Earlier this month I went to a conference on legal translation in Lisbon, held at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. I hadn’t been to a Tradulinguas conference before, and knew nothing about the company, so admit to being a little apprehensive about taking a leap into the relative unknown. What swayed me was that it offered a great opportunity to spend a few days brushing up on my Portuguese in Lisbon, as well as a chance to meet up with other translators specialising in law, including several I knew already.

The conference’s focus was very much international, with sessions delivered in English, Portuguese or French. The speakers were not afraid to be controversial and stimulate debate about legal translation at the coalface, including the background, skills, depth of knowledge, research methodology and/or qualifications a translator specialising in this area ’should’ have. A key theme was the role of comparative law, since countries’ legal systems are rarely directly comparable, even if they follow the same legal tradition and use the same language.

I was both surprised and impressed at the strength of opinion expressed in the sessions. It was great to see so many attendees speak up, giving the sessions a lovely interactive feel. But I do wish that the sessions had kept more to a traditional ‘answers at the end’ format, as some speakers weren’t able to finish their presentations due to the sheer number of questions from the audience while they were in full flow.

Highlights of the conference for me were:

- Ingemar Strandvick’s and Professor Klaus-Dieter Borchardt’s opening sessions on multilingual law-making and legal translation in the European Union and Community Law. Professor Borchardt’s publication ‘The ABC of European Union law’ is available from the Publications Office of the European Union.

- Dr Pommer’s session on comparative law and its quest for a legal ‘meta language’ to facilitate international cooperation and harmonisation: is law a global discourse?  Comparability vs. translatability: does translation always have to mean equivalence?

- Ana Soares’s presentation (in Portuguese) on the Portuguese legal system compared with the legal system of England and Wales.

- Juliette Scott’s session on DIY corpora in legal translation – her ‘NIFTY’ approach.

- Véronique Sauron’s session on online resources for legal translators, and mostly importantly how to use them quickly and effectively, identifying reliable sources.

- Filipe Carrera’s interactive session on networking and what it really means. Filipe is clearly a highly experienced speaker and his session got the message across without being cheesy.

Oh, and the weather was fabulous! More information on the conference, including speaker bios and abstracts can be found here: http://www.tradulinguas.com/conf-juridica/

Image courtesy of World Travel Guide 2010ikoniхудожник на икониИкони на светци

ITI’s 25th anniversary conference was held in Birmingham on 7-8 May, and the theme was ’Expanding our horizons’.

On a personal level, a great thing about the event was the huge Twitter buzz surrounding the event. This hadn’t happened on quite the same scale before, and it was particularly nice to see after my social media presentation with Sarah Dillon at the 2009 ITI conference. The hashtag #iticonf was being used throughout the weekend, and the Twitter feed was displayed in the conference foyer all weekend. There was even a tweetup on Saturday afternoon (which to my embarrassment I managed to miss, as I was engrossed in another conversation!).

You can see a twitter feed captured by @valivonica here.

I think that one of the main highlights for many people was a chance to hear Chris Durban give her ‘mystery shopper’ talk, a very interesting experiment where she posed as a client who required a translation. After a sending her request to a number of language service providers (translation companies in this instance), her conclusion was that ‘It’s hard being the client’. With such a wide range of quality and pricing, who can they rely on, if not the language service providers? And that includes the freelance translators providing the translation via the companies.

Like many of the other speakers, the overall message was to always strive for quality, and with this in mind Chris repeated her call to translators to sign their translations. Fly-by-night operations are playing on a different field to those of us who are in this business for the long haul, and whose reputations are at stake. We have more to lose.

Interestingly, Nicolas Ostler, the keynote speaker, pointed to a possible emergence of a two-tier industry: information-only (possibly processed using machine translation) vs. top-end, very high quality writing.

On the Saturday I chaired Janet Fraser and Michael Gold’s session on their 2010 recession survey. Their findings were extremely revealing – they found a rather large gap in the 40-50 age bracket. Meanwhile, many respondents were under 34, and lots were over 55. This is fascinating because to me, 40-50 is a key age bracket. It is usually the stage in a career where you at the top of your game and are leading the way for others. What does this mean for the translation industry?

Respondents’ perceptions of themselves as entrepreneurs differed wildly according to age bracket, too, which I would have expected. Most of those under 34 saw themselves as ‘natural’ entrepreneurs – i.e. that they hadn’t necessarily set out to be business people but were happy to be business people. In the discussion that followed, we explored reasons for this, including how the dramatic change in the cost of going to university in the UK since 1999 might influence how people approach their careers. It will be interesting to see how the under 34s’ responses change as they age and progress through their careers.

