Fidus Interpres » English

Vacation Notice / Aviso de férias

Fabio M. Said — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:00:27 +0000

Dear reader/visitor

I will be on an annual vacation from May 19 through June 10 and will not be able to update this blog or accept offers for new translation jobs.

If you need to contact me, please send me an e-mail. I will answer as soon as I am back.

This blog’s comments functionality will be unavailable as of Saturday. It will be active again on June 11.

And when I am back I will have great translation-related news to tell.

See you back in June,

Fabio Said

Caro leitor/visitante,

Estarei em férias anuais de 19 de maio a 10 de junho e não terei condições de atualizar este blog, nem de aceitar propostas de novos projetos de tradução nesse período.

Caso precise entrar em contato comigo, envie um e-mail. Responderei assim que estiver de volta.

A função de comentários deste blog estará indisponível a partir de sábado e será reativada em 11 de junho.

Em junho terei uma grande novidade para contar que tem a ver com tradução.

Até lá,

Fabio Said

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This was originally posted on Fidus Interpres, a translation blog with over 1.4 million visitors since 2008. The blog is run by Fabio Said, a Brazilian Portuguese translator living in Germany, and the author of a Portuguese-language book about the translation industry. To contact Fabio Said, please click here.
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Este artigo foi publicado no Fidus Interpres, blog de tradução que obteve mais de 1,4 milhão de visitantes desde 2008. O blog é mantido por Fabio Said, tradutor brasileiro de inglês e alemão residente na Alemanha, autor de Fidus interpres: a prática da tradução profissional. Para contatos com Fabio Said, clique aqui.
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Enjoying the Benefits of Booming Business!

Fabio M. Said — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:15:53 +0000

I have never turned down as many jobs as in the last few months. But God only knows that I am not lazy. It’s just that all my marketing efforts are paying off, and they are bringing me more prospective clients than I am able to handle. Business is growing. And I would be a fool to not reap the benefits.

The most obvious benefit is that the more juicy translation jobs I get, the more selective I am with new prospects, and the more I tend to prefer direct clients over first-time agency clients. And that is not only because direct clients pay higher rates: They also tend not to fuss over prices and discounts for “fuzzy matches” (most direct clients don’t even know what a fuzzy match is). Also, direct clients don’t usually demand that I use a specific CAT tool, which is always a plus for them. But I don’t dump translation agencies just because business is booming: I remain very loyal to a very select group of translation agencies that have supported me for years and years.

Another benefit of booming business is that I tend to accept job offers that I like more. No need to accept boring projects in order to pay the bills. If I have enough projects to keep me busy and enough new clients willing to pay my highest rate level and up, why should I? This is also a good opportunity to stick to one’s specialization in a given area by deliberately turning down jobs that do not fit into that specialization, and an excellent opportunity to tell prospects: “No, I am sorry, I do not work with Across anymore. I prefer to work with memoQ.”

Because I already have enough jobs, I am also more confident when negotiating deadlines, and – guess what – prospects usually accept my suggestions for extended deadlines, which makes me even more happy.

And, of course, the obvious benefit of growing business is that I can invest more in things like software licenses and continued education, especially when those expenses are tax-deductible. And I can enlarge my financial cushion for harder times (knock on wood).

But I am not the only one who benefits from my own business boom. Rather than saying yes to all the job offers and then subcontracting (God forbid – I know what a hassle that is), I prefer, when appropriate, to refer prospects to a competent colleague who will do business directly with them. For example, the other day I recommended a good interpreter for an interpreting job that I didn’t really want to accept. Situations like that reinforces the bond between two professional linguists. Of course, in most cases I don’t even bother to recommend a colleague, because I see myself as a matchmaker who brings the perfect client and the perfect linguist together. And it’s not because I am overworked that I would neglect my duties of giving back and helping the translation industry develop.

Translators, Know Your Enemy!

Fabio M. Said — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:06:34 +0000

It doesn’t take too long for a freelance translator to see that his/her worst enemy is himself/herself. It is no use protecting oneself only from The Others – bad payers, amateur translators, bottom-feeders and whoever else they might be. Your biggest enemy is right here. It is you whom you should be protecting yourself against most of the time! If you have been translating for more than a few years now, you have probably noticed how you sabotage your own business in one way or another. Based on my own experience, here are just a few examples of how this could happen:

Procrastinating

By far the most dangerous form of self-sabotaging, procrastinating is everywhere in our daily lives as linguists. It happens not only between projects (ah, that sweet moment when you don’t have an immediate delivery schedule to meet), but also during a project when you are so tired of researching new terms that you just need a rest and look for more interesting things to do (oh-oh, trouble ahead). Yes, sometimes doing nothing is really what you need, but doing nothing productive too often may be deadly to your freelance business! Procrastinating leads to missed deadlines and damaged business reputation. And you know who is to blame for that – you, and you alone! If you feel the need to clear your mind away from translation work between jobs, why not do it productively by writing for your blog, reading news articles on your Kindle, learning a new language, checking and polishing your online image or planning your expenses for the next big conference you are going to attend? Procrastinating on Facebook or Twitter (as opposed to doing consistent marketing/networking on Facebook or Twitter) will most likely not do you any good.

