Finally: a very funny video that has a professional point to make. This video eloquently summarizes the main points about pricing that we've discussed in the last few months. Without further ado, please have a look at this very well-made poignant video about how other services providers would react if their pricing strategies were challenged. Does any of this sound familiar? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Judy is showing this video, which has been circulating among translation organizations around the world, at a workshop tomorrow in Seattle as well.
Online Resources: World Languages
We just came across a very interesting website sent to us through one of the listservs that we belong to. It's a site that covers information on a wide variety of languages spoken around the world, including Malayalam, Pashto, Quechua, Dakota, Tok Pisin and many others that you probably aren't familiar with (we weren't.) It's a fascinating resource, especially for language professionals, and it has a wealth of extremely well-researched information, including difficulty of language acquisition, dialects, background, strucutre, writing, etc. This is a good website if you need to settle any discussion about languages; for instance: where is Telugu spoken? Answer: it's spoken by 70 million people in India, mainly in the state of Andra Pradesh. Or: what's the third official language of Ruanda? Answer: Kinyarwand. Warning: this site is not only highly informative and academic, but also highly addictive. Enjoy learning more about languages of lesser diffusion! Visit the World Languages site here.
Entrepreneurial Linguist Site: Live
While we are still in the final stages of editing our "Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation" book, we have received so many inquiries and pre-orders that we have created a website with more information, where you can also add yourself to the pre-order list. It contains a tentative table of contents, information on what an Entrepreneurial Linguist is, etc. Check it out here. We are currently working on a cover design with the assistance of our fantastic IT guru Thomas Gruber and our amazing photographer friend Ulf Buchholz. It might look like the image above, but the jury is still out. If any of our readers have any ideas, we'd love to hear them, and who knows, perhaps we will use it! It's the new area of collaborative ideas...
Professional Development: Health Care Interpreting Workshop
The Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association (NITA), for which Judy serves as vice president, is holding a one-week health care interpreting workshop in Reno, Nevada, from November 9 through 13. It's a week-long course that includes a certificate of completion and is given by well-known interpretation trainer and NITA founding president Tracy Young. The workshop is open to speakers of all languages and incldues a pre-course language proficiency exam by a third party. This is a full 40-hour course held in one week. NITA has secured a fantastic hotel price for those participants from out of town at $35 per night.
For full information, please visit the NITA website. The registration deadline is coming up on October 1. This is the second time this year that NITA has been able to offer this workshop (in only its second year of existence), so we hope you can join us. There's an increasing need for health care intepreters in the U.S., so if this are of interpretation has piqued your interest, this is the workshpp for you.
For full information, please visit the NITA website. The registration deadline is coming up on October 1. This is the second time this year that NITA has been able to offer this workshop (in only its second year of existence), so we hope you can join us. There's an increasing need for health care intepreters in the U.S., so if this are of interpretation has piqued your interest, this is the workshpp for you.
Translation Times Turns One
This week marks this blog's first year of life on the blogosphere, and we have been delighted with our blogging experience. We were inspired to add a translation blog to our list of blogs by many of our fantastic colleagues who have blogged about translation for years. Here are some of this year's highlights:- 125 posts
- Average of 7 -9 blog posts per month
- Hundreds of comments and interesting discussions
- Appreciative feedback from readers we informed of an interpretation company that has not paid many contractors, as reported to us by affected parties
- Our most popular blog entries, by number of comments, were the above-mentioned non-payment alerts, including this one here and the accused's response here.
- Many good ideas and suggestions from our readers, which inspired new blog posts, including one on languages in literature.
Thanks for reading, everyone! We are appreciative of your input and feedback and look forward to continue strengthening our translation community by writing about relevant things for linguists. We will continue bringing you popular posts about marketing tips, advertising strategies, cost-saving tips, information on professional development, and much more. We'd love to hear from you as well - let us know if you'd like us to address a particular issue. Here's to a great second year! Note: the above picture was taken by our good friend and volunteer photographer, Ulf Buchholz, in front of a run-down building in east Las Vegas, signaling the end of the building boom in Nevada. No end of the blogging boom in sight, though!
Professional Development in Berlin: Meet a Twin
September and October are usually very popular months in the professional development world, and this year is no excception. The American Translators Association's 50th Annual Conference starts in NYC on October 28.This weekend is the German association's (technically, the Federal Association of Translators and Interpreters) long-overdue national conference in Berlin, Germany. As opposed to the ATA, the BDÜ does not have yearly conferences, but when they do, it's a in grand style, including evening entertainment, dinners, cruises, etc. Dagmar, the European twin, will be representing the Austrian Translators' and Interpreters' Association UNIVERSITAS in her function as Assistant Secretary General. Be sure to say hello to Dagmar at the conference! We are already impressed by some of the BDÜ's ideas, including an customized electronic conference planner, which is certainly much more sophisticated than the paper-and-pencil schedule that we are forever altering at the ATA conferences. Both of us already went to Berlin earlier this year, and that's where this picture was taken.
For more information about the BDÜ conference, titled "Interpreting the Future," please visit their official website. It looks like it will be a very popular event with more than 1,600 linguists registered. The event is September 11 -13.
Early Bird Special: ATA Conference in NYC
The American Translators Association's 50 Annual Conference is promising to be quite an exciting event, with a record number of submissions for seminars and speaking slots and a higher-than-usual expected attendance. It's fitting that the ATA comes back to where it all started: New York City. Judy will be there, just like every year, and she's presenting her seminar "Lessons from Business School: The Entrepreneurial Linguist" on Saturday, October 31, at 11 a.m. The conference is from October 28 through the 31.
If you haven't registered yet, be sure to do so by September 25, as the early bird registration ends that day. To sign up visit the ATA's website and save 20%. Hope to see you there!
If you haven't registered yet, be sure to do so by September 25, as the early bird registration ends that day. To sign up visit the ATA's website and save 20%. Hope to see you there!
Efficiency Nirvana: Empty Inbox
Last week, for the first time, Judy achieved something that Dagmar, the more organized twin, routinely achieves: a completely empty e-mail inbox. You don't need to be one of those office organization consultants to know that it's not good to have hundreds of e-mails cluttering up your inbox. While we are still working on achieving a very clean inbox on a consistent basis, here are some quick tips to get you started:
- Set up e-mail filters for all newsgroups and listservs that you belong to. These messsages will then bypass the inbox and go into pre-specified folders to read at your leisure.
- If you don't think you need an e-mail, delete it. When in doubt, delete it.
- Create good folders on your e-mail system. The more granular, the better. Have one for each client, subdivided into correspondence, projects, invoices, etc. We have dozens of folders that are well sub-divided for ease of finding.
- When you get an e-mail, evaluate if you can take action within a few minutes. If yes, do it right away. If not, wait until you have some extra time to research and think before responding.
- Consider setting up a "pending but not urgent" folder. You could move anything that's not too pressing into that folder and program a reminder to look at it once a day.
Having a clean inbox really gives one a sense of accomplishment, organization, and simply room to breathe. Also, you will save lots of time as you will be easily able to locate important messages. Try it -- it's actually easier than cleaning out a desk drawer.
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