Learning the Hard Way

Posted in Freelance life, Weekly post by Carol's Adventures in Translation

After a 4-day Carnival break traveling, I come back home eager to go back to work, with 3 projects to deliver the next day. I feel relaxed and ready to work on my best client’s projects. Only to find out, when I turn my computer on, that it is plain, with absolutely no configuration: no wallpaper, only a few links on my desktop, no Outlook, no FTP, no documents… as if it had just been formatted. “Well,” I thought, “I’ll see what happened later on. Let me work on my projects first.” No, no, no! This client’s CAT, Trados Studio, wouldn’t work either!

I called a colleague. He had never heard of such a thing before. I then called my cousin, and we stayed awake until 5 am (from 11 pm) trying to figure out what happened and to fix it. He was able to find all my documents in a hidden folder. Phew! (I had a backup, but not a recent one.) But I still couldn’t open Trados. A friend of mine came over later that day and also tried to fix it. Nothing. We were only able to create another user, in which I could at least work on Trados. Apparently, my Windows crashed my user in an update, all by itself.

Consequences: I had to do something I dread: cancel all my projects. I felt terrible, desperate and miserable. It was a huge volume to allocate last minute and it was my best client, after all. While there was nothing else I could do because the situation was far beyond my reach, we can’t help it, right? We do feel horrible.

Bottom line is we learn some quite important things when catastrophes like this one happen. My lessons this time were:

There is no way a professional translator can have only one computer. We must have at least two! I was already planning on buying another laptop. No plans anymore. I’m buying another one right now!
Our backup computers must also have all the programs, software, etc. we need and have on our main computer. That is, I will have to buy another Trados license. This may be obvious for some of you, but it wasn’t for me.
Needless to say backups are a must. But they take time and we end up doing them less frequently than we should. So I got an idea from a colleague: send important files we use daily to the cloud, and do it every day. And then we do our overall backups every week or month.

If you, like me, hadn’t thought of the points mentioned above before, please start considering them now. It’s better to spend some money now than to lose important clients (and our heads) in the future.

Has anything bad ever happened to you that taught you quite a lesson?

20Feb2014

Don’t wait for things to fall from the sky. Go and get it!

Posted in Weekly post by Carol's Adventures in Translation

Last week’s post resulted in a healthy debate on the importance of having a higher degree in translation or not, and consequently, on what universities courses lack. So I had the idea of writing about this lack.

I remember my first translation project ever. It was for a translation agency, a PowerPoint presentation. As a newbie, I did not have any CAT tools yet, so I was translating and adjusting formatting. Let’s face it: a PowerPoint preso isn’t a translator’s best friend, especially when the poor thing (the translator, I mean) does not have any experience at all.

However, so far, so good.

The problem was that there were non-editable images on the file. I panicked. Tight deadline, weekend, and I had no clue of how to translate those images! I did not know what to do. It was a Saturday night so it was not possible to contact anyone from the agency for help. I ended up inserting the translation on top of the image.

Cutting the story short, the project was later returned to me, because I obviously didn’t know (and how should I?) that non-editable images should be translated on the comments area. At that time, that was exactly what I thought: “How should I know? Nobody ever told me that!”

That’s right, a BA nor an MA in Translation will teach you practical things you should know when actually working as a translator.

Is that a problem? Is that something those courses lack? I’m not sure.

Usually, university teachers are academics, researchers, not professional translators. Lectures are theory-oriented or practical, but toward the translation act itself. You translate and, at most, you learn one thing or two about one or two CAT tools. That’s it. No project management, no handling projects, no accounting, no branding/advertising.

How are you supposed to know all those things then? Practicing. Or attending extracurricular classes, courses, conferences, events, lectures, reading blogs, joining professional groups, asking, researching, and so on. In other words, going out there and getting it yourself, not waiting for it to fall from the sky on your laps.

This is not such a big deal. The internet makes it quite simple actually. You just need to be willing to spare some time to engage on social media and the like.

Here are a few tips on how to learn those things:

Follow people (translators, agencies, companies) on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.). There are also some specific Facebook groups for translators you can possibly join. They offer great tips and discussions, and allow you to ask your own questions to all the members.
Follow translation blogs. You can find all sorts of useful information on blog posts.
Participate in translation events, like conferences, symposiums, etc. Social media can also help you stay tuned on events being held near you.
Make the most of your degree. Check if your university offers extracurricular activities that may interest you.
And last, but not least, engage with people, network. Ask when in doubt. Always try to learn from the experience of others.

It would indeed be perfect if universities offered a practical lecture on management and dealing with clients, or if there was a management specialization on translation. But since that is not the case (yet?), we have to do our part and chase it ourselves.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

13Feb2014

Does an academic background really make a difference?

