What Is This? Enter to Win!

A few weeks ago, our friend and colleague Nataly Kelly, co-author (with our also friend and colleague Jost Zetzsche) of the marvelous book Found in Translation, donated several copies of the book to us. We will be raffling them off here on the blog, and tried to come up with a clever way to select a winner. 

In the past, we have done this by having readers identify who is who (we are, after all, twins) in a picture, having readers guess where a particular picture was taken, and a variety of other things. We haven't yet run out of ideas, so here's our latest one: Have a look at the picture below and tell us what it is that you are looking at. We realize it's a bit challenging, so here are two hints:

1. It does have to do with either translation or interpretation.
2. Judy tried to work here.

The book (standard shipping included to wherever you happen to live) will belong to the first person (timestamp) to guess correctly. Simply submit your entry (one per person, please) leaving a comment.

Good luck! We love raffles! And yes, we willl raffle off more copies of Found in Translation very soon.

Top Language Lovers: Voting Phase

We can't believe it's already been a year, but time flies, doesn't it? We recently received a notification that this blog had been nominated for Lexiophile's Top 100 Language Lovers competition. We are very honored to have won this category (language professionals blogs) before, so if you enjoy our blog and would like to vote for us, we'd very much appreciate it. You can vote for this blog (or a variety of other fantastic blogs written by our friends and colleagues) here. The list is alphabetical, so if you'd like to vote for us, please scroll down until you see "Translation Times." There are so many great blogs to choose from!

The official voting button.

In addition, Judy's Twitter feed (she's @language_news) was also nominated in the Twitter category, and to our astonishment, she has more than 7,000 followers! If you enjoy what she shares on her feed, you can vote for it here. 

As past winners, we know that winners do not receive any monetary reward, but you do get bragging rights and Lexiophiles makes a lovely donation to a charity in the winners' name, which we think is just fantastic. 

Voting is open now and continues through June 9th. Winners will be announced on June 12. The final results will  be based on votes (50%) and evaulations by the Lexiophiles staff (50%). In addition to the Twitter and language professionals blog category, there are also a variety of other categories that need your vote, including best Facebook page, best YouTube channel, and best language learning blogs.

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 for us, we'd been on the lookout to create simple and powerful graphics, mostly for use on this blog and during our presentations. The problem was that we aren't very savvy when it comes to design. Well, enter Canva, a free (some exceptions) design tool that seems to have solved all our problems.

We recently took the software out for a spin, and here is one of the first graphics we produced in 10 minutes (just as a sample). We might use a similar version of this in an upcoming presentation.

Then Judy created this one, which will be part of the PowerPoint presentation (7 Essential Elements of a Language Services Price Quote) that she is giving at the NAJIT annual conference in May in a few weeks.

The system is easy to use, beautifully designed (of course!), and comes pre-loaded with many gorgeous fonts. We've long struggled with combining fonts that look good together (yes, we know, there are people who write books just on fonts!), and Canva gives you nice templates with fonts that just look good, and we love them! While Canva is essentially free, there are a few elements you have to pay for, and that's clearly indicated when you look at all the images/backgrounds options. The images presented here where entirely free and you can download them to your computer as an image or make PDFs. 

Nice and easy! What do you think, dear colleagues? Have you used Canva or can you recommend another design tool?

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 we have taken ourselves with our very unsophisticated phones. We are delighted that we now have millions of professional images to choose from to make this blog even better.. We just created an account on Getty Images and downloaded the image you see on this page. The process was free and quick, and once you find the image you like, you click on "</>" (embed code) right underneath the image to copy and paste the image code into your blog or website. You will have to agree to the site's terms (=no commercial use), and you are on your way! Unfortunately, we could not align the image left without having to work in the code, so there are some drawbacks to sizing/positioning, but free images are great! Here's the BBC article about Getty Images' decision, and here is the link to get started.

