Learning points...enjoyable and not so enjoyable!

Happy Valentine´s Day! Another lull in my work from the agency in NYC gives me the chance to muse about the unexpected aspects of translating professionally.

One of these, perhaps not very unexpected, is to me perhaps the single most enjoyable thing about working as a translator. I learn something new with every project. It is passionately exciting to see words that I have never seen! I LOVE my Real Academia Española dictionary for Spanish words, and my dear partner David splurged and gave me an on-line subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is like pure, exquisite, intense, dark chocolate to a linguist like me :).  I learn new WORDS with almost every project, but I also frequently learn new concepts, and am introduced to fields of human endeavor that are far removed from my daily life and acquire the tinge of fascination provided by the "exotic".

I took a rush job last week in the field of life sciences, where I usually don´t work at all. I do however hold the French Baccalaureate in Mathématiques et Sciences de la Nature, so I was not too daunted by the subject matter. It fit in nicely in a gap in my other ongoing project, a fraud investigation for a major department store chain in Mexico. The life sciences project was full of scientific acronyms in Spanish, and of course knowing the reversal of positioning for adjectives and nouns from one language to another, I was alert to the fact that ARN was RNA and VHC was HVC, and that RVS in English is SVR (sustained virologic response). Then I got to PCR...assuming it would be RCP or something in English. A quick Google search however, led me to conclude that the Spanish scientific language uses the common English acronym for this one, which is in fact the acronym for polymerase chain reaction.

Which leads me to another lesson that is brought home to me every time I translate: never take anything for granted! I am glad that I love research, because I have to do it for every single project! Whether it is an entirely new concept, an idea that resembles another with which I AM familiar, but is not exactly the same, or lack of correspondence between semantic fields from one language to another, it is never safe to make assumptions when translating. Sometimes, I find a word that has no corresponding lexical item in the target language, as I did a couple of weeks ago with a financial term: anticresis. With these obscure legal-financial terms that are in a register that most people don´t ever stumble upon in their daily life, I frequently find an equally obscure English cognate that is virtually identical. And although I think my vocabulary is extensive, as often as not, it is a word that I don´t remember ever seeing. This one, however, can only be translated into English, as far as I could determine after exhaustive research, by "Welsh mortgage". So quaint, fascinating and excellent! This means the owner of a property gives up the product of the property to his creditor.

So these are some of the happy lessons that delight the intellectual magpie in me, shiny things that I put away in my mental nest to later turn over like Gollum in his hoard, deriving an almost obscene pleasure from my new intellectual treasure. Thankfully the place where I keep these things is like a womb...expands to fit its contents...or like the inside of Oscar the Grouch´s house...much bigger than it seems from the outside.

I have had some not-so-pleasant lessons on the business front in the past weeks, as well! Both of them taught me that I am lacking in experience in assessing the potential for problems in an assignment. In the first, I was asked to proofread 12,000 words of contract material in 5 hours. As I looked back at the other proofreading jobs I have done, I realized that experience told me to expect to spend no less than 8 hours on this job--assuming the original translation had been done by a translator who was somewhat proficient. I accepted the assignment anyway, not seeing the potential for trouble there! About 75% of the way through, I realized I would never finish on time, and with still 2 hours to go before the deadline, emailed the project manager and informed her that if the job were to be completed to anyone´s satisfaction, some of the remainder should be handed over to another linguist. She asked me to just do my best, which I did. At the deadline, I told her I had not finished, and sent what I had done to her. She then added another hour to the PO and told me to gallop onward and complete the rest as best I could. Well, I knew I couldn´t do the job to my accustomed high quality standards, but after informing her of this and receiving instructions to go ahead anyway, I did so, KIND of completing the job about an hour and a half later. Knowing it probably still had some pretty glaring problems that could not be remedied by a quick read-through, I handed it over anyway, assuming that the need for perfection with the project must not be as high as I had imagined.   I forgot about it and moved on to other projects, but when I requested the final PO to send in my invoice, was informed that due to the client having found an error, I would not be paid in full. I was outraged to say the least, and responded with a blow-by-blow account of things from my end, including my request to have some of the job assigned to someone else, and my warning that I COULD NOT do justice to the usual quality requirements in such a short time. In the end, they told me that the client had had to take responsibility for the quality issues, due to the job having been submitted as an extreme rush. I could certainly attest to that, as the translation that I corrected, while it was all one document, had 3 clearly defined sections done by 3 linguists of highly varying ability! The first section was great, and sections 2 and 3...well, I don´t want to be uncharitable, but let´s just say, NOT SO MUCH!

Anyway....live and learn! That is the first and last time I will ever accept a proofreading job that expects me to get through more than 1,500 words per hour.

There is one more experience that I want to share, but my lull has just been broken by my first assignment in French! It´s a quick and dirty 1,700-word document due for tomorrow. I know I will have to research this twice as much as I would if it were in Spanish...I am just not as accustomed to working in French. But I do love la belle langue and I am sure to enjoy my research as much as I always do, even though I will be doing a lot more of it on this one!

I LOVE TRANSLATING! Back to work and hasta la vista. 

Legal eagle

Well here it is the end of January already.  I am in a lull with my work from TransPerfect, and it's a perfect time to catch up on administrative and marketing tasks.  I am very pleased that I have been kept busy to more than full capacity with the work from TPT over the past month.  My fears of not getting assignments from them after the holiday rush were quite unfounded.

I have been absolutely LOVING the work that I am getting, and it's all legal translation.  Contracts, bidding guidelines, court proceedings, divorce-related documentations, legal opinions, and financial contracts have constituted the majority of the work that I have been doing.

