We’ve already given our dos and don’ts for clients who want to buy translation services, but what about those selling them? Yes, I’m talking about translators - the missing link in our business equation. Those who help us make it happen for each and every one of our clients.

Here is an early Christmas gift - just a few pointers for translators who are looking to increase their client base (and in the current economic climate, who isn’t?) by applying to agencies.

1. Your CV: Cast a critical eye over your CV. The same rules generally apply for translators as they do for anyone applying for work: anything over 2 pages is just too long. Two pages is ample to give an overview of your relevant experience, qualificiations and specialist subjects - you can keep a list of translation projects you’ve worked on separately, then it’s ready to provide should someone ask for it. Doesn’t belong in your CV!

2. Please please please send your rates with the CV. Even if you negotiate with clients for most projects - your rates may or may not be be the deciding factor in whether you will be approached for a particular project, but you’ll almost never be added to an agency’s internal database without them.

3. Only mother tongue language as target please. “Near-native” strikes me as a vague and somewhat worrying term, and most agencies worth their salt will not use a translator who works into any language that is not their mother tongue. Interpreting and other types of language work are a different matter, each situation may call for something different.

4. Email it. Most agencies won’t thank you for a printed copy these days, as then someone has to input the information into whatever database they use. Don’t even get me started on faxing.

5. Describe yourself. It doesn’t have to be long, and a traditional covering letter may not be appropriate if you are sending your CV speculatively, but do mention your language combinations either in the subject line, or the body of your message. A short description of the type of work you are most interested or experienced in will stick in the memory of whoever receives your message. Many companies also file emails for future use, so this will be a great help if they can search for the language or specialised subject they need at that time, and your message will be found easily.

6. Offer references. Better still, include a couple in your CV as standard, if you have space.

7. Test pieces. We know no-one likes to work for free, but this can be a very effective way to get particular ongoing or large projects from agencies, and also to pick up other additional work from them along the way. Most project managers feel more secure using a translator they know has been tested, even if not for the specific project they are working on. If you are willing to do a test piece of reasonable length (no more than 200-300 words) for free, you could get a lot more work from that company. Unfortunately there is no guarantee of this, just as there is no guarantee that the agency themselves will get the work.

Keep one thing in mind: Project Managers are busy, so the easier you make the processes of remembering you, contacting you and working with you during a project, the more they will want to use you.

Happy Hunting!

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This blog post is dedicated to all of the Céciles, Célines, Josés and Frédérics out there…

An easy way to make someone feel appreciated is to get their name right!  (I’m sorry, Petar, for writing “Peter” in my email last week…)  It does get a bit tricky when you are writing to Jesús or Agnès, however, as to really get their name right you need to stick in one of those funny accent marks…

The obvious way is to click the “insert symbol” function in Word or Outlook and look through all of the characters until you find the one you need, but this can sometimes take a while.  When I was at university, typing out too many French essays, I reassigned the functions of all the function keys on my laptop, so that when I hit “F2″, an “à” appeared, and “F3″ an “è”, etc.  (I don’t think it worked for F1 for some reason.)  I re-learnt to type with an extra row of keys and it really did speed up my essay-writing!

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The greatest - and I do mean greatest - quote by any non native in a second language has to be that belonging to US President, J. F. Kennedy. On June 26th 1963 he declared ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. Here comes the shocking part: he did not categorise himself as a jelly filled doughnut in saying those words, as the whole world, it seems, thinks he did.

In fact, according to the nuances of German, his translation of ‘I am a person of Berlin’ was perfect, as should any translation be. And that includes the punctuation, and brings me nicely to the topic of this entry: foreign quotation marks.

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Recently, we had a .ttx file that would not clean up. We tried the usual tricks, including putting the Excel source file in the same folder as the .ttx, and naming the source file exactly the same name as the .ttx file, but nothing seemed to work. The error message we kept getting was:

“Unable to locate original file. Please copy this original file into directory above and try again. File skipped!”

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I reckon subtitlers must be well in demand going on the amount of subtitled content we’ve been seeing on our screens of late.

Now, as a linguist and having spent many of my language-learning student years with my eyes glued to that bar at the bottom of the screen, I’m no stranger to subtitles. In fact, I am eternally grateful for the invention as, without them, not only would we be missing out on hours of Kung-Fu lips-moving-no-speaking hilarity, but I’d have been lost in the midst of countless French films, despite learning the language for most of my conscious life.

But what’s with all the subtitling of English speaking people that’s happening at the moment?

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Oh, sorry, that title is probably a shade misleading: PM refers, of course, to Project Manager, rather than Prime Minister. We all know what a Prime Minister does anyway, right? Not much…unlike a Project Manager.

My ears are often pricked when someone talks of their day-to-day toils, be that out of nosiness, out of insecurity - their job’s not better than mine, is it? - or simply out of narcissistic wanton to confirm that my job is the only job worth doing. (Which of course, boss, it is.) And so I find myself detailing a day in my life, for any one of you who is curious as to what I do between replying to your emails.

The day begins at nine, and with a heavy inbox.

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It has quietly come to light that any golfers competing on tours run by the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), must speak English.

The language vigilantes seem to be targeting 45 South Korean players, and the fact that eight of those women rank amongst the top 20 earners only serves to highlight the underliying cynicism of the crusade.

For those in question, failing an English Language test will result in an overly officious suspension from the tour. The reason? Well, these succesful Koreans are winning a large portion of the tournaments but are not reaping big-buck rewards for the media moguls behind the scenes, owing to their inability to give post match interviews. Tricky as it is to work out exactly how enlightnening such an interview would be, there seems to be a fairer way of doing things…

Interpreters, anyone?

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Language has come a long way from the pictographs of 5000 years ago (above), with the development of grammar an integral part. You wouldn’t think much of reading a piece of text littered with grammatical errors, as much as you wouldn’t were it soiled with spelling mistakes, right?

I read somewhere that, back at the turn of the last century, some Bolshevik print workers from St Petersburg refused to carry on with their jobs unless they were paid, not only for each letter they printed, but each punctuation mark, which seems fair…(note to self: do not let a translator hear that, we’ll have all manner of trade unionists on our backs: those printers arguably precipitated the first Russian Revolution!)

My point is that, paid for or not, grammar is as important as anything else, which is why translations should not be edited by anyone other than a trained linguist, despite what your intuitions may tell you.

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The ultimate answer is ‘it’s up to you,’ but here is a small gathering of words which may help to sway you one way or the other…

Think of this address on the back of your widget sales brochure, which has been translated into Hindi:

Widget Heaven
13 Wiggle Road
Bristol
W1D G3T
United Kingdom

Sure, the city and street should not be translated, but is the average provincial Indian postman really going to know what United Kingdom means? If you were posting something which had been translated into English would you know what यूनाइटेड किंगडम meant? (That’s an easy one, too, it means United Kingdom.)

You see the point.

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