Top Language Lovers: Voting Phase

It's that time of year again: the voting phase of the Top Language Lovers 2013 has officially begun. We don't know who nominated us, but we do know that we were once again nominated for this competition, so we are very, very grateful. There's no money to be won -- only bragging rights and some fabulous charity donations in the name of the winners, which we earned in 2011. Great stuff indeed! While we would love to repeat our win from 2011, we realize that it's quite improbable. This year's nominees are all fantastic, and include blogs by many of our friends and colleagues. 

The official voting button. 

This blog was nominated in the Languages professionals category and if you so choose, you may vote for us here. The list is alphabetical, so you will have to scroll down to find "Translation Times." Of course, there are so many fantastic blogs out there, so it's hard to choose just one!

In addition, Judy was nominated in the Twitter category. Last year, she got eighth place in that category,  so it would be wonderful to be among an elite group of language tweeters/twitterers again. You can vote for @language_news here. Dagy was also nominated, and you can vote for her feed, @deutsch_profi here as well. You can only vote for one, unfortunately. 

Voting is from May 22nd until June 9th, and results will be announced on June 12th. Best of luck to all our wonderful fellow bloggers!

Royalty-Free Pictures on Pixabay

This week's technology tip comes, as always, from our very own web guru Thomas Gruber, who has a knack for finding interesting stuff that we like sharing with our colleagues. Many of you might find yourselves looking for good online pictures for use in, well, blogs, newsletters, T&I association matters and even for clients. Yes, we sometimes replace language-specific images in translations (if the client agrees and/or requests that) with more neutral or culturally adequate images. The challenge, as always, is trying to find out whether the image is royalty-free, because we certainly don't want to violate any copyright laws. There are, of course, a variety of sites that do this for you, but Pixabay might be one of our new favorites. We tested the site by doing a few searches for images we wanted (networking, marketing), and found some great ones. Since this is a free service, you will have to deal with some ads, and the search results will also return paid images from Shutterstock, but the vast majority are royalty-free.

Just because we can, we are posting this one of a puppy here. Check out Pixabay here. Many thanks to Tom Gruber for today's technology tip!

Win a Blogging Toolkit

A few weeks ago, Judy gave an interview sharing what she knows about blogging to fellow translator Olga Arakelyan of Russia, who also runs a Sharp End Training, which offers training for freelance translators with her business partner Jonathan Senior, who works out of the UK. Olga and Jonathan interviewed several translation bloggers and created a nifty how-to-get-started package for beginning translation bloggers. While it turns out that this information will not be free, but will rather be available for sale in the future, you can win it now by participating in the no-strings-attached contest (we love raffles). Readers of our blog have two ways of winning. Please read the information below.  

Here is the information (slightly edited) we received from Sharp End Training:

The toolkit includes -

• Complete video training package for setting up Wordpress
• A "What not to do with Wordpress" training course
• Interviews with translation bloggers
• A comprehensive PDF cheat-sheet manual 
• 30 days FREE membership to their blogging mastermind "closed doors" support group
• Plus a series of "mystery bonus" items that are still shrouded in secrecy

You can enter the contest here. For a second chance at winning, you can also leave a comment on that page saying that you have entered the contest.

The Sharp End Training guys will give a copy away on their contest. In addition, we will also select a winner from the comments left on the page.

Good luck!

Translation Times Turns Four

Time sure does fly. It seems like yesterday that we were debating whether the world really needed another translation (and interpreting) blog, and  here we are. We've had a lot of fun throughout the years, and it's been a pleasure to share the (useful) stuff that we know with colleagues, clients and friends.

We've never (at least not yet) run out of ideas to share, and it's been really enjoyable to start thinking like bloggers and to keep our blog in mind when learning new information. We are always asking ourselves: would this be useful for our readers? How can we present it in a concise, easy-to-read way? Granted, it's quite a bit of work, but it's worth it.