Jonathan Downie’s talk ‘Oan the telly’ was another highlight for me, and he retold his 15 minutes of fame in a highly entertaining talk. But there was a wider message to be learned from his experience: when someone asks you about what you do for a living, find a way to condense that down into a punchy message that would fit onto a t-shirt. I’m calling this Jonathan’s personal rebranding of the ‘elevator pitch’.

I don’t know if anyone else felt this way, but the overall tone of the conference felt a bit like regrouping and taking another look at how our industry presents itself. Should we re-align our approach to professionalism? When we talk about the vague term ‘quality’, what do we really mean? Do we have the confidence to promote ourselves more ‘actively’ to the outside world, including putting our name to our work?

As always, the conference was a chance to meet old and new faces, learn new things, and confirm and challenge existing knowledge. I came away with plenty of food for thought.икони

Over the past 6 months or so I’ve experimented with the Swordfish II Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) program; this post is a brief walkthrough of its main features.

Flexibility: The main attraction of Swordfish for me was that it’s cross-platform, so I can use it on a Windows PC and on a Mac (or on the Linux operating system). This degree of flexibility is hard to come by on the CAT tools market, and in my opinion is Swordfish’s main selling point. The only slight snag is that, although you can use the same licence across more than one computer, you have to disable and enable it each time (unlike with open source cross-platform programs such as OmegaT, for example). This is fine in principle, but you need to be good at remembering to disable the licence on your desktop PC before venturing out to work within Swordfish on your laptop!

File formats: Swordfish can handle an impressive range of different file formats very competently, including Trados .ttx files. It works by converting these file formats to ‘XLIFF’ format (an open standard) before opening the file within the Swordfish editing environment. The documents are converted back to their original format once you’ve completed the translation and are ready to proofread the final version. This also means I can convert a PowerPoint file, for example, to XLIFF in Swordfish, start working on it in Swordfish and come back to it later within another program that supports the XLIFF format (e.g. MemoQ). This adds an additional layer of flexibility and interoperability.

Layout: The interface is clean and extremely easy to find your way around, even if you don’t have time to read the (short) user manual back-to-back before starting to use it. Like in other programs, the Translation Memory database and terminology database results are displayed in a right-hand column as you type. A click on a term (or keyboard shortcut) will simply add it to your translation. You also have the option to have several TM and terminology databases open at the same time.

Terminology search integration: One of the features I like most about Swordfish, and which I haven’t seen offered to the same extent by any other CAT tool, is its integration of search tools such as Linguee, IATE and Termium Plus, which you can search while translating (provided you’re connected to the internet) without having to open a separate browser. This feature is fully customisable for the language combinations you work with, and is so useful that I tend to have Swordfish open just for this even if I’m using another CAT tool for a particular job. Like some other programs, Google Translate is also integrated, should you want to search its corpora during your first draft.

Downsides: Swordfish can be slow in moving between segments compared with other programs of its capabilities. The QA function is up there with the best programs of its kind but again tends to run slower than I’d like. The ‘concordance’ function can take far too long to load if your Translation Memory databases are sizeable. Also, the ‘create database’ function doesn’t differentiate between a Translation Memory database and a terminology database, so you need to ensure you give meaningful names to your databases (e.g. _TM/Term) in order to find them again.

Verdict: The PC version of Swordfish could certainly run a lot faster than it does, but the program does offer a very great deal for its relatively small price tag, and I think it has the edge on cross-platform interoperability. Its integration of the main online terminology search tools makes it feel like a ‘translator’s translation tool’. The support offered is also extremely responsive, in my experience.

Swordfish is can be downloaded as a 30-day free trial. See www.maxprograms.com for more screenshots and details.ови услуги

Céline Graciet’s post over at her blog, Naked Translations, got me thinking about my own experience of applying to be a Qualified Member (MITI) of the ITI, which fortunately was not as bewildering as Céline’s experience sounds.

By the time I applied for MITI membership, I’d already been a member of ITI for some time, having first joined as a student member while studying for my MA in Translation and Linguistics in 2003. This gradual transition through the membership grades may well have made the procedures more familiar to me than it would to someone perhaps coming straight in as an MITI. When I began working as an in-house translator a year later I then ‘upgraded’ to Associate membership. Anyone with a proven ‘professional interest in translation or interpreting’* and who can provide two references can apply to be an Associate member.