Not Saying No

I don’t think that fledgling translators realize how much strength you need in order to say “No” when a client offers you a project with an unrealistic deadline in a domain that is not exactly your cup of tea. It is even harder to say “No” when your job flow has been slow and you just need to pay the bills. But, you know what, unless you have a family to support, even in situations like that you should learn how to say “No”, simply because it pays off. Saying “No” helps you build a reputation and makes you strive even harder to do your very best with the jobs that you do accept. It also helps to know your clients’ “cycles” – i.e. if you know that certain clients only come to you in certain periods, it makes sense not to accept less interesting offers from other prospects in those periods. Also, if your income target for the last quarter has been bigger than the previous quarter, why should you feel pressed to accept every job offer that appears on your email inbox? Not saying “No” leads to lack of specialization and scheduling conflicts. In order to say “No” you need to know who your clients/prospects are and who you and your long term goals are.

Not Raising Rates

I don’t hear translators talk about raising rates often. Maybe it’s because most translators I know work for translation agencies, who are commonly perceived to be unfriendly towards rate increases. But raising rates is a must if you want to keep (or increase) the value of your services. You know, there’s inflation, your health insurance gets more and more expensive, and gas will not be cheaper next month – so if you do not raise your rates you will soon be working just to cover your expenses, or worst still, your income level will soon lie below your expenses. Ask any experienced translator about the best time to raise rates, and they will tell you it is every single day, with every new client – that is, if you already have enough clients to keep you busy otherwise. So, new clients are your first target. Raising rates for existing clients is a whole lot different, but it’s not impossible. Raising rates is a nice way to get rid of old clients who are too complicated – raise your rates above what you think they would agree to pay, and they probably will not bother you again with those uninteresting job offers. But what about the really good, dear old clients? Raise rates for them too, and they will see you more and more like business partners instead of handymen – but you have to be damn good and provide them with ample evidence that your services really add value. If your work is sloppy, you should never dare to raise your rates.

Reluctance to Get Out of the Cave

Translators are like cave dwellers observing life from their computer screens. Why are translators so reluctant when it comes to leaving the home office now and then to attend a conference, informal gathering, trade fair or seminar? It’s because they fear losing jobs and being forgotten by the clients, I guess. A totally wrong way of thinking, because the more you get out of the cave – but not that often -, the more you are exposed to new business opportunities. There is no way you can be a successful translator if you do not meet people. And it’s not just about business networking. Getting out of the cave is also about learning – learning from more experienced colleagues, learning from other people’s mistakes, learning how your clients think, learning new professional perspectives. If you do not learn and network, your hard-won expertise risks becoming outdated and your translation business may become irrelevant. Don’t do that to yourself!

So, translators, know your enemy – know yourself! – and learn how to get rid of those bottlenecks that keep your business from being more and more lucrative.

Do you know of any other forms of self-sabotaging that you might want to share? Feel free to leave a comment!

Searching Old Translations and Glossaries With Archivarius 3000

Fabio M. Said — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:00:53 +0000

I only began using a translation memory system about 10 years ago, and I’ve only been exclusively translating with a CAT tool since 2005. But I haven’t imported everything I’ve translated before into my preferred CAT tool, and until recently loads of my old translation data wasn’t even searchable yet. Then I attended a seminar at ATA’s Annual Conference in Denver given my the great Naomi Sutcliffe, who introduced me to Archivarius 3000. Archivarius 3000 is a great tool to keep your old files indexed and searchable, like translations you did a long time ago and bilingual glossaries you want to keep in a neutral format (as opposed to a CAT-tool-specific format).

Actually, Naomi’s presentation was about terminology management. She said you could keep your bilingual glossaries in a neutral format like simple text (TXT) and index them using Archivarius 3000, thereby making your terminology easily accessible even when you use a CAT tool other than your preferred one, or if you use no CAT tool at all. But I’ve since found out another great way to use Archivarius: searching really old translations of 10, 15 years ago. Problem is, 10, 15 years ago I didn’t keep digital files of the source texts. So I can search only translated texts, without the benefit of comparing them to source texts. But even so I can search for a specific term when I know more or less the kind of sentence in which I used it in an old translation. Archivarius 3000 is great for that.

Sure, you could use Google Desktop or another web-based tool for almost the same thing. Or maybe Windows 7′s built-in indexing and searching capability could be enough in your case. As for me, though, I need more, and I need control over my data, so I decided to rely on Archivarius 3000 as a tool that is not web-based and that allows me to safely search my almost two decades’ worth of data.

