I’ve written a replica of that case study for my blog:

Job title:

Freelance Translator

Languages:

French, Spanish and Portuguese (into English)

Company/location:

My cosy home office in London!

Background:

I translate from French, Spanish and Portuguese into English (my mother tongue). I started off by doing a BA in French and Spanish at Cardiff University, then went on to do an MA in Translation and Linguistics (Spanish and Portuguese) at Westminster University in London.

After my studies I managed to get a job as an in-house translator, and this gave me the opportunity to really hone my language skills. However, after a few years I decided that freelancing was for me and so I launched a new career beyond cubicle life.

A typical day for me:

I’ll usually be at my desk quite early in the morning, since my commute only involves a short walk to my desk! I often start my day in the same way as most other people, by checking my emails. There may be urgent requests from clients that I need to respond to. I will also typically do some reading of industry-specific newsletters and foreign press or listen to podcasts in my source languages. When I start working on a translation project, I will need to consult with the client for any background references and will need to carry out my own research into the subject matter and terminology. The finished product will then need to be thoroughly edited and proofread before delivery to the client.

Working from home, I get to manage my own workload, but I generally try to work a standard 8 hour day, although I sometimes need to work evenings and weekends to complete urgent or large jobs.

What’s the best thing about your job?

Without a doubt, being my own boss!

So you want to be a professional translator?

You’ll need excellent writing skills in your mother tongue and of course fluency in the languages you translate from. You’ll also need to acquire sound knowledge of one or two specialist fields, for example medicine, law, IT, engineering or physics. I work mainly in the fields of law and marketing, so I need to maintain my knowledge in these areas through ongoing training.

You’ll also need to bear in mind that if you’re freelance, you’re effectively running your own mini-business, so take some time to check out what that entails.

*Psst! If you’re tempted by translation but would like to have a taster before committing, I notice that London Metropolitan University are hosting a Taster Day for Linguists as Mediators, through the UK National Network for Translation.

Attendees of the event who are new to my blog may be interested in reading a little more about how I got into translation, as just one example of how a freelance translator begins their career. Well, if you’re wondering, read on…

For me, translating freelance was something I’d aimed for since starting my MA in Translation and Linguistics at Westminster University over six years ago. Completing the course 9 months later, I realised that freelancing lark would require planning, careful consideration and funds (not to mention paying off various bills and loans). So, quite early on I started looking for in-house translation jobs in London, eventually accepting a job as a full-time in-house translator in the public sector. My plan was to stay in this job for about a year, save up and then launch my freelance translation business.

I remember that I was fairly overly confident about my abilities as a translator at that stage, despite not having much real-world experience of it. Embarrassing to think about it now! A year passed quickly and I realised that I still had a long way to go before I felt ready to go it alone, both in terms of my translation skills and my ability to run a business. I still felt that I was much more suited to freelancing than to cubicle life in a rather uninspiring air-conditioned office, but the value of what I was learning was too great to just ditch it so quickly. I decided to set myself a target of at least 3 years in the job, and then to go for it freelance.

So, apart from translating diligently, squirrelling away my pennies, making my escape plan and daydreaming about a fantasy life as a freelance translator, what else was I doing during those years? Well, because I was serious about becoming freelance, and felt that if I put my mind to it and got support from the right people I could really make a go of it, I spent a lot of my evenings online researching how others were doing it, what sort of hardware/software/ancillary skills I might need for my business etc. Like many translators, I did regular voluntary translations in my spare time in order to hone my translation skills. I joined several ITI groups, and started reading the e-group threads after work. I attended steadily more ITI and CIOL events (networking is a long-term activity so I thought it best to get started on that ASAP), and I started a blog. I had been reading other translation blogs, and realised that I was gaining so much from reading about the experiences of other translators that I wanted to contribute something of my own. This led to more networking and becoming part of a dialogue with other translators in order to share our experiences.

