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

Before switching, of course, all of my main programs and files were housed on my PC, where I worked most of the time. So I knew that finding a way to get all of those onto an entirely different computer AND operating system would probably not be quick and easy.

Not only that, but a small but highly significant proportion of my main programs were Windows-only programs, such as MemoQ and my bilingual digital dictionaries (although one of the CAT tools I use, Swordfish II, is cross platform).

My solution to this was Parallels 6, which enables you to run your Windows OS within your Mac OS as a ‘virtual machine’ without having to reboot into Windows. My Windows programs would run right alongside my Mac applications – simple.

I used Parallels Desktop 6 ‘Switch to Mac edition’, which comes with a high-speed USB transfer cable which you connect from your old PC to your new Mac, quite literally transferring the Windows OS, files and programs across.

Sound too good to be true? It did take a long time, and I had a couple of hiccups along the way (not associated with Parallels itself), but overall the process was surprisingly simple if you follow instructions carefully.

Philippa’s tips:

• Remember to back-up your files before doing anything!

• Allow plenty of time for the switch. Preferably over a weekend, rather than during the week when you’re likely to have deadlines looming.  The process is not overly complex but that doesn’t mean you can do it in your lunch hour.

• Turn off any overzealous anti-virus programs if you find there is something preventing the transfer from starting. It took a lot of fiddling around before I realised that TrendMicro had created a firewall that blocked the transfer.

• File synchronising software: Careful! I should have known to temporarily disable SugarSync altogether because, doing its job, it started to create two copies of everything on both computers. I felt safer temporarily upgrading my account while the transfer was taking place and sorting it out later. Better that than interrupting and risking data loss.

• Ensure your Mac has plenty of RAM. Mine has 8 GB. Ensure you grant the Windows ‘virtual machine’ more than 1 GB of this, otherwise it will run extreeeemely slowly.

• Fine-tune your virtual machine settings within Parallels according to your needs – e.g. choose which operating system will run faster, and configure back-up behaviour if you use Time Machine (which can get very confused if it thinks it needs to back-up two ‘different’ machines!).

• To make life easier as you’re switching, use as many cross platform tools as you can. For example, LastPass + Xmarks premium to help you keep track of all your website passwords on your old and your new computer, while Evernote, Firefox and Thunderbird helped make the day-to-day transition seamless for me. Once the machine was up and running by Monday, I just got on with work.

• You can certainly run your Office suite in your virtual machine, but it’s probably simpler in the long run just to buy Microsoft Office for Mac, as you may not want to have your Windows virtual machine open all the time. I have found the Office for Mac 2011 edition easy to use and fully compatible with Windows versions of Office. The only programs I still run in Windows are now MemoQ and my dictionaries. The rest are in Mac.

• Use ‘coherence’ mode in Parallels (usually only possible if your machine has enough RAM). Parallels has video tutorials to explain the difference between the different ‘modes’ available for running your two operating systems side by side, but I’ve found ‘coherence’ the most streamlined way of working. I’m barely aware that I’m running two different operating systems.

Does anyone have any more tips they can add?икониПравославни иконииконописikoniсвети георги

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

Image courtesy of All Systems Go Computer Consulting

Last month I realised that my 3-year old desktop computer needed a serious upgrade; although it had 4 GB of RAM multitasking was becoming gradually slower and the processor was not quite up to scratch. Not only that, my PC was enormous, taking up about one third of my desk. It was also very loud. Working alongside something that sounded like an aircraft taking off was distracting.

I had the option to upgrade some of the PC’s parts, but once I started to tot up the costs, I realised (with a little help and persuasion from fellow translators on Twitter!) that it was time to buy a wholly new desktop. Many of the PC’s parts were already over 5 years’ old, as it has been built and rebuilt over the years.

I did quite a bit of research about which new computer would suit me best. But you may be surprised to hear that switching to a Mac desktop and OS wasn’t initially in my sights.

My main priorities were:

1)   8 GB of RAM, for faster multitasking

2)   Small form factor, ideally an all-in-one, to avoid continuing a situation where my desk is dominated by my computer

3)   Peace and quiet!

