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?

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

Here are my take-aways from the event:

Top tips:

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

Book recommendations:

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

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

Happy writing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a little progress report on the targets I set myself:

• Desk stretches: thanks to @bonnjill, a translator I had the good fortune to meet via Twitter and the blogosphere, I have discovered Workpace. This neat little (fairly unobtrusive) program that reminds you to take regular breaks from your desk and prescribes a series of exercises you can do (best thing about working from home: only the cat can see me do these .  I usually obey Workpace and now take regular 5 minute breaks every hour or so. Gold star! Thanks Jill!
• Sitting position: well, not much of an improvement. My tendency to sit cross-legged at my desk has been my default setting for so long that it may take a lot of time and persuasion to change that…but still, at least I’m actually moving about more now (see above).
• Getting daylight: hmm, another one I need to work on. Work has been very busy lately and sometimes there literally isn’t time to get out while it’s light, but I do try to at least get out into my garden (especially to water the herbs and rocket leaves I optimistically bought a few weekends ago)
• Water: all good in this department I think. Gold star.
• Lunch: plenty of tasty food eaten, yum. Away from the desk? Not so much…that’s the problem of having too many interesting blogs to read   Today, even though I ate my food at my desk, I did manage to get to the gym beforehand, so that must count for something. Half a gold star.
• Working late: hmm, a difficult one for a freelancer. My hours are not set in stone, so sometimes I will work later because it suits me. It’s hard to judge exactly how long my hours are each week, in that sense. A lot of time is still spent on the PC, but if I’m going to use a computer in the evenings or weekends, I’ve begun to make serious efforts to limit this and to use my laptop in a different room in order to offer some time away from the four walls of my office.
• Holidays: this has been the funnest target of all! I’m off to Portugal next week for a bit of R&R, and I’ve also booked my other half and I into a guest house for a night away from the city for our wedding anniversary shortly afterwards, and I’m currently compiling reams of bookmarks for places to go in the summer*.  I’m resolute that none of these holidays will involve me working, as we remember how that went last year. Two gold stars!

One of the first things cubicle-bound people normally ask me about freelancing is whether I find it hard to resist the temptations of daytime TV. After I ask them whether they’ve actually seen what’s on offer on daytime TV these days, I tell them that actually the biggest problem for me is resisting the temptations of my office, crazy as it sounds. I actually NEED programs like Workpace to be told to get up from my desk every now and then. So, I was relieved to read today that I’m not the only person who has this problem, Paul Boag wrote an inspiring guest post today on Ramblings of a Remote Worker called The Reality of Home Working.

I thought that Paul’s helpful hints about a homeworker’s workspace were spot on, especially about the importance of having a separate space to work in, if possible. I have a separate room in our flat where I can work with a nice big desk (upgraded recently – very good move) and proper office chair.

Sarah Dillon also wrote two great posts about this very recently on her blog, in which she asked readers to share pictures and descriptions of their home offices. Fascinating to be able to peek at other people’s offices! Everyone really does have a working style that suits their particular lifestyle and needs.

My next target is to try to put the ‘free’ back in my freelance lifestyle and being to work on a slightly more mobile basis. After a recent crisis with my wireless internet connection I decided to purchase a mobile broadband dongle so that I can do this more. I also decided that, even though I have quite enough space, that didn’t mean I needed to clutter it up with paper and machines. For example, I have a web-based fax service for that reason, rather than for reasons of not being tied to my office. In in all, although there are many ways for me to work away from my fixed desk now without it necessarily affecting how I work, like Sarah I still find that that working from a fixed home office for the majority of the time suits me best right now.

* On a separate note: In the interests of frugality (buzz word of the year already), our holidays this year will mainly be camping ones. Sites like Cool Camping show that you don’t need to spend a lot of £ to go on holiday in comfort and style.

There are of course things I’d like to look at and improve on in the 2nd year.  Surprisingly, most of the things I’d like to work on revolve around allowing myself adequate time away from the computer to relax and recuperate. I’ve learned, on reflection, that although mobility and flexibilty are a freelancer’s best friends, working whilst on holiday is not necessarily a great idea for your sense of sanity.

I think most of us fail at taking time out of our daily routine to focus on our own wellbeing, rather than just the wellbeing of our business. This is a serious and potentially costly misjudgement. YOU are your business’s greatest asset, and to neglect that asset could damage your business.  Without sufficient breaks, holidays and mental (i.e. doing something different to your primary skill) and physical exercise, you are not giving yourself the regular M.O.T. you need to keep running your YOU-BUSINESS efficiently.

I should practice what I preach. I’ve been guilty of allowing myself to sit in front of the computer for ours on end without taking a break or stretching, and sometimes days go by without leaving the house. It’s great that I can be so enthralled in my work that it doesn’t even occur to me to move myself away from it, but I usually find that if this goes on for too long I find myself feeling a little less well-adjusted than ‘normal’ (not to mention that my weight has been ballooning out of control, and my eyesight has deteriorated rapidly).

So, to kickstart my new approach, I plan to implement the following into my ME-BUSINESS:

• Do 5-10 minute stretches at my desk every 60-90 minutes
• Check my sitting position at my desk every so often (I’m guilty of sitting cross legged at my desk)
• Get out of the house at least once a day – get some daylight!
• Do some form of exercise for at least 30 minutes everyday – even if this is just walking around the block
• Drink plenty of water
• Eat a proper lunch, and eat it away from the desk at least twice a week
• Try not to work too late into the evening, and plan something completely different (i.e. not computer bound) after work
• Allow for at least 22 days’ holiday a year (I’m ashamed to say that last year fell woefully short of this)

Shouldn’t be too hard to achieve, right? I’ll keep you posted.

To kickstart your own healthy new YOU-BUSINESS,  take a look at the excellent tips in this article on Freelance Switch.