pure and simple.


Educate those clients, win them, keep them. Build your own future. There is more than enough work out there for those who can do this. Are you one of them?

Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…

How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a Freelance Translator
and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

ISSN 1470-3866

 

***End of issue 68***

Social networking has come of age (even for freelance translators)

 tranfree, translation business  No Responses »
Mar 132010
 

Several social network sites for translators have sprung up recently. Clearly they meet a perceived need that the classical forum sites don’t. For busy professionals it can be difficult to meet all one’s social needs in person. These sorts of sites can be very useful and fun to snatch a little human(ish) contact in spare moments.

The main problem is that, for busy professionals it can be both good and bad. Good because it gives “human” contact, bad because it provides another reason to stay at the computer instead of getting up and moving about, giving our eyes a rest. It’s all too easy to get hooked in.

A new site http://www.langmates.com/ by the guys behind AIT software was launched on 3rd March 2010. By 12th March they had 1000 members.

It’s very similar to Facebook in look and feel and functionality. I think it’s a brilliant idea and wish them every success.

Another one I took an instant like to, and was made instantly very welcome at is Andrew Bell’s http://watercoolernetwork.com/, which is a network for established freelance translators only. Membership is not a “free for all” and all members need to be approved. It started a few months ago and there are now 827 members.

Even more selective is stridonium which applies three selection filters before you can be a member. You have to…

  1. be a member of a professional translators association or have a minimum of three years translation experience
  2. be nominated by two existing members
  3. pay an annual subscription of €50 plus VAT

This is going to be a fairly exclusive private club, and that’s obviously the intention. I am not a member so can’t evaluate it. But here is what they say on the site…

The aim of Stridonium is to provide a platform for professional translators to interact in a collegial spirit of give and take. As the site was not set up for commercial purposes, there is no formal area on the site for outsourcing work and no attempts are made to sell products or services to members. Furthermore, as befits a community of adult professionals, regulations are kept to a bare minimum.

If you are a professional translator and are interested in joining the Stridonium community, please see the conditions for membership.

So that’s three for now, but there’s probably more I don’t yet know about.

How do you Interpret This?

 tranfree, translation business  No Responses »
Mar 102010
 

Listen to: How Do You Interpret This?

I have just received a very interesting offer from a German interpreting company. It came through the post and addressed to my translation agency, in a brown A4 envelope, with a fairly thick, bulky brochure attached.

On first quick scanning of the letter, it looked quite impressive and the letter did its job. I picked up the brochure – quite a thick presentation and thick paper – good quality printing all about conference interpreting.

The brochure was nicely presented, good use of photographs – plenty of “white space” – nice brochure. I flicked through the first half, which was in German. I thought to myself “hey this is very good – I’ll just flick forwards through to the next part where they’ll have the English version”. So I flicked through the rest of the document, all looking very nice, but the whole thing was in German.

I don’t get it. The letter was English, sent to an English address. They clearly knew it was to an English firm, but the brochure is in German. I know that it says translations in the company name, but that doesn’t actually mean that I’m going to pay somebody to read your marketing literature. I don’t speak German, some agency owners will, but most won’t.

So I decided to go back and have another look at the letter. Now before I rip into the letter, let me say again, the letter did its job. It got me to open the brochure and have a look. That is what the letter is for. But on closer inspection, the letter is seriously wanting as well.

It starts with the foreigners classic, “Ladies and Gentlemen”. That is not how to start a letter – that is how to begin a speech. Well, this is written by a conference interpreting firm, so we can only assume that their skill set lies in the spoken realm. Yes, sadly on close inspection, the letter is very foreign sounding “this is not an image brochure”. Can anyone tell me what an image brochure is? Sorry but I’ve never heard of one. I bet if you are a German-English translator you will know the German word this was translated from – I don’t.

Next we have “This is an updated, highly informative handout about conference interpreting.” Well I think I can figure out what what they’re trying to say, but it’s very stilted.

They even go on to talk about having interpreted for Barak Obama and Tony Blair. Clearly these people are top-flight interpreters.

I could go on. In fact, I’d quite like to go on. But I won’t. Why won’t I? Simply because I’m not trying to embarrass or belittle people. I am simply trying to make the point that when you spend time and money marketing yourself, you would be very wise to ensure that you have good quality marketing materials to do it with.

It would probably have been mortifying for them to admit this, but what they actually needed was a translator. Not only that, but it needed to be someone with native English.

Perhaps it was a mistake? Perhaps all the other agencies in the UK that they sent their materials to received a copy of the brochure in English? Why do I doubt that?

I don’t know. Let’s call it a gut-feel thing. How undignified would it be for somebody who has interpreted for president Obama to have to pay a translator – a mere translator – to prepare marketing materials for them. Dignified or not, it was clearly necessary in this case.

This is a very clear example of a top flight professional thinking that a translation can be done satisfactorily by a non native. Even worse, it’s a language professional. Tut, tut – should know better! This is somewhat disheartening for the profession. How can we expect captains of industry, businessmen, governments, and others to respect, value and take our profession seriously, if our fellow language professionals don’t? I guess they thought they could do it OK? But isn’t that something we hear nearly every day when we’re asked to proofread and correct poorly written documents that were translated by the “secretary who knows a bit of English”.

Okay. I don’t mind a letter from a foreigner who sounds a bit like a foreigner. That is to be expected. That is forgivable. But what I find unforgivable, in terms of marketing errors, is the sending of a 24 page brochure in German trying to solicit work from a UK firm. The only reason I didn’t throw it in the bin immediately was because I thought it would make an interesting article on how not to market yourself.

Alex Eames
http://www.translatortips.com/
helping translators do better business