Pandemonium

Realizing something was amiss (her address), that considerate woman spammed me today. Again.

Please note that my correct e-mail address is adriana_lesova@hotmail.com

Be careful. :)

P.

PS: Another address for our friend: adriana_lesova@macroconsulting.com

I received the following message this morning:

I am contacting your company because I have been working as a freelance translator for nearly five years and would like to offer my services to additional translation agencies.

I translate from French into English and also provide proofreading and editing services.

Do you require translators to complete an application form? Do you require tests or samples? What range of rates do you typically pay?

Colleagues of mine may also want to offer their services to your agency. What other languages do you require.

Please let me know if you would like to me send my curriculum vitae.

Thank you for your interest.

Best regards,

Adriana Lesova
French - English Freelance Translator
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
E-mail adriana_lesova@videotron.ca

I am used to receiving this type of messages asking for jobs (someone put me right in the middle of a directory, or so it seems), so I’ve answered the following:

Please, do check my web site, right where it says: “I work exclusively into Spanish, my mother tongue“. That means I do not outsource.

Best of luck,

P.
———————–
Pilar T. Bayle
Traductora EN-ES Translator

And then I’ve received the following message from my server:

This is the mail system at host hl20.dinaserver.com.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system

: host mx.videotron.ca[24.201.245.37] said: 550 5.1.1 unknown or illegal alias: adriana_lesova@videotron.ca (in reply to RCPT TO command)

So I’ve started googling. That «adriana» sends viruses. Please, be careful.

P.

Or so they say. Nevertheless, the only one who experiences bliss is the poor ignorant who doesn’t even perceive the need to learn. The people around just experience a certain desire to ring his or her neck.

Today I am going to be a little bit nasty with translators, group in which I include myself. Everyday, I see problems among my colleagues, who show a certain degree of ignorance and too much daring when facing translations. So, let’s repeat some whopping great truths, that are basic and crucial if we want to project a professional image.

1. We must behave properly in professional mailing lists. We cannot be cute and greet everyone, and then forget to provide context or to check the most common dictionaries. When we ask for help, we must facilitate the job to those who provide it. We must write proper messages, and that means no orthographical mistakes, for instance… We should show some command of our mother tongue, at least to be taken seriously. We should also abide by the rules of the list. We should not EVER forget that some of the list readers are agencies and can offer us a translation.

2. We have to avoid translating into a different language from our mother tongue at all costs. Yeah, yeah, I know you are truly fluent in Spanish, sure, but no matter how fluent you are, it’ll never be your mother tongue, and verb tenses will prove the foreigner you are in 2 seconds flat.

3. We all have to go through a learning process; none of us was born knowing a bunch of things. So it is not weird to translate things that we have a scant knowledge about. What we cannot do is to accost someone with a list containing 100 words, for example. In order to defeat our ignorance and learn (our ultimate goal, I believe), we can do the following: a) find an organism in our country equivalent to the one that overviews what we are going to translate, and read a few documents to get a flair for the language; b) find a good proofreader whose specialty is our topic and pay for his/her services.

4. Let’s not take in too much work. Some times I read some statements that leave me totally flabbergasted, such as “I translate 7,000 words daily, technical texts”. Come on! Review what you do. If it is technical, and you want to do a GOOD job, you won’t go beyond 2,500 words daily, and that’s already a lot.

5. People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. So do NOT lower your rates as if this were a flea market. I know there are many guys that would have no scruples trying to make a profit from you, but there are also very good clients. So, DO your homework and find good clients. Do not be afraid to ask for higher rates; there’s always time to negotiate if needed.

6. We should experience certain reserve about asking terminology in public. It’s good to ask for help and I certainly do it from time to time. But one thing is to ask for help, and a very different thing is to prove the world that you have not bothered to do a proper search, or that you don’t know how to. For example, use the “define:xxxx” function provided by Google. This way you’ll know the exact meaning of a word, so that you can request precisely what you need in your language.

It seems I am done for now. If you have any suggestion, I’ll be happy to reopen this issue.

P.

I read yesterday a complaint about a good client that stopped being good: Payment for the last couple of invoices is overdue by two or three months. The author of the message asks for ideas/advice to get paid. The agency is located in the US so it is not feasible to wait for the owner at the door.

