Middlebury College Questions: Answered

One of our colleagues, Prof. Karin Hanta, recently contacted us to see if we would be willing to participate in an interview project in her translation studies class at prestigious liberal arts school Middlebury College in Vermont. Of course, we were happy to do so, and decided to post our answers here for the benefit of other students who might have similar questions. Here's our Q&A with Middlebury freshman Greta Olivares, who grew up bilingually -- just like we did. Question: How did you get into translation?Growing...

Iraqi Interpreters: Petition

A few weeks ago, we started following Linda Wesson of Clovis, CA on Twitter. Her tweets all centered around one thing: the difficulties of Iraqi interpreters. We are always interested in anything related to interpreters, and we requested more information from Linda. After doing some research, we feel that there are many layers to this that we haven't fully understood yet, but Linda has started a petition to get protection for Iraqi interpreters who are receiving death threats for their role in the conflict. The Americans...

Jobs: Senior Spanish Content Editor

While this job is not in translation per se, we think it would be a great position for one of our Spanish-speaking colleagues. The job description is eerily similar to Judy's previous job at a travel website (although her position included heading the translation team), and it sounds quite interesting. If you are a native Spanish speaker, have extensive online writing experience and are a whiz at working with content management systems, then this six-month position might be a fit for you. It can either be in New York...

Call for Proposals: ATA Annual Conference

It seems that the fall conference season just ended, but time flies: the American Translators Association is already hard at work gearing up for the October 24 -27 conference to be held in sunny San Diego, California. We will both be there, and as usual, Judy will be submitting a proposal or two -- she's presented at the last three annual conferences. We'd love to see many first-time speakers, so if you have something interesting to share, don't be intimidated -- the conference is fantastic and it's a great opportunity to increase...

Giveaway: Another $100 in Google AdWords

We recently received another free Google AdWords certificate, and as usual, it can only be used by new users, which excludes us. Hence, we are delighted to give away another one to one of our dear readers. You just have to answer one question (see below). A quick overview of Google AdWords: after signing up for a free Google account or using an existing one, you can register for the adwords service. Detailed online...

Open Thread: Tricky Editing Project

Happy 2012, everyone! We wanted to share an interesting business case from our practice with our dear readers and would love to get your opinions. As usual, since we are talking about a real client, we have changed all the identifying details.  A few months ago, a new client came to us with an editing project. We requested his documents to determine whether he would need proofreading, editing or a new translation....

The Power of Social Media

Happy 2012 to our friends and readers from around the world! We hope you had a great start into the new year. We were able to celebrate together in southern California (with our respective partners). We rang in 2012 at a laid-back Irish Pub in Thousand Oaks, CA, playing darts and thinking about how great 2011 has been. And turns out that we are off to a great start in 2012. Here's the follow-up post on our fundraising efforts for  Álvaro Degives-Más. Many of you have asked about how it's going, so read on: We started our...