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tranfree issue 45 - 28 January 2002
The Six Deadly E-Mail SinsAre you guilty of them?By Mary Maloof E-mail technology is a tremendous blessing in many ways. If you are reading this article, you've already experienced how it can...
Furthermore, you're already familiar with how all this is done instantaneously - in "real time" - with no regard to physical geography, time zones, or any other barriers that have traditionally hampered rapid communication among people who live and work far away from one another. It's all so amazing, isn't it? However, as with nearly everything else in life, there's a tradeoff. In the case of e-mail technology, it is the impersonal nature of our correspondence. Unfortunately, many of us, whether we're just making the transition to the big, bright world of the Internet or have been hard-core Netizens for years, make the mistake of confusing impersonality with informality. As a result, we take certain liberties with our e-mail correspondence that we would never dream of taking on the telephone, in a letter, or...
At best, these liberties are inconsiderate of the recipient (who is often the very person we need to impress). At worst, they can seriously tarnish our professional image and wreck our marketability. As a freelance translator who does approximately 85 percent of her business online, I can't tell you how many times I've wrung my hands at the computer screen as I see fellow translators display bad e-mail manners over and over again and commit professional suicide. I've grouped them into six "deadly e-mail sins" below.
1. Caution, Paper Avalanche Zone!When corresponding with potential clients, don't blitz them with unsolicited paperwork: your six diplomas, translation samples in all thirty of your language combinations, and three different versions of your CV that should have been combined into one. If your e-mail is a response to a call for CVs, remember that you aren't the only translator in the world who has responded to their request. Even if you are, potential clients are busy folks who usually have precious little time to spare, and may need to fight a gazillion other fires before they can even open the first attachment you've sent, let alone the other ten. So give potential clients only what they ask for, when they ask for it. If they don't want or need something, they won't ask for it, so don't presume and send it to them anyway. (If you think they haven't asked for something because they didn't know to ask for it, request their permission to send it.) When you do send a solicited attachment, keep it short, helpful, and relevant to what they want. Put it this way: If you were on a face-to-face job interview, you wouldn't plop reams of paper unceremoniously on the interviewer's desk and say, "HERE! Read this, baby!" Nor would you keep them on the phone during their lunch hour to listen to you toot your horn about every single one of your accomplishments dating all the way back to 1981. Yet people do the very equivalent of this via e-mail, every single day. This is not to say that you shouldn't be proud of your credentials. By all means, show them off … but only on request. Also, send your attachments in a format that is easy to read and which can be opened on just about any computer. Word 97 is usually fine, because it's pretty much universally accepted in the translation and business world, but plain text sent in short chunks is even better, because it is positioned "inline" within the body of the email and the recipient doesn't even have to click on an attachment. (Remember that limited time factor.) And plain text can't carry viruses - at least so far.
2. (You Know You Make Me Wanna) Shout!You wouldn't yell at a complete stranger, would you? How about the people you work with face to face? Of course not. Yet many e- mail users forget that using the Caps Lock on their keyboards IS THE EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING. When sending e-mail, make sure that the Caps Lock key on your keyboard is not activated.
Not only that, but it's very hard to read, looks terrible and is very disrespectful to the reader.
Signed... Who?As the director of a job leads network for translators, I receive mountains of e-mails with nothing but - the attached CV. No name, no greeting, no language combination or specialty, no "thank you for your time," no nothing. (These e- mails are almost invariably sent from an address that is full of characters that don't make sense, making it impossible to guess the sender's name.) If senders can't bother to introduce themselves, and do the cyber-equivalent of plopping their CVs unceremoniously on my desk, I don't feel like taking my valuable time to open the attachments and read them. I simply hit "Delete." I know this sounds arrogant, but please believe me when I say there are many translation agents out there who share my viewpoint. Introduce yourself, be short and sweet and to the point, and end it with a closing phrase ("Regards," "Sincerely," "Very truly yours") and your full name, exactly as you would in a formal cover letter. Otherwise, you're killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Your e-cover letter is your opportunity to shine, to market yourself. Don't throw that opportunity away with both hands. Of course, I'm aware that many translators do this because they have little or no experience with the language that is spoken by the recipient. They fear that if they write an e-cover letter and make mistakes, the recipient will catch the mistakes and not want to work with them, so they just don't say anything at all and hope they can get away with it. Unfortunately, they usually don't get away with it. If you're in this situation, have a fellow translator who is fluent in the language write up a short letter for you. You can then do a barter arrangement to repay the favor.