There were several ideas, some quite soft, some a little bit harsher, but what knocked me off my socks was the author’s reaction: He doesn’t want to denounce this agency to the Better Business Bureau or post an unfavorable review at any of the payment practices lists because the agency is a good client and pays good rates, although it is not answering his mails demanding payment…

Let’s review something very basic: What’s a good client?

Good clients depend on the translator and the agency/direct client. Together, they’ll reach a consensus on several key points.

1. Rates
I read quite often the following: “He is a good client, but rates are low”… No, no, no. Rates depend on the translator, his/her savoir-faire to negotiate them, and his/her desire to accept whatever s/he is offered. Let me explain what I mean: If I ask for 10, get offered 6, and I take it , those low rates are to be blamed on me exclusively. When I am offered low rates, I always have an ace up my sleeve: “Thank you very much, but no, thank you”. I know some translators feel sick at the thought of saying no, but guess what: You need to learn how to say NO.

2. Payment
Good clients are also defined by their payment policy. It is important they follow their own policies, so that I can trust I have my money in the bank to pay my mortgage or my car. I personally give my clients net 30, which is the most common terms, but I don’t mind accepting net 45 if the agency is fine-tuned that way. Besides payment periods, we need to know whether they prefer an invoice per project, a monthly invoice… With newer clients, I usually issue an invoice per project; with clients I know well, I issue monthly invoices or invoices when I reach a minimum amount.

3. Treatment
After the two previous considerations, treatment is a deal breaker for me: Are they nice? Are deadlines reasonable? Are projects interesting? It is important to collaborate with someone who is nice, helps you solve terminology problems, and is genuinely interested in the quality of your work.

For me, these three conditions are sine qua non. If any of them is missing, the likelihood of collaborating with that client evaporates, because our relationships with clients are based on trust. This doesn’t mean a good client may get behind with payment, that’s quite common. What’s truly devastating is that they don’t bother to reply to your mails inquiring about the delay.

P.

Two weeks ago, I saw “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” again. It’s not a great movie at all, but it was handy and it didn’t require too much thinking. Sometimes you can find something truly redeeming in this type of movies. In this case, the gem is the sentence Vince Vaughn utters when he is awoken by the people who are asking him to kill his friend: “I don’t get out of bed for less than”…

The idea we must make ours is not the million dollars or whatever ridiculous price he quotes, but the minimum conditions we must have discussed and agreed upon before switching the computer on to do a job for any client.

Before we sit at the desk, in front of our computer, we must have discussed and agreed upon the following:

1. Rates
2. Word count for the job
3. Delivery deadline
4. Payment method and deadline
5. The way we may ask linguistic questions

I know it sounds appallingly basic, but because it’s a basic part of our job, we should always take into account these minimum conditions that must be always present before we start working.

I want to add a last piece of advice: don’t you EVER take a job on a Friday afternoon for a new client. It simply spells disaster… :)

P.

November is over and it leaves behind the stale topic of rates. This time it has nothing to do with specific numbers or price dumping, but rather with something basic and essential: who establishes rates.

I am quite fed up of listening to people judging the quality of agencies on the rates they offer. And this kind of talk is not bad per se, but it crashes frontally with the mentality translators should have: We are companies and nobody should dictate rates to us; we establish rates.

None of us goes to market and offers a price to the fishmonger**, do you? “I give you 4.50 euros per pound for that beautiful tuna steak, deal?” If I did it to my fishmonger, who sells it for 6 euros, I am sure his laughter would echo in the neighborhood.

So this is the first lesson for all translators, newbies and veterans: We must adopt a corporate mentality. It is us who fix the rates, not the agencies we deal with.

P.

**Following my acupuncturist’s advice, I said goodbye to all types of meat 10 days ago. Now I only eat fish. :)

It’ been a couple of weeks without writing, not because I didn’t want to, but because I had too much work. I finished yesterday and I slept like a baby last night. Before I turn to my new project, here you are something that has been haunting me for a few weeks.

From “Doing Business in Argentina” by Teddy Bengtsson, on page 15 in the Guide to South America 2007.

Hey, it seems middlemen want a bigger piece of the cake! Please, do not allow, ANY OF YOU, to be dictated your conditions and rates. I am speechless!

P.