Eventually, I felt the time was right to finally go freelance. If anything, though, I felt even more terrified at the prospect of freelancing at that point than I did when I graduated years before, when I was blissfully ignorant about what it involved! But I was still determined to do it, and resolute that in-house translation was not for me at that point in my life. I needed something to make me take the plunge, but I also needed a security blanket. So, I hatched another plan. I started attending a TESOL course for 3 hours each evening after work to qualify to teach English as a foreign language – a sort of back-up plan just in case freelancing didn’t work out, or if it took a lot longer than expected to get going. I also sat the ITI exam to become a qualified member (MITI).

Happily, I passed both the TESOL course and the ITI exam and no longer had any excuses to put off going freelance. The next thing I needed was the ITI’s Professional Support Group course, as after years in the public sector I was still seriously lacking any business skills. So, one week after leaving my in-house job for good I started the PSG course and was at my new desk in my home office. I got a short-term part-time teaching job in central London to help pay the bills, and also some locum teaching and private tuition in Business English. By October 2008 (6 months after going freelance), I was finding it too difficult to fit all this in with what was by then a full-time translation workload and felt secure enough to stop the teaching altogether.

I think it’s fair to say that each freelance translator will have taken a slightly different route, and the length of time it takes to get to the point where you’re earning a decent full-time income with regular, valued customers will vary considerably (depending on your language combinations, experience, marketing material, and often just sheer good luck). However, hearing how other people did it and how long it took them is one of the best ways of getting a realistic picture of what to aim for. I started my career in-house, and I’m not suggesting that’s what everyone ’should’ do. However, I do think that however you do it, careful planning is one of the best routes to a successful, sustainable freelance career. Running your own business is very fulfilling but can be scary, and so ultimately, the crucial qualities are determination and the ability to be brave when it’s needed!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) deals with optimising websites for people who use search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. If you’re wondering what this has to do with translation, read on…

What is SEO?

SEO is centred around the ‘natural’ (or ‘organic’) search listings shown in a search engine results page. This is distinct from ’sponsored’ results (coloured red below) also seen on a search results page.

Sponsored results can be paid for by companies that want their website to appear when someone performs a search for a particular word or phrase. However, natural search results are determined by proprietary algorithms, and companies cannot pay to appear in the listings for these search results.

SEO can help websites to improve their positions in the natural results for certain search phrases (or ‘keywords’), which can significantly increase the number of visitors coming to a website.

So why is this important to translators?

As members of the translation industry know better than most, translating from one language to another is not simply about copying a text word for word into another language. As content on the internet grows, the need for quality translation services naturally grows with it.

As with any other discipline, writing for the web requires certain skills that may not be immediately obvious. Firstly, usability is an issue – usability guru Jakob Nielsen sums it up perfectly under the heading How users read on the web:

They don’t

Although this study was undertaken 12 years ago now, the fundamental principles hold true; you can’t write content for the internet in the same way as you do for paper. On the web, reading habits are vastly different, and this must affect the way we write or translate.

Secondly, findability is a consideration; if nobody can find your translated content on the internet, why was it translated? This is where even a basic knowledge of SEO can come in handy. Beyond the technical aspects of a website, SEO also deals with linguistic aspects of a website’s content.

One of the first processes SEOs undertake when optimising a website is keyword research, which analyses the language people use when searching for a particular product or service. By focusing the language used on a website to what people are actually searching for, the website’s content becomes more likely to appear in the natural search results and attract visitors.

As a starter for ten, a couple of free online tools that translators may find useful when translating online texts can be found with Google Insights and Google Trends.

Google Insights for Search

Both of these tools offer international data on searcher behaviour over the last 5 years. Data can be narrowed down to country and city level, and may be useful when researching terminology usage. For example the image above shows that more people are using the phrase “mpv” than “people carrier”, although the gap between the two phrases has narrowed since 2004.

