2 Blogs: 1 for Colleagues, 1 for Clients

In Everything You've Been Told is Wrong - The Truth about Marketing Your Freelance Business with a Blog Michael Martine writes about freelance bloggers who achieve a decent number of followers for their blog, but no actual business from it. That is so because advice about business blogging is usually not geared towards freelance service providers such as translators. This results in blogs being written for peers, not customers. His assessment certainly rings true for this blog.

I've been pondering how to change this. Mr. Martine's advice to simply change the targeting and content of blog posts to attract customers instead of colleagues leaves these colleagues behind. Based on comments I have received on this blog and the associated Twitter account, Language and Translation does appear to be useful for fellow translators. I don't just want to cut off my colleagues.

The obvious answer would be to start a separate blog aimed at potential clients. This is an attractive idea, but I don't really have time to write two blog posts each week - one for translators, the other for translation buyers. So here is what I will do: set up a separate client-focused blog and continue this blog less frequently. I will still be blogging once a week, but one week it will be this blog and the next week the client blog.

Next on the agenda is to pre-write several client-focused blog posts before actually setting up that second blog and going to the bi-weekly schedule on each blog. Given my other commitments, this may take a few weeks, but I'm trying to have the client blog up and running before I head to the STC Summit in late May.

Speaking of the STC Summit: As a presenter there I have been asked to add the Summit logo and a link to their website to my own online presence: see image above, therefore.

"Project Manage Your Life" Presentation at STC Meeting

As promised in my tweet last week, here is a summary of the presentation "Project Manage Your Life" by Anita Dhir that I attended at the Society for Technical Communications' meeting (New York Chapter) last Thursday.

Ms. Dhir started with the phases in managing any project: proposal - planning - implementation - closing down. When managing professional projects, managers and/or participants sign off on each phase before moving on. In one's personal life, such sign-off may involve soliciting the help of family or friends or outlining specific tasks for the following phase. The projects a person undertakes in his/her private sphere should align with that person's life goals, whatever form they may take. Just as in professional circumstances, life goals should also be SMART: specific - measurable - applicable - realistic - time-bound.

Another aspect of successfully managing one's life is good communication, which includes visual aspects, such as clothing, as well as the tone of conversations. It takes only 7 seconds to make a first impression, but 21 repeats to change that impression. This statistic shows how important it is to make a good first impression.

In addition, today many families, as well as work teams, are dispersed geographically. This means that important visual clues in communication, such as body language, are frequently missing when we speak with/write to family members or friends who are located far away. Photos and videos can help bridge that visual gap, but the tone of any communication must be controlled even more carefully, since it cannot be counterbalanced by visual clues.

Finally, project managing one's life helps to better allocate one's time, so that activities support achievement of one's life goals. After all, time is the only absolutely non-renewable resource, Ms. Dhir emphasized. Once it has elapsed, it can never be brought back.

Follow reliable translations on Twitter: @reliabletran.

Society for Technical Communication's Annual Conference

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) is the best-known professional association for technical writers, translators and teachers of these professions. I have been a member of STC since I moved from using computer documentation (as an IT manager for a non-profit organization) to writing that documentation (for a software developer) many years ago.

STC's 2009 Annual Conference will be held in Atlanta in early May. Not only will this be my first such conference, but I will be presenting on international technical translation. The way this "progression" works, apparently, is that I sit at a table with eight or so other conference attendees and give a 10-minute presentation, followed by about 20 minutes of discussion among everyone at the table. This setup is then repeated with a new group of attendees. By now, I have written and re-written my presentation a number of times and read a half dozen books on being a presenter, but I'm still not sure how exactly this will work.

The title of my presentation is "Preparing Text for Translation: One Translator's Perspective". I'll talk about writing issues and additional information which help to improve the quality and efficiency of a translation.

For example, I just translated a document where various sections appear to have been written by different departments within the company, each using its own terminology. In the beginning, I didn't know whether a slightly different term was actually trying to refer to something different or whether it was simply a different way of saying the same thing. Developing a consistent company terminology -- and providing the translator with a list of such terms -- would have made my job a lot easier. It would probably also have made both the original document and the translation more consistent. In the end, when in doubt I had to assume that two different terms actually did mean two different things, even if they could (and probably sometimes did) mean the same thing.

It would be helpful if everyone whose writing may at some point be expressed in another language were aware of some of these issues. To that end, I will try to devote some of my future posts to writing text for translation. Meanwhile, however, I'll go back to looking over that presentation (and possibly rewriting it) yet another time ...

Until next week,

Barbara