Let’s learn a new word today: pyrrhic. According to two dictionaries:

1885, from Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, who defeated Roman armies at Asculum, 280 B.C.E., but at such cost to his own troops that he was unable to follow up and attack Rome itself, and is said to have remarked, “one more such victory and we are lost.”

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

Pyrrhic Victory
A victory in which the victor’s losses are as great as those of the defeated.

Collins English Dictionary, Millennium Edition, © 1999 Harper Collins

Why do I think we need this word? Because yesterday I saw an episode of Boston Legal in which they talked about “victoria empírica”. Thinking it was a bad translation, I switched to the English audio and heard them talking about an “empirical victory”… The victory was pyrrhic because although the defendant was found guilty, she didn’t even go to jail.

So, failing grade for the American scriptwriters who don’t know their own language and failing grade for the Spanish translators who didn’t see the lack of logic and just translated the sentence.

P.

After the nasty e-mail exchange I had last year with a Spanish company to which I wrote to point out that the English version of their website was a disaster (What a Rash! and Yikes!; complete story in Spanish at Cuecen habas, Cosas veredes, and SPAM Is a Four-Letter Word), something happened yesterday that has made me recover my faith in humankind.

I saw the name of a French agency, and it was quite cute and clever, and made me go and check their website. The English version of the site was flawless, but the Spanish version had some errors, some of them quite silly, actually.

I wrote to them, pointing these mistakes out, and, by golly!, they wrote back, a charming message in impeccable Spanish, thanking me and saying they had already introduced some of the changes I’d proposed, that the rest would have to wait for their webmaster. In that same message, they asked for my rates, praised the design of my webpage, and remarked a couple of things about the blog.

Obviously, paraphrasing Dirty Harry, “You’ve made my day!”

P.

Brand-new translators seem to have a gloomy view. I read the same remarks everywhere: “I am just starting, I have little experience, I make mistakes, I cannot charge the same rates of an experienced translator.” I believe a new translator can charge the same rates as an experienced one. But s/he has to learn the ethics to outsource his/her translation to a proofreader who will polish the text and do away with mistakes. This way the client will see that your finished product is a high-quality translation and will send more work.

Polish your résumé, get a proper e-mail account (don’t even think in yahoo or hotmail, please), sign up for the many mailing lists dealing with payment practices and use them to find new clients, visit those potential clients’ websites, fill in the forms they may have, do the test translations they may send your way (remember, the proof is in the translation), but don’t do a whole chapter; 300 or 400 carefully-chosen words can provide meaningful feedback to the tester, keep track. If you cold call on an agency, do not attach your CV to your message, many people automatically delete unsolicited messages with attachments; do paste your résumé below your message. Invest some money and time in your presentation: buy a web domain, prepare your webpage, write a blog. Just a piece of advice: make a sober webpage that uploads quickly. I am quite impatient with web pages that take ages to upload, and I have a DSL connection… In short, learn how to market yourself professionally. And top your package with professional rates.

P.

I see translators who offer discounts as soon as the total tally of a project exceeds 15,000 or 20,000 words. I’ve never seen the logic for this discount, and I will try to explain why.

Supposing you translate 3,000 words daily, it will take you 15 days to complete 45,000 words. Unless half of the text is repeated, and your client or the agency will deal with it.

Our productivity does not increase after translating 3,000 words. It follows the same rhythm because languages are a living being and context means the world. So even if you work with translation memories, you’ll still have to check every comma to see that what you have written makes sense. And you still have to type your 3,000 words.

Personally, I prefer short projects that do not tie me down more than 2 or 3 days. Why? They are so short they make me stay concentrated. Above all, I usually learn a lot. And to top it all: I never have enough time to get bored of them.

P.

Besides computing risks (like frying your CPU or losing your data), there are some physical risks inherent to our profession.

Until now, I thought they were limited to bone problems, such as the carpal tunnel syndrome and backaches. And until now, I’ve never experienced those (knock on wood!).

But I’ve just discovered a new risk. I know my eyes suffer from the constant exposure to the computer screen and it’s unavoidable to suffer from farsightedness once you turn 40. I resigned myself to wearing reading glasses once my arms were not long enough to move reading materials far enough from my eyes. Fine.

But the straw that breaks the camel’s back is to have a pair a perfectly healthy eyes all your life and then they start turning nearsighted at 45.

