Tracking Data to Create a Business Plan

Most Mondays find me paying last week's bills, invoicing the work I did the previous week and generally inputting financial data into Quickbooks Pro. A few weeks ago I added another step to my weekly finance session: filling in a spreadsheet with the money earned during the previous week. For this purpose, any work submitted during the week counts as a project for which the money was earned that week. The spreadsheet is divided by currency (US$, Euros, Swiss Francs), with formulas to create US$ totals (using approximate average conversion rates) for the week and month, and a running US$ total.

This spreadsheet, along with a daily planner divided by half hour increments where I try to track how long I spend on various projects (including administrative chores, marketing, etc.) is an attempt to get enough data for an actual business plan. I can (usually) estimate reasonably accurately how long a given project might take and I know what money I have (or don't have) in the bank. But since payments for projects arrive a long time after the work has been completed and since I regularly transfer money from my business account to the family account, I don't have a good sense of how much I actually earn for the time I spend.

Hopefully this system will eventually give me enough data to figure out what I'm actually making per hour, both on average and from specific clients. That should help me create a realistic business plan. Let's see how it goes ...

How do you approach business planning?

Finding Time for Marketing

Sorry for posting so late in the week. The last couple of weeks have been really busy, plus I had contractors at my house renovating a bathroom. A one-week project that turned into two weeks and required more of my time than I had anticipated. That, at least, is over now. The work rush, though, is likely to continue for another week or more.

All business advice books and articles I have read say you have to market yourself, including on social media, even during busy times. I try to do that by scheduling my blog posts on my to do list and using Tweetdeck to set up my Tweets in advance. While I try to treat these marketing activities as just another project, they are clearly less urgent than paid work. So they occasionally fall by the wayside, like this week.

Eve Bodeux asked about my "How I Plan to Target Swiss Direct Clients post how that plan was coming along. To be honest: slowly, if at all. I started to research Swiss IT companies online before I left for Vienna, but found that most appear to be very local. There were a couple of possible leads, but I haven't really done anything with them. Maybe if next week is less crazy, I will contact them.

In addition to paid projects, there are the unpaid articles and book reviews I keep agreeing to write. They are marketing activities of sorts, too, I guess. My next to last book review for the STC's Intercom magazine was just published, and I'm waiting for my next review copy to arrive. Meanwhile, during my meeting with fellow interpreter & translator Sabina Illmer in Vienna, I agreed to write an article for the next newsletter of the Austrian Court Interpreters Association.

So how do you find time to market yourself?

Hyperpolyglots or Unscrupulous Translators?

Last week, the New York Times profiled a New York high school student whose hobby was to learn a large number of different languages. The student, Timothy Doner, now creates You Tube videos of himself speaking in various languages, making him a minor Internet celebrity. By his own admission, he is not striving for near-native fluency in any of these languages, but rather attempts to learn the basics of as many languages as possible.

Doner is part of a select group of individuals who know dozens or more, often very dissimilar, languages, so-called "hyperpolyglots". They collect linguistic knowledge the way others collect porcelain figurines or autographed baseballs. It certainly takes quite a talent to learn foreign languages that quickly and it also helps to start that hobby young.

I'm not sure whether the e-mails I have seen advertising translation services from and into a dozen or more languages provided by a single person were from such hyperpolyglots or from unscrupulous translators. I could see people with a relatively basic (but not rudimentary) command of a language attempting to translate simple general texts, such as an invitation to an event, from that language.

Most documents handled by professional translators, however, are much more complex and/or specialized. So even if the person advertising such services were a talented linguist who collects languages, I doubt he or she would be able to accurately translate, say, a technical whitepaper for a new type of construction machinery into half a dozen languages.

As always, the challenge is to explain to end clients why they are unlikely to receive a translation of acceptable quality from such a super-multilingual translator and why that matters.

Lessons Learned From a Long Trip

My trip to Vienna was fun, but despite regularly checking my e-mail while I was away, there is quite a bit that still needs to be addressed. Plus, clients were already e-mailing me about new projects before my plane had even arrived in New York. It's nice to be wanted, but it feels a little overwhelming sometimes.

Here are a few lessons I learned for the next long (at least by American standards) trip:

1. Double-check WiFi availability for your destination/hotel. My (really cheap) hotel had only one (rather slow) desktop computer with an Internet connection next to the reception desk, with a time limit of 15 minutes per guest and no way to connect my Netbook. I wound up using the free WiFi in Vienna's largest train station (which was several subway stations from my hotel).
2. Copy promotional information, rate sheets, etc. onto my Netbook (and a USB stick) before leaving. For some reason, several new potential clients contacted me while I was away. They were gracious about waiting for my return to provide that information, but then I have a number of them to follow up with this week.
3. If I can solve 1. and 2., schedule about 30 minutes a day to deal with business. Yes, I'm on vacation, but following up immediately on new leads or potential projects to be completed after my return cuts down on the backlog I need to address right away when I've just arrived back home and am still jet lagged.
4. Explore copying all that information to the cloud, rather than my Netbook, so I only have to take my iPad, instead of both Netbook and iPad (the latter for e-Books to read and for better portability in terms of Internet access).