Further reading

There is a huge number of free resources available on the net if you’re interested in learning more about SEO. Unfortunately the quality of information found on a the majority of blogs and forums is at best poor at often misleading if not wrong.

However, the links below are some of the best places to start:

• Official Google SEO Starter Guide – a useful reference to the basics, available in 40 languages.
• Google Webmaster Central blog – a must-read blog for anyone running a website.
• Search Engine Land – leading search engine news website.
• Matt Cutts’ Blog – Google’s head of Webspam blogs about a number of issues that affect webmasters.
• SEOBook – leading SEO blog; highly recommend buying the book for a detailed guide for anyone learning about SEO.

What have been your experiences of SEO? How much do you know about the inner workings of Google? For more discussion on SEO, check out Rob’s blog at robbiehammond.com. Feel free to leave any SEO-related questions in the comments below and Rob will answer them.

In case you hadn’t guessed from the name, Rob is my other half

12 September, ITI London Regional Group Marketing Workshop, University of Westminster, London.

This is an all-day event with talks and workshops on a variety of marketing-related subjects, including:

- marketing yourself as a freelance translator or interpreter

- website dos and don’ts

- a practical workshop on how to write good promotional copy

- assertiveness and negotiation skills.

Speakers include Heidi Kerschl MITI, Keren Lerner of Top Left Design, Eamonn O’Rourke (freelance copywriter) and little ol’ me, MITI. I’ll be tackling assertiveness and negotiation skills, for example dealing with stressful client relationships, setting boundaries and finding a happy place between being a doormat and a prima donna.

This is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how to market and promote yourself as a freelance professional, network with with colleagues and make new contacts.

17 October, Novotel, London City South, ‘Starting out as a Translator & Specialised Translation’.

In the morning session, I’ll be giving a presentation especially aimed at newcomers to the profession, although it will also be of interest to established translators. I’ll also be following this up with a CIOL webinar later in the year.

The afternoon session will be devoted to “Specialised Translation”, a subject of ever increasing importance to translators. Ricardo Martínez Perales, a sworn translator, will talk about legal translation and Noemí Rey, a long established technical translator, will give a presentation about the mechanical engineering field.

And don’t forget the ITI Annual Translation Workshop at the University of Westminster, London, on 18 October! For more information, follow @ITIEducation on Twitter.

Image courtesy of http://www.backup2go.com.au/dataloss.php

Céline over at Naked Translations wrote a post yesterday about back-up systems for freelancers, and invited others to share how they guard their businesses against data loss. Céline, if you’re reading, this post is my answer!

I actually have what some might call a fairly paranoid approach to how I back-up my work, and have a few solutions. It took me a long time (too long) to fully realise just how important it is to make sure important documents can be recovered in the event of computer failure/other business disaster. I’ve never experienced the anguish of losing a humongous translation hours before a deadline, but last week I did experience major data loss. I think we can all identify with how it feels at that moment you realise something important has just gone ‘poof!’ and disappeared into thin air.

My first solution, similar to Céline’s Dropbox solution, is to use online syncing. I use Sugarsync. Essentially, as I’m typing, each document is then automatically backed-up on their servers, meaning I can access all my updated files from any computer that is connected to the internet (whether it’s a PC or a Mac). I can do this remotely via my profile on the Sugarsync website or via the downloadable Sugarsync file manager. Sugarsync also offers a number of advanced features, including an intriguingly named ‘magic briefcase’ and a secure ftp location for sending large files. For anyone worried about data security and backing-up in ‘the cloud’, files are encrypted with 128-bit AES – can you say that about email?

I love Sugarsync, but it’s certainly not my only solution. I also use a more traditional back-up and storage tool called ZenVault that stores my important files at a remote location. The data loss I experienced last week illustrated exactly why I use back-up as well as syncing: as soon as I managed to lose the crucial files on one computer, that change was automatically synced across all my computers, so there was no chance of recovery. However, instead I was able to go into my ZenVault terminal and recover the documents from previous back-ups. So, I have a way of taking a static snapshot of all my documents and past documents, as well as a way of making the latest versions of my documents available across all my computers.