This means that the main difference between Associate members and Qualified Members is that Associates have not been ‘officially’ assessed or examined by ITI; Associates are also not listed on ITI’s directory. However, they are very much part of ITI and enjoy many of the same benefits as MITIs (at a fraction of the membership subscription that MITIs pay).

When the time was right to apply to for MITI membership, I opted for the exam route, which is quite different to the assessment route (I think the cost is more or less the same). The ITI admissions officer was helpful and clear in her instructions, but I have to say I thought there were some areas for improvement in the exam itself. For example, my text was way out of my subject areas, despite specifically stating these in advance on the application form. I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on the text if offered it as a real-life job. Needless to say, it was one of the most challenging translations I’ve ever worked on (and rightly so), a real test of my linguistic research and translation skills. I enjoyed the creative challenge, but it would perhaps have been more of a test of my ability to translate in my specialist fields if I had been examined in one of the subject areas I actually translate in.

I took the exam in the comfort of my home office over a weekend. I received the text on the Friday evening and had to deliver it back to the ITI office the following Monday. It was a relief to be able to do the exam at home, on computer, rather than in an exam hall on paper. This also replicated my normal translation environment. I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge that the ITI exam is sat in this way; it was certainly one of the attractions for me. I felt the results could go either way right up until I received them, but I’m happy to say I did pass. Similar to Céline, to get any feedback at all (i.e. more than ‘yes’ or ‘no’) I would have had to pay around £50-60. Even though I passed, I’m sure the feedback would still have been informative. I think the exam does have a fairly low pass rate, something around 20-30%, much like the CIOL DipTrans, but I don’t think that should put people off if they feel ready and enjoy a challenge. The bar for professional recognition should of course be set high, while remaining achievable.

What attaining MITI status meant for me was that I was able to feel a lot more confident about hitting the ground running in my new freelance career. I have felt a lot more sure-footed about my work ever since. Because I haven’t ever really been freelance while an Associate member (I went freelance shortly before my exam results), it’s hard for me to compare the benefits of Associate vs. MITI in terms of the amount of work I get, but I *have* got some excellent clients simply through my ITI directory listing. Besides being able to meet and share ideas with other translators and attend discounted training events and conferences, the main benefit for me is confidence in my work. Having that external validation is like having a seal of approval, especially if you’re starting out as a freelancer like I was.

I hope this post helps give a rough idea of what it’s like to take the exam route to be a Qualified Member of ITI, and I also hope many more people will decide to do it. For others’ sake, I also hope Céline’s blog post will be used by ITI as constructive feedback so that the overall application procedure will be made as transparent as it possibly can in future, for example automatically including feedback in a revised application fee. However, even as an Associate the benefits of being an ITI member are numerous, so if MITI is not something on your business plan for 2011, I’d certainly argue that Associate membership is worth looking at.

*Wording from ITI’s website

Last Saturday I attended the CIOL Centenary Members’ Day in London. This was my first CIOL Members’ Day, despite having been a member for about 7 years. There were lots of great speakers, but the two talks that attracted me most were Professor David Crystal HonFCIL on ‘Languages: Past, Present and Future’ and Michael Benis FCIL on ‘Translators or Consultant Linguists?’

I’ve heard Michael touch on this idea of ‘consultant linguists’ before (and FWIW I think it’s something we should all be considering), but in this blog post I want to focus on an observation Michael made during his presentation: we have a talent leakage in the UK translation and interpreting industry.

As a profession we seem to lose a higher than average number of talented, hardworking people, at a time when translation needs are sharply increasing. It’s true that fewer people are studying languages at school and university right now, but I’d be surprised if the impact of this was already so apparent.

Why? Does it matter? Do we have an image problem? If so, how do we change it? We want the best talents to seriously consider a long-term career in our industry, don’t we? How can we stop them leaving, assuming we think there’s a good reason to get them to stay?

The first leakages might occur at undergraduate or postgraduate university level, or later on, after a stint as a project manager. Project manager frequently choose not to move into translation itself. What is clear is that they are finding their skills are better rewarded (financially or otherwise) in other/related industries.

One reason could be that there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and it often starts at school. Language students often decide to aim for a career outside the profession because a message filters through that studying language(s) is a ‘useful asset’, rather than something to base a career on. As Helen Campbell FCIL from the EC’s DG for Interpretation said in her talk (‘Training Translators and Interpreters in the Next Ten Years’) last Saturday, the very real shortage of high-calibre English mother tongue translators says otherwise. Even at university level the myth still circulates that there’s no real ‘career’ (or decent income) to be had in translation, so students start to think of a broader career portfolio.

