Get Rid of Robo Calls: Hiya App Review

No matter where you live, one of today's modern inconveniences are robo calls or unwanted cold calls from marketers, and this is especially true for small business owners in any industry. Ours is no exception, and many T&I professionals run their businesses with a cell phone instead of both a land line phone and a cell phone. Either way is of course fine, but the issue of unwanted phone calls remain, and they are not only annoying but also take away time from actual important work-related tasks. So what can be done to reduce those unwanted calls? Judy tried an app for her Android phone called Hiya and it works really well. Here's her quick review.

• Hiya is actually free and has no ads. You can download it here by entering your cell phone number. Available for Android and iOS.
• Basically Hiya is an additional layer on top of the phone. Say someone calls you who's not in your address book. Your regular phone service will not identify the caller, but Hiya will. It will also add the helpful "spam suspected" warning to the call screen so you won't waste your time picking up the call.
• Some unknown numbers -- we haven't really been able to figure out how Hiya determines which numbers -- will receive a text message thanking them for their call and asking them to identify themselves. In our experience, Hiya is smart enough to only send these messages to actual cell phones, and the caller gets the option to type in their name and their query. Robo callers will not do that, so problem solved. Hiya has sent these automated text messages to actual real new customers, but in our experience, they were not that bothered and simply typed in their name, got cleared by Hiya, and called again. 
• Hiya's caller ID is incredibly powerful -- it will identify pretty much any caller. That's how Judy found out that CNN was calling her for an interview a few weeks ago (more on that in a future post).
• You can look at your missed calls on your regular phone interface, but going to the Hiya interface identifies the caller quickly, so you can see, at one glance, if you missed a call from a potential or current client you might not have saved in your contacts. You can then prioritize those phone calls, for instance if you see that you missed a phone call from law firm XYZ.
• In summary: I've been using Hiya for a few months and it's blocked at least 5-10 spam calls every day, which makes my work life more enjoyable and I actually enjoy answering the phone now because I have not taken one single robo call since I've had Hiya. It's definitely one of my favorite apps right now.

We hope you find this post helpful, dear colleagues! If you have found a similar solution that also works great, please do share it with the community. 

Link: 139 (Mostly) Free Tools for Translators

Today marked the publishing of a blog post by our dear colleague Alina Cincan over at Inbox Translation, and it sure is an exciting day for those of us who want to discover new software tools. This is, as far as we know, one of the best and most comprehensive lists of free (or almost free) tools for translators. In total, 72 translators, including Judy, contributed to this list, and we want to try them all out right away! We hadn't heard of some 60% of these tools, so this list has already benefited us immensely. As you might imagine, compiling this information and getting the submissions from 72 translators is a ton of work, so we'd like to thank Alina very much for undertaking this project that benefits translators around the globe. 

Here's the link to Alina's blog. 

Can Translators Learn to Love MT?

Created on www.canva.com

First things first: we are not experts on machine translation (MT) by any stretch of the imagination, but we certainly know that it's an incredibly polarizing topic in our industry. It is, perhaps, the most polarizing issue we've encountered in the last 10 years--in addition to how much we should charge for our services, of course. Now, our lovely colleague Jost Zetzsche is, without a doubt, the expert in the subject, and he told us about Lilt. Jost wrote about Lilt very eloquently here. Since the recommendation came from someone we trust, we went and checked it out. For the record: MT is integrated into many of the translation tools we use (Smartling, Wordfast, etc.), and while most of the MT-generated suggestions for translations are still quite giggle-inducing, MT has been getting better. As we've mentioned: we don't know that much about MT, but we have, chosen to view it as a tool to help translators become more efficient rather than a tool that will replace us. Others view this very differently. Allow us to elaborate on Lilt. And you probably know this, but let us emphasize that we have no financial or business connection to Lilt. We just think it’s a cool tool.

Courtesy of Lilt. Great summary indeed.

We took Lilt for a spin, and here are our findings: the program is very promising. Basically, it's a super-easy browser-based interface, there's nothing to download (just sign-in with a Google account or e-mail address). It's technically a statistical machine translation tool (SMT).  It was developed by the smart folks at Stanford Natural Language Processing Group, and it learns as you translate. We tried it for English->Spanish, and while it created some hilarious results, some were also very good. Lilt is currently available for EN<->ES, EN->FR and EN->DE). It's very nice to know that this system was created by a bunch of brilliant programmers at top-notch universities who are a lot smarter than we are. The whole idea is to make translators' work better and smarter through the use of technology. We know this is a big shift, but think about it: we work smarter and better because of computers in general, right? (Trite, but true.) They've allowed the industry to flourish, in part because we can research better and don't have to type up our work on a typewriter anymore (not that we are old enough to remember this). Perhaps this is the second revolution for translators--courtesy of computers, software, and computational linguists. Speaking of computational linguists, we had the chance to interview Spence Green, one of the founders of Lilt. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford (yes, smart guy; and nice, too). So here's a lot of information, straight from him, because he can say it so much better than we can. We sure do think we are ready for the next era of translators learning to embrace MT. What do you think?