Here's a brief overview of the Translation Times adventure:

• 4 years (launched in September 2008)
• 389 posts (some not published yet)
• 1,515 comments
• 312,218  page views
• Winner, Top Languages Professional Blog, 2011
• Most popular blog posts:  The True Spirit of Christmas: Helping a Colleague Recover (3,581 page views), Your Courtroom Ally (2,991 page views) and What Interpreters Really Do (1,683 page views)
• Spam comments by people who want to promote their own products: too many too count
• Hours spent writing posts and managing the blog: roughly 1-2 hours/week
• Size of our team: 3. Thomas Gruber is our tech guru and he's constantly finding and testing new software for us to share with our readers
• Companies who ask to do guest posts under the pretense of selling their services: too many to count
• Most important achievement: raising $11,000 for a colleague in need with the help of all our readers. We'd like to once again thank you, from the bottom of our hearts!

We look forward to many more years of blogging. Will you help us celebrate? Leave a comment if you like our blog! Is there anything else you would like us to write about? We are happy to oblige. Just let us know. 

A ♥ for Language Blogs: Thank You!

Last month, we encouraged fellow bloggers to share lists of their favorite blogs and asked them to title the blog post "A ♥ for Language Blogs." The idea was to discover new blogs to add to all our RSS feeds. On Twitter, this is called Follow Friday, but on the blogging side, we don't really have a similar tool. Hence our little initiative.We were overwhelmed by the response. Our techie guru made a graphic showing you who participated and how we are all connected (click on the image to enlarge it). We'd like to thank everyone who participated. We discovered a lot of fantastic new blogs; we have some reading to catch up on!

As promised, we've randomly chosen two winners who will receive a copy of our book. We tried to get Judy's dog, Luna, to point to a blog on a print-out of the image, but her paws are too big, so Judy rolled the dice (it's Vegas, baby!) and the dice landed on: Catherine Translates (Catherine Jan) and Linguist Blog (Alexandra Milcic Radovanovic). Congratulations, Catherine and Alexandra! We will be contacting you to get your mailing addresses. 

A ♥ for Language Blogs

We've been thinking about how we find new blogs, especially language blogs, and in particular those written by fellow translators and interpreters. We hear about them at conferences, read about them on Lexiophiles, and find them via Twitter.  New blog owners also e-mail us to let us know they've launched a blog. Sometimes they ask us to add their blog to our blogroll, which we gladly do after a few months of following that particular blog. In terms of spreading the word about blogs we like, we have our handy blogroll, but what else is there? On Twitter, we have #followfriday, and for the blogosphere, we thought we'd do the following.

Below is a list (with links) of 10 of our favorite language blogs, in no particular order, followed by a brief description. We'll then ask our blogging readers to do the same on their blogs (don't forget to link to the blogs so everyone can find them!) and title the blog entry A ♥ for Language Blogs. The idea behind this exercise is to spread the word about new blogs that we all benefit from reading. Because we like raffles, we'll raffle off one of our books to anyone who does a blog posting. In a few weeks, we'll do a Google search for A ♥ for Language Blogs and choose a winner (randomly). How does that sound? Are you in?  By the way: there are significantly more than 10 blogs that we love, but we just chose the top 10 that we feel engage us the most. 

1. Thoughts on Translation: Our wonderful friend and colleague Corinne McKay, who lives in Colorado, pens beautifully written articles about our industry. Highly interactive with lots of comments.

2. Mox's Blog: We really enjoy Alejandro Moreno-Ramos' hilarious cartoons about the world of translation and interpreting. He sees the funny side in our business, and we are huge fans of Mox, the underpaid translator, and Mina, the smarty-pants turtle. Alejandro is both a translator and a cartoonist.

3. About Translation: Italian translator Riccardo Schiaffino has been blogging for a long time, and his comments and insight are a very worthwhile read. He's also based in Colorado, where he also teaches translation.

4. Translate This!: Our friend Michael Wahlster, who is based in Southern California, is a true language blog pioneer. His blog has been around since 2003, and he frequently blogs about technology.

