Language Blog Translation Times: March 2014

A Highly Scientific Method

We oftentimes talk and write about making business decisions, and about how they are not always easy -- quite the contrary. Your succcess in this industry, and in any other, depends (to a large extent) on the decisions you make. Much of this has to do with the clients you choose to do business with, and we will focus on that important aspect in this brief blog post. Sometimes, it's all Greek. Athens, 2013. As we...

Just Do It: Price Discrimination

Yes, we collect bills from around the world. Photo by Judy. It was a tough winter here in the US, and some companies made a handsome profit because of it. The revolutionary car-on-demand service Uber is one of them. In the middle of the Washington and New York winter, Uber decided to charge customers three and four times the regular rate. This earned the company a lot of bad press, but the company’s CEO...

35 Million Free Images

Thank you to Rose Newell, who tweeted about Getty Images' decision to make 35 million images available for free use for bloggers! This is good news for those of us who have blogs, but, as the BBC correctly points out, it essentially means that Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, has given up, as it's just too challenging to patrol the internet for stolen images. We think it's essential to respect others' copyright, and on this blog, we have long used only purchased images, royalty-free images, or images...

About us

We (Judy and Dagmar Jenner) are a pair of identical translating and interpreting twins working in Spanish, German, English, and French (Dagmar only). We were born in Austria, grew up in a bilingual household in Mexico City, and run our translation, interpreting and copywriting business, Twin Translations, from Vegas and Vienna (Austria). In this blog, we dispense (useful) tips and tricks on how to run a translation and interpreting business. We frequently share what we know with fellow linguists via our "The Entrepreneurial Linguist" workshop. The "Entrepreneurial Linguist" book has sold more than 5,000 copies and is available on www.lulu.com. Judy pens the monthly "Entrepreneurial Linguist" column for the American Translators Association's Chronicle and also serves as a spokesperson for the ATA. She holds an MBA in marketing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Dagmar has a graduate degree in French, an undergraduate translation degree and a graduate degree in French and Spanish conference interpreting from the University of Vienna. She is the president of UNIVERSITAS Austria Interpreters' and Translators' Association and is an accredited freelance conference interpreter for the institutions of the European Union, where she works in the German booth. Judy is a federally certified Spanish court interpreter, a master-level certified Spanish court interpreter in Nevada, a certified Spanish court interpreter in California, a registered German court interpreter in Nevada, and a past president of the Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association, and serves as the organization's professional development committee. She also teaches in the University of California San Diego's Extension translation and interpreting certificate program.