Courtesy of Spence Green

Translation Times: What would you say to translators who are afraid of MT? And where does Lilt come in?

Spence Green: Machine translation is a tool. Specifically, it is generalized translation memory. Whereas a TM can only produce an output for an input that matches X% of some previous input, a sufficiently large MT system---where all of the major commercial systems today are sufficiently large---can produce an output for any input. The intellectual heritage of TM traces to Martin Kay's 1980 position paper on man/machine approaches to translation. Of course, Martin was and is an MT researcher. So translators should see MT as an evolution of a tool that they already use and ostensibly derive value from.

Lilt is an interactive MT system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_machine_translation). Interactive MT is an old idea that dates to at least the 1960s, but it has never been widely available for translators. Lilt is based on a research system we built at Stanford called Predictive Translation Memory (PTM). PTM began as a human-computer interaction project to understand translator behavior in the presence of machine suggestions, be they from TM or MT. It evolved into an interactive MT system. About 100 professional translators from Proz and elsewhere participated in the three research studies during 2012-2014.

In my view, the issues that seem to upset translators---the MT post-editing experience, rate discounts, often unrealized promises of productivity improvements by vendors---have more to do with the peculiarities of the industry than with the technology itself. 

TT: Why did you create Lilt?

SG: After undergrad I moved to Abu Dhabi. This was in 2005, and I was 24 and restless. I wanted to learn a non-European language, and it seemed to me that the Arab world would be very important during my lifetime.

Two significant things happened during that time. First, after about a year, I found that most of my friends were Arabs who didn't speak English well. Through their eyes I saw a different world. You often get paid less. There aren't as many books available. Wikipedia and Google search stink. Information access began to matter to me.

Second, Google Translate was released. I thought that this technology could solve the information access problem at a scale that human services never could. I wanted to learn how it worked. But I soon realized that my undergraduate training was insufficient. So I applied to Stanford and started graduate school in 2008.

In 2010 Ed Bice of meedan.org gave a talk at Johns Hopkins, where I was spending the summer doing research. He runs a small translation non-profit in San Francisco that uses MT from IBM. I started to visit his office regularly. I began to understand the differences between the assimilation and dissemination use cases of MT. Google Translate solves the former, but the latter---which is translation with a quality threshold---seemed like an underexplored area consistent with my desire to improve information access.

Courtesy of Lilt

I spent the summer of 2011 at Google working on Translate. I learned how to build huge translation systems. And I learned how many people send translation feedback to Google, and what can be done with that feedback. There was real work to do that was both intellectually compelling and high-impact.

At Google I worked with John DeNero, who worked for Franz Och. John and Franz both left Google in 2014. I graduated at the end of 2014. John is a co-founder of Lilt, and Franz is chief advisor.

TT: Wow, that’s quite a pedigree. Now, what’s your current revenue model?

SG: Lilt is in a free trial period. We will add a professional version in 2016. We charge for our translation API, for which we currently have one launch customer.

TT: Sorry for this question, but: what’s the catch? If Lilt is free now, how will you make money? 

SG: Yes, the professional version will be released later this year. But there will always be a free version or a free trial.

TT: Can you tell us when exactly other languages will be added?

SG: Fr-En and De-En will be added next week. En-Pt will follow in February. The Danes and the Dutch seem to be pretty enthusiastic, so we'll probably add those language pairs in February.

TT: Can you tell us about yourself, your background, and your core team? Who are you? What’s your favorite author? Your favorite musician? 

SG: I'm a Southerner, but I've moved around a lot since high school, so my accent doesn't betray my nationality anymore. I grew up in Atlanta, went to U.Va, and then to grad school at Stanford. I speak Arabic; I run; and, I am a scuba diver. My favorite book is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. If I were stuck on an island forever, I suppose that I wouldn't tire of listening to The Joshua Tree by U2.

John DeNero, my co-founder, completed graduate school at Berkeley, then spent four years at Google on Translate. Now he is a CS professor at Berkeley. He teaches the largest class at the university. He's a busy guy.

Joern Wuebker and Sasa Hasan, the other two founding members of our company, completed graduate school at RWTH Aachen under Hermann Ney. They're great. Hermann produced Franz Och, who then worked with Philipp Koehn, then a grad student at USC. Franz and Philipp went on to produce Google Translate and Moses, respectively.   My brother Richmond is in charge of marketing. It's great fun to work with a sibling, as you must know! Chris Manning and Jeff Heer, my two academic advisors, are also on our advisory board.

TT: Did you raise any venture capital or how is your company financed?

SG:Yes, we raised a VC round. We are backed by XSeed Capital.

TT: We know you don’t have a crystal ball, but do you think translators will ever be replaced by MT? Is Ray Kurzweil right? What’s your hunch?

