62 Short Pieces of Advice

Created with www.canva.com. Time flies! We've been writing this blog for almost six years, and we have published almost 500 posts. Not bad, huh? In 2010, we published a book (The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation), which has sold more than 3,500 copies around the world (thank you!) and contains pretty much everything we know. However, we are delighted to keep...

Fabulous Free Design Tool: Canva

We are so delighted that we've finally found a design tool that lets even design-challenged people like us create very nice images and  graphics for use on the web, in presentations, on flyers, etc. We don't have Photoshop, and we have often been impressed with some of the lovely graphics we have seen on others' presentations and websites. While we have hired several graphic designers to create design elements...

Keep Calm and Interpret

While "Keep calm and carry on" might be a bit overused these days, it's still a powerful message, and it especially applies to interpreting. Whether you are a conference, court, community, medical, diplomatic o especially military interpreter, keeping cool under pressure is very much an essential part of the job. This usually isn't a problem for experienced interpreters, but if you are a relatively new interpreter,...

ESLETRA Conference in New York City

It's not often that a language-specific conference (a language other than English, that is) comes to the United States, so we are delighted to share the following information that we have received from the organizers of ESLETRA. Suffice it today that medical translation superstar Dr. Fernando Navarro will be one of the keynote speakers. Unfortunately, we have other engagements that weekend (Judy will be attending an...

Webinar: Fundamentals of Waste Management

Abigail Dahlberg. We love spreading the word about conferences, seminars, and webinars. The latter are very convenient to fit into everyone's busy translation days, as you don't even have to leave the house! One of our favorite new organizations to do provide high-quality webinars for translators is the LSP-run Alexandria Project. Judy was recently approached to moderate a series of three seminars on "The Fundamentals...

You Are Fired!

Don’t worry about the title of this blog post: this is not about the linguist getting fired, but about the linguist firing a client. In general, we are not big fans of the term firing clients, but it does make for a catchy title. Now that we've got your attention, let’s talk about a problem that every small business owner, regardless of the business sector, faces sooner or later: clients who are simply, well, not worth...

Conference Interpreting: Booth Etiquette 101 (And Beyond)

Inside the booth. Picture by Judy, 2014. We've both had the pleasure of working at many high-level conferences, with many great booth partners. Most of our experiences have been extraordinary, but we've also learned from our own (and others' mistakes). Without further ado, here is a brief (by no means exhaustive) list of what to do to make yourself popular with your booth partner. Go the extra mile. If...

NAJIT Conference: Free Vegas Advice!

NAJIT's keynote speaker. Photo: Smartling. The National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT) puts on one of our favorite conferences every year, and it's always in a different city, which makes for fun travel opportunities. Compared to the annual conference of the American Translators Assocation (ATA), NAJIT's conference is relatively small (250 attendees or so), and that's part of what...

Translation Cartoons: LuComics

A few days ago, one of our lovely Twitter followers (Daniela Bottazi, @Vinglish_Italia)  tweeted a hilarious cartoon that we have included here in this post. It's been a few years since we discovered a new translation cartoonist (the last one was, of course, our brilliant colleague Alejandro Moreno-Ramos of Mox fame), and we are happy to report that Lu's work is great! She has a Facebook page and a Tumblr page...