5. Musings from an overworked translator: A very busy German-to-English translator, our friend Jill Sommer runs one of the most popular language blogs. She's always generous with her insight. Our favorite blog post is the one about certified translations for the U.S. market.

6. Separated by a common language: American linguist Lynne Murphy, who lives and teaches in the U.K., provides priceless insight into the differences between American and British English.

7. Brave new words: Globetrotting linguist B.J. Epstein hails from Chicago, lived in Sweden for many years, and now teaches at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. We met her in Vienna a few years ago, and really enjoy her posts, especially those about literary translation.

8. Translation Tribulations: Our colleague Kevin Lossner, based in Germany, is one of our few cyberfriends we have not met (we will try to change that soon). We particularly enjoy his insightful posts on translation technology, and Kevin is a witty and gifted writer.

9. There's something about translation: Sarah Dillon, who's Irish and lives in Australia, runs one of the most beautifully designed blogs we've ever seen. While she doesn't post as frequently as others, her posts are a great read. She's an expert on all things web 2.0.

10. Words to good effect: A newcomer to our list of favorite blogs! Marian Dougan lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and Judy had the pleasure of meeting her a few weeks ago. Thoughtful, thought-provoking posts. 

From Gardening Blog to Translation Client

Most of our readers know that we believe in the power of the Web 2.0 for business purposes. At our workshops and presentations, we always encourage our colleagues to explore the endless opportunities of these new technologies and to use them to their advantage. Something we highly recommended is writing a blog. If this sounds like work (and it is, no doubt about that), think again: your blog doesn't necessarily have to be related to translating or interpreting (although we'd love to see more blogs in our field). Why? Because decision-makers in large, medium or small companies (= your potential clients) are people like us: they have hobbies.

Let’s say that a passionate gardener, who happens to be the director of marketing at a large international company, really enjoys reading X’s highly insightful blog about gardening. The director of marketing will, at some point, want to know who pens her favorite blog. She will look at the “About me” page and learn that the gardening expert is actually a translator. At that point, the marketing director might remember she had been meaning to look for a translator for an upcoming project. Translator X will be a natural choice for her, not because the marketing director has any idea of translator X’s expertise as a linguist, but because she knows her as a regular, highly professional blogger and she will assume that translator X is equally reliable as a linguist. 

It recently happened to Dagy, who blogs about the new German orthography. One of her loyal readers contacted her about a large translation project two days ago and confirmed her quote the same day. The reader of the blog assumed, rightly so, that Dagy is just as professional and knowledgeable a translator as she is a blogger. The same would definitely have been true if her blog weren't language-related, but, say, dedicated to scrap booking. Give it try! Blog about something you are passionate about, share your thoughts with the world and connect with like-minded people. Although of course it's never guaranteed -- and getting business probably shouldn't be your main motivation -- you might be surprised by the positive, if long-term effect on your business. We recently read Jost Zetzsche's interview in the ATA's Chronicle (conducted by Marcela Jenney), where he discusses his outstanding free biweekly newsletter on technology for translators.  He mentioned that folks hire him as a translator "because of the consistency of the newsletter, there is the message that I'm reliable and consistently produce results." If it works for Jost, it could work for you. 

Blogging Lesson Learned

Some of our wonderful readers noticed and contacted us because our blog was offline for roughly a day earlier this week. Thanks to our IT guru and guardian angel Thomas Gruber, it's now back online, and we couldn't be more grateful. This is a Blogger blog (part of Google), and here's what happened and what we learned:

• Google found some suspicious activity in the Gmail account that's associated with the Blogger account, which is Judy's (she rarely uses it). Google promptly shut the account down, which is a good thing.
• When Judy logged in to Blogger to publish some comments, the system informed her that she had no access. A quick Google (yes, always) search informed her of the Gmail security issue.
• She logged into her Gmail account, verified her identity by receiving an activation code via text message, and Google quickly restored access to all associated services (Picasa, Google profile, etc.) That is: everything but the blog.
• While we had backup files, that didn't do us any good, as Google was not giving anyone access to the blog -- neither to the owner nor to readers. 
• After Thomas communicated with the Google folks via the online forums and asked them to restore access to the blog, it was done within a day -- sometimes it just takes a while for all the information to be re-linked to your account.

