Should You Work From Home?

Partial view of Judy's home office. Many newcomers to the profession are attracted to the flexibility that translation and interpreting afford: you get to work from home, and you make your own schedule. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? But not so quick: working from home isn't for everyone. Read on if you are a beginning linguist or are thinking about making the move from in-house to at-home. There are a few questions...

Keeping the "Free" in "Freelance"

Image created on www.canva.com For today's quick post, we'd like to address an important topic: the fact that as freelancers, we are free to work or not work with any client. Oftentimes, we hear from colleagues that they feel locked into certain relationships, and while it's certainly difficult to walk away from established business relationships, we need to do so if they don't work for us -- or at least try to negotiate...

Blind Translators: Making Their Lives Better

Created with www.canva.com Happy Friday, dear colleagues! This morning, Judy received an e-mail from her friend and colleague Jamey Cook, who is a trailblazing blind interpreter and translator. Yes, you read that correctly: she's blind, yet she's a certified medical interpreter and a translator. Judy had the honor of profiling her for the ITI Bulletin magazine in 2013, and her story even made the cover. Life...

The Power of Price Quotes + Contracts

Image created on www.canva.com. We have oftentimes lectured on the importance of price quotes and contracts in our industry, including Judy's recent session at the 55th Annual American Translators Association Conference in Chicago in November 2014 (Quote This!), but haven't blogged about this topic in a while, so here we go (warning: it's long). Please remember that this is merely our point of view, and that we very...

No More Sisyphus: Shifting Our Focus

We hope all our lovely friends and colleagues had a great start into 2015! Time sure does fly, doesn't it? It seems like yesterday that many were worried about Y2K and now here we are 15 years into this decade.  We wanted to start the new year's posts off with a trend that is neither new but surprising,  but one that seems to be gaining momentum: complaining about things we cannot change in our industry....