SG: This is a philosophical question that Nietzsche, Quinn, Jakobsen, and others have considered. I tend to think that their treatments were more sophisticated than those that you read in the media. I wrote about this in the introduction to my dissertation (sect.1.2; http://www.spencegreen.com/pubs/dissertation.pdf).

Short summary: yes, for text that can be memorized or otherwise easily routinized (imagine a large TM of all of the translations ever produced in the world...). Not anytime soon for any sort of translation that requires world knowledge. That problem is AI-complete and would signal the advent of artificial intelligence. 

  

TT: What’s the most underrated website on the internet, in your opinion? 

SG: Wikipedia. It is one of our greatest intellectual achievements as a species. 

Many thanks to Spence for answering all of our questions. We've barely scratched the surface with Lilt, but will continue playing around with it. It seems like a great tool that can potentially really make every translator's life easier, and as scary as MT can be, we encourage colleagues to keep an open mind and view the tool as a benefit. And no, we are not about to work as post-MT editors anytime soon (we actually don't know anyone who does). What do you think, dear colleagues? Do you have any questions for Spence? We bet we can twist his arm to answer them here. 

What Should I Tweet About?

We have a confession to make: well, it's not really much of a confession, but we think Twitter is great. It's revolutionized communication in many ways, and it's a powerful and free tool for self-promotion. We know that there are many Twitter haters out there, but there are fewer now than were a few years ago. Oftentimes we get asked what self-employed linguists should tweet about. While there are no solid rules that work for all, Judy has amassed many followers (8.5 K, specifically) by doing a few things that worked for her. Have a look at some of these:

1) Follow the 80/20 rule. That means you should promote yourself 20% of the time while focusing on other things 80% of the time. Reason being: it's hard to get followers if you only tweet things like, "Hire me!". That's just not interesting, and there's a reason that airlines don't just tweet about their newest and best flights. They tweet about other interesting things as well to grow a following, and so should you.

2) Be helpful. Not everything you do on Twitter has to be related to your business. In fact, most of it won't (see above). If someone asks for a restaurant recommendation in your city, chime in. It's never a bad idea to be a nice and helpful person, online and offline. We oftentimes retweet (=share) things that others ask us to share.

3) Post interesting things. Just posting stuff about yourself is the Twitter equivalent of only talking about yourself on a first date, so don't do that. Share things about organizations and people you like. Most people are aware that retweets aren't necessarily endorsements, but we still recommend reading everything before retweeting it to make sure it isn't offensive.

4) Politically correct? Speaking of offensive: it's almost impossible to never, ever, offend anyone, unless you want to be so politically correct that you are a bit bland and boring. Some linguists prefer to only tweet about business-related topics (which can be controversial enough), while we like to mix personal and private, and yes, sometimes, we use Twitter to briefly complain about bad service from say, our cable provider. We have learned to not censor ourselves too terribly much, but we also don't tweet about overly private things. 

5) Have fun. Twitter is the online equivalent of the watercooler, and it's supposed to be fun. Of course, as with the real water cooler, there are people online you'd rather not interact with, and you don't have to. If someone is harassing you, block them. If you don't want to respond, just don't. There will always be people you can't get along with --online and off---and you have to pick your battles. Surround yourself with good, positive people, just like you would in real life.

6) Learn. We can't even tell you how much we have learned from being on Twitter--we follow prominent journalists, writers, activists, politicians, and of course, fellow linguists. It's been an amazing tool, and it's also great for continuing to read in all our languages. 

How Do I Market My Translation Services to Clients? (Video)

Without a doubt, the question we get the most from fellow linguists (especially beginning linguists) is: how do I get clients? How do I market my services?

We have both had the pleasure of speaking at conferences around the world to address this very topic, and we did publish a book on this topic as well, but now there's more: a 10-week class that Judy is teaching at the University of California-San Diego's Extension program. It's entirely online and there are no prerequisites (even though the class is part of the Certificate in English/Spanish Translation and Interpretation). Anyone can sign up for it, and this year's class (it's usually only offered once a year) starts September 29 and runs through December 7. It's presented entirely in English, so you don't need to speak Spanish to take this class.

While it is true that many T&I universities around the world fail to focus on the entrepreneurial and marketing aspect of our translation, there is now a class available that teaches you those skills, so: no more excuses! The class is offered by one of California's premier public universities, so it's also affordable at $475 (it was important to Judy to work with a well-known bricks-and-mortar institution that focuses on teaching rather than on maximizing profits). But rather than tell you all about this class in writing, we had Judy record a little video to explain the class in a bit more detail. Here's the link to sign up.

But rather than just read about the class, allow Judy to tell you about the class in this brief video:

Meet Wordycat

We recently heard about Wordycat through a colleague and are happy to spread the word about it. It's a new platform for translators, and before you roll your eyes and think "I've heard this before," have a look at what they are doing. They might be on to something! 

