Get Paid!

Many times, it's relatively easy to find out details about a particular client's past payment history by using fantastic tools such as Payment Practices. However, those rating services largely focus on translation agencies. We work almost exclusively with direct clients, which makes it difficult to obtain readily available information about their payment practices. We have thus far had almost overwhelmingly positive experiences in terms of payment, even by individuals (not backed by a corporation) who would be difficult to...

The Business of Integrity

Entrepreneurship in any line of business is all about referrals and reputation. To succeed in our profession, it is extremely important to develop a solid reputation as a trustworthy, professional translation services provider who has, first and foremost, integrity. It's overused and sounds trite, but it really is true that your character shows when no one is looking. Our your business integrity, in this case. One...

Translator Gone Wild

In our experience, the vast majority of our fellow translators are highly professional individuals who like to go the extra mile to make their clients happy, especially in times like these. However, there seem to be linguists who either do not need more clients or who are, unfortunately, willing to ruin their reputation (and, by extension, our profession's) with unprofessional behavior. True story: one of our most treasured...

(Net) working

As a follow-up to last week's post, we wanted to share some thoughts on what we call the "new/old" networking strategies. In our opinion, the "new" networking sessions -- the business mixers, the networking luncheons, the Chamber of Commerce-hosted happy hours -- are, in general, a good idea. The problem is supply/demand. Too many sellers, not enough buyers. At those events (which we have been attending for years, mostly...

No Translator is an Island

Having a solid network of fellow linguists is paramount for entrepreneurs in the translation and localization industries. Just like most businesses, we get a substantial amount of work through word of mouth and referrals, and we frequently pay it forward. We are happy to send work to fellow translators when we are too busy or like to recommend specialists who are better at the field in question than we are. It's also...

Good Monolingual Business Dictionary

In our quest for always finding better and more subject-specific dictionaries and glossaries, preferably online and free (we already have most of the good, expensive ones on CD-Rom), we came across this Monolingual Business Dictionary. It's a good tool to help one understand basic as well as complex business terms before starting a translation. It also helps with these troubled financial times: many terms are recession- and crisis-specific, and we haven't run across them frequently before 2008. Hedge-fund related terminology:...

Marketing Tip of the Week

A few days ago, I was reading my alma mater's (University of Nevada Las Vegas) alumni magazine, and just like every month, I looked under the "class notes" section to see what my fellow graduates (the ones I am not in touch with) were up to. It's always great to read about other alumni's careers and lives after graduation. As a two-time alumna of UNLV (B.S., 1998 and M.B.A., 2001) and lifetime member of the alumni organization, I had, however, never submitted information on my own career to be included in the magazine. Today,...

Automated Translation Amusement

The merits and pitfalls of several aspects of machine translation are highly debated in the language technology world, and it's an interesting topic. However, we can all certainly agree on one thing: automated translation does not work: these programs can't conjugate, decline, recognize meaning, read between the lines, do syntax, etc. Many of us have tried this for fun on Bablefish where one can enter a say, German text and have it translated into awful English. The real fun starts when you translate it back into the original...