Another key back-up for me is having alternative computers to work on in case my main PC fails. I also use the über-traditional method of backing up to an external hard-drive on my desk, which is the preferred option for most freelancers. At this year’s ITI conference, there was a lot of chatter about using ‘the cloud’ to store data, but people seemed to assume that storing it in offline was automatically more secure. What would you do if your home was burgled or burned down and your one and only back-up solution was inside? Is that really any more of a secure solution than using an encrypted online back-up service to store important files at a remote location?

The possibilities really are endless for the paranoid, and my view is that these contingencies are not likely to happen at the same time. However, it’s really does pay to be too careful when you’re freelance (i.e. without IT support on hand).  Essentially, the only (almost) fail-safe solution is to have more than one contingency planning solution.

To learn more about online back-up and syncing, have a read of this article.  Warning – the review is rather long, but if you can scan it and pick up the salient points it’s a good starting place for contingency planning. The key message is not to rely on just one solution.

The response to our presentation has been really positive, with many people wanting to learn more or see the slides again, so we decided to take our little 2 person roadshow online for the big wide world to see. We are now pleased to unveil a stripped down, re-recorded version of our presentation available at Slideshare.net. You can view the show within this post (below) or by following this link to Slideshare if you have problems hearing or viewing the embed.

The event was particularly useful for translators working on creative texts, such as marketing copy, but most of the tips provided can be universally applied to other specialist fields.

Here are my take-aways from the event:

Top tips:

• Remember that as a translator you’re also a professional writer
• Trust your instincts
• Imagine yourself as an actor, giving the text a voice
• If you’re struggling, look at each paragraph in turn and break them down to establish what each is talking about
• Careful of ‘translationease‘ such as the phrase ‘in terms of’ – look for ways to re-word this
• When editing, remember to keep the text snappy by pruning superfluous words (particularly applies to Latinate languages)
• Always take a break before the final read-through of your translation
• Try printing out the text in a different font for your proofread, to create distance and objectivity
• Try reading your translation aloud, paying attention to rhythm
• Invest in a style guide
  
• Four eyes are better than two!

Book recommendations:

• Stephen King ‘On Writing’
• William Zinsser ‘On Writing Well’
• Jack Lynch ‘Online Usage and Style Guide’
• The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market (Perfect Paperback)

One thing that particularly struck me during the group activity was that as translators we have a reputation for getting obsessive and overzealous about what we perceive to be mistakes in a text, but which may simply be a newer term, or a term used by a particular industry. The way I see it, our role is to be linguists observing language and how it changes, not prescriptive grammatarians. Each industry tends to have its own dialect, and sometimes our role is also about speaking our clients’ language.

Happy writing!

First up was ‘EU Terminology and other EU Reference Material‘, jointly organised by the ITI office and Fiona Harris from the DGT. I attended this course yesterday afternoon at the European Commission Representation office near St. James’s Park.  On the agenda were presentations by Professor Margaret Rogers of Surrey University, a well known terminology expert, and Timothy Cooper, senior terminlogist at the DGT, and chair of the committee that oversees IATE. We discussed topics such as the importance of maintaining a terminology database, even if it means investing a little time in maintaining it. Professor Rogers argued that not only is it important to maintain a well organised terminology database, but that each entry should ideally also contain ‘metadata’ (e.g. definitions, context, register etc.) in order to be truly useful for a translator.

Most of the attendees were already very familiar with IATE, so Timothy Cooper focused on introducing some of its finer points, such as its quite powerful search and star functions. He also gave a brief history of IATE and how it was developed, in addition to the DGT’s famous style guide, and the ‘Fight the Fog’ style guide, which many attendees hadn’t seen before.