We are not associated with Wordycat in any way, but we think it's a great idea. But enough of us writing about them: here's a link to their Kickstarter campaign. We like how this new project describes itself: "Wordycat is an exclusive network in which freelance language professionals and their customers meet at eye level." It's the brain child of Anja Müller (and team) of Germany. While they did not reach their backing goal, it's not too late to support them! We also think the idea of language professionals getting recommended based on their skills and profile is a strong one; one that's very much in tune with what we think: business professionals will recommend linguists to their peers (or anyone else) if their experiences are good, and having a platform to do so is smart. This platform basically takes an idea that works well offline (recommendations) and replicates it online. Here's a link to the website with plenty of news in both German and English. 

And for the record: the creators spell Wordycat with a lower-case first letter, but in line with the major style guides, we will capitalize the business name in this post.

Most importantly, here's a cute YouTube video that they produced:

Only time will tell if this concept will catch up, but we'd like to congratulate Anja and her team for their vision, effort, and enthusiasm to create something better and make a positive contribution to the industry,

Is Twitter Stupid?

Source: www.twitter.com

Every time we talk to colleagues, either casually or during some sort of formal conference, invariably someone will say: "Twitter is stupid. I don't get it." That was us six years ago, and we were wrong. Trust us, we joined Twitter kicking and screaming in 2008, when we couldn't really see the point. But the point is that all great ideas sound somewhat absurd in the beginning, think: the printing press, the wheel, the car, the internet, e-mail. Sometimes you just have to be an adapter of technologies and see where they take you, especially if they are free and help you promote your business.

So, dear Twitter users and haters, here are our top 10 reasons (in no particular order) why Twitter is not stupid.

1. It's free promotion for your business. Don't constantly tweet things like: "Please hire me!" because that is annoying. Tweet about things that you think might be interesting to others. Share before you focus on getting business. Help others rather than trying to get business at all cost. Twitter is not unlike relationships: you get out of them what you put into it, and you shouldn't go into any relationship only expecting to take and not to give. One of our most grateful followers is a successful media executive who was hard-pressed for a creative appetizer recipe before having some big-shot clients over, and we sent her our secret recipe for _____ (it's secret). And no, we didn't get any business out of it, because that's not always the point. This takes us to point #2.
2. You grow a business--any business--by increasing the amount of people who know that you and your services exist. If you only tell your circle of friends about your awesome services but don't widen your circle, it will be hard to grow your network. Twitter allows you to easily increase your network and to keep fresh in people's minds. This takes us to point #3.
3. You stay fresh in potential client's minds. Just yesterday, a client asked us for a translator to work on some texts from English into Canadian French. We know plenty of linguists in that language combination, but one stands out, not because she's a great translator and absolutely lovely, but also because we see her on Twitter all the time, where she has insightful things to say. As clients, we also use Twitter to keep track of our industry and its most successful players. Sadly, we also make a mental note of those who like to pick fights and tend to badmouth their clients and we make sure to stay away from them, because nothing good can come out of it. 
4. You learn to keep things short. Judy tends to be quite verbose, which results in lost productivity because every e-mail she used to write resembled a novella, and she's learned to keep things short thanks to Twitter. It's amazing that Twitter actually offers some writing lessons in keeping things to the point, to the tune of 140 characters. It's harder than you think.
5. You learn about your specialization. It's fascinating to follow industry leaders in your specialization, and it's amazing how much you can learn. Interact with them with insightful comments and you just might develop some sort of online relationship you might not otherwise have.
6. You keep your languages fresh. Between us, we follow users (journalists, thought leaders, politicians, businesspeople, etc.) in our five languages, and it's remarkable to read original content from actual country of origin. This is especially important for Spanish, and we try to follow users in regions that are relatively untouched by English, such as users in Argentina. We also follow a number of newspapers and leading radio and TV programs to keep our language skills fresh. We also want to keep current on the news, and Twitter is a great way to do it.
7. You keep in touch with your source/target markets. See above. Knowing what's happening in both your source and target markets is crucial, because you can only live in one of them, but clients might want to make small talk about what's happening in their world. If you have clients in Austria, you better know who Conchita Wurst is and why Wolf Haas changed the German language forever. 
8. You can help promote clients. Trust us: they love this. Pretty much all of our clients are on Twitter, and we make a point to retweet what they have to see. Retweeting is the equivalent of liking/sharing with your network. It does not cost us anything, but clients are very grateful for the promotion, especially because we have more Twitter followers than some of our smaller direct clients.
9. You learn something new from others. There is so much collective wisdom if you get a few dozen people together for a translators' coffee get-together. Can you imagine what happens if you get millions of people together? Great things can happen. Of course not everything that everyone says is interesting or relevant, but that's also true for your offline interactions. Just because your friends don't always say interesting stuff doesn't mean you will stop hanging out with them, right? Keep that in mind for Twitter, too. Take the interesting stuff and ignore the rest.
10. You don't need to leave the house. Making it out of the house to an in-person networking event can be painful and yes, occasionally boring. We are not saying you can replace all your in-person networking with Twitter, but it's all complementary and we think you need to do both (unless you live in a very remote area, of course). So there's no need to get our your suit, polish your shoes, and get your business cards ready: you can conquer the world, so to say, from the comfort of your home office.

