After a few weeks of development, the new linguist database linguistdb.com was launched and has so far signed up a great range of various language pairs all ready to work on a freelance basis for any company or agency that wishes to work with them.

Late last year I had created thefrenchjourney.com to help people learn French in a fun and intuitive way. The plan was put on hold for a good 6 months but is now coming back online after a consistently good traffic record, even with no new updates.

So with the launch and re-opening of these two sites, I hope to work my way back up through the search engine rankings and into the lives of linguists and French learners.

I’ll keep you posted if there’s anything to report, dear reader

Business Advice for Freelance Translating

Collected from the freelance translation community on twitter , via the hashtag #xl8

This post aims to collate helpful information from freelancers and translators around the world on managing money, tax, clients and cashflow. It may be of use and interest to other freelancers.

Please feel free to add any tips that may have been of use to you over the years in the comments section below or email them to contact@lukespear.co.uk.

The advice:

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Tax tips

(expenses, claims, IRS, HMRC, VAT, etc.)

UK based:
- Starting up is simple: declare to HMRC within 3 months using the self-employment form found here.
You’ll have to complete a tax form by the 31st of January every year. It’s easy to fill in online.

On this form you can claim for expenses. If you work from a rented home (flat, etc.) then you can claim for a fraction of how much of the home you use. An accountant can help with this, but 1/3 of rent is not uncommon (this does not constitute professional advice, just personal experience). Homes with mortgages are subject to Capital Gains Tax for any claims made, also the fraction is subject to a time-rated scale for usage. Definitely seek professional advice here.

VAT not essential, still awaiting more advice from the freelance community on potential benefits.

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Cashflow
(long payment terms, late payers, example payment request letters, etc.)

Payment practices
It’s best to check out any new clients you are working with to make sure they aren’t a fly-by-night agency that won’t be around to pay you the agreed amount when it comes to it. The main way to do that currently is via the proz.com Blue Board, using its useful search function. Other ways were recommended as follows:
From @Gaby_Ibanez, who describes herself as a “Translator. Subtitler.” from “Beautiful Argentina”.

“Yes, always check out the agency’s payment practices and never stop doing it, no matter how long in this business you’ve been.”

“There are several PP lists: some are free, some you have to pay to get access to them. There’s also the Blue Board on Proz. >>”

“>> And the Hall of Fame & Shame (TranslatorsCafe.com), but to have access to the last 2 you need to have a paid membership.”

Leading on from this, the ATA have released a document called “Ensuring payment”, here’s the direct link [pdf].

In this document you’ll find links to various company payment practice lists from around the world.

@pcruzp, an “EN FR SP Freelance Translator”.

“#Proz BB it’s a good start, but I trust more on Yahoo Group Lists for PPs + checking Contact Details + http://whois.domaintools.com/”

Using the whois tool enables you to compare the name of the website registrant to the person/address you are in contact with and progress in any potential research that may need carrying out.

More useful links from @Gaby_Ibanez regarding Payment Practices.

1 - WPPF: World Payment Practices Fees
2 - Translation Payments WhoWhenWhat
3 - TCR List managed by Laura Hastings; a paid service.
4 - Payment Practices managed by Ted Wozniak; a paid service.
5 - Blacklisted Translation Outsourcers a paid service.

More information is available, as pointed out by Gaby, on their respective websites.

Terms and Conditions
Including your terms of work in initial contact with new clients is effective, as practiced by Tom Ellett of Albascan Translations, with an example of his terms and conditions here, including the following clauses on:

- Copyright
- Confidentiality
- Amendments (and their costs)
- Cancellation (and its cost)
- Liability of the translator
- Payment (within 7 days, interest at 2% per month)

Also, interestingly, is the “wire transfer fees and other [payment] charges are payable by the Client.”

Included are two reminders (as logos) of the associations the translator is a member of. All clearly laid out on one A4 PDF.

There was also advice from @petergarner when asked if he used Terms and Conditions with either direct clients or agencies.

“Generally no. But occasionally I am asked to provide a formal estimate 4 big jobs, in which case I include certain pretty basic T&C.”