I’ve just started using glasses because my world started getting fuzzy beyond 15 feet. The other day I went to the airport to meet a friend who had a stopover here in Madrid, and I was not even able to see the signs hanging from the ceiling. Everything was blurred.

The next day I went to have my eyes checked and they told me that, at age 45, my ayes are becoming nearsighted.

I went to pick up my new glasses this afternoon and I almost collapsed in a heap when I saw how sharp colors look again. :)

P.

PS: I keep on thinking that I may have some responsibility for the present state of my eyes, because I basically live in a 6-feet world and I don’t give my eye muscles a chance.

I was flabbergasted yesterday by a statement I read in one of my mailing lists that put opening a CPU on a level with opening a pen when we were kids. I don’t know what kind of pens my colleague used, but mine were Bic and went straight to the waste basket when they didn’t work.

Opening a CPU is not difficult, but you need some knowledgeable help in the beginning because a CPU is basically a box with a board where everything is connected, and everything must be connected in a certain way… Here you are an ASUS motherboard (my favorite for their design). Check it out; all slots you need are there, the ones you need for processors, graphic/sound cards, RAM memory… everything. That’s where you connect even additional fans you install in your CPU.

I have said ASUS boards are my favorite because of their design. It is obvious I have seen a few boards and know how they work.

So I don’t think it is a shame to take your CPU for technical service to extend memory, for example. If you have a friend who is into computers and knows how to do this, ask him to call you whenever he is ready to do something. This way you’ll learn the basic facts for hardware maintenance.

But software is another thing altogether. As translators, we work with software every day and we should know how to use it, to update it, to do maintenance, and to extricate ourselves from some of the messes it can cause. This includes getting rid of viruses we may have caught for any reason.

First golden rule: you need to be a little bit smart to avoid viruses. You need to ACTIVATE EXTENSIONS first. Boy, you don’t know what extensions are… They are the three letters or numbers that appear after the period in file names, like .avi, .doc, .mp3, .txt, .xls, .pdf, etc. They are important: they actually tell the computer what program to use to open a specific file. It’s easy to activate them: click My PC, for example, and choose Tools > Folder Options > View. In Advanced Settings, uncheck the option Hide extensions for known file types and check the option Hide protected operating system files. Click Apply to All Folders and then OK to exit the dialog.

This serves two purposes:

1. If you don’t see system files, you’ll be less likely to erase one.
2. If you see extensions, you’ll be less likely to open a virus (safe in the knowledge that Windows default configuration is hiding extensions, many hackers name their files XXX.txt.exe, for example, and you just see XXX.txt and think it is a text file).

More tips another day.

P.

A few days ago I mentioned here that CVs were not a reliable instrument to select translators since the details could be puffed up:

Our CVs help, that’s for sure, but they are not a reliable scale to judge someone’s ability as a translator. Why? Because anyone may misrepresent/puff up details, change actual names of colleges for more prestigious institutions… I can come up with a thousand reasons not to rely heavily on CVs, that’s the truth.
(from “CVs and Tests“)

And I just read some news that left me shocked: The Dean of Admissions at MIT has tendered her letter of resignation because she falsified her academic record 28 years ago when she first applied for a position at MIT (MIT News).

It just surprises me that an institution such as MIT is so easily deceived, because there are many ways of verifying that a given person is who s/he says and studied X at X university.

And it’s truly amazing she made it public 28 years later! This is true heresy, I know, but was she good at work?

P.

New polemic in one of the mailing lists I subscribe to. One of my colleagues (I am unworthy of calling him colleague, for sure**) points out that the most reliable way to recognize true translation professionals consists of checking for specific degrees in translation. That short introduction always serves him to state his very high level of qualifications, of course.

No kidding, we are going to become so stupid and naive now as to walk back like crabs and just check the CVs…

Our CVs help, that’s for sure, but they are not a reliable scale to judge someone’s ability as a translator. Why? Because anyone may misrepresent/puff up details, change actual names of colleges for more prestigious institutions… I can come up with a thousand reasons not to rely heavily on CVs, that’s the truth.

If I were looking for translators, I’d check their CVs, but I would not stop there. The true proof is in the pudding, i.e. how someone faces a text.

What I am going to say now is plain anathema for many agencies I know, but translations tests lead nowhere. First, many tests are poorly designed. I have seen many tests that consisted of a list of parts. That only proofs that you already know that vocabulary or that you can look it up and are prepared to waste your time doing so. But it doesn’t proof you have writing skills. What writing skills do you need for “Right side-view mirror”? None.