We'd venture to say that in three years (or less), Twitter will the technology we can't live without. Facebook is still very  relevant, but it seems like Twitter is quickly overtaking it (at least for business purposes) because you can grow your network more quickly.

And yes, we've gotten work from Twitter. But don't go on Twitter with that end in mind. Approach Twitter just like you would approach any networking opportunity: enjoy the journey and the worl might come. However, just like with everything else in business, there's never a guarantee. 

Meet TM-Town and Its Creator

Photo courtesy of Kevin Dias.

Here at Translation Times, we are always on the lookout for new technologies that might benefit us and our friends and colleagues. Every once in a while, a new idea comes up that is very, very promising. Here's one that seems quite revolutionary: TM-Town. Just like many industry professionals, we are quite convinced that translators won't be replaced by technology, but rather, that the most successful translators in the future will be the ones who embrace technology. Full disclosure: TM-Town's creator, Kevin Dias, had previously taken advantage of Judy's consulting services, but other than that, we have no other ties to the company. We just think it's a great idea. Here's a preview: it's a translation enablement platform. But rather than writing about what we think TM-Town is, we figured we'd bring you the information from the founder himself.  Here's our interview with American developer Kevin Dias, who is based in Tokyo, Japan.

Translation Times: It looks like you are not a translator. How did you get involved in a project for translators? What’s your background?

Kevin: I'm a developer, and I love web development in particular. I have a friend who is a translator, and when I saw the way he was working, I began to imagine some things I could build to help him in his work. Once I got into the field I became fascinated with the possibilities for blending web development with emerging language processing technologies. It is a very interesting field.

What exactly is TM-Town? Can you give us a quick summary?

TM-Town is a place for translators to store, manage, leverage and optionally share their prior work. For those interested in establishing new relationships, it is also a place for clients and translators to be matched on the basis of that prior work. I am using the term "translation enablement platform" to describe this.

Are you a small company? Or is it just you? Who is behind TM-Town?

For now, it is just me. I received a small outside investment from a person who noticed my prior project, Transdraft. That has allowed me to work on TM-Town on a full-time basis for the past six months.

Who do you see as your competitors?

I am not aware of anyone providing a "translation enablement platform" of the sort that I have developed. One aspect of TM-Town is providing tools for translators to manage their linguistic assets. In this regard, I view TM-Town as a “Dropbox for Translators”. As many translators currently use Dropbox or Google Drive to manage their translation files, this is one form of competition. Another aspect of TM-Town is the job-matching platform. In this regard I think TM-Town is very unique in that it is the first service of this kind to match based on an analysis of the document to be translated against the prior work of translators to find the most suitable subject-matter expert for the job.

Are there any downsides to using TM-Town?

A person who is not comfortable with the idea of uploading prior work to the "cloud" may not find TM-Town suitable. Beyond that, the site is free to try so I would invite your readers to find out for themselves. If anything needs to be improved, I am ready to do it!

How many clients are currently signed up? How do you plan on continuing growing the client base?

Aside from some informal personal invitations that I sent to select people, I started promoting TM-Town just last week. I am pleased that about eighty translators have registered so far. I plan to begin promoting the site to clients in 2015.

Thanks for your time, Kevin!

Read more about the innovative ways translations are priced here. Learn more about TM-Town.

Free Software We Love: Toggl

Today's post is short and sweet, and it's about software we love that makes our lives easier. After kissing a few software frogs, we went with a dear colleague's suggestion and started using Toggl to keep track of hours worked. We charge more and more clients by the hour, and needed a simple and reliable way to keep track of our hours. Toggl does the trick. There's nothing to download and no learning curve. While some features are fee-based, we have not used them and just use the free version. Paid features include invoicing options, which we don't need because we already have a very solid accounting system.

We started using Toggl within five minutes of visiting the website, and it is user-friendly and intuitive. You create a free account in a few minutes, and you are off to track your time based on projects. The company's tag line is "Insanely simple time tracking," and that describes it well. We are actually quite addicted to the software now, as it lets us see very clearly exactly how we allocate our time. Of course you do have to get used to clicking the "start" button when you start working on a particular project, which took us a few days to remember. Just like lawyers, we only get paid when we have billable client hours and it's fascinating to see that some days we only bill four or five hours to clients and the rest is work that cannot be billed to any clients. These tasks include administrative work, answering e-mails, quotes, invoices, inquiries, blogging, social media, filing, organizational tasks, teaching (for which we get paid a fixed amount and do not bill hourly), pro bono work, etc. It really does put our work day in perspective! We also really like the easy reports that Toggl allows you to compile. If requested, these can be sent to the client.

