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tranfree issue 5 - 7 August 1999

"Dealing with Malicious Proof-Readers"

 

Welcome to issue 5 of tranfree - the newsletter for translators.

This tranfree contains...

As always, I would like to strongly encourage people to ask questions. Your anonymity is assured, unless you specifically want to be named. Keep the questions coming - if you don't know the answer to something, the chances are someone else doesn't either.

I hope you find tranfree valuable and enjoy reading it. Please tell all your friends about it.

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author -
How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator

 

 

Caution When Criticising Others

By Alex Eames

I'm just back from holiday, and one of my regular clients sent me a translation to check. This job would have been done by me if I hadn't been on holiday, and to be honest, the work that the other translator did is not very good. Since I was asked to "check and amend if necessary" that is exactly what I decided to do. The client will see for themselves how many changes I have made and (s)he will draw the appropriate conclusion. I sent back the amended file without comment - except to say that I'd made a few changes.

The other reason for being cautious here is that I don't know who translated the original; it may have been done by someone working at the agency - I know they have at least one "in-house" translator there. If this is the case it would be foolish to heavily criticise their work because, in future, that person will always be looking to find something wrong with mine. This does not mean I didn't make the required changes - just that I didn't make a big fuss about it. Let's be honest - a fresh pair of eyes can always find something to improve in a translation job! Whenever I write something I always find a way of saying it better if I read it again a couple of months later - it's normal! But when working to a tight translation deadline we never have this luxury.

 

 

    This tranfree's Feature Articles...

  1. Dealing With Malicious Proof-Readers
  2. Senior Translation Agency Staff Column - Considering the Agency as a Whole

 

 

4 T's - Tips, Tactics, Tricks and Techniques to improve your translation business

What to do if a Malicious Proof-Reader (or anyone else) Attacks Your Work

By Alex Eames

  1. have a good look at the comments and, being polite, professional and unemotional, ask for as much detailed specific feedback as you can get - preferably a marked up copy of your translation. Ask as many questions as possible and get all the information you can without being defensive - collect information first, then you can mount your defence using the facts!

  2. be as objective as possible - accept that some of the comments may be fair and some may not be

  3. conduct a detailed analysis e.g. On page 1 there were 30 comments. 3 were improvements, 15 synonyms, 10 stylistic comments, 2 were completely wrong criticisms

  4. Write a short report, including the best examples of wrong "corrections" that you can find - fully explained in the client's language - and fax it to the client as soon as possible. This gives the client ammunition to fight your corner for you. Where applicable, provide back-translations of sections that were totally changed. This often leads to a satisfactory result for you as it gives the end client solid proof that the changes to the document may be mostly stylistic or rewrites of their original text.

  5. If client does not get back to you within a week you should follow up with a telephone call or you'll go mad with worry

 

 

translatortips.com Linkers FREE Prize Draw

I am keen to get as many of you as possible who have your own websites to link to the translatortips.com website. To encourage you all to put a link to translatortips® on your own site, I am holding a monthly prize draw for everyone who does this. Each month all those people who have put a link on their own website to the translatortips site (and let me know about it) will go into a ballot and the winner gets a FREE translatortips product of their choice from the following...

this winner is Cecilia Etchegoyen - please contact me within the next 3 months to claim your prize from the above selection.

If you wish to put a link to the translatortips.com site on your site you can find instructions at the bottom of this edition.

 

 

Readers' Questions

Question from "young French translator"

I have a website, but my main problem is to get known by potential clients. What could I do to achieve that? I'd like to be at the top in the web directories. What could I do for that?

What other kinds of advertising could I use? If you could help me with that, it would really be interesting!

I have another question: are there other websites, or magazines… to help translators ? I'd like to have more tips, and learn how to avoid some problems.

Thank you very much.

Answer

This is a little bit off-topic but nevertheless interesting. Search engine design is a science all by itself. There are companies out there who will guarantee to place you in the top 10 positions for various keywords on the most significant search engines (but this does not last forever because the engines themselves are constantly evolving). However, you will find this service is rather labour-intensive and you can expect it to cost you at least $1000. So you have to be sure that your website actually works or you could be throwing away a lot of money. I mean, it's all very well getting people to come to your site, but if they aren't interested in your offer you will get little return from this.

For a single independent translator this may not be the best option. The quickest cheapest and best form of advertising to translation agencies that I know is tranmail . You can email your details to over 1000 translation agencies. It even includes a booklet on how to write a stunningly effective email selling your services. Click here to find out more about tranmail.

In answer to your second question, Gabe Bokor's Translation Journal is a site I would heartily recommend http://www.accurapid.com/journal

Also Cecilia Falk's page of resources for translators...

http://www2.sbbs.se/hp/cfalk/indexeng.htm

Question from Greek Translator

I am a Greek translator dealing mainly with art, cinema, theatre. I would like to know how promising is the market for translators of this kind, since technical translators seem to be the most popular ones?

Answer

Since I have no first-hand experience of this kind of work, I can only really tell you what I've seen in places like sci.lang.translation. The general opinion seems to be that literary and artistic translation is much less well paid than, say, legal, technical or even general commercial work. I do not really know why this is and it doesn't seem particularly fair. Perhaps it is something to do with the general impression that "artists produce their best work when they are suffering" or maybe it's just that people are glad to see their name in print and aren't really doing it for the money. I don't handle any of this kind of work myself either as an individual or an agency and we've never been asked to either (this might give an indication of the amount of work, but it is more likely due to the fact that we do no marketing in these areas). If we were asked, we would charge our normal rates or decline the work - but I think publishers often approach translators directly. SM tells me that film and corporate video scripts are quite well paid.

 

***End of issue 5***