Another error in tests stems from the fact that all agencies want unpaid tests. A week ago, I received a test. After wasting a couple of hours with it (there were some impossible paragraphs on mechanics), I decided not to invest more time in something that didn’t provide me with any tangible benefit, but the vague promise of “high volume in the near future”. Who knows! Both, the obvious waste of my time and the “real” paid work I had on my desk made me give up in no time at all.

How to change this attitude to be able to check the goods in a controlled environment? Paid testing. Order a paid test, without saying that it is a test, at the regular rates you have negotiated with the translator. Around 400 or 500 well-chosen words may be key to see whether the translator has what it takes or not.

Agencies do not seem to take into account a translator’s commitment with a paid project. First things first: many of us will reject the job if we see we don’t meet the necessary expertise. If we have reasonable deadlines (about 3 days for this fake test, for instance), our brain switches to working mode and we do the best we can to accomplish the task.

Many of you may say that so many paid tests will bankrupt a few agencies. Sure, that’s a possibility, though careful screening of correspondence and CVs could wipe out up to 95% of applicants… :-) Add in another 3 or 4% for different reasons, and you are left with just 1% for the paid test.

P.

**I am unworthy of calling him colleague because I do not have a degree in translation… that didn’t exist when I attended college.

The brand-new heir to Eurodicautom does not work. It stopped working 10 days ago, coinciding with Easter. I armed myself with patience and waited, since even government employees take a few days off (I should have said that “in fact, government employees do take a few days off”).

But this past weekend I wrote, enquiring about the problem and its possible solution. The problem lies in the cookies, that are not coded correctly. And yes, there is a solution.

The recommendation they make is to delete cookies between searches, a solution that is a little bit cumbersome and tedious.

The solution that has worked for me consists of fine tuning the configuration of the browser and then forget all about deleting cookies. First things first: I use Internet Explorer 6.0 (yes, I know, how backward of me… Except that it doesn’t give me any problem displaying anything and I love avoiding trouble).

So open IE, go to Tools>Internet Options and choose the Security tab. Choose Restricted Sites and then click Sites. Include there the Internet address for IATE (http://iate.europa.eu). Click Add and then OK. Then click Default Level and you can close all that by clicking OK.

By including IATE in Restricted Sites, your PC won’t accept IATE cookies, and you get rid of the cumbersome solution of deleting cookies between searches.

P.

PS: I always used Eurodicautom when IATE was down, but that does not work any longer, because Eurodicautom has been redirected to IATE. I don’t know whose privileged mind came up with that idea…

PPS: When IATE is back to normal, remember to delete the site from Restricted Sites, so that IATE will remember your search preferences…

In one of the professional mailing lists I subscribe to there is an ongoing polemic about correction when writing messages. While some people think that form is not too important, others think that professional lists are a reflection of who we are. I am among that latter group and I am going to explain why.

We work with languages and we try to earn a living with them. I believe it is important to offer a correct image when addressing messages to a professional list. You never know who is reading you, you never know where your next project is coming from. It is important that your audience, so many times silent, gets the following two ideas:

1. That you bother to check dictionaries before making a query.

2. That you are able to express yourself with grammatical, orthographic, and semantic correction, both in questions and answers.

Is it too much to ask for proper punctuation (in Spanish that includes opening question/exclamation marks)? Is it too much to ask for proper spelling (like their/there/they’re or it’s/its in English)? Is it far too much to ask for writing that adheres to the most basic grammatical notions?

This reminds me of a friend of mine, who used to shower and wear clean underwear whenever she went out for a drink in the evening, in case something happened and she ended up in a hospital.

This is something similar. It doesn’t cost you any money to look professional in these lists, just a little effort.

P.

After reading Jaime Bonet’s blog today (English-Spanish translation pitfalls #2), where he points out that Spanish does not need crutches to know who we are speaking about and that pronouns are used mainly for emphatic purposes (as shown by these two samples from our linguistic heritage: “te lo digo yo” ([I am telling you]) and “¡qué sabrás tú” [What do YOU know?]), I have been reminded of my teaching years and the way the Spanish pronoun was always linked to the verb. Only after a few years of intensive studies and a stay abroad, were my students ready to drop pronouns.