 I am also proofreading, and it didn't take me long to realize that this obviously means that some of the translators who work for them don't have the same level of skill that I have.  Sigh of satisfaction.  I wasn't sure I wanted to proofread, as I began doing so at a rate of payment that was about 25% of what I could earn translating. However I soon reasoned that the service I provide as a proofreader is almost more essential than the original translation, especially when the latter has been done by someone who is apparently not very skilled or experienced.  As a consequence, I put my price up to where it's worth it for me to be doing this work, and the company didn't bat an eyelash.  I continue to get as much work as I can handle and I am now charging twice the rate I began with.

I FEEL SO BLESSED to have this fantastic opportunity.  While I know my skill level is high, I still have a LOT to learn about the logistics of this business and the broader market, as well as about business skills generally.  It is clear that honing my marketing and presentation is key, and also that I can't do this unless I understand the market, my competition, and how to negotiate.

In all, it's a fantastic adventure, and it's new and fresh every day.  It's freakin' awesome, as my kids would say! And now it's time to run, as I have an interpretation assignment in half an hour.  I have taken up the interpreter's training where we left off in the fall after our instructor fell ill, and I will be fully certified and accredited by the end of February with that.  It has been really useful to me to do the training, not only because I have learned a lot about protocols and professionalism (and some things about the practical side of the task as well, in spite of the fact that I have been doing the job professionally for 4 years already), but in order to obtain translation-related credentials.  I am an accredited translator on the list now at Immigrant Services here in Guelph, and I have actually had a fair bit of work from them in the past month.  When I started this business 6 months ago, I hoped that I would achieve this kind of success, and now I can really see it happening.  I am SO happy and excited about it all!  Onward and Upward!!!!!

Happy New Year!

What a difference a month can make!  My last post was un lamento borricano...not really but a lament still.  In spite of my frustration at my last writing, I came away from the experience of creating another blog post feeling better than when I started.  As I underwent a process of self-questioning as to the effectiveness of the activities I have been engaged in as I nurture my little translation business into being, I came to some important realizations on the concrete front, and gave myself a helpful pep talk on the more intangible side of things.  When I wrote that last post, I had the sense of a buzzing, as of bees, just beyond the reach of my flowers...the work I have been putting into my translation business, it seemed to me, HAD created results, even though as yet they had not resulted in any income.  Well, by the middle of December I received word that I had passed the legal translation test for a large translation agency based in New York City, and on December 19th I started receiving a steady stream of translating and proofreading work from them.  Yay!!  I have been SOOOO happy, excited and thrilled to be finally WORKING!!  In the meantime, I had continued to work on proofreading and editing the very poor translations that were up on the website belonging to the Embassy of Guatemala in Canada, a pro bono project that I took on after going to their website out of curiosity and finding it strewn with egregious translation errors.

It was interesting to say the least to have a sudden flurry of work coincide with the preparations for our Christmas celebrations.  I have been hoping most fervently that I will continue to get steady work from the agency when the holidays are over.  It has occurred to me that it is possible that many of their regular translators are on holiday, and that may account for some of the volume of work I have received. Nevertheless being the QC FANATIC that I am, I am pretty sure that they will be happy with the work I have been doing.  I agonized over every word of that legal test, and they came back saying that I had only TWO small errors on the test:  one of repetition (I repeated "by and between" at the beginning of the mock contract), and the omission of one word in one of the articles.  Within a day of my returning administrative paperwork to them, they had called to discuss rates and CAT tools.  I was QUITE disappointed to realize that they were planning to offer me 5 cents per word less than I had stated to them was my minimum rate.  However I am at the "beggars can't be choosers" stage of my career at this point, as much as I feel I won't be here for long.  In the end, I can still make damned good money at around 40% of the optimal rate I would LIKE to be receiving for my work.  This is in fact heartening, because I expect to be working at 100% of my desired rate within 6 months to one year.

I have hired Marta Stelmaszak of Websites for Translators and the Want Words blog to help me with my marketing strategies.  While I am convinced that there is still plenty for me to learn on the technical and professional side of this business, the marketing part of it is where I feel I need immediate help.  I DAILY bless the miracle of the Internet, with its fantastical ability to cause barriers of time and space to evanesce.  I am super excited about going through the 8 modules that Marta has prepared for me.  So far, these have consisted of a very thorough recounting of my own abilities, training, education, experience, and on-line presence.

David is here beside me as I write my blog post, and he has just shared a tidbit with me from one of his Google Plus contacts:  Productivity tip:  Tim O'Reilly took this from Clay Johnson's book, The Information Diet:  #1 Productivity Tip: Spend 10% of your time consuming and 90% of your time producing. Make more stuff. Watch less. Read less. Do.  (Source: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fd5DAQ4bY3p)


This seems extremely relevant to MY last blog post.  I lamented my own distractibility and tendency to go down virtual rabbit holes on the web...I wasn't quite clear on why a part of me was telling me that I was wasting too much time, but I was very clear on that feeling!!  This productivity tip certainly speaks to that feeling.  Producing should be much more prevalent than consuming, when it comes to being productive!  Simple, obvious, but apparently, something that many of us struggle with.

Either way, I am loving this exciting process.  It is much like the creativity of child-rearing...in some sense it feels to me like almost as great a privilege.  I am so lucky to have had my life experiences and the fabulous education that I have had.  Now, I am blessed to have the impetus, confidence, and support from my family, to forge into the grand adventure of running my own business.  I am absolutely empassioned by the daily learning that I must engage in to move forward in my enterprise. I have the strong sense of being incredibly blessed to be able to do this!  Woohoo.  Onward and Upward!!