What about you, dear colleagues? Do you use a time-tracking tool like Toggl? If yes, which one? We'd love to hear about other software options. 

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?

Do You Have Klout?

Earlier this year, our dear friend and colleague Karen Tkaczyk mentioned that a Klout score higher than 60 would get her into a fancy airport lounge at San Francisco International Airport. We'd heard of Klout, but had never spent any time researching it. This nugget of information got our attention.

So what exactly is this thing, Klout? Well, it is a sophisticated set of algorithms that measures how important one might be on the internet. Of course, internet fame or influence should always be viewed quite suspiciously, but the idea in itself is intriguing. According to Wikipedia: 

Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which is a numerical value between 1 and 100.

That makes sense. The more active you are online, and the more of an influencer you are perceived to be, the higher your Klout score, which will earn you a certain number of so-called Perks. Most of the items Judy has earned (discounts at restaurants, free stuff meant to promote the company giving it away) have not been too exciting yet, but Klout seems to be a fascinating beast indeed.

Seen in the most positive of lights, Klout rewards online behavior that is useful and of interest to others. For instance, if all you do all day is post updates about what you ate and what your cat is doing, that will most likely not be too thrilling for others and thus won't increase your Klout score. On the other hand, if you engage others, get them to retweet your post and discuss your idea on Facebook or any other social media outlet, this will increase your score. That also makes sense. Now the question is: What's the point? At our most cynical, we could say Klout is just another online popularity contest with no real tangible benefit other than marketers benefiting from what we do online. However, we want to spend some more time exploring Klout before we make up our minds. While much has been written about how to increase your Klout score, Judy recently tried some of these strategies, but her score remains steady at 62 or 63, which is a bit puzzling. Ah, the mysteries of algorithms...

What about you, dear colleagues? Have you tried Klout? What's your take on it? We'd love to hear your opinion. 

Free Online Dictation

Our web guru recently discovered this free online dictation software, which seems to work quite well. Warning: it's no Dragon Naturally Speaking, but it is free and seems to be a good option for short messages. Perhaps you want to try it for your annual Christmas letter? We do a tremendous amount of typing, and any sort of relief we can get is great, so we took Online Dictation for a spin.

Here's a brief overview of our very informal software testing:

• There's no need to install any anything. Just click on the link and start speaking after you click on the microphone symbol.
• It only works in Chrome, which happens to be our browser of choice, but we realize that this is quite limiting for folks who use other browsers.
• We tested the system with several sentences. First, we tried: "The chicken laid an egg today" in honor of the very first egg that a friend's chicken produced today. The transcription was flawless. If anything had been incorrect, we could have clicked on the word in question to correct it. The system allows you to copy and paste the transcribed texts, and it looks like this: The chicken laid an egg today.
• We then tried another sentence. Again, perfect. The system was batting 1000.  I really don't feel like going to the gym.
• The third sentence was harder and was purposefully spoken in our best Austrian accent. Here, the system produced hilarious results. What we said: "I can't believe this dog is hungry again!" (referring to Luna, our always-hungry mutt), and the system came up with this, so clearly there's some room for improvement: Hey get a pizza target how to get.
• The final test was a comment about today's work load: "The work is piling up on my desk." Again: perfect. The work is piling up on my desk.
• Our humble opinion: this system works quite well as long as you speak in short sentences, enunciate well and don't try to mock your own accent, as we did in example #3. It's a great tool for short e-mails, tweets and perhaps even blog posts!

Again, here's the link to Online Dictation.

Essential Software: TranslationOffice 3000

Many moons ago, when we started our small business (specifically, the European side of our business), we made many beginners' mistakes, including managing to invoice incorrect amounts to incorrect companies. We chronicled this mortifying experience here, and shortly thereafter, we decided that it was time for an invoicing and accounting system. Our IT guru set out to find one, and we loved it from the very beginning: TranslationOffice 3000, mainly known as TO3000. We have been recommending this nifty software at all our seminars and workshops around the world for years without having any financial connection to the company (other than the fact that we gave them money for the software). However, in the spirit of full disclosure, we want to let you know that earlier this year, AIT, the company that makes TO3000, decided to take out an ad on this blog. However, this does not prevent us from giving this software an honest review. The short version: we love it.

Screenshot of main screen. Courtesy of TO3000. 

First things first: What is it?
TO3000 is a translation management software that allows users to track every project, every invoice, every client and every payment. It's relatively simple to use, and readers of Translation Times get a 25% discount (version 10 is currently EUR 183).
The software allows you to create very pretty template-based quotes and invoices for clients, which has forever eliminated embarrassing invoicing errors for us. We also have a solid database of customers, phone numbers, addresses and contact persons inside the software. You can created many different billing categories, including hourly interpreting services, per-word translation rates, discounts for repeat customers, etc. One of our favorite features, which was missing from many of the other software packages that we looked at, is that you can invoice in many different currencies.

Our favorite features
There are many fantastic features of TO3000, and it's a bit hard to narrow them down. However, we've tried to come up with our 10 favorite features in no particular order.