In this same line, I have to talk about a pitiful pitfall we all fall into: the use and abuse of possessive adjectives, enshrined by computers. We even have “My PC” in Windows, as if it were legitimate and common seeing other people’s PCs in our Desktop… That “My PC”, that should have been translated into Spanish as “PC”, “Distribution”, or something similar, became “Mi PC” in Spanish… Whenever you feel like, we may ask an expert in hacking how normal and common it is to see other people’s PCs in our PC.

Now all the possessive adjectives are superfluous, the same ones I was lacking in English, the same ones I worked so hard to incorporate in my speech at a subconscious level. I always felt like laughing whenever I heard “My head hurts/aches” (I heard it from several people). As if it were possible to feel other people’s pains! And the way I had to fight against “Me duele mi cabeza”, because students were not dropping “mi”…

The other day I was asked about source words and target words in Día de correo (Mail Day). They are the most common ways to charge translations into Spanish; other languages use cartelle, lines, etc.

Why am I always so adamant about charging per source word? Here you are three reasons:

1. I can always present a definite quote to my client.
2. I know exactly how much money I am going to earn with a project.
3. The most powerful reason to myself: NOBODY will demand a change in style to adapt to his/her budget.

It is vital for me to maintain some control over the finished product. And I don’t need anybody to question my use of the language for money. For instance: “Click button X” is “haga clic en el botón X” in Spanish. Three words more than in English. Should I bastardize the use of the language and say something like “Cliquee botón X”?

Hey, sure I can. I do not want to, though (because the result is incomprehensible). This way, with source words I can stop worrying about the way I charge my rates and I can focus on the best way to say things.

I only remember a couple of times I charged my rates according to target words: the original was a pic included in a PDF, so there was no word count unless I did quite a bit of preprocessing.

P.

My husband has a client that requested a quote for doing a campaign with some press releases in several languages. Pablo requested a quote from a translation agency in the following pairs: ES>EN, ES>PT y ES>IT. When he received it, he gave it to me, and asked me to have a look at it.

Because of that, I’ve discovered you can apply the same techniques when you look for a client and when you become one.

First thing that caught my eye was the LOW rates they were demanding from Pablo, who is a direct client. Automatically, I checked the payment practices lists I subscribe to and discovered that this agency has a reputation for not paying their translators on time.

Using the same reasoning I adopt when looking for clients, I reached the conclusion that if they pay little to their translators, or they are usually late with their payments, it’s quite possible they have a huge turnover of translators and possibly quite new translators, until they wise up a little.

It’s a good idea to have impeccable payment practices even to get a client.

P.

I was talking yesterday about the need to team up with a good proofreader when you are a newbie. But in fact, two pairs of eyes see far more than just one pair, so the proofreader becomes a need even in the case of experienced translators. Nevertheless, proofreaders should always be paid for their work; that’s the only way to maintain this service.

I personally don’t like acting as a proofreader. Reviewing something translated by someone else may be quite an upsetting experience.

First of all, you may encounter a translator who is quite new in the field and whose work is just chaos. First reaction is to throw up your hands in horror. Then you speak with your client. If your client is reasonable (and let’s knock on wood, mine are and trust me, maybe because I assign guilt with the same largesse I assign praise), he will give you carte blanche to charge whatever you need to charge. In these cases, what you need to do is to charge by the hour, because correcting/reviewing a bad translation may be more time-consuming than just translating the text itself. This has a simple argument: choose several juicy examples, backtranslate them (so that your client may understand them, in case he is foreign), and then present your proposed version and argue (with reason, dictionaries, and grammars) why it’s better. Few clients withstand that.

You may also find yourself arguing with an unreasonable client. In that case, you have two options: reject the job on the grounds of its (lack of) quality or work for free. Personally, I am so simple I believe they call it work because it must be paid for. But everybody is free to decide.

Someday, I’ll talk about the concept of firing clients… :-)

Until now I’ve written about agencies that contact me to proofread work. They are the same agencies that I translate for, so I know for sure they add value to their translators’ work. I don’t mind they charge their clients the earth. They pay my rates in both cases: translation and proofreading. Obviously this arrangement is profitable for them, and for me too.

What happens in the case of final clients? Same thing, although this time there is no middleman (agency) at all. You are the one in charge of managing the project, translating it, finding a proofreader, paying for his/her job, and delivering a finished product. In this case, the priority is to deliver a FINISHED product, ready for publication if necessary.