Here's what we learned:

• Add a second user to the blog. We've now added Thomas as an administrator to our blog. If the Gmail account gets hacked again, Thomas will have access and the blog won't be owner-less in cyberspace.
• This all happened because Judy's Gmail password was weak. Bad Judy: she uses the highly sophisticated password database Keepass (we wrote about it here), but her old Gmail password was too easy to guess. Easy lesson: use difficult passwords with special characters and numbers. Keepass automatically generates complex passwords.

We are generally very happy with Blogger, but also use Wordpress for other blogs and websites. For now, the issue was user mistake (weak password) combined with a smart hacker with a smartphone in Brasil (who sent out some drug-related e-mails on Judy's behalf). We are incredibly grateful it's been resolved. We wanted to share what we learned so it doesn't happen to you. 

Top 100 Language Blogs

We are delighted that some of our wonderful colleagues have decided to nominate Translation Times as one of the Top 100 Language Blogs. The list is compiled by Lexiophiles, and it's a big honor to even be considered. There are four different categories, and Translation Times is listed in the Translation Professionals section. While there are hundreds of fantastic blogs to vote for, many of which are written by our talented linguist-friends around the world, we'd love to have your vote if you really like our blog. We've already cast our vote for our favorite blog -- and no, it wasn't ours. Visit the site to vote.

Two Entrepreneurial Lawyers/Linguists

A few days ago, we received an e-mail that two of the best legal translators (French<->English) had decided to go into business together. TransConnect Translations focuses, not surprisingly, on legal translations. We think their tag line is great: Translation for Lawyers by Lawyers. Congratulations, Marianne Reiner and Cindy Hazelton! We think theirs is an excellent, highly entrpreneurial idea: they have a native speaker in each language, can edit each other's work, and are both lawyers in addition to being linguists. We wish them much success in their partnership. We really like their very clean and easy-to-navigate website. Sounds like they really don't need to read our book, as they have plenty of entrepreneurial ideas themselves, but we'd like to thank them very much for buying it.

There is a New Blog in Town

We are avid readers of colleagues' translation blogs, and are always quite excited to hear about a new one. Unfortunately, one of our favorite bloggers, the mysterious Masked Translator, has not posted since the middle of last year. While we miss his/her honest take on the translation world, we are happy that there is another high-quality blog that just made its cyberspace debut. It is hosted by English-to-Swedish translator Tess Whitty, who lives in gorgeous Park City, Utah, where she runs her business, Swedish Translation Services. Even though her blog has only been live for a few weeks, she has already shared some great information. We particularly like her post about time management. We have added Tess' blog to our blogroll, and you can also visit it here. Be sure to add it to your RSS reader. Congratulations to Tess for starting a great new blog!

Purchase of the Month: Ergonomic Office Chair

Dagmar recently invested in an ergonomic office chair that cost more than Judy's first car (which isn't hard) that promises significant relief for her neck problems. Judy soon decided to follow suit. The American side of Twin Translations now has a good, but not top-of-the-line chair, which is much better than the 12-year-old chair (from a garage sale, really!) that she was using before. Judy's hestitation to buy a good chair stems from the fact that while she was working as an in-house translation department manager, she thought she was sitting on a regular run-of-the-mill chair. Turns out it was a $1,000 dollar chair, but it didn't help the neck pain.

Finally, Judy headed to her beloved Costco to buy a Space executive mesh chair for $200. If you are not a Costco member, you can buy it on a variety of office chair websites, for roughly $300. Judy proudly put the thing together herself. No word yet on neck pain relief from either side of the Atlantic, but we will keep you posted!