Overview of invoices. Courtesy of TO3000.

1. With one click of a button, you will know how much money you have outstanding for the month. You just go to Invoices to clients --> calculate totals. The system will clearly indicate which invoices are outstanding. 
2. Creating professional-looking quotes is a breeze. They are based on templates that you will help create -- this is a bit tricky, you not too terribly difficult to figure out. 
3. There is a built-in word counter that's integrated into the quote tool, which is fantastic. You upload the document and the system counts the words and automatically tells you how much the project will cost. Brilliant.
4. We really enjoy knowing who our biggest customers are. This comes in handy around the holidays, when we decide who should get the larger presents! You can easily view how much you've earned from each customer.
5. The project tracking tool (called Schedule of Projects) is wonderful. Once you enter the quote and get the project, you enter the deadline for the project and the system will tell you exactly what's due when. 
6. Invoicing is, without a doubt, our favorite administrative job. There's something very satisfying about writing an invoice, and with TO3000, it will only take a few minutes. We then convert them to PDF and off to the customer they go (via postal service in Europe, via e-mail in the U.S.)
7. The company's customer support is top-notch. We've only had a few questions through the years, and every time, the friendly folks at this Ukrainian company have answered our questions quite quickly. It's pretty nice to actually have a relationship with the people who make the software.
8. Entering payments from clients and closing out the project is fast and easy. The system will keep track of the average time it's taken for a client to pay, so the next time you issue a quote to that particular client, it's handy to know that they took longer to pay than you would have liked. This might be a good time to ask for a deposit.
9. TO3000 is a database, so you don't have to worry about hitting "save" for things to get saved. 
10. You can try the software for free for 30 days, but by the end of it, we bet you will be hooked.

Adding a job to an invoice. Courtesy of TO3000.

The software is made by AIT (Advanced International Translations), which makes a variety of other cool software tools as well. Stay tuned for our review of Projetex. 

Any bad news?

Well, not really. Initially, the navigation (those menu items that one uses to click on things) wasn't as intuitive as it could be, but it has both improved a bit with new versions and we've also gotten used to it. Some navigational items aren't very elegant, such as going from creating a project to creating a project-related job, but those are relatively minor details. AIT is very good about bug fixes and new versions, which we've always installed without problems. By the way: we are not translation software gurus (that would be our friend and colleague Jost Zetzsche). Rather, we are advanced users, so rest assured that if we can figure out this business-essential software, so can you. 

Don't forget to get your Translation Times reader discount -- no strings attached. We really don't know how we managed to run our business without TO3000. If you are only going to purchase one piece of software this year, make it TO3000. 

Google Adwords: Another $100 Up For Grabs

We've been receiving a lot of these free Google Adwords coupons lately, and we are happy to give them away. There's no catch at all. The only thing is that whoever get it has to be a new user of Google Adwords -- which we are not.

So: we are giving away a $100 certificate for Google Adwords. As usual, you have to answer a question. This one is a bit trickier. We will give the certificate to whomever answer the question correctly (if there are several folks, we will draw names). The certificate must be used by November 30, and we will e-mail the access data to the winner.

Which language is Dagy currently studying? Hint: it's not a Romance language. Good luck!

Sounds of Nature

The "light thunderstorm" theme.

As always, our web guru is responsible for one of our newest obsessions: Ambient Mixer. It's a free website that lets you listen to some very relaxing sound recordings of things like rain, beach, etc. We are particularly fond of the scuba diving recording (even though it's a bit spooky), grassland and rain, rain, rain. There are also some oddball recordings to be found, including a few for Halloween and things like "restaurant in the evening" that can be used for videos and movies -- free thanks to the Creative Commons License.

Listening to the recordings (they are actually mixes of audio files) online is entirely free. However, there is a small fee to download the recordings. Get started here. If you don't find something you like, you can create your own with the handy mixer. Watch this video to get more details. 

Enciphering Web-Based E-Mail

This nifty tip comes from our resident web guru, who's great at finding free new tools that make our lives easier -- and safer. It's an online encryption method that works with web-based e-mail accounts (and Outlook, too). It's also an excellent tool for sending important information via Facebook. There's nothing to download and it's completely free. Here's how it works:

1) You copy and paste the text you want to encrypt on the website https://encipher.it/

2) You create an encryption password

3) You send the message, and in order to decrypt it, the recipient has to enter the same password 

We just tested it using Judy's Gmail account and it worked like a charm.  Update on Outlook (we'd previously said this program didn't work with Outlook): we've been corrected by our web guru and we feel slightly silly. Since this software is cut/paste, it also works with Outlook. Great news! 
Here is some technical information from the creators for your peace of mind:

We use Advanced Encryption Standard to protect your data. All encoding/decoding is performed locally in your browser.