4. Yo, Whassup?If you're discussing things with a close friend who is quite familiar with your personality, and you can both safely predict one another's reactions to certain things, you can be very familiar in your speech. However, when speaking face to face with clients, potential clients, and fellow translators you don't know, you're far more careful with what you say. It's no different with e-mail. When engaging in professional correspondence, by all means keep the tone of your emails cordial and friendly, yet not overly familiar. It can be a little discomfiting to receive a professional email with overly familiar speech from a colleague you hardly know.
5. Trigger Happy!This "sin," if combined with the previous one, can be disastrous! Be extremely careful with the "Reply," "Reply All," and "Forward" buttons at all times. Just yesterday, I received an email from a translation agency I hadn't heard of. I composed a forward to a translator friend of mine that said something like, "Yo tanta - have u heard of this co. or done work w/them? hmmm innerestin' luv - M." However, instead of hitting the Forward button, I hit the Reply button. OOPS! I wanted to find the nearest hole and crawl into it! But there's always a first time, and although what I said looked pretty stupid, it could have been a lot worse. Don't let this happen to you! When composing e-mail, try to make sure that ALL e-mail correspondence that you send is phrased so that it won't be horribly mortifying if the wrong person somehow ends up reading it.
Absolutely right. I've had a couple of 'near misses'
with this sort of thing. Usually it happens when you
are rushing. If you never say anything nasty about
anybody, you have nothing to worry about. But there
are precious few people like that around.
6. Flamed, Broiled, Or Roasted?When you engage in a mailing list discussion and get involved in a dispute on a translation- related issue, it's frighteningly easy to lose your cool and say things you wouldn't normally say to someone's face or on the telephone. After all, you're looking at words on a computer screen, not the human being who wrote them. And even when you're not upset, someone on the other side of the fence can still misread your comments as being angry or malicious. After all, they, too, are looking at words on a computer screen, not the human beings who wrote them, and they don't have the benefit of the visual and auditory cues you get in a face-to-face meeting or telephone conversation. That's why it's helpful to introduce emoticons (those "faces" you make with characters on your keyboard, like :-) , :-( , or :-D ) into your text so that the other person gets the benefit of visual cues and will not misread the tone of your comments.
http://www.translatortips.net/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi It's just too easy to be really nasty to people on the 'net. You can say things that would usually get you a punch in the face if you said them to someone in person.
We have already expelled people from our forums for breaking our
rules. In fact, some of them have been known to initiate negative
discussions about tranfree content in other forums
That's OK. I don't mind people disagreeing with me - it keeps me from getting too big-headed.
Okay, enough - time for me to get off my Miss Manners soapbox and leave you with my wish for the online translation community. Let's stop committing these "sins," start doing as much as we can to maintain professional and polished e-mail correspondence, and encourage our colleagues to do the same. It's a small thing, but in the end, it will leave a great positive impact on the image of our profession. Mary C. Maloof is a certified Spanish > English translator who resides in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. She is the founder and moderator of "SpTranslators," an Internet mailing list for Spanish translators, founder and moderator of "Legaltranslators," an Internet mailing list for legal translators, director of The American Web for International Languages, a worldwide job referrals network for translators and interpreters, and owner of Maloof Language Services, Inc., which offers a wide range of translation and interpretation services. For more information about her work, please contact her at mmaloof@sprintmail.com Mary also offers consulting services to translators - contact her for more details. |
...face to face.