When I have a final client, my rates go up by 50-75% to cover additional expenses, such as project management and proofreading.

Remember to treat your proofreader with care. Ask for his/her rates, tell him/her about the deadlines you have, and do not forget to talk about your payment conditions. In the case of final clients, the proofreader works directly for you, so you will have to negotiate conditions with the proofreader the same way you negotiate with any of your clients. And you must respect those conditions meticulously. You cannot argue “I’ll pay you when I get paid by my client”. Your proofreader doesn’t care about your client; YOU are his/her client.

Get used to working with several proofreaders specialized in different fields and choose them for their suitability. Ask them to explain changes you don’t understand. Work with people you trust and admire…

:-) Sorry for my preaching today.

P.

PS: If you work for an agency as a translator, what’s expected is that they will get a proofreader for your work (after all, you have not included the rate for an independent proofreader in your rates). But that does not give you carte blanche to submit your work without your own proofreading. I usually do two revisions: spellchecker, that is quite bad (see the entry entitled “De pautas y putas“, in Spanish, that deals specifically with that topic), and a “manual” proofreading (the usual ones, with a printed copy and a marker).

I am thrilled by what I have just read, so I’ll be writing again about the same topic. But first let me give you some background. I do NOT believe a translator should charge less just because s/he is fresh out from college. And I have been preaching this now for some time, it has almost become my personal crusade, a mantra I chant whenever I get the chance, in this blog, for example (Traductores recién llegados a la profesión; cómo mantener unas tarifas mínimas y no morir en el intento, in Spanish, from November ‘05) or in any of the mailing lists I subscribe to.

Today I woke up late and when I opened my mail program, I found a thread specifically on this topic: how new translators feel unable to get high/regular rates because they lack the experience that guarantees a suitable level of quality in their work. According to what I have read, there are translators in Spain accepting 4 cents per word. Since they are doing these favors to agencies, they always have a large volume of work. But this is a serious Catch-22; with that amount of work at that low rate, they will not have too much free time to:

- Continue their education. A translator’s training is not over the day s/he exits college. They must have a curious, wandering mind, read whatever lands in their hands… That’s the only way to become specialized.

- Find better clients (usually foreign agencies) that pay better rates for the same job.

- Acquire true experience.

- Enjoy the money they have worked so hard for.

What I have read today in that thread is the proof that someone put my scheme to work, and that it worked well.

The idea is quite simple and I am going to retell it to see if more people jump on the WE-ARE-NOT-GOING-TO-ACCEPT-LOUSY-RATES bandwagon. Let’s imagine an agency contacts you. After hard bargaining, you agree on 8 cents per word. Anything beyond those 4 cents the Spanish agency pays you it’s benefit. That horrid agency loads you with work for that rate, doesn’t it?

Now find an experienced translator in the field you are going to work, and pay for his job proofreading your work. Do not send your work unannounced. Make a habit of having several translators in your payroll and announce work to ascertain their availability. Ask them for automatic tracking of changes in Word and request the delivery of two documents, one clean and one with track changes (you are their clients and you pay for the job, it is not a favor). Read the clean document to ascertain everything is OK and send it to your client: that’s your finished work.

The document with track changes is your study guide. Check the changes in style, study the vocabulary (the things you “got right” and the things you missed, and why)…

With several documents on the same topic, you’ll start getting a clear idea of the way that particular field works.

Playing to your client, you achieve something crucial: your work has quality and you’ll start having a good name for that agency.

The advantages you get for your own work are many: you learn, maintain rates, and get to perform well in your job in a specific field. That’s called specialization.

Continue this process until they send you a short job. Do it on your own, test the waters, see how it works out. If you are unhappy or uncomfortable, go back to working with a paid proofreader. If it turns out well, congratulations. Keep on reading, studying, checking whatever lands in your hands. You are on the right track. Bon courage and good luck!

P.

I’ve just discovered this precious video (thanks, Xosé!).

As you can see in the clip, the “interpreter” can gracefully ride the more orthodox sentences, but as soon as Axel interjects one of his “f***ing” and starts off a sentence based on idioms and little grammar, poor Noel gets lost and only says nonsense, in many cases altering the true meaning of the sentence.