Any other great chairs that you love? Please share your favorite in the comments section!

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, and while she has found that she has a good foundation thanks to many years as a legal translator, there is a tremendous amount of things to learn. It's a humbling experience.

The court interpreter certification workshop was put on by the Supreme Court of Nevada, which does an excellent job at administering the program. Andrea Krlickova is very efficient at running this certification process (by herself for the entire state!) and has been delightful. The trainer was the well-known and respected Agustín de la Mora, one of the leading authorities on interpreter training. The two-day workshop was very informative and enlightening, and, as opposed to other states that face budget crises, we are glad to see that Nevada is still offering the certification and workshop.

On Judy's to-do list:

• Get a tape recorder and record a simultaneous and/or consecutive interpretation every day. You only get better by doing this frequently.
• Read the most important works on court interpretation, especially Holly Mikkelson's books.
• Gain a solid understanding of Nevada court terminology, including responsibilities of each court.
• Listen to YouTube videos and interpret them simultaneously.
• Ask colleagues for honest feedback.

It's thrilling and challenging to expand our interpretation services and move beyond escort community, and health care interpretation. Judy took the written exam today, and in March she will know whether she will be able to take the difficult oral exam in September.

Our hats are off to all your court interpreters! If you have any suggestions for those starting out in this particular field, Judy would love to hear them.

Report From the Front Lines of Interpretation

Fresh from a delicate interpretation assignment involving some private family and legal matters, Judy has been thinking about the interpreter training she has received and how it works in the real world. We wanted to share some of our thoughts about this particular situation, which shows that while we certainly have to uphold our ethical principles and our code of conduct, sometimes minor adjustments need to be made in order to achieve the best possible communication result.

1. Third person versus first person: It's widely known -- and taught -- that interpretation needs to be done in the first person, unless special circumstances dictate otherwise. In this difficult conversation between an adult and his elderly family member who suffers from dementia and has trouble following complex conversations, Judy decided to opt for the third-person summary style of interpreting. It felt awkward, at first, to move away from the classic interpreting mode in community settings, but it was a good decision: communication went relatively smoothly.
2. Taking sides: As interpreters, it's essential to be impartial and to not take sides, as compelling as they may be. Both sides had very good points, felt very strongly about certain issues, and everyone's heart was in the right place. It was difficult at times, but Judy managed to stick to her interpreter role. An interpreter is not an advocate.
3. Enforcing frequent pauses: Ideally, our clients and their parties would speak slowly and make frequent pauses to make the intepretation process easy, and they would speak one at a time. Unfortunately, when things get heated, both parties tend to talk at the same time. The traditional hand signals for pausing were not working for Judy in this conversation, so she had to use the "please stop so I may interpret" phrase. While hand signals are the preferred way to ask a party to slow down, sometimes you have to ask verbally. It worked in this case.
   
4. Taking notes: It was very helpful that one party had prepared written notes that he was reading off to his family member to help him ensure he wouldn't forget anything. He read them slowly, which enabled Judy to take good notes and use those as a basis for the interpretation for the other party, who was speaking freely. While good memory is essential for being a good interpreter, good note-taking skills are vital, too.

It's been another highly interesting interpretation project. As challenging as it was, it taught us to adjust to complex situations and to do what we've been hired to do: to serve as a conduit.

Translator Profile: Abigail Dahlberg, the "Trash Girl"

In our second translator profile (read the first one, about BJ Epstein and her process of getting a PhD in translation studies here), we are delighted to interview our wonderful colleague Abigail Dahlberg, a German->English translator specialized in waste management. Abigail hails from the UK and lives and works in Kansas City.

Translation Times: Is it OK if we call you the Trash Girl? We think that’s a fabulous, edgy term.

Abigail Dahlberg: Of course, you can! A client once suggested that I develop a superhero cartoon character called Trash Girl, but I have not quite found the time for that yet.

TT: How did you find your specialization?