How do you prepare for long trips/vacations?

A Translator's Education Never Ends

I had a couple of very interesting meetings with translator colleagues -- some of whom also function as very small translation agencies -- here in Vienna. Our e-mail communications are usually limited to exchanges about a specific project or topic. That is certainly appropriate for the medium and the fact that such conversations tend to take place in the middle of our workdays. A (very) occasional after-hours face-to-face meeting, on the other hand, affords us the opportunity for much wider-ranging chats.

One of the things I learned in these meetings is that the Austrian translators association, Universitas, holds summer courses on terminology at the University of Vienna. Something to bear in mind for Summer 2013, when I'll be back in Vienna for my father's 80th birthday anyway. Spending a summer in Austria would also be a good immersion course in contemporary German. Like most translators, I do try to read regularly in my "other" language(s) (i.e., the one(s) in which I'm not living), but actually living in that linguistic environment 24/7 is different.

I consider trips back to Europe part of my continuing education as a translator. So is the class in green building/alternative energy that I will attend in New York starting in early March. It should help me better understand how solar energy and similar technologies work. I have translated a few documents on photovoltaics, but wound up resorting to Wikipedia to help me understand the technical concepts behind the text I was translating. That understanding (and credentials, since the class prepares for a certification exam as an LEED associate) should pave the way for more work in the alternative energy sector.

But a translator's continuing education isn't limited to source and target languages, as well as subject matter. It should also include changing technologies both in our field and for general use. This means keeping abreast of new CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tools, terminology databases and social media networks, as well as administrative software, such as CRM (customer relationship management), project management and invoicing programs. Another thing I learned in my meetings here is that the CAT tool memoQ is becoming rather popular in Europe and is apparently more flexible than Trados, which I use. I'm not sure I want to spend money (and time) on two tools, but I'll certainly investigate the program after I get back.

PS: I will be on vacation the next two weeks, so won't post again until my return in early March.

Will Controlled English Take Over Technical Communication?

The Society for Technical Communication organizes regular web seminars (webinars) on a variety of communications-related topics. I attended last night's webinar on "Controlled Language", presented by language service provider TedoPres.  Controlled English -- also called Simplified English -- is used to standardize technical texts, as well as to make them more concise. It limits writers to a list of approved terms and imposes a set of grammar and style rules in addition to general English grammar. The vocabulary list and rules differ from company to company, so that there is no one single "Simplified English" standard. However, there are specifications, such as Simplified Technical English (used in the aerospace and defense industries), which can be adapted to a specific company's needs.

Using such controlled vocabulary and grammar ensures consistent use of terminology. It also guards against ambiguities and needlessly complex sentences. That, in turn, makes translation easier and more efficient. Consistent terminology allows me to use my translation memory tool more effectively. Clearer source text helps to avoid mistranslations due to erroneous interpretation of the original. The same is true of simpler sentence structures.

All this streamlining usually also reduces the amount of text to be translated. According to the webinar, use of controlled language reduces translation cost by 20-30%. However, too concise a text can become ambiguous when the intended audience is not considered. The presenter cited one example from an airport in Canada where the instructions included the phrase "clear runway". Everyone working there left the area in question, except for the snowplow driver, who entered the runway to clear away leftover snow.

In addition to reducing translation cost, controlled language also makes the text easier to understand for speakers of English as a second language. While writing in English for global audiences does not require the use of a specific controlled language, many of the rules for simplified English apply in this situation, as well.

So does the proliferation of English-language documents read by global audiences, as well as the drive to reduce the expenses associated with expanding a business internationally mean that in the future most technical text will be written in a controlled language? The trend seems to point in that direction, although marketing considerations probably pull the other way. I'll look at the relationship between technical information and marketing tactics in a future post.

PS: I am leaving for Austria this Friday, Feb. 10, for three weeks. I will try to post at least once during that time, but possibly not more often than that.

Language Learners as Translators?

The recent newsletter of the American Translators Society contained a summary of an article published by New Scientist (Great Britain) about a free language learning website called Duolingo (Learn a Language, Translate the Web). At this point, it only teaches German and Spanish. So far, so good.

But Duolingo not only teaches its users a new language, it has them translate from that language and check translations provided by other learners of that language. This is not just a learning exercise (incidentally, apparently not supervised by a teacher), but Duolingo uses these efforts to build paid-for translations of websites.

Not to disparage talented language learners, but I wouldn't dream of translating from a language I hadn't thoroughly mastered. Unless the website in question consists entirely of short subject-verb-object sentences, maybe with an occasional adjective thrown in, I doubt very much that such a translation would adequately grasp the subtleties inherent in the original.

Granted, the initial translation is reviewed by other amateurs before being accepted. But simply having several people who are just learning a language deem a particular translation correct does not make it so. I have edited text translated by professionals who had mistaken a subject for an object in a long German sentence. How much more likely is such a mistake for someone who is not fully fluent in the language?

Duolingo seems to be another step in the continuing decline of linguistic quality, both for translations and text written in the author's native language (to wit: typos, grammatical errors and repeated text in books printed by large publishers). Can we stop that decline? Is it even worth trying?