tranfree issue 11 - 15 February 2000

"Growth and Translation Technology"

This tranfree contains...

• tranfree growth forces upgrade in facilities
• Followup to online job listing services
• Marketing your services on the web
• Translation Technology pt 2 of 4 - Bert Esselink
• Anonymous Articles regarding UK clients
• Show Me the Money- Mary Maloof
• translatortips.com Linkers Prize Draw
• Readers' Questions

tranfree growth

The continued rapid growth in popularity of tranfree has meant that it is really no longer feasible to mail it out as I was doing before - using a dial-up ISDN connection. The last tranfree took 10 hours to mail out around 80 megabytes of information to you all. So I have bought some excellent web facilities which means...

1. we now have our very own Majordomo which we can use for distribution of tranfree. The subscribe/unsubscribe addresses are now different
2. we will be able to greatly enhance the spectrum of facilities which we can offer you - further details to be announced as they develop!
3. if you ever have problems with accessing translatortips.com (which is unlikely) you can try translatortips.net instead - it's on a separate server with a different provider, so if one service is down the other should still be available

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 - and we'd all benefit from an answer.

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

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

This tranfree's Feature Articles...

1. Translation Technology pt 2 of 4 - Bert Esselink
2. Show Me the Money- Mary Maloof

Has anyone actually got work through jobswarm or myconduit yet?

There is a whole bunch of these types of website springing up all over the net. Are these sites any use or are they just building up mailing lists of people to market to in future? If any of them are actually delivering the goods I would like to know about it so I can share the info with you all.

Please post your opinons, comments and details on the translatortips.com message board

Marketing your services on the web

If you are interested in finding out more about web marketing you really ought to subscribe to the IMC Marketing Chronicles. It's a free weekly ezine which I have been reading for about a year. I've put up a page where you can find out more and subscribe at...

http://www.translatortips.net/imcezine.html

translatortips.com Linkers FREE Prize Draw

I am keen to get as many of you as possible who have your own web sites to link to the translatortips.com website. To encourage you all to put a link to translatortips.com 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.com site (and let me know about it) will go into a ballot and the winner gets a FREE translatortips.com product of their choice from the following...

• My ebook - How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator
  
  
• tranmail - list of 1800 translation agencies around the world, with email addresses and a booklet about marketing yourself by email

this winner is Sarah Pearman - 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.

NEW Medical translators mailing list

A new mailing list for medical translators has been started by Tiina Onttonen.

"This is a group for discussion on medical terminology & other subjects of interest for translators specializing in medical texts."

If you are interested you can subscribe by sending a blank email to medical_translation-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/medical_translation and click the box "Join this group".

Anonymous Articles

If you work in the UK, or for UK clients you will probably be interested in two short anonymous articles which were sent in this month...

• Non-payment by British solicitors
  
  
• Public Service Interpreters

If you want to read these click here

tranfree Readers' Questions

Question From: Japanese translator in UK

I've just missed a huge...

... fish - 12,000 pounds worth! Well I had to because a company in San Diego asked me to translate a 175,000 word technical document in 3 months. It worked out 2,000 words per day.

Is this a normal kind of demand to any translator nowadays? I realise that deadlines are getting tougher and tougher every day but I cannot possibly keep up with as many as 2,000 words per day. Does it mean that I am failing as a professional translator?

Answer:
No you're not failing at all! 2000 words per day is what some say an experienced professional translator can do on average. I think it depends on the individual, the subject matter and the language combination.