I’m now on my way, as I write, to the ITI Scotnet’s ‘Style Matters’ workshop in Perth. This event offers an opportunity for creative exploration and exchanging ideas with some of the best names in the business. It always surprises me how much I can learn just by working with colleagues on a translation – there’s not always a ‘right’ answer in translation, after all. The tutors are Chris Durban and Ros Schwartz, so we’re guaranteed a first class workshop. Next week I’m attending City University’s ‘Commercial and Corporate Law’ course, to hone my legal translation skills and general knowledge of this area of law. I think I can safely say I’ll have covered quite a few CPD bases by the time the month is out! I’ll write a couple of short posts about these events too.

If you’re a translator on LinkedIn and/or Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that a bit of a firestorm broke out earlier this week after LinkedIn put out a survey to professional translators with profiles on its site asking whether they’d be prepared to help translate their website into other languages for free (with a token amount of PIE – not the edible kind – thrown in). Within minutes, the Twittersphere was ablaze with fury and a group called ‘Translators against crowdsourcing by commercial companies’ was rapidly set up within LinkedIn itself, where members vented their increasingly angry thoughts about the very suggestion that LinkedIn would crowdsource free translation of its site from among its members. A couple of translators have already written very well-argued blog posts about it here and here.

This mini-drama has made it clearer than ever that as a professional community we are concerned about having an image problem, about being taken for a ride, about being the ‘little man’ against big business. I couldn’t agree more that offering our translation services for free is really only appropriate for a client with a very good cause but minimal budget – the latter is certainly not the case with LinkedIn – but perhaps we should now turn our considerable collective energy to showing The Big Wide World just why they would get  a better service from a professional translator paid a professional fee. It’s not enough to complain and say “pah, you obviously don’t know how great we are as professionals”, we must *demonstrate* this somehow. A professional service really is worth its weight in gold, so let’s focus on the positives and on all the great things we *can* do for the money we charge. We really showed what we can do when we unite as a professional community this week – let’s put that to good use.

After a delightful evening meal at the library of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (the main conference venue), we reconvened early the next morning for another day of presentations, chat and lots of coffee. I felt that there was a perceptible shift on the second day towards the more practical, day-to-day aspects of translation and interpreting, with the emphasis on technology, work-life balance and professional development.

The day started with yours truly – co-presenting with Sarah Dillon. We’d done a lot (and I mean A LOT – see Sarah’s write-up) of preparation and research for our presentation, and it was both terrifying and exhilarating to finally be able to share it with our professional community in this way. We basically offered a whistlestop tour of the concepts behind social media and web 2.0, the type of online tools available, and how language professionals might best use them. Sarah did a demo of some novel uses of LinkedIn and Tweetdeck which appeared to be new to many delegates.

We had a small technological hitch along the way, with our remote presentation tool throwing a wobbly halfway through. Although it had worked fine in our tests, we had foreseen this happening, so managed to remain calm and carry on thanks to  our backup plan (a PowerPoint file containing screenshots). However, I think that our key messages still came through – that these tools are not scary or difficult to use, that they allow YOU to be in control of how much information you receive, that not every one of these tools will be right for you, and that’s OK, but that the online world is changing – big time. It’s almost a case of ‘find a manageable way to keep up, or get left behind’. I think these messages were fairly well received, and Sarah and I have been really, really excited to see more ITI members venturing onto Twitter, for example.

Watch this space for more news on our presentation, as we already have plans to make a recorded version of our presentation available at Slideshare and perhaps even to publish our research, thoughts and findings as an ebook via  Lulu. The ITI Conference website will also be uploading copies of every presentation early next week – go to  www.iticonference.org.uk.

Our session was followed by a panel discussion entitled ‘Where to draw the line?’ with Nick Rosenthal, Iwan Davies, Patricia Sommer and Paul Appleyard.  A few questions had already been sent to the panel in advance, focusing on the usual suspects such as how to chase late payment. We were reminded that it is important to operate a rigorous policy when dealing with late payments – don’t take any prisoners, and operate a zero tolerance policy, but remember to remain professional and courteous in all dealings with clients.

