ATA Conference Boston - Review of Sessions II

This is the second part of my session summaries from the recent ATA conference. You can read Part I on sessions dealing with technical translations/terminology here.

• "The Entrepreneurial Linguist: Lessons from Business School"
• "Translating Digital Media: Marketing 2.0"

"The Entrepreneurial Linguist: Lessons from Business School" by Judy Jenner

Ms. Jenner emphasized that even a one-person translation business run out of one's home is a business that must be run professionally. This includes maintaining a well-designed website, a website-specific e-mail address, a separate business telephone number and marketing materials that advertise the value one's translation services add to a client's business instead of a resume that looks like a job application. Since networking and a personal connection are important in obtaining business, a professional photo of the translator is important on the website and other marketing materials. As sellers we set the price of our services; that price should include a minimum charge, as well as annual adjustments for inflation and surcharges for working on weekends and holidays, Ms. Jenner said.

"Translating Digital Media: Marketing 2.0" by Jon Ritzdorf

Mr. Ritzdorf spoke about translators who can market themselves to direct clients in ways that go beyond traditional translation and interpreting services. He focused on three areas: video subtitling, mobile applications and search engine marketing. Translating subtitles for marketing videos may require first timing and transcribing the original text and adjusting the translated text to fit the timing of the original video. The interface for mobile applications not only needs to be translated, but the application itself also must be tested in the target market. Translators here can act as in-country experts who ensure that the application functions as intended in the context of the local infrastructure and can communicate any problems in the language of the application's producer. Keywords used in search engine marketing not only must be translated, but also adapted for the target market, since customers in different markets may not search for the same terms, even in translation. As a user of local search engines, the translator again can act as the in-country reviewer/tester who can also communicate in the client's language.

These are just some of the sessions I attended. I may implement tips from a presentation on using speech-to-text software (specifically, Dragon Naturally Speaking) later (and blog about it).

One of the nice things about language-related conferences is that not all presentations are in English. This gave me a chance to attend lectures presented in German, as well as Spanish, which exposed me to current German business language and honed my Spanish comprehension skills in a dialect I was unfamiliar with (Argentinian, it turns out).

Report From the FIT Congress -- Part I

Last week, I listed six sessions as highlights of the congress of the International Federation of Translators, which I attended last week in San Francisco. Here are summaries of the first three of these sessions. I will summarize the remaining three next week.

• Maggey Oplinger"Hybrid Careers: Atypical Translation Skills in the Workplace"
  
  
• Nataly Kelly "Translation Market Trends: What Freelancers Need to Know"
  
  
• Panel discussion "Creating a Lasting Partnership: Working with LSPs in the Age of Post-Editing"
  

Maggey Oplinger "Hybrid Careers: Atypical Translation Skills in the Workplace"

When working in such hybrid professions, the translator does not simply render the source text accurately in the target language, but rather re-writes it to better fit the target culture and customs. This means there is no complete source text against which to proofread the translated text. Johnson Controls, where Ms. Oplinger works, has an information storage system in multiple languages where text is tagged, so that information can be retrieved independent of the language in which the source text was written. Many of the hybrid jobs described are in-house positions, although some tasks (e.g., reviewing/editing) are sometimes outsourced. When managing an atypical workflow in house, it is important to plan all facets of the project (e.g., linguistic difficulties likely to be encountered in the target market), to clearly manage the project, to include all involved parties (e.g., monolingual subject-matter experts) in the project team, to clearly define the workflow and to plan for production (e.g., printing, shipping) after the translation/transcreation phase of the project has been completed. Monolingual teams must frequently also be educated about the need for translation/transcreation work on a specific project.

