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tranfree issue 13 - 15th April 2000
"Advertising Jobs & Localisation pt. IV"
This tranfree contains...
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
translatortips.com news and new site developments
tranfree is now a year old
tranfree is celebrating its first anniversary!
There are now around 6700 subscribers.
New this month isTranslation Joke, contributed by
Yuri Dudinski. Yuri suggested, and I agree, that it would be nice
to round off each edition with a translation related joke.
If anyone else has suggestions for relevant articles - or even
completed articles - I would love to hear from you. I plan to
make tranfree a twice-monthly issue within the next few months.
I'd like to thank Bert Esselink for his excellent series of four
articles on localization. I'll see if I can twist his arm into
writing some more articles at a later date
Right now he's busy working on the next edition of his book.
New look translatortips.com site - much more Netscape friendly 
I had a few messages on the translatortips.com
message board
about problems with Netscape browsers using the site.
The original site layout is a year old (at least two generations
in web terms).
So I have begun the process of converting the
whole site over to a new layout which avoids the use of frames
and is also much much more Netscape friendly.
Let me know what you think of the new layout. It only affects the
first level pages so far.
If the feedback is positive I'll go ahead and change over the rest of the site too
When I created translatortips.com, I committed the cardinal web
design sin of not viewing the site with several different browsers.
When I recently viewed the site with Netscape 4.6 I was
shocked to see that it didn't look nearly as good as it should 
So take a tip from me - if you haven't viewed your site with both
Netscape and Internet Explorer - you really should do it. You may
be amazed how different they look!
If you haven't built your own site yet, you should check out...
http://www.sitesell.com/tt.html
and learn how to build a web site that sells.
tranmail development
I am delighted to announce that Janos Fazakas has agreed to take
on the role of maintaining, developing and growing the tranmail
list of 1800 translation agencies around the world.
http://www.translatortips.net/tranmail.html
Actually, Janos has already grown the list from the original 1000 entries
to more than 1400, see...
http://www.translatortips.net/tranmail.html
I've got some great tranmail users' success stories which will be
going up on the site in due course. If you want to add your
success story, just email it over to me
editor@translatortips.com
Customer letter of the month...
"Alex, Alex, Alex,
What can I say?! I've been meaning to e-mail you my tons of gratitude, but I've been so busy
answering e-mails, that I just haven't had the time! I must say that when I first ordered your "How
to Earn $80,000...," I did so with much skepticism since I had already spent quite a fortune on
"other" freelance-work-at-home-opportunities that turned out to be...well...a major disappointment,
putting it mildly!
I found the products I received from you to be professional, concise, and on target, and the
suggestions extremely easy to implement.
http://www.translatortips.net/ht50.html
Guess what? I, too, achieved a response rate in excess of 20% from my e-mail campaign!
Unbelievable (and, I can say that since I'm in the market research business!!!). And, I only
scratched the surface of your Tranmail list!"
http://www.translatortips.net/tranmail.html
Mildred Rivera
This tranfree's Feature Articles...
- I Don't Want This Job Thanks - But I'll Do It Anyway
- Alex Eames
- Localisation Project Models - Bert Esselink
New Mailing list glossary resource
Maria Eugenia Farre has recently started GlossPost
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GlossPost
GlossPost is a recently created list for translators, interpreters and technical writers. Here
you can submit links to online linguistic resources found on the Internet, such as glossaries,
dictionaries, d atabases and so forth.
We are averaging 10-20 messages a day, mostly URLs
sprinkled with some requests. Several important glossary hunters have been contributing regularly
to the list too. The list is a strictly no-chat; no thank-you note environment.
LegalTranslators Mailing list
Mary Maloof has set up the LegalTranslators mailing list, which is intended to be a forum for
in-house and freelance legal translators working in all languages. Members are welcome to discuss
terminology, resources, client issues, the law as it relates to translation, and anything else that
pertains to legal translation as a profession. To subscribe, go to...
http://groups.yahoo.com/list/legaltranslators
...and follow the directions to subscribe. Alternatively, you can send a blank email to...
mailto:legaltranslators-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
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...
this winner is Iain C. Purvis -
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.
Q & A
I've got registered at Aquarius only about a month ago and now starting to benefit
from it, though very slowly, but it's OK at the moment. But the problem is,
when I contacted employers by email sending them my resume and
other details as an attached file I was getting some response.
Answer:
OK - have you read tranfree 3?
http://www.translatortips.net/tranfreearch.html
That edition was almost exclusively devoted to marketing by email to celebrate
the launch of tranmail.
http://www.translatortips.net/tranmail.html
I recommend putting your CV/resume in the text of an email. Some
people do not open files from strangers because of viruses. In
fact only this week someone sent me an application for work which
contained the Ethan virus. It got trashed by my antivirus
software without even being opened!
As soon as I started to point to my Aquarius web page
(just simply giving a link to it), the message flow from potential employers
somehow broke up. Could it be because of this change?
Answer:
Definitely! Sure! Without a doubt! This is also mentioned in my
ebook. How to earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator...
http://www.translatortips.net/ht50.html
What makes you think that they want to go and look at your web
site or your page at Aquarius to find the information that you
have failed to provide them with? If you don't provide them with
the information they need, they will use someone else who does.
You have to make things easy for them! After all you are asking
for work.
The reason why Aquarius works is because people go there looking
for a translator. As shown in last month's survey, 44% of
translators think it's the best source of translation jobs on the
net. [But that changed quickly, by Jan 2000
Aquarius had p***ed off a lot of translators with the way they
handled their commercialisation - our updated survey showed a new
leader click here for more up to date info]
Having a web page/site can be great. As I said last month, we at
ALMAL get a large percentage of our new customers through our
site. This works when people are looking for you or someone like
you! But in the case you mention, you are looking for them. They
did not ask you to write to them, so you have to give them
everything they need quickly and easily. It makes a world of
difference.
If you want to see how to make a web site that sells really well
go to...
http://www.sitesell.com/tt.html
This is not only an example of a site that sells well, but it is
also a site that gives away and sells excellent information about
marketing using the web.
Making a great site does not mean you just point people to it in
an email or letter to avoid doing some work yourself. You can't
just expect them to run along over there. If you apply by email,
yours is being deleted almost every time you try this fatal
tactic.
Yuri Dudinski's - Translation Joke
The Dairy Association's huge success with the campaign
"Got Milk?" prompted them to expand advertising to Mexico.
It was soon brought to their attention that the Spanish
translation read, "Are you lactating?"
***End of issue 13***
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