But what about those who do make it as far as the beginnings of a career in translation? We accept that not everyone who starts out in translation and interpreting will want to stay forever and ever, but I think there’s a definite pattern emerging. In this talk, Michael suggested that these professionals feel that their talents and skills are not rewarded in the industry, and that there’s no clear career progression. Or perhaps they think the industry is not forward-looking or modernising enough to accommodate them? So they look to related professions, where they find exactly the same skills they used as translation professionals are much more highly regarded and remunerated.

How can we reverse this? We have 2 major professional associations in the UK, and they do their bit, right? If we take the example of the few client <-> linguist events that do exist, these are rather one-way, usually with a panel of translation companies at the front of a room taking questions from the floor (the budding/established freelance translators). We need to press for more visibility and a more active role for translators, not passiveness and invisibility (hence Michael’s use of ‘consultant linguist’), and this means being better communicators as a professional group and getting ourselves out there. Why don’t more translators and interpreters attend industry trade fairs, for example, to show the outside world what we’re made of?

I dare to suggest that perhaps there’s also too much inward-looking negativity out there in our industry. We often complain about how difficult it is to succeed as a freelance translator, how standards are falling, how so many translation companies pay unacceptable rates, how we’re the little guys against the big corporations. This victim mentality is not helpful, in my opinion, and it’s seriously off-putting to new entrants to the profession. We don’t want to deny that to make a living as a professional translator or interpreter requires a lot of hard work and dedication, but what career worth having doesn’t require a bit of hard graft?

It’s still only July and like many of you, by this stage of the year the extent of my forward planning goes about as far as fantasising about my much-needed summer holiday next week. Life post-holiday is quite low down on my priority list right now, but there have been a couple of events which have caught my eye recently. I’m pleased to report that I’ve managed to muster the energy to reach for my pen to mark them in my diary now, as I’m sure the dates will have crept up before we know it:

The first, on 25th September, is the Chartered Institute of Linguists Members’ Day in Bloomsbury, London. The programme consists of a series of seminars with titles including ‘Translators or Consultant Linguists?’ and ‘Training Translators and Interpreters in the Next Ten Years’, and will finish off with a lecture by my favourite linguist, Professor David Crystal OBE HonFCIL.

The second is a webinar entitled ‘Specialising in legal translation’ by Ricardo Martinez of City University, a good one for those of us who specialise in legal translation. The webinar itself is run by eCPD Webinars. After ITI’s first webinar yesterday morning, in collaboration with eCPD Webinars, it seems that this training format is something translators and interpreters want to see more of, and I hope it will continue to grow.

The third is Portsmouth University’s 10th annual translation conference; this time entitled ‘Translating Multimodalities’. I attended this conference for the first time last year, after intending to go for years, and was not disappointed. As a translator ‘at the coal face’ I rarely get a chance to discuss the slightly more theoretical aspects of translation or explore other areas of work with languages, and this conference allows me to do that without offering up too many abstract theories.  Take a look for yourself here: http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/academic/slas/conferences/translationconference/

Inverness castle. Image courtesy of http://www.sys-tec.ch/

Last Friday I set off for weekend far, far away from home up in Inverness with other foodie translators. This was my first event since becoming Food & Drink Network Coordinator, and I was really looking forward to meeting other members of the network, and to catching up with Scotnet members, who never fail to put on a good bash.

The event certainly lived up to expectations. On the programme were Karen Stokes (founder and first ever coordinator of the ITI Food & Drink Network), Lulu Norman and Norma Tait, all true experts in this field and each with fascinating real-life examples. Karen ran a practical session addressing and finding solutions to the challenges of working with menus and culture-specific dishes (‘Cullen Skink’, anyone?), while Lulu gave a fascinating insight into her co-translation of a Lebanese cookery book from French into English, and Norma, an expert in the field of whisky, rounded off the day with the brilliantly-named talk ‘My experience – distilled’.