Nataly Kelly "Translation Market Trends: What Freelancers Need to Know"

There is a growing market for outsourced (i.e., provided by freelancers rather than staff, not necessarily outside the U.S.) language services, but most of that growth is in multimedia localization and similar work, rather than traditional translation. The U.S. market is fragmented into many language service providers and buyers. The buyers may even include different departments within the same large company. Most of these use multi-language vendors (i.e., translation agencies), but over half the large buyers of translation services use freelancers directly. Ms. Kelly's employer, Common Sense Advisory, publishes annual pricing surveys. In the U.S., end clients pay agencies US$0.26-US$0.28 per source word for German to English translations. Other trends include movement towards transcreation (i.e., re-writing, rather than translating, the source text), crowdsourcing (i.e., non-professional bilingual volunteers providing translations), machine translation, faster turnaround times and globalization of products and markets. Ms. Kelly noted that the buyers of crowd-sourced translations are generally not the same as those buying traditional translation services and that machine translation is often used to disseminate information internally or to provide fast customer support, rather than to update marketing materials or similar text. An audience member also noted that agencies increasingly use automated project management systems, where the translator and computerized system also take on aspects of the project manager's traditional role.

Panel discussion "Creating a Lasting Partnership: Working with LSPs in the Age of Post-Editing"

The panelists were Kåre Lindahl of venga corporation, Michel Lopez of e2f translations and Uwe Muegge of CSOFT. All three agencies work in the technology sector, with e2f translations specializing in post-editing of English<->French machine translations. At venga corporation, the translation tools are built into an Agile software development environment. Agile development means that individual portions of the overall product are being translated as the project moves along, rather than having the entire help system translated at the end of the software development cycle. While this guarantees a steady workflow for the translator, this setup requires translators to work remotely on the agency's own system. However, agencies using such a setup do not always provide training on their own specific tools. Since in an Agile environment source text is still being developed, translators can -- and are expected to -- provide feedback on that text. Either an hourly rate or a combination of hourly and word rates was proposed to compensate translators for the extra time required to provide feedback on the source text. It seems to me that that hourly rate should also be paid for the time it takes a translator to learn the agency-specific tools/environment, if no training is provided. During the discussion period, I noted that remote work on the client's servers can cause problems if that server is located in a different time zone and crashes during that time zone's off hours, but during the translator's working hours. I have encountered that problem before and found there was nothing I could do except to wait for the client's IT department to get into the office the next morning (while I was asleep in the U.S.).

A Brief Dispatch From the FIT Congress

As noted last week, I am attending the congress of the International Federation of Translators (Federation Internationale des Traducteurs - FIT) in San Francisco. Despite a good number of cancelled sessions (some of which were offset by last-minute additions), I found at least one presentation to attend during each of the 5 one-hour slots per day over the last three days. Taking in that quantity of information in such a short time does get tiring after a while, however. Two more keynote speeches tomorrow and the congress will be over.
A few highlights so far:

• Maggey Oplinger discussed "hybrid careers": jobs that include, but go well beyond, translation, such as bilingual writers, localization specialists or post-editors for machine-translated text.
• Nataly Kelly spoke about trends in the translation market, noting that while the volume of translation services has declined over the last year, multimedia localization services have increased.
• A panel discussion on translators' relationship with language service providers emphasized long-term relationships with freelancers willing to use the client's own tools remotely on the client's servers.
• Nicholas Hartmann noted "educated German disease," the tendency of German third-party reviewers to believe that their English is superior to that of the translator.
• Rosana Wolochwianski explained the various levels at which machine-translated text can be edited and what qualities are needed in a successful post-editor.
• David Rumsey advocated that translators talk to end clients so as to better understand the client's own processes.

I will report more fully on these sessions next week.

Following Up on Some Promises

In some previous blogs I noted that I would later post on some issue that I only mentioned in passing in the original post. Some of these I haven't seemed to get around to. So here are brief updates on the items I promised:

April 8, 2010 - "Language Swapping Site"

I signed up with lingomatch on the day of that post, but I haven't yet received a single e-mail in response to my listing at that site. It appears that the site's user base is still too limited to find someone to swap my German/English knowledge for their Spanish knowledge.