4)   Reliability

I soon realised that if you want a powerful computer, you may have to compromise on size and noise. I looked at all-in-ones but after reading reams of reviews it seemed that they weren’t necessarily the best option for business users, usually being less powerful. Most also seemed to be pre-loaded with Windows 7 ‘Home Premium’ rather than Windows 7 Professional, which suggested to me that they weren’t really designed for the sort of intensive use business users tend to inflict on their computers. There’s obviously an additional risk with all-in-ones too, since it’s likely to be more difficult to remove and replace the computer’s parts. However, what the reviews did tell me was that if you ‘re set on an all-in-one, the Apple iMac still stands out miles from the competition.

After deliberating over a couple more alternatives and not finding anything else that could combine performance + size + quietness so well, the iMac was the only computer through to the final round. I went for a 21.5” iMac (I use 2 screens) with an Intel Core i5 processor, a 1 TB Serial ATA Drive and 8 GB (2x 4 GB) of RAM. I customised the computer on the Apple website; it was pricey, but the final cost was not wildly different to that of a PC with the same specs, based on my online searches.

I have no plans to become an Apple cheerleader; I have no burning preference for Apple hardware and software and (perhaps unlike some other Mac users) in my opinion there’s nothing inherently wrong with PCs or Microsoft Windows. I don’t have an iPhone and these days my business laptop is a great little Lenovo ThinkPad.

But I have to admit that my new iMac has most definitely been a change for the better. I now have a high-performing computer that is virtually silent and has allowed me to reclaim a large section of my desk. This is a revelation in itself, aside from the benefits the computer itself offers. I have a small office and surface space is at a premium – this is now much less of a problem. This is important to me. With Parallels, I also have a way to continue using my Windows programs (such as my preferred CAT tool) – more on this in my next blog post, which will give some tips for making the transition as smooth as possible if it’s something you’re considering.икони на светциКартиниИдея за подаръкикони

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

Let me share with you three quotes I’ve read in the last week about customer service:

‘Making customer service key to your organisation will keep your employees motivated and your customers happy.’

‘A successful business must never lose its focus on its customers and its standards.’

‘Rather than viewing customer service as a cost centre, it is more helpful to see it as a means of keeping your customers coming back for more, and also of bringing in new business.’

These are all wise pieces of advice for any business, and they all come from one source: Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, a company which enjoys a good reputation for customer service. Sadly, my own recent experience of one of the Virgin Group companies fell a long way short of this (several thousand air miles), but that’s another story. However, that experience and these quotes have made me more aware than ever that how you treat your customers will leave a lasting impression.

So while it’s true that a bad customer service experience will tend to linger in the memory longer than a good one, it’s also true that an outstanding customer service experience will also leave a lasting impression a customer will want to tell all their friends about. For example, in November I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of some first-class customer service from none other than Majestic Wine.

My husband and I have shopped at our local Majestic Wines a few times, but generally buy our wines from supermarkets and small retailers. Our interest in wine has grown recently, after a visit to vineyards in Sonoma County, California in October and, wanting to prolong the holiday mood, we decided to book a free wine tasting at Majestic Wine one Friday evening when we got back to the UK. Because we’d seen the ‘free’ in the title, we assumed this would be a 15-minute affair involving 3 sips of wine, a strong sales pitch and an overt expectation to buy. How wrong we were. The event lasted about 2 hours, was led by friendly, enthusiastic staff who genuinely knew their stuff and went out of their way to make the evening fun and educational. We received no less than 10 or 12 generous tastings, a selection of good quality food for a food-and-wine pairing exercise, and were at no point rushed or made to feel that the hosts were tired and wanted to get home (which they surely did – it was a particularly cold, wet Friday evening). When the event came to an end, the hosts appeared more than happy to keep the store open for a little longer to continue chatting to attendees, and to allow them another taste of wines they particularly enjoyed. As I say, there was no expectation to buy, but we were so impressed that we asked if we could buy a couple of bottles, forgetting the 6 wine minimum purchase policy. Despite this, they happily waived the policy on this occasion.

