Bloggers' Lunch at ATA Conference

In keeping up with a tradition introduced last year, our friend and colleague Jill Sommer from Musings of an overworked translator is organizing another bloggers' lunch during the ATA's national conference. This year it's happening during the American Translators Association's 50th annual conference in New York City. We are going to meet on Thursday, October 29, at 12:30 p.m.

To let us know you are coming, please visit Jill's blog for detailed information and let her know that you will be attending by leaving a comment. We look forward to another entertaining lunch. Last year in Orlando we got to make contact in the real world with fellow bloggers as well as friends and also speculated about the Masked Translator's secret identity. Shall we do it again?

Short Survey for Judicial Interpreters

In an ongoing effort to improve the quality of court interpreting services available on both the state and national level, the National Association of Judiciary Translators and Interpreters (NAJIT) is kindly requesting interpreters' help with filling out a 15-minute survey. This is done through the anonymous Survey Monkey software and is completely confidential.

The purpose of the survey is to obtain detailed information nationwide about the ways in which state and federal courts use certified and non-certified spoken-language interpreters, so that NAJIT may best target its future advocacy work. The data generated by this survey will be made available to all participants and will be summarized on the NAJIT web site and in its advocacy efforts. No specific information that could reveal the identity or locations of the survey participants will be published.

You can take the survey here. For more information about NAJIT, please visit their website.

Link to Payment Options: A Great Overview

Translation and interpretation is an increasingly international business, and entrepreneurial linguists need to determine the best ways to accept payments from both domestic and international clients. There are many options, and some have some intransparent fees, while others are just too expensive for small amounts. Which one should you chose? PayPal? And what's ACH? And what does Bloomberg and the interbank rate have to do with anything?

Join our friends and colleagues Corinne McKay and Eve Bodeux as they discuss the different payment options in a well-researched, easy-to-follow report, which also includes links to the most important sites that they mention. Listen to the informative (and unique!) Speaking of Translation here to ensure that getting paid doesn't get too expensive for you.

ATA Conference in NYC: Marriott Room Available

For those of you who are going to the American Translators Association's 50th Anniversary Conference in NYC at the end of the month, you might have noticed that the excellent rate ($199) that the ATA had secured at the host hotel, the Marriott Marquis on Time Square, has sold out. There was a limited block of rooms available. If you are still looking for a room, contact Judy (click on "Contact Us" for the e-mail address). She recently found out that a good friend of hers is going to be able to house her on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and instead of just canceling the reservation, she'd like to transfer it to a colleague. Preference will be given to someone with the same dates -- Tuesday, October 27 through Sunday, November 1 -- as to not "waste" any nights at the special price. Other than that, it's first come, first served. We are also posting this information on other listservs so all our colleagues have a chance to see this.

See you in NYC!

Negotiating: A Short Case Study

Negotiating is one of the skills that are crucial for any entrepreneur, especially in the languages industry, where we frequently get asked for discounts and yes, free translations. In general, unless you can expect an immediate promise, in writing, of a project following your free translation, they are not a good idea. You'd be voluntarily devaluing your product. We do, however, think that giving advice, along the lines of attorneys prodiving free first consultations (but where they do NOT give you a sample contract) is advisable. We routinely provide free over-the-phone assessment of clients' translation and multicultural marketing strategies.

We wanted to share this brief case study. A few days ago, a potential client called us with what sounded like an interesting long-term collaboration on multilingual websites. The client, to remain anonymous, asked us to translate a few lines for free, but that he would show his gratitude by "sending a little something via PayPal." The first thing we need to remind ourselves is that this is not personal -- it's just business. We quickly responded that we do not provide free services on the promise of future projects, which might or might not happen. The potential client mentioned that it was "only a few lines," to which we said that this was about the principle about not providing free work. We then quickly thought about what the customer wanted: he wanted to verify that we have website localization and e-commerce experience, which is certainly a very fair request. We offered him a following:

1. Customized links in the language combinations that he was looking for to live websites that we've translated and localized
2. References from clients who have used our services for website translations

We felt that this was a good compromise and that it would fulfill both purposes, which are:

1. Giving the customer what he wants: a verification of our skills
2. Giving us what we want: to not give away free work, but to make our customer happy

We are happy to report that our customer seemed satisfied with this scenario and we hope to collaborate with him in the near future.

