Full credit for inspiring this post goes to Mitch Joel at Twist Image and his blog, Six Pixels of Separation.
In yesterday’s post, Nobody Knows What You’re Talking About, Mitch argues that we know what we do so well that we have a hard time explaining it clearly to others.
And “others” aren’t just clients and prospects.
“Others” = everyone you come across since, as we all know, referrals are the single best way to land new business.
Can you type this in [foreign language] for me?
Folks, if you can’t explain what you do well,
how can you market your expert skills and bill what they are worth?
To prove his point, he used a video Google had uploaded to YouTube where they conducted 50 street interviews in New York City asking people “What is a browser?”.
Easy question, right? Such a ubiquitous tool in our lives, everyone knows what it is, ya’think? Surprise:
When starting to practice yoga, breathing properly is hard to learn. You have to be aware of each inspiration, each expiration and whether you are practicing diaphragmic, clavicular or complete yogic breathing.
As you master increasingly difficult positions, proper breathing becomes automatic: you are no longer consciously engaged in leading your body’s inspiration-expiration dance.
Writing workshop
Ros Schwartz and Chris Durban’s writing workshop for translators, Style Matters I, held in Paris February 5th, was an immersion in writing translations for publication.
It offered valuable advice and techniques for those wishing to hone their craft and invited a return to consciousness for those used to leveraging their writing skills to serve their clients’ interests.
Writers and translators rely on proficiency of language to craft high impact texts. They also use their senses and their instinct, just as painters and musicians do to give life to colors and notes. With experience, techniques learned and practiced merge with creative intuition, words flowing together in an artful dance as if graced with a life of their own.
Conscious choreography
Working in a group spurs conscious engagement.
Why did we choose a word rather than another? What awkwardness in this turn of phrase tickled your pen to change it? What effect do you think this change has on the balance of the text or on the message it is to carry? What solutions did colleagues find to transform gibberish into music?
Chris asked me whether I’d found the course useful.
The answer is a resounding yes, for several reasons. It spurred a return to the consciousness of doing, and the satisfaction and enrichment this brings. Watching how colleagues approach a text and hearing the solutions proposed can boost your own creativity. And developing relationships with others who work in similar areas broadens opportunities, as a team, to take on complex projects for demanding clients.
And I learned that, in UK English, an m-dash is an n-dash and it takes a space before and after it.
Doesn’t it feel terrific when a client drops you a line to thank you for your great work on a project?
Yesterday’s post brought a wonderful surprise: the Bel Group sent each member of the project team a lovely album illustrating the two years of work invested to launch the Maison de La Vache qui rit.
An elegant and thoughtful gesture to thank everyone and celebrate the team spirit that made this project a success.
As I browse through various translation industry fora and blogs, I notice many posts that recommend increasing one’s rates with ringing in the New Year to adjust for inflation.
Don’t get me wrong, I am strongly in favor of independent professionals charging professional rates commensurate with the level and quality of service rendered to clients.
The New Year “cost of living adjustment” rate increase reflex is perplexing for several reasons:
1. It’s predictable and, as Simon Turner underscored in his presentation at the SFT’s Journée mondiale de la traduction in December 2009, it is counter-intuitive from a marketing standpoint. Building client loyalty is even more important than getting a rate increase from January 1. It’s a smarter move to announce a rate increase, but tell your clients that ,*for them*, it will only be applicable say from June 1. He has a few other tactics up his sleeve that make this (small) discount pay off even more. Continue Reading…
At the end of each calendar year, many periodicals publish a forward-looking issue on trends, issues, fads and priorities, rubbing their editorial crystal ball until it shines brightly.
Seth Godin invited 70 people to contribute a 200-word piece each, choosing one word to show what they feel matters now. Seth is giving out this e-book free and inviting readers and bloggers to add their own contribution.
Here’s mine.
TOUCH
Touch is our first language.
Its importance in infant development is equal or greater than that of food. Touch is not an emotion, but induces feelings that trigger emotions and provokes the release of endorphins. It is one of the pillars of non-verbal communication that proclaims our humanness and recognizes “the other”. The benefits of touch are so broad the University of Miami launched a Touch Research Institute in 1991. Continue Reading…
The next time you come across a translated volume of uneven quality and discordant voices, the source of the problem way well be the end client, not the various players who worked on the publication.
The client is not always right. Sometimes the end client commits translation roadkill by:
1. Starting work on a bilingual publication without putting its translation team in place.
2. Contacting its translation team with a stated volume and deadline, but with only half the texts written and no clear date when the rest of the files will be available.
3. Shortening the deadline by half once the translation is already under way (and the rest of the source texts still unavailable).
4. Scurrying about to find extra translators to handle the volume in the reduced amount of time.
5. Allowing no time for review and harmonization of all the texts translated by a slew of last-minute recruits.
This is just what happened to a wonderful corporate book on which a respected colleague had asked me to work with him. We are finishing the sections we had started and calling it quits.
We work hard and long for projects we can be proud of. We won’t even consider whipping through an entire book in under a week. “We don’t do MT”.
Disappointing? Of course. But the big looser is the end client. They’ve tossed a nice chunk of change right out the window and won’t have much to show for it.
Savvy clients invest. They do the exact opposite of each point above because they want their corporate books to shine in all languages.
Finding a title for this post to describe all Pearltrees‘ potential uses is near impossible. You’ll soon understand why.
This is not a paid advertisement! I don’t know the creators and have not invested in their start-up (though if it ever goes public, I’ll consider investing). I discovered this tool just a few days ago: the more people use it and contribute to it, the better it will become.
A group of French entrepreneurs, headed by Patrice Lamothe as CEO, launched Pearltrees this spring. It is still in alpha mode, but it rocks. So what is Pearltrees? A new GUI that allows you to create mind-maps of your Web, any way you like, to guide your friends and colleagues through your Web, discover and share in others’ Web, and much more. Continue Reading…
Nearly a year ago, on LinkedIn, Michael Seidle of Problog Service asked “Why is it so hard to find good writers?” All answers, including mine, looked at the question from the writer’s angle. You can learn how to write properly, but the ability to write compellingly is a gift that still takes work to perfect.
As I work my way through 30 Days to Better Business Writing, Matthew Stibbe’s recently published e-book for wordsmiths, several chapters swirl in my head, calling for a client-oriented version.
Maybe even client-oriented versions in other languages. Take Day 7, “Analyse bad writing”, and Day 16, “Manage your writing”, for example. Continue Reading…
24 hours on Twitter, and I sense an existing dilemma is going to get worse.
Independent professionals don’t have gobs of free time. Many already struggle with work/life balance issues; one of my colleagues, a French to English medical translator, often Skypes me grumbling “Gawd, it’s WDWEWDWE again!” – meaning her husband is hovering over her desk asking when and what is for dinner while she’s on a deadline. Mine occasionally quips I’m married to my computer more than to him. Continue Reading…