Posted in Weekly post by Carol's Adventures in Translation

This is a quite controversial issue in the translation sector. Those who have an academic background categorically say it is essential, while those who do not, say it is not. With a BA and MA in Translation, I have to admit I am biased on the subject. Therefore, if you are like me, you will most surely like this post. If you have no academic background though, do not give up on me: keep reading. If I can make you change your mind, great! If not, you can share this post as the most absurd thing you have ever heard of. 😉

You see, the thing is, unfortunately, in order to become a translator, you do not necessarily need to have a higher degree. If someone masters (or not) two languages, this person can work as a translator (please be aware that I am not discussing quality and professionalism here, just the fact that pretty much anyone can be a translator). As simple as that. If it is fair or not, that is a topic for another discussion. The fact is, since an educational background is not mandatory, people sometimes refuse to “spend” their time and money sitting on a chair, doing plenty of reading and writing, and practicing translating.

After all, what’s the point in studying Translation? I’ll give you some reasons:

The theoretical knowledge you learn will help you build your translator self, your identity as a professional who knows about all the history and theories behind the art of transforming a bunch of words in one language into a beautifully crafted text in another.
You will have plenty of practice translating several types of texts. This will help you have at least an idea of which path to take. Besides, it helps you learn some tricks, dos and don’ts.
Grammar lessons. They may sound stupid and useless, but believe me: you do not know everything and you do make grammar mistakes you are not even aware of.
Culture and literature lessons in both your working languages. And depending on your major, even other lessons. For example, my MA was in Translation Studies with Intercultural Communication, so I had, among others, Interpersonal Communication and Translating Cultures lessons.
You get to learn more than you bargained for. I learned Italian in my BA (including for translation purposes), and Greek in my MA (Ab initio for translation purposes).
It offers you recognition and validity.

Are those reasons convincing? Well, some people say the bad thing about those courses is that they do not offer you a practical idea of the market. That is right, they don’t. However, I question if that is really the role of any university. The university only guides you. It is not its responsibility to give you every piece of information you need to be a successful professional. That is your job. Living and learning, with practice. Besides, it is better to be introduced in the market with all the background I pointed out above than with nothing at all.

Bottom line is there are no cons in taking a higher degree (in any field). Knowledge is never too much.

Some other related articles:
How (Not) to Be a Professional Translator and 6 Tips to Help You Become One (Fresh out of the oven. Alina also posted it today! Serendipity?)
The (un?)importance of translation-specific degrees to translation (also mentioned in Alina’s article)
Masters in Translation

What’s your opinion on the topic? Do you also have an academic background in Translation? Do you agree with me? Would you add any other good/bad points?

6Feb2014

Boosting Productivity and Removing Distractions

Posted in Productivity, Weekly post by Carol's Adventures in Translation

In our last post, we talked about tools for minimizing the effects of working all day long in front of a computer. Today, we will see some tools for helping us keep focused and free of distractions.

We usually spend 8 or 10 hours per day – or sometimes even more than that – in front of the computer. However, it is quite difficult and it requires an extreme effort and discipline to stay focused and not check your email every 5 minutes (or less!), check what your friends/colleagues are tweeting about, see what people are posting on Facebook, read that (giant) infographic about productivity (how ironic!) on Google+, see who has viewed your LinkedIn profile, chat on Skype about your weekend adventures with a friend, browse Pinterest to find something cool, watch Beyoncé’s new video clip on YouTube, see who has commented on your blog. Phew! Talk about distractions! And the list goes on. Besides distracting and not allowing you to focus on your work, those are dangerous time-wasters if you are not careful.

Well, if you are one of those addicts who have a hard time keeping yourself away from online distractions, it may be a good idea to go hardcore.

StayFocusd is a Google Chrome browser extension that limits the time you spend on sites that, as predetermined by yourself, make you waste your time. Set the maximum amount of daily time you allow yourself to spend on each site and, after that, you are not allowed to access any of them for the rest of the day.

It is scientifically proven that our brain remains attentive only for a limited amount of time (and on a limited amount of information). To avoid overloading our brains with information or working long hours on a task non-stop, it is advisable to split your time in productive chunks and breaks. You can actively work for say 25 minutes knowing that you will have say a 5 minute-break to do whatever you prefer. After all, rewarding yourself is also important.

Strict Workflow is a Google Chrome extension similar to the Pomodoro technique – but as the name says – stricter. It enforces you to work 25 minutes in a row, blocking a list of websites set by you. After that period is over, you are allowed to access those blocked websites for 5 minutes. You can repeat that as necessary and change the timer duration.

Now if you want to have a better idea of the time you spend actually working and the time you spend on social media and the like, the software Visual TimeAnalyzer tracks all your computer usage (work time, pauses, internet use, etc.) and provides detailed reports of all your activity. You can find out how much time you spend on Facebook, working on projects, and even daydreaming!

If you just need to focus on writing your blog post, preparing your next presentation or writing a book, Ommwriter is a free text editor app for Mac OS (CreaWriter for Windows) that runs in full screen. You can change the font type and size, and the background image. Just indulge yourself in a calm distraction-free environment to be highly focused on your writing only.

Good luck and stay productive!

Do you know any other tools that help us keep up the good work and stay aways from distractions? Don’t be shy and share your thoughts with us.