February 12, 2010 - "Wordfast Professional Training"

I installed and have used the new release of Wordfast Pro, but I can't detect much difference from the old version. One improvement I did notice, though: a setting now lets you determine which part of a word's glossary entry is displayed in the target language area when you pre-fill that segment (e.g., by using "copy source"). In the old version, both the source and target term for the word would display in the target language area, requiring rather annoying clean-up. I configured the new version to display only the target term, although for some reason that's still not the default.

December 23, 2009 - "ProZ Conference Vienna - Part II"

I signed up with Xing, but I have had few useful contacts so far besides connecting with translators I already knew from other venues. There is a job watch feature, though, where I set up the type of job, industry, etc., I'm interested in. I have received a few e-mails as a result. None have worked out so far, but at least they were specific enough to fit within my relatively narrow industry and specialization -- not bad for a non-translation-specific site.

I also downloaded a trial version of Anycount, which seems to work quite nicely, especially with PDFs. In addition to supporting a variety of file formats, it lets me add an entire list of files, so I don't have to open each of a set of Word files separately to get the count.

And I installed a trial version of Trados Studio, but haven't really had time to actually work with it. Since others have meanwhile written about both Trados and Wordfast, I won't bother with my two cents on this topic.

International Technical Translation Conference

Speaking of conferences: I will be heading to Lisbon, Portugal for the International Technical Translation Conference next week and will report back on it in early June.

ProZ Conference Vienna - Part IV

The last set of presentations at the recent ProZ Regionalkonferenz in Vienna was related to language and translation itself:

1. "Übersetzen für die Wiener Börse" by Edith Vanghelof


2. "Übersetzen aus dem Deutschen -- Wortstellungsprobleme" by David Wright


3. "Deutsche Rechtschreibung" by Dagmar Jenner

Edith Vanghelof spoke mostly about different types of markets and the terminology related to them, as well as to other financial instruments. Translating for the Vienna stock exchange (Wiener Börse) involves mostly rendering legal texts into non-country-specific English. It is not clear to me, however, how such English is arrived at, since financial products, as well as the specifics of a given economic system, differ among countries. Since stock exchanges are highly regulated environments, I'd imagine that the different legal systems producing such regulations would also play a role in how a particular term is rendered into English. Thus, it seems to me that translating such texts without reference to any one country would, at best, be difficult and frequently impossible.

David Wright showed examples of how text is easier to understand if the sentence starts with information already known to the reader. He said that German was more flexible with regard to word order than English, but that in German a particular word order also carried a certain connotation. While Mr. Wright is certainly right that some German word orders are simply ungrammatical in English, keeping the original word order does make text comparison easier. That seems particularly important with legal texts, where some clients may lay the two versions of the text side by side to ensure nothing was skipped or added during translation. With marketing texts, on the other hand, both word order and the actual words (or even phrases) may need to be changed to convey the same mood in another culture. To change word order, or not to change it: it all depends.

Dagmar Jenner had participants complete a short exercise filling in blanks on a business letter with the correct post-reform spelling. [The German-speaking countries changed how things are spelled a couple of times during the last decade or so.] Having left Austria before these spelling reforms, I find that much modern German text looks "misspelled" to me. That's one of the reasons why I prefer to translate into English, rather than into German. After this workshop (and while still in Austria), I did go out and buy the latest standard German spelling dictionary -- the brand-new version of the Duden's "Die neue deutsche Rechtschreibung". Now let's just hope the powers that be won't change things on me again ...

That concludes my notes on this conference.

Until next time,

Barbara

ProZ Conference Vienna - Part III

In my last post I grouped the presentations I attended at the Proz Regional Conference in Vienna by topic. I then summarized the presentations in topic (group) 1. This post will be devoted to the presentations in Group 2 (marketing your services/getting (more) business). These were:

1. "Modding Your ProZ.com Profile" by Siegfried Armbruster


2. "EN 15038 -- ein Erfahrungsbericht" by Dr. Leopold Decloedt of Connect-Sprachenservice GmbH

Siegfried Armbruster uses his ProZ profile page instead of maintaining a separate website for his services. While it is certainly possible to do so -- and apparently a number of translators do this -- I appreciate the flexibility my own website affords me. The ProZ profile can apparently be customized quite a bit, but it can't be designed from scratch, the way I did with my own website. Mr. Armbruster spoke mostly about the ways in which he has customized his profile to illustrate what could be done.