Next up was Dr. Steve Vincent from Leeds University Business School, on the subject of work-life balance for knowledge workers. Steve challenged the phrase ‘work-life balance’, suggesting that it was more an issue of ‘work-life conflict’ – this is a description that I also personally feel is more appropriate. Siobhan Soraghan, a business coach, ran the next session, again on work-life balance. Siobhan has personal experience of ‘burn-out’, and proposed that we check in with ourselves and our working/non-work habits and rationally analyse them.  We are all busy people, we all wonder how we’ll get everything done with just 24 hours in the day, so Siobhan suggested that in order to avoid burnout, in our daily tasks we should prioritise our endless lists of things we ‘need’ to do, by asking ourselves which of them are both important and urgent. The most important asset in each of our businesses is our health, and this needs investment through ’self-sustainability’ activities. To read more about Siobhan’s work, visit: http://www.active-insight.com

A truly original and inspirational presentation came next, by Phil Goddard on ‘Finding a work-life balance crossing America’. Some readers may already know about Phil’s 3000 mile walk across the USA for charity, but for those who don’t I urge you to visit http://anenglishmaninneworleans.blogspot.com and  www.nytola.com. Impressively, Phil found that he was still able to work on translation jobs while he was away, and often found himself delivering jobs from his laptop at random hours of the day or in unusual places – this really showed us just how ‘mobile’ it is possible to be these days if you really want to be.

Reinhard Schaler, founding editor of the Journal of Specialist Translation (JosTrans), and founder and director of the  Localisation Research Centre at the University of Limerick, presented a session entitled ‘Where is translation technology going?’. Reinhard started by stating a problem: there is more material out there online than translators can translate. Some examples: 40% of Facebook users are not using English, but Facebook’s mission statement is to make their product available in ALL languages. Their way of tackling this has been to crowdsource volunteer translators from within their existing user base – collaborative translation where users can comment on and update translations in order achieve a final version. This is a controversial practice among translators, and rightly so in some cases, but I am minded to agree that it is the most effective method for a product such as Facebook – after all, none of the language used on it is highly complex, and wouldn’t its users be best placed to understand the terms in context? The fact of allowing users to update other entries, Wikipedia style, would also go some way to resolving translation errors and stumbling blocks.

I attended the translation technology parallel session run by Ana Luiz Iaria. Ana is well known to be very knowledgeable on this subject, and took us through a run-down of productivity tools, back-up, tag verifiers etc. Look out for Ana’s presentation on the ITI Conference website to see the links to the tools she introduced us to.

And so the conference drew to a close, and there were a lot of tired but happy faces in the audience. To finish up, we discussed ways that the ITI is supporting the profession, with training courses and several new initiatives in the pipeline for the coming 12 months. Despite the feeling of tiredness I could sense we were all experiencing, I could also feel the unmistakable sense of renewed enthusiasm, new ideas and new contacts we so often come away with from conferences. At their best, conferences and any indeed any gathering of freelance professionals remind us why we’re in this profession, and help spur us on to develop ourselves and our businesses. I can safely say that this was one such event.

At the conference I attended last November, I decided to ‘live tweet’ from the event. But this time somehow the mood just didn’t take me, and I also knew that a few other delegates, particularly @nickrosenthal and @serenadorey would be tweeting updates, so I knew it would be well covered. Not to mention the fact that I was cripplingly nervous about my Sunday morning appearance as a speaker, so was rather distracted by that! So, I stuck to good old-fashioned paper notes this time, and here are my thoughts:

The conference had 3 key themes: ’sustaining the profession’, ’sustaining the professional’ and ‘moving with the times’; each  session being built into these. The Saturday morning began with the keynote speaker, Katerina Germanis from the FSC, describing the FSC’s work, and also giving a brief insight into its translation needs. This set the tone for the weekend very well. It seemed clear to me that the FSC are currently rethinking their translation ’strategy’ and assessing how best to proceed, so there may be some interesting developments there.