Tip:
You can configure Archivarius to search certain directories on your computer – like, for example, the directory where you store all your digital dictionaries as PDF files. Archivarius will show you the results in a way that you don not need to open Adobe Acrobat in order to read the page where the term comes from. I personally find this functionality extremely useful, as I have lots of PDF dictionaries from publishers who are still stuck with PDF and have not figured out a way to publish their works as decent CD-ROM dictionaries.

Key Features

Instant full-text search of documents and e-mails
Support for LAN (local network) and removable drives (CD, DVD and others)
Support for popular formats, document search from MS Office and PDF to TXT
Searching documents in archives ZIP, ACE, RAR and others
Searching in Outlook, Outlook Express, MS Exchange, Netscape, Thunderbird, PocoMail and The Bat! e-mail messages and their attachments
Remote searching and documents accessing via Internet
Full Unicode support

Selling Points (For Me)

Fast indexing and searching
Lots of controls on the search interface
It’s not web-based (everything happens on my hard disk)
I can preview files (such as PDF, DOC, XLS, even backed up e-mail files) without opening the original application
I can specify the directories I want to index and create search profiles for each one of them
The price is great (30 euros for personal licence)

Screenshot

(Click to enlarge)

Download and More Information

http://www.likasoft.com/document-search/index.shtml

The Time Machine: Looking Back at 4 Years of Blogging About Translation

Fabio M. Said — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:43:35 +0000

Fidus Interpres turns 4 years old today. To celebrate the anniversary, here’s a look back at the blog’s history and what I have gained from it.

In early 2008 there were a couple of active and well-known translation blogs already, like Michael Wahlster’s Translate This!; Sarah Dillon’s There’s Something About Translation; Céline Graciet’s bilingual blog Naked Translations; Riccardo Schiaffino’s mother of all translation blogs, About Translation; Pablo Muñoz Sánchez’s great Spanish translation blog, Algo más que traducir; and Danilo Nogueira’s fantastic Portuguese translation blog, Tradutor Profissional. But 2008 turned out to be a great year for the translation blogosphere. It was during that year that some of today’s most popular translation blogs were started. First, in February, Corinne McKay created her wonderful Thoughts On Translation. Then, in May, encouraged by Corinne, Jill Sommer launched her equally wonderful Musings from an overworked translator. In June, Abigail Dahlberg was the first to write a blog about environmental translations in her The Greener Word. In September, the Jenner translating twins from Vegas and Vienna inaugurated their very popular Translation Times. Finally, in November, my all-time favorite translation blog, Kevin Lossner’s Translation Tribulations, was launched. And it was amid all that blogging frenzy that Fidus Interpres was launched, in March 2008.

At the time, blogging was not a new thing, but certainly not as widespread as today. When I abandoned an earlier attempt at blogging – in May 2007 I had started a monolingual blog using a free platform, which soon proved to be not enough for professional purposes, although it did bring me several new clients and a large translation contract with a publishing house – and settled for a trilingual blog using a more professional platform, I wanted to reach out to a larger global audience. Blogging about my daily life was not among my primary goals. I wanted to share technology and business tips, be useful to the younger generation of linguists and contribute to the development of the translating profession. I wanted to make a difference and, of course, make myself more visible in the industry.

Four years later, what have I gained from blogging beyond the obvious benefits about which I wrote last June when my blog reached its first million visitors? First, it was because of the visibility I gained through this blog that I was invited by the American Translators Association (ATA) to be their Portuguese Language Division’s Distinguished Speaker at ATA’s 2010 annual conference in Denver, where I gave two presentations on terminology. Second, it was because of this blog that a magazine in Brazil invited me – first in 2010, and then again a few months ago – to write articles on translation, thereby allowing me to influence the general public’s view of professional translation a little deeper. Third, in the last 4 years, a few journals have approached me to ask for permission to print articles I wrote for Fidus Interpres. Fourth, because of this blog I was interviewed by other print media in Brazil giving me additional opportunities to explain how I see my profession. And fifth, blogging here made me aware of a lot of interesting people in the translation industry from whom I have learned a lot. So, to sum up, blogging has not been a purely virtual experience for me, as it has opened a whole lot of other possibilities outside of the virtual world. I am extremely pleased with that.

Last weekend I was in a throwback mode and hit the blog’s Archives section (right column). It was nice revisiting 4 years’ worth of postings and choosing the ones that I had specially enjoyed writing and of which I most proud. But instead of writing about those posts or linking to them here, I decided to tag them under “top posts” so that they are now forever indexed as my all-time personal favorites. Click here to enter the time machine and check my favorite blog posts since March 20, 2008.