Some of his ideas can be applied to freestanding websites, as well. One suggestion I may implement is a sustained attempt at increase the Google ranking of my website. While that would certainly increase my visibility, it remains to be seen how many of the hits so obtained are actually serious potential end clients and how many are low-cost overseas agencies trying to find translators willing to work for very little money (more about that in a later post).

Another idea I'll pursue is the creation of a central MS Word document containing all relevant information for updating my profiles on ProZ, LinkedIn, Translators Cafe, my own website, and, possibly, Xing (the European equivalent to LinkedIn I touched upon in my previous post). I'd like to find a way to automate profile updates across all these sites, but I'm not sure that can be done -- at least not without spending money.

Leopold Decloedt's presentation focused on an Austrian certification process, which, however, also exists elsewhere in the European Union. It is meant primarily for certifying translation agencies, but individual translators can be certified, as well. More and more European agencies are becoming certified according to this norm, which regulates work flow, as well as freelance translators' qualifications.

While standardization can be a good thing -- and should make it easier to convince end clients that the translation services purchased are, in fact, valuable -- it presents a problem for many translators. The norm prefers freelancers with a formal translation degree who work into their native language. Having come to translation through living and working in a language other than the one I grew up with -- a circumstance common to many translators, at least on this side of the Atlantic -- I don't have a degree in translation. I have translated professionally for the last 9 years, and have done so informally for much longer. I do hold a B.A., but it's in Media Studies, not translation.

Also, technically my "native" language is German, since that's what I grew up speaking. However, by now I have lived and worked in an English-speaking environment for a longer time than I have lived in Austria. Most of my technical knowledge was acquired in English -- personal computers were in their infancy when I left Austria 25 years ago. As a result, I am better at translating technical documents into, rather than from, English. At this point I consider both German and English my native languages. I will address the question of what constitutes a native language more fully in a later post.

One thing I noticed during this presentation was that I already follow many of the procedures required by this norm, e.g., I use translation memory; I systematically archive client orders, as well as work performed; I have a transparent invoicing system; I have a system for tracking client orders, their completion, invoicing and payment, etc. So rather than actually getting certified according to EN 15038 (which would be costly for an individual), I will get the regulations for the certification, see which portions apply to my business and then list on my website which of the requirements I follow, and how I do so.

Until next time,

Barbara

ProZ Conference Vienna - Part II

This is the first of 3 posts on the presentations I attended at the ProZ Regional Conference in Vienna at the end of November. These presentations can be grouped roughly as follows:

1. the business side of freelance translating
   
2. marketing your services/getting (more) business
   
3. language and translation itself
   

Group 1 included the following presentations:

1. "ProZ oder Amateure? Der Übersetzer als Unternehmer -- Erfahrungen aus dem Büroalltag" by Dr. Michael Bolten of Newspeak-Sprachlösungen
   
2. "Project administration -- the financial side of a translator's job" by Angela Starkmann
   
3. "The 21st century translator" by Dipl.-Ing. Jerzy Czopik of TransDocu
   

Note: All presentations I attended were given in German, although the slide presentations were sometimes in English.

Michael Bolten's presentation was an interesting exchange between the translators/interpreters in the audience and translation agencies as personified by Mr. Bolten. I learned a number of things about German/Austrian industry practices from this discussion:

Standard payment terms appear to be 30 days from invoice. This stands in marked contrast with the common U.S. practice of "pay-when-paid", where agencies delay payment to their translators until they receive their money from the end client. This often leads to a delay of two or more months until the translator is paid.

Pricing is by target language word/line count. Here, generally source language word counts are used to determine the price of a given translation. For translators from German, with its concatenated extra-long nouns, this practice means a lower income for the same amount of work.

