Our Favorite Translation Cartoon

We should probably wait until our book, the Entrepreneurial Linguist, is published, but we are so excited about this cartoon that we just had to share it. Our wonderful colleague, translator, and translator cartoonist extraordinaire, Alejandro Moreno-Ramos of Spain, draws some of the funniest cartoons we know. He has generously contributed a fantastic cartoon to our book, which will appear on the first few pages. We...

Live English->German TV Interpretation: Scary

Now that Judy has started her court interpreter certification and Dagmar is working on her advanced conference interpreting degree, we've been thinking a lot about interpretation. Specifically, about how much of a challenge it is, and about the different high-pressure environments that we would not want to work in. One of them is live television -- think Miss Universe, award ceremonies, press conferences, etc. These jobs are best reserved for highly experienced simultaneous interpreters with nerves of steel. We've been honing...

Link: Basic SEO for Linguists

This month, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting's Bulletin published one of Judy's article, which addresses an issue dear to every website owner's heart: search engine optimization. Inspired by all the strategies and tips that Judy has learned from our IT guru, Tom Gruber, she put together an easy-to-read article with tips and tricks. The article contains no hard-to-understand jargon and is written from one linguist to another: not from one techie to another. Translation: it's written in plain English. While Judy...

A New Field: Court Interpretation

This week, after much hesitation, Judy decided to take the first step towards becoming a certified court interpreter for Spanish in the state of Nevada. It's a difficult and long process with a 5% pass rate on the first try for those who take the written and oral exam in the same year. We have both always had a lot of respect for those interpreters who are able to work in high-pressure court environments with extremely high stakes. Judy wasn't sure if she had the necessary knowledge of the court system to start the process,...

Adobe Reader Warning

Our IT guru just alerted us to the following issue, which we would like to share with our readers. If you are like us, you probably use Adobe Reader quite frequently. Unfortunately, some critical vulnerabilities have just been identified. Here is more information: Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system. All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds...

Have You Updated Your Rates?

We have written about the need to adjust your rates on January 1 very frequently. So, have you done it? January 1 is the best day to do this, unless you spend the entire day at the gym working on your other New Year's resolutions. The reason you need to adjust your rates is simple: inflation. With your very small rate increase, you are simply ensuring that you have the same purchasing power this year as you had in the previous year. If you don't increase your rates, you are effectively giving yourself a pay decrease. That doesn't...

How Much Would You Pay?

We hope all our colleagues around the world had a fantastic start into 2010. We took advantage of a few relatively quiet days to make major progress on our book. We are still on target for a spring publication of "The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation," which we are planning on self-publishing on Lulu. We are able to set our own price, and we are in the process of determining what the price should be. We'd like to make a modest profit off our work, but we also want the book to be...

Link: Video From ATA Conference

While the ball was dropping last night in NYC, we received news from a fellow linguist, French->English audiovisual translator Alexander Totz, who tackled a time-consuming project: interviewing many translators and bloggers during the ATA conference in NYC at the end of October. He's compiled a short video with brief interviews featuring Corinne McKay, Eve Bodeux, and one of us, Translation Times' Judy Jenner. These interviews were held at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, just like last night's NYE festivities (but...