Let’s go back to Common Sense 101: a language is a living being. It doesn’t matter whether you read a lot, you study more grammar than anybody else, or you translate long and complex texts. Those factors only serve as a crutch in language learning.

What truly gives you presence and helps you to extricate yourself from any mess is living in the country where they speak the language you intend to master for a time of no less than 1 year. That for starters…

Nowadays they are discussing the requirements for the Translation & Interpretation degree here in Spain and many people are complaining about the way the degree is planned, with little focus on practical training (such as specialized vocabulary) and too much stress on theory. Some people are even stating that a long stay abroad is not a sine-qua-non condition to become a translator…

Nevertheless, almost all old-school translators (and I include myself since the degree didn’t even exist then) have lived abroad for quite a few years…

Generally, these stays do not serve any purpose when translating technical texts (don’t get me wrong, they help you to get along without a dictionary); that type of texts require advanced knowledge on the topic, rather than the language used. But for literary translators it is essential to live abroad for several years, since most questions I see in mailing lists about this topic actually focus on idioms and idiomatic usage of the language. That’s all.

P.

Around this time of the year, freelancers in Spain must pay 4th-quarter and annual taxes, and every year I see the same. My colleagues are able to waste a full day filling in some incomprehensible papers.

I don’t know what rates they are fetching, but the way the market is, a day may mean 200-300 euro in income. I do not understand how they can do away with that income instead of giving it to an accountant to push the papers for them.

When I became a freelancer, income was modest. But I always paid an accountant to do the forms correctly. I do not trust myself to solve all those calculations under such headings I cannot even understand.

It’s cheaper for me to pay an accountant to do the forms and forget about the many headaches I see. In all the mailing lists I subscribe to, the “what do I enter in box 309?” messages are piling up. The fun part is that answers are varied and contradictory.

Anyway, here I am talking about responsibility and just yesterday I set another obstacle in my husband’s evolution toward maturity: I bought him a kite.

P.

The last few days I’ve been working in the translation of a software for a client that required Catalyst. For those of you who don’t know this program, it is a graphical interface to translate software. You can see the dialog boxes, the arrangement of options within menus… It’s a fun program, why deny it.

But the same way it is fun to work with, it’s a waste of time too.

This time things have been even more complex than usual. Besides Catalyst, my working conditions have been quite peculiar.

My client asked me to update to version 6, so I downloaded the .exe. After many attempts, I had to give up. XP does NOT like Catalyst.

Then I decided to install the program in my laptop, since it runs Windows 2000. I installed it in the first try, with its license and all. So I had to work in the laptop.

I pushed my regular screen to the back of my desk, and put aside my regular keyboard and my mouse. In the free space, I set the laptop, and the extra keyboard and mouse…

Now that I have finished and have dismantled this assembly, my desk seems huge, as huge as my regular screen. Above all, I am delighted to avoid deciding which keyboard/mouse to use… I was answering to someone’s comment before and I found it within my translation because I had forgotten to change keyboards to write in my regular computer… :-)

Happy 2007, a little bit late.

P.

These days, I have received three projects with certain peculiarities.

The first one is the translation of a software, so they have asked me to use Catalyst. Being the only client who requests Catalyst from time to time, I didn’t think it twice when they asked me to update to version 6. The weird thing is that I didn’t get to install it in my desktop computer, just in my laptop. I’d install the program, upon opening I’d get one of those fatal errors that ask you to send them to Microsoft (I never do) and that was it. After about 15 failed attempts, in between which I cleaned up the registry, etc., I let it go. I run Windows XP SP2 in the desktop computer and Windows 2000 in the laptop.

Second weird case. I receive a translation that has been segmented with Trados, with the segments populated with the source text. They demand that I do not use Trados and send me a PDF with instructions about translating a Trados- segmented and prepared text without Trados. So to speak, it consists on overwriting the text without touching any of the special marks. Surprise: What’s the point of translating a Trados-prepared text without Trados?

Third project arrives in: It’s a document that has been obtained from the conversion of a PDF, so there are plenty of spaces in between the words, weird margins, etc. They again demand that I do not use Trados, so that I’ll maintain the format in pristine condition. My question is: Besides fonts, has Trados ever screwed up the original format? :-) It would be my first.

So I finish the year with some strange requests. If anybody can shed some light, I’d be very thankful.

P.