While LinkedIn includes many members based in Europe, the professional networking site of choice in Europe appears to be Xing. One of my New Year's resolutions, therefore, is to join that network, as well.

Angela Starkman presented her own survey on the business practices/background of freelance translators. Much of her presentation was unfortunatley not applicable here in the U.S., where things like multi-currency invoicing software (or even non-U.S.-dollar denominated checking accounts) don't exist. A number of practices she suggested I had already implemented in my home office before this presentation. I did, however, learn about two tools I intend to try out in 2010:

Anycount apparently is a shareware tool that lets you quickly analyze documents in terms of text length. This allows translators to prepare estimates for clients without having to convert each file into MS Word format to see word/character counts.

A dashboard on the computer's desktop that includes the day's appointments, to dos, etc. This is an interesting idea, although I am not sure how to implement it on my Windows XP-based desktop. (Given the bugs in Vista, I paid extra last Spring to buy a desktop computer still running XP).

Jerzy Czopik spoke about the definition of quality. Quality is meeting a customer's expectations, Mr. Czopik said, not what the translator perceives as quality. I have seen this first-hand when on one occasion an end client -- through the agency -- demanded that every single "the" and "a" in a text for their website be translated, even though definite articles are used much more frequently in German than in English. I had delivered a translation that read like a text originally written in English, but on the customer's request, added in all the extra articles, making for a rather clunky English version.

This presentation also emphasized the need for translators to use computer tools, including CAT tools. In this and other conferences I attended, the most commonly used CAT tool appears to be SDL Trados. I purchased Wordfast a while back and have held off on switching to Trados, both because of its price and the time (and money) required to learn it. Another of my New Year's resolutions is to download a trial version of Trados Studio and try out both Trados and the Wordfast Professional. Look for a future post on that experience.

My next couple of posts will be devoted to the presentations in Groups 2 and 3 above. Meanwhile, have a happy holiday and all the best for the new year!

Barbara

Vienna ProZ Conference

The ProZ conference just ended last night with a dinner near one of Vienna's (semi-)traditional Christmas markets. I met quite a few interesting colleagues, including one who had come all the way from Chile.

What struck me here, compared to U.S. conferences, is how many of the attendees weren't just bilingual, but spoke multiple foreign languages fluently -- and in some cases translated from/to quite a number of languages. As is common with international conferences, the lingua franca was English, although, this being a regional conference, many -- if not most -- attendees also spoke German. I found myself constantly asking people I met which language they spoke/preferred.

Maybe a variation of the Quebecois greeting should be developed for such conferences. In Montreal, when I bought groceries the cashier would greet me with "Bonjour, Hello". I was then expected to reply either "Bonjour" or "Hello" to indicate my preference for French or English. The remainder of the transaction was then conducted in that language. I could see participants in international gatherings greeting each other with "Hi, Guten Tag, Bonjour", for example, to indicate the languages in which the conversation could be carried out. For some people -- particularly in our profession -- that might become a rather lengthy greeting, though.

Most sessions were in the end conducted in German, even though some of the session titles were in English, and some speakers had expected to give their presentations in English. So the PowerPoint slides projected behind the speaker might be in English, but the speaker's commentary on them would be in German. I generally try to take notes in the language in which the talk is given (or the book is written), but I found myself using English, English abbreviations, German and German shorthand all in my notes for the same presentation. Not a problem, unless someone else wants to see these notes, or I need to remember the language in which the talk was originally given, but potentially confusing.

Being back in Vienna makes me a little homesick for this city, although I don't think I could move back here permanently. I am too much of a New Yorker by now to live with the slower pace, smaller city and relative homogeneity of the population here. Participants at this conference were talking about having attended, or planning to attend, conferences in various other European cities. There is definitely an advantage to living in the center of Europe. Maybe some day I'll come back for a little while ...

I got to go to visit my parents -- another advantage of being in Vienna: they are just a subway ride away, instead of an ocean away.