Next up was Helen Wolfson, international coordinator at Friends of the Earth, who gave a great overview of some of the work they do. Helen (clearly a very experienced and talented speaker) explained that FOE work with 3 official languages, and all their material needs to be available in each of these, meaning that their translation needs are huge. I was so impressed with the presentation, I decided to join FOE!

One of the most eye-opening sessions for me came up next: ‘Where have the translators gone?’, by Klaus Ahrend, Fiona Harris and Terry Clough of the DG Translation. I wrote a blog post a while ago about this, when the problem of sourcing talented into-English translators first arose in the mainstream British media, but I really had no idea that the problem had got so serious so quickly. About 1/3 of their staff translators are due to retire in the coming years. Some figures for you:

• In 2000, they worked with 10 language pairs and had 185 translators
• In 2004, they worked with 19 language pairs and had 222 translators
• In 2008, they worked with 22 language pairs and had 156 translators
• Their order volume has gone from €1.2m in 2005, to €3.8m in 2008.

As you can see, the general trend is fewer and fewer suppliers, against increasing (and wider) demand.  A particular problem is finding high standard English translators for the languages of the newer EU members. This is something Fiona Harris is seeking to address, namely by starting a MAJOR awareness-raising campaign (even using Youtube videos!).

According to Marcel Lemmens of Teamwork Vertaalworkshops, a similar situation is unfolding with the Dutch language. He explained there is a mismatch in the market in terms of Dutch>English translators. There is a major shortage, and only 2 universities in the UK offer translation courses where students are able to have Dutch as their source language. Marcel also emphasized one of the key take-home messages of the conference – that target language writing skills are the single most important skill in translation.

I really, really relished the next sessions – a series of presentations from recent MA in Translation students from assorted universities across the UK. They gave us a brief overview of their dissertations, which varied from translation gains in the international reporting of Chinese leaders’ speeches, to issues surrounding working as a sign language interpreter. You can read about some of the graduates in interviews on Sarah Dillon’s blog.

The conference then moved back towards an environmental theme, with a presentation by Cat Akana of Blue Planet Multicultural, a translation company specialising in the environment. I think our eyes were opened to just what a dire situation we’re in, in terms of the environmental challenges that lie ahead, and we were reminded of the need to take action now, before it’s too late. In fact, as Cat pointed out, climate change is happening NOW, and peak oil may already have happened, meaning that the ‘future’ we still assume to be far off may already arrived. Some of us may have noticed translating more and more environment-themed texts, and this is likely to continue to increase.

We were then treated to a fascinating presentation by Silvia Ferrero, owner of MediaLoc, on the games localisation industry. I’m not very familiar with this type of translation, but learned alot about what is involved, including a high degree of creativity and sometimes rewriting in order to achieve the best final result.

As we moved towards wrapping up the 1st day, we discussed contingency planning with a panel of experts. Questions from the floor included (paraphrased) ‘how safe is the internet?’, ’should I use online word processing tools?’ and ‘how often should I back-up my work?’. We were shown techniques in supporting mobility and flexibilty through folder and software syncing, how to boot from Linux in the event of a system failure, and how to link your main PC to others in your office. The main message from this session was that we should never just rely on ONE solution, contingency planning means preparing for several eventualities.

The final session was by Liz Robertson, Chair of the Association of Translation Companies, entitled ‘Sustainable relationships in a recession’. I really enjoyed Liz’s presentation, and particularly appreciated how well she set the tone for the 2nd day (and for our presentation). Her key points were that translators and translation companies are usually seen as 2 separate groups, that there was a lack of mutual recognition. Instead we should be focusing more on working in cooperation, since we already share a common goal. Her take-home points were: 1) know your client, 2) understand yourself and 3) ask for feedback, and welcome it when it comes.