AD: I think there was a certain element of happenstance involved. After I finished my degree in translation and interpreting, I realised that my next career step should be to move to Germany and find an in-house position. I ended up living in the Black Forest area and applied for every translation position I could find within a 50-mile radius. I was ultimately offered a job as an in-house translator and journalist for a trade journal specialising in recycling and waste management issues. As part of my job I attended countless trade fairs and conferences throughout Europe on subjects as varied as battery, electronics and packaging waste recycling, and also went on tours of different kinds of waste treatment facilities in several countries.

TT: What’s the most interesting thing about your specialization?

AD: For me, I think it is the wide range of texts and topics that I handle even within such a narrow speciality: One day I might be translating a report about the state of Germany's ferrous scrap market and the next be working on a press release or a contract for a waste management firm. It is also interesting to watch new terminology develop as concepts and technologies that exist in Germany are exported to other countries.

TT: What’s the most challenging assignment you have worked on lately?

AD: The most difficult text that I have translated in a while came across my desk a couple of weeks ago with a section containing lots of stocks and bonds terminology. Luckily my husband is fluent in German and works for a bond fund so he was able to lend me a hand. It is always good to have a group of people who you can contact with specialist terminological questions, even better if they live in your home!

TT: What would your advice to newcomers be who are trying to break into your field?

AD: My number one tip for newcomers trying to hone out a spot in any niche market, not just environmental translation, is to find a topic that you are interested in and then read everything you can get your hands on to build up your level of knowledge. Subscribe to trade journals in your source and target language and find courses online or in your area to develop your skills. Attend conferences and trade fairs to meet companies that might need your services and market yourself aggressively online (e.g. start a blog, join LinkedIn or Twitter) and locally through active involvement in your local translators association.

TT: Did your passion for this field develop organically or was this always something you were interested in?

AD: While I would not describe myself as passionate about waste, I have always been interested in environmental issues. As I have become more involved in this field, my dedication to reducing our impact has grown although I am far from being an activist. In our household we try and do all that we can to minimise the amount of waste that we set out in black bin bags at the kerb each week. Yet I am aware that our family's carbon footprint is massive simply by virtue of the number of transatlantic flights that we take each year.

TT: What direction do you think is the future for your general field?

AD: I think that the future for environmental translators is definitely bright as people become more aware of environmental issues and companies and governments take action to minimise their environmental impact. When it comes to growth areas, I think a great deal depends on your language pair. For translators working into US English, green technologies should be a fairly safe bet. Renewable energies are certainly an area to watch closely regardless of your language pair. Translators working with languages spoken in Africa and the Middle East might also want to consider specialising in water provision, sanitation and wastewater treatment.

TT: Who are your clients?

AD: I would estimate that 90 to 95 per cent of my business comes from direct clients located in Germany. My single largest customer is the publishing company where my career started. I also work for German waste management companies and government agencies. Moreover I still provide translation services to a select few companies outside my area of speciality, notably publishing firms, that I have worked with since shortly after starting my freelance business in 2005. Translation agencies only account for a very small share of my income at present.

Thanks for speaking with Translation Times, Abigail!

Royal Academy of Spain Publishes New Language Rules

The Royal Academy of Spain (RAE), which is the ultimate authority on the Spanish language, has recently finished one of its most ambitious projects to date: the publication of more than 4,000 pages of grammar rules, aiming to unify the Spanish language from Madrid to Tierra del Fuego. For the first time, the Spain-based institution has included details about the pecularities used spoken in all parts of Latin America. To achieve this, RAE worked with its dozens of sister organizations on the other side of the Atlantic for more than 11 years.

Academics analyzed and studied more than 3,000 works of literature to come up with their final work, hoping to unify the language and its rules for the 400 million people who speak Spanish around the globe. The full book is in three volumes and is quite, well, extensive, at roughly 4,000 pages (King Juan Carlos has been given a book -- this will keep him busy throughout 2011). Abbreviated versions will be available for everyday use. Read the full BBC article here.