Barbara

Off to Vienna! + Backup Security

Hi all,

I am getting ready to leave for Vienna, Austria, to attend the ProZ Regional Conference there this weekend. Next week I am meeting a few business contacts and will also visit my family. I'll return to the U.S. December 8.

The conference sounds interesting -- not surprisingly, I seem to be the only U.S.-based translator who signed up for it. Frankly, I probably wouldn't have signed up, either, if I didn't have family in Vienna. A number of people from various European countries (not just German-speaking) are attending, though, so that should be fun. Plus conference attendees were apparently invited to a fancy "Heurigen", a Viennese-style wine bar cum restaurant, by the mayor of Vienna.

I spent part of today backing up information & transferring files to my laptop, so I'll not only have everything I could possibly need with me, but the information will also be stored on CDs and on an external hard drive. I am rather over-conscious when it comes to backing up digital information -- particularly business- or client-related items. Every night, each project I am working on is copied to a CD for that client (which is stored in the client's folder, along with print-outs of work orders & e-mails with instructions from that client). When a project is completed, it is again backed up to CD. Once a week, both my desktop and laptop automatically back up to an external hard drive attached to my home network. Similarly, accounting information (kept in QuickBooks Pro) is backed up regularly on CDs (one for the business, one for home/family accounts), and contact information and e-mails (kept in Outlook with Business Contact Manager) are included in the weekly backup to an external hard drive.

I am considering adding a layer of online backup every other week or so, in case something *really* bad happens to my house. The question is, how secure is such a backup (especially when it comes to client and/or financial information)? Anything on the internet can be hacked, including "secure" online storage. Houses can be broken into, as well, but at least I'd notice if someone broke into my home office and made off with my files (not sure why anyone would do so or what they would do with the files, but ...). If someone hacked my online backup space, I wouldn't necessarily know that the data had been compromised. On the other hand, online storage seems the only viable option for securing data if my home office is physically destroyed or severely damaged (e.g., a fire -- it's on the third floor, so flooding is unlikely to be a problem).

Do you have any experience using online backup solutions? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

Until next time,

Barbara

PS (April 2010): I have since set up online backup. Read about my entire backup/disaster preparedness system.

ATA Conference + Translation Industry Study

As a child I had always admired the hotel concierges in old movies who dispensed advice and critical information along with mail and phone messages. At the recent American Translators Association conference here in New York I got to be something of a concierge. I, along with a number of other members, volunteered at the hospitality desk set up by ATA's New York chapter, the New York Circle of Translators. We could even use a "real" receptionist's area, complete with chest-high countertop and little cubicles behind the countertop. We volunteers not only helped out-of-towners find their way around New York City, but in the process we met conference attendees from a number of different places. This being a conference of language professionals, the information could even be offered in a number of different languages (although the printed materials - some of which came from the New York City tourist office - were only in English).

The most valuable part of the conference for me were the contacts I made with both other translators and purchasers of translation services, such as translation agencies and organizations with translation departments. I am heading for Vienna in the end of the month and will meet with some of these contacts there. ProZ, one of the larger translation websites, is holding a regional conference in Vienna, which I will be attending before visiting family and meeting with some business contacts in early December.



The ATA conference also included a number of interesting presentations. One of these was a study from Common Sense Advisory suggesting that the translation industry in the U.S. is poised for significant growth, particularly in the national security, international affairs, public work and public safety sectors. That's great news for translators working in Middle Eastern, Eastern European or Southeast Asian languages who are willing to work for the U.S. government. Not so great news, though, for those of us who work with Western European languages and won't work for the U.S. military or "homeland security". According to this study, the next-biggest industry in terms of translation and localization potential is IT. That would be great for me, since I specialize in IT documents, but the language most needed in that sector is Chinese. Since I don't speak Chinese, that doesn't really help so much ...

How have you translators of Western European languages who do not work for the U.S. government fared in terms of assignments received during the last 6-9 months? Has the volume decreased, increased or stayed the same? Have any of your regular clients cut back or stopped assigning translations altogether?

Either post a comment here or write to me at blog@reliable-translations.com.

Until next time,
Barbara