In my last post, I gave some tips on “How to Be a Good Translator”. Good translators (editors, web designers, accountants, insert profession of your choice) tend to be even better when they’re working with good clients. The tips listed below (from my website article How to Be a Good Client) were written with translation …
Category archives: Quality
How to be good (1). Tips for translators
I got a pleasant surprise a couple of weeks ago when I logged on to Twitter and found that several translators had been tweeting and retweeting the link to the “How to Be a Good Translator” page on my website. If you haven’t seen them, here are the tips from that page — I hope …
Fees: to publish or not to publish? (1)
After much humming and hawing, I’ve finally taken the plunge and published my fees on my website. I know that many translators and other small-business owners prefer not to do so. Some say that as they provide a service, not a product, their fees are not — should not be? — easily quantifiable. Others feel …
Smart quote-marks for smart translating
I wrote on 21 July about quote-marks — how to decide whether you should be using curly (smart) or straight quotes and, once you’ve decided, how to type them using keyboard shortcuts where necessary. Translators, however, need to decide not just which quote marks to use but whether or not to “translate” them. For example, …
Want to look trustworthy? Write it right.
Word geeks like translators and editors are always wittering on about poor translations or badly written web material being bad for business, because they make a company look sloppy or unreliable. Well, I saw this belief in action during our recent trip to Lisbon. We needed to hire a car, and I asked my 16-year-old daughter, …
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The language, or the message… Why not both?
I’ve just read an opinion piece on transcreation by Steve Puttock of Schawk, Inc. in the PopSop brand magazine. The article begins: The global marketplace is providing businesses with fantastic opportunities but also, inevitably, moving into new markets can cause headaches! One area for particular concern is around the creation of international advertising and marketing campaigns. For the …
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The king’s speech — and how to translate it
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve had a speech-flavoured working week. Translating a speech is a good opportunity for translators to provide added value for their clients. Not only should our translated text read fluently and naturally, it should also be easy for non-native-speaking clients to read aloud (and for their audience to …
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The king’s speech (not to mention the queen and the presidents’)
It’s been quite a month for historic speeches in the UK and Ireland, with the speeches by Queen Elizabeth, President McAleese and President Obama during the Queen’s State Visit to Ireland and President Obama’s to Ireland and the UK. And it’s been the year of The King’s Speech (the film, that is), featuring Lionel Logue …
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Take our poll: should new clients test your skills or hire you on trust?
The Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s 25th Anniversary Conference took place in Birmingham on 7-8 May. It was a fantastic event that gave us all lots to think about and plenty of great ideas to put into practice. One of the workshops, No translator is an island, examined the sort of human interactions translators have to …
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Resolutions for clients
Do our clients make New Year Resolutions? Or, given that as business owners we too are clients (to our accountants, designers, marketing advisers, lawyers, printers…), do we ever make resolutions wearing our client hats, rather than our “own business” hats? Here are some resolution suggestions for anyone wanting to be a better client. Resolution 1 …