Pricing: Video on Vendor-Client Relationships

Finally: a very funny video that has a professional point to make. This video eloquently summarizes the main points about pricing that we've discussed in the last few months. Without further ado, please have a look at this very well-made poignant video about how other services providers would react if their pricing strategies were challenged. Does any of this sound familiar? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Judy is showing this video, which has been circulating among translation organizations around the world, at a workshop tomorrow in Seattle as well.

Online Resources: World Languages

We just came across a very interesting website sent to us through one of the listservs that we belong to. It's a site that covers information on a wide variety of languages spoken around the world, including Malayalam, Pashto, Quechua, Dakota, Tok Pisin and many others that you probably aren't familiar with (we weren't.) It's a fascinating resource, especially for language professionals, and it has a wealth of extremely well-researched information, including difficulty of language acquisition, dialects, background, strucutre, writing, etc. This is a good website if you need to settle any discussion about languages; for instance: where is Telugu spoken? Answer: it's spoken by 70 million people in India, mainly in the state of Andra Pradesh. Or: what's the third official language of Ruanda? Answer: Kinyarwand. Warning: this site is not only highly informative and academic, but also highly addictive. Enjoy learning more about languages of lesser diffusion! Visit the World Languages site here.

Entrepreneurial Linguist Site: Live

While we are still in the final stages of editing our "Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation" book, we have received so many inquiries and pre-orders that we have created a website with more information, where you can also add yourself to the pre-order list. It contains a tentative table of contents, information on what an Entrepreneurial Linguist is, etc. Check it out here. We are currently working on a cover design with the assistance of our fantastic IT guru Thomas Gruber and our amazing photographer friend Ulf Buchholz. It might look like the image above, but the jury is still out. If any of our readers have any ideas, we'd love to hear them, and who knows, perhaps we will use it! It's the new area of collaborative ideas...

Professional Development: Health Care Interpreting Workshop

The Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association (NITA), for which Judy serves as vice president, is holding a one-week health care interpreting workshop in Reno, Nevada, from November 9 through 13. It's a week-long course that includes a certificate of completion and is given by well-known interpretation trainer and NITA founding president Tracy Young. The workshop is open to speakers of all languages and incldues a pre-course language proficiency exam by a third party. This is a full 40-hour course held in one week. NITA has secured a fantastic hotel price for those participants from out of town at $35 per night.

For full information, please visit the NITA website. The registration deadline is coming up on October 1. This is the second time this year that NITA has been able to offer this workshop (in only its second year of existence), so we hope you can join us. There's an increasing need for health care intepreters in the U.S., so if this are of interpretation has piqued your interest, this is the workshpp for you.

Translation Times Turns One

This week marks this blog's first year of life on the blogosphere, and we have been delighted with our blogging experience. We were inspired to add a translation blog to our list of blogs by many of our fantastic colleagues who have blogged about translation for years. Here are some of this year's highlights:

• 125 posts
  
• Average of 7 -9 blog posts per month
• Hundreds of comments and interesting discussions
• Appreciative feedback from readers we informed of an interpretation company that has not paid many contractors, as reported to us by affected parties
  
• Our most popular blog entries, by number of comments, were the above-mentioned non-payment alerts, including this one here and the accused's response here.
• Many good ideas and suggestions from our readers, which inspired new blog posts, including one on languages in literature.

Thanks for reading, everyone! We are appreciative of your input and feedback and look forward to continue strengthening our translation community by writing about relevant things for linguists. We will continue bringing you popular posts about marketing tips, advertising strategies, cost-saving tips, information on professional development, and much more. We'd love to hear from you as well - let us know if you'd like us to address a particular issue. Here's to a great second year! Note: the above picture was taken by our good friend and volunteer photographer, Ulf Buchholz, in front of a run-down building in east Las Vegas, signaling the end of the building boom in Nevada. No end of the blogging boom in sight, though!