Here are my main takeaways from the day:

• Remember you are selling a product, and think about who you are selling it to – is it the chef or the diner? How tasty a dish sounds is very important, and advanced creative skills are often called for. Take ‘gizzards’, for example. Yum, huh? There is a constant balance to be found between the ‘acceptability’ factor and losing the poetry of the original writing.
• Consumers, particularly higher-end consumers, are usually pretty attuned to foreign words, which can be kept in the translation. Think ‘coulis’ and ‘béarnaise’. Karen’s advice was that if they sell it in Sainsbury’s under a foreign name, that’s a good yardstick. Indeed, sometimes using another European language, particularly French, can act as a ‘bridge’.
• The words we use to describe food can changes between generations. Take ‘muffins’ for example, which I would now tend to use to describe a small, cupcake-like cake rather than a breakfast muffin or ‘English muffin‘ (which I would probably call a ‘breakfast muffin’). Think about who the end user of the document will be and be guided by that.
• Remember that in recipe measurements you may be catering for two ‘Englishes’. Always check with the customer if they’d like conversions, and whether any measurements might even need to be adjusted to suit the type of products available in different countries. Lebanese flour is not necessarily the same as the flour we get in the UK, and other countries may have different techniques for ingredients as common place as garlic, for example. Did you know that in France they tend to remove the green core of a garlic clove before using it?
• Recipe styles can differ between countries. Recipes in the UK have a very discursive and descriptive style, preferring adjectives such as ‘chopped’ or ‘diced’, while many French recipes adopt a fairly technical style.Go for an hourly, rather than a per-word rate, if you can: food being such a clear indicator of cultural difference, translating in this field can be a real labour of love. But don’t let that mean you are short changing yourself!
• As always, some terms just cannot be translated into one word in another culture and the simplest approach is to explain the concept, particularly in an interpreting situation. Norma gave the excellent example of ‘mash tun’. The Portuguese term she once heard used to describe the ‘mash’ (mistura) doesn’t quite capture it, does it?

Portsmouth Spinnaker Tower, courtesy of virtualtourist.com

Last month I spent a Saturday down in Portsmouth at the university’s Ninth Translation Conference, entitled ‘The Translator as Writer’. It’s incredible that I’ve never made it to the event before now, as I’ve always noticed the high calibre of speakers every year (a combination of practitioners and academics), and I’m pleased to say that having finally made it this year, the event lived up to my expectations.

It seemed to me that the event had a very similar theme to other translation conferences I’ve attended in the past 12 months: the translator beginning to take a more strategic and proactive role in the text (aka the product) production process and to bring other skills they offer to table in their role as intermediaries between cultures and as professional writers.

Here are some of my takeaways from the event:

Jody Byrne’s plenary lecture on technical translation:

* The traditional distinctions between the work of translators and writers are rapidly fading

* Technical translators have traditionally not been viewed as needing or possessing excellent writing skills in the same way as translators of more ‘creative’ types of text have been, but this is changing

* Customer expectations of technical translators are changing: technical expertise is often needed as well, with the translator assuming a greater role in the overall usability of a document.

Practical workshop by Fiona Harris on localising and editing press releases for the EU:

* EU press releases translated into English often need to be extensively edited and localised to ensure they are relevant to the everyday life of the people in the target country

* In the case of the UK, the press releases need to appeal to a British audience. For example, they are often adapted for a Eurosceptic press, in order to get the best coverage.

Luc van Doorslaer’s lecture on translation and journalism:

* Globalisation tends to emerase /emquestions of translation in the news media

* Fast communication needs do not pay attention to translation and will rather tend to make it invisible.

* Through this reduction in multilingual diversity, the world is often falsely conceived as being monolingual.

* National image-building in the media: do the media express or create cultural proximity? Reconstruction of a constructed reality?

Neil Bartlett’s inspirational keynote address on ‘Inspiration’:

* How can a translator facilitate the ‘breathing’ of a sentence?

Denise Merkle’s lecture on translating and expert writing in translator training:

* There are misconceptions among some translation students about what translation actually involves

* Many translation students have poor reading and writing skills, and tend to read less in general (I am still not convinced of this myself – is this measurable?)

* How do we define quality?:  a lot of LSPs focus mainly on their quality procedures in their promotional material. For example many make a lot of their Quality Assurance (QA) procedures and turnaround times, competitive rates etc., rather than selling the quality of the writing they are offering.

On the last point, I have since wondered how much of this was a sign of the times, where businesses in just about every line of work seem to be placing great emphasis on procedural aspects such as safety and reliability, sometimes over and above their actual product offering. I’m curious about why this might be. Do we live in such a complaint-fearing world that we feel we must set out these types of parameters to armour us against any risk of grievance? Are we not confident enough to place a bigger emphasis on selling the quality of the product we are offering, and to be able to defend it?

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!

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