Protect Your Vision

If you are like us, you probably spend way too much time glued to your computer screen. As our optometrists constantly tell us, it's not good for your eyes, and we should take frequent breaks (which we don't, we will admit it). Luckily, our web guru just found this nifty tool that should help us take care of our precious eyes a bit better. It's a simple and free online tool that will black out the screen at pre-defined intervals. You can either set up a custom break rule, meaning that you tell the system how long of a break you'd like to take every X minutes, or you can use some of their pre-defined rules. Try the 20-20-20 or 60-5 rule. The 20-20-20 rule means a 20-second break after 20 minutes of work,. During the break, you should focus eyes on something that’s 20 feet away. The 60-5 rule means a five-minute break after 60 minutes of work. We chose the latter, and we like it.


Evo, a cute little robot, will be your personal vision-protecting assistant. The program is completely free to use. Get started here. There's also a handy section for eye gymnastics. However, if you have serious problems with your vision, be sure to visit your doctor!

Screenshots Made Easy

We've tried several different ways to take easy and quick screenshots, mainly to incorporate them into PowerPoint presentations. We tend to spend quite a bit of time messing around with the screenshots, and hadn't really find a simple way to do them. Our talented techie just told us about Thumbalizr. It's in beta, and it's free. You don't have to sign up (unless you want to; it's free and gives you some extra features) and there's nothing to download. Simply go to the site, enter the URL you want to capture, choose between taking a regular screenshot or the entire page, and click on "thumb it." We tested this with a few websites, and the conversion wasn't super-fast -- well, it only took around 30 seconds. You then get the choice to download the screenshot in a variety of sizes as a PNG file (registering gets you more formats, including JPG). Save that to your computer. If you want to edit it further, you can use your favorite photo editing software. Here's the link again.

We did sign up for the free membership and came up with the JPG of our website. We are not crazy about the grey margins around the screenshot, but we easily cropped those out with a photo editing software. You can see the edited screenshot on the right.

What do you think? Do you like it? We think it's good, but could be a bit faster and we could do without the grey areas. Can you recommend any other ways of taking quick and easy screenshots? We'd love to hear from you.

Giveaway: Another $100 in Google AdWords

Since we had so much fun last time and we like sharing stuff (as twins, we learned to share early on), we figured we'd give away yet another $100 Google AdWords certificate that we just received as part of a little thank-you gift from Vistaprint (we are good customers). Last time, our German colleague Anke Wiesinger won the certificate, and we hope she's putting it to good use.

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 tutorials show you how to buy keywords that you can use to help promote your website via the sponsored links on the margins of the Google search results pages. You will select a few terms related to your business, then determine what you want your daily budget to be (you can easily cap it $100 and not spend a cent beyond that) and the amount you would like to pay every time someone clicks. Once customers search for one of the terms you have purchased, such as "Farsi translator Brisbane," your ads may appear next to the search results. Read more about Google AdWords here. Getting started is quite simple and straightforward.

Some rules:

1. You must be a freelance translator or interpreter and have a website to participate. Please include the link in your comment.
2. Google is giving away this certificate for new customers only. If you already buying Google AdWords, the system won't let you use this new customer coupon. Sorry; Google said so.
3. The certificate expires on March 15, 20011.
4. We will e-mail the access code to the winning person.

Here's how to play:

1. Identify who is who in the picture above. Is it Dagy/Judy on the left/right? We know it's a challenge, and we even dressed the same (we don't do that a lot). It was taken in Utah (Zion National Park area) in 2008.
2. Tell us the name of Dagy's beloved cat. She lives in Vienna, but was born in Vegas (a very international cat). 

Good luck and have fun!

Keeping Track of Your Inquiries the Smart Way

When is the best – read: slowest – time of the year to go on vacation? Who is my best client in terms of translation volume? What is my proposal-to-job ratio? Do most potential clients contact me via e-mail or phone – and can I fire my fax?

To get a better idea of how many potential clients contacted us when, how, and how many times quotes turned into projects, we’d been keeping a very simple Excel spreadsheet for many years. It didn’t make us very happy and we wanted much more – actually, we were looking for an inquiry management tool/small customer relationship management tool. We also wanted the option of entering potential clients’ data and the option of exporting their e-mail addresses for sending them newsletters, special offers, etc.

The free, nifty Inquiry Wizard is exactly what we were looking for: it was created especially for freelancers (not just translators), it’s very easy to use, doesn't have functions we don't need or use and it runs entirely online. We enter the relevant data every day and the tool automatically generates insightful statistics (which become all the more meaningful the more data you add over time). In addition, it has the export function mentioned above that comes in very handy for marketing purposes. There is no need to download or install anything. All you have to do is register with your e-mail address. The FAQ section features two birds explaining the basics in a cute cartoon. Here’s one very insightful tidbit of information: 91.7% of all potential clients sent an e-mail. 

The graph above was taken from the FAQ page on Inquiry Wizard and compares the number of inquiries received in 2009 to 2010 for a demo account. You also have the option of playing with this demo account before registering. Get started here.