The lessons I have drawn from this, albeit as a provider of a service rather than a commodity (an important distinction), is that if you make it an easy and pleasant experience for your buyers to buy from you, they will probably be back. We certainly will. Moreover, if you convey enthusiasm for what you do, customers respond better. The wine tasting event will have been a considerable outlay for Majestic in cost terms, but the marketing investment will undoubtedly pay off. In the space of 2 hours we went from occasional customers of Majestic to brand evangelists, an accomplishment which I believe is more powerful than any other marketing tactic.

Oh, and if an ‘ouch’ customer service experience does happen, a measly £20 voucher when the customer has spent upwards of £600 (on, say, a long haul flight) does not say ‘I’m truly sorry, we’d like you to remain a customer’. There are ways to recover from an ‘ouch’ experience, and that’s not one of them. Just so you know.

Image courtesy of Wired magazine

The Institute of Translation and Interpreting will hold its General Meeting this Saturday (13 November). I urge all ITI members to attend if they can, or to vote by proxy if they haven’t already done so*. There are a number of important motions to be voted on, and I’m sure it will be a lively meeting. In my view, what many of these motions reflect is the need for greater professionalism and transparency in ITI as a membership organisation, which is a good thing. I want to be part of a professional body which represents real-life practising translators and interpreters, and which is represented by real-life practising translators and interpreters.

I intend to speak up at the meeting, but in advance of that I’d like to share some things I would like to see ITI introduce:

a) Greater transparency. The primary aim of this would be for ITI’s members, whose subscriptions sustain it, to have better knowledge of how their membership fees are being used.

b) Ensuring ITI’s leadership is similarly transparent, and that Council and Chairman are a visible team who members feel they can approach and who can be relied upon to represent their interests. Since the Chairman and Council represent members’ interests (without whom, of course, there would be no ITI at all), it is essential that they are able to interact freely with other ITI members as part of a two-way dialogue.

c)  Following on b), I’d like to see a permanently-available (perhaps on the website), clear  description of network coordinator, committee member, committee chairman, Council member and ITI Chairman roles. It doesn’t have to be lengthy, but should at least tell members what the roles involve, and how much time they would typically require. This would help members to decide whether to volunteer for them in future.

d) In order to ensure that these voluntary roles are performed by the best possible people for the job, drawing on the wide-ranging skills of ITI’s membership, I’d like to see a slightly more formal application process for roles, in addition to incentivising them (financially) where appropriate. This could involve advertising vacancies, for which a standard ITI application template could be distributed. This would seek to emulate the procedures used by other professional bodies, and I hope that with the new Equality and Diversity Committee in place, a new and transparent process will eventually emerge.

The ‘incentivising’ bit I sneakily slipped into my final point is a perhaps an audacious and controversial wish, but there is so much talent within ITI and I think it is currently underused and underrepresented. What proportion of that talent is unable to find a way to contribute because they are put off by the amount of uncompensated time they might have to give up? It’s not just that the roles (primarily that of Chairman) appear so cumbersome to members that’s the problem – I can’t imagine many freelance translators or interpreters earning a decent crust falling over themselves to sacrifice a large chunk of that income to act as Chairman, a vital and hugely time-consuming role, on a voluntary basis (or in return for ‘token’ money). I don’t think it’s money-obsessed to say this, it’s simply a practical observation based on the reality of the situation. I believe that practising translators can and should be able to be accommodated in order to sit on committees, on Council, and as Chairman alongside their normal work commitments. We should not rely on academic members and retired members to fill these roles. If proper financial compensation is what it takes to draw from a broad spectrum of the wisest people in the industry in this role, I believe that dismissing this idea altogether would be a serious misjudgement.

The topic of the role played by professional associations in their professional communities is so broad and open-ended that a single blog post will never begin to cover it. There is so much more to say, and I look forward to the discussions on Saturday! But for now my closing thoughts are these: what we as 21^st Century translation and interpreting professionals need is a professional association that accurately represents us, supports us in our careers, and projects a positive image of our profession. If we really want to promote and strengthen translation and interpreting as professions then we must walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk.

* 11 November (tomorrow) is the deadline for receipt by the ITI office of proxy forms.

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/