It is possible to speed up late payments using a letter or email. Here’s one that worked for me, but may have damaged future relations. If anyone has a more diplomatic offering to share, it’d be welcome below.
————————-
Hi [project manager],

Thank you for checking the invoice payment status. When we spoke over the phone regarding the work you’ll remember that you assured me of a 60 day payment. Changing the payment terms without notification is unacceptable.

As a reminder, on the [date] you further confirmed a 60 day payment:

[quote previous email exchange]

Is there anything you can do to prioritise this payment? Neither of us would want this to get any more complicated than it is, and it would be better if we could keep this matter private, would it not?

Sincerely,

[name]
————————-

Invoices
Céline of Naked Translations has offered this list of items to include on any freelance invoice. Behold:

INVOICE or QUOTE, clear and visible
Date
Your details
Client details
Client reference
Invoice number
Job description
Rate
Amount due
Payment terms
Payment details
Payment due date

“This makes it much easier to get paid on time and to chase any overdue invoice.”

Céline also suggests the use of FreeAgent. It’s an online accounting system that allows you to import bank statements for speeding up most accounting work. It also calculates taxes, graphs essential data and separates expenses from income quite simply. A 10% discounted version (normally £15 for freelancers) is available here freeagentcentral.com with my referral code, but I’m still in the free trial and haven’t made up my mind whether or not to stick with it.

I have also seen Crunch.co.uk which provides a similar service coupled with an accountancy firm to tie up loose ends and incorporate you if it becomes worth it, which they say happens around the £25k mark.

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Sales
(increasing them, growing business, cold calling, email templates, etc.)

It seems it would help with professional image to have a website. Among the examples of what appear to be clear and well designed sites are those of Tom Ellett, Céline Graciet and Percy Balemans.

Tips from the translation community on positioning include having a single or few specialisms. This helps the client better understand your offer.

Gaining new clients (the dreaded marketing!)

@pikorua
“I get most of my clients via word-of-mouth/networking and via my ProZ profile/website.”

@AngelaMDickson
“None of the active ways I’ve used to seek clients have been as effective as being easy to find and having an in-demand specialism; in other words, they find me.

I have met 2 (in 5 yrs) worthwhile clients after bidding for their jobs on proz. I only bid for interesting-looking jobs tho.”

@ultramegajoy of the Netherlands has also reached a great stage where,

“Most of my new clients come from word-of-mouth referrals or networking, occasionally ProZ direct contact.”

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Costs

(reducing them, waste, good deals on insurance, webhosting or related, etc.)

Hiscox offer insurance to freelance translators that covers £250k throughout Europe for professional indemnity at £15 a month. Most surveys and polls taken show translators don’t generally have insurance, and if they do they’ve never used it, but it’s not very expensive to add a further comfort for your clients. It may be a shrewd marketing move, if nothing else.

Cheap web hosts in the UK with great customer support, use them to *easily* register your domain and set up webhosting: layershift. Around £10 for a web address (domain name) and £4 a month for hosting.

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Links

A small list of Small Business websites:

US based
Inc.com – online version of print magazine.
CNNmoney.com Fortune & Money magazines with CNN.
Sba.gov US Government tools and resources.
Duct Tape Marketing for low cost, effective marketing strategies.
Business Week The Small Business section
All Business information and advice from a well regarded, oft-cited source.
Startup Nation “175,000 pages of award-winning advice”

UK based
Startups.co.uk is an active community with a broad range of articles.
Business Link is a UK government run site for tools and resources.
UK Business Forums is another active community with lots of real, experience based advice.

More to come, add a comment and stay tuned [/lang_en]

Myth 1 – Voice recognition makes too many mistakes to be worthwhile
I have used Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 for two years now and find the amount of mistakes made to be minimal. Those mistakes that appear over and over can be trained away. Common mistakes I find with my accent – a non-region-specific blend of Southern/Midlands UK with hints of Irish and Canadian influences – would be “we’re” recognised as “were”, “for” (ie. he’d be there fuh three days) being missed by the software or names of people the software hasn’t heard before. These errors have been trained away in minutes though, and I always keep an eye out for them now, just in case. The software is set to recognise me as a British English speaking male. I have read the training texts for approximately one hour in total.

I don’t use the software on every translation I do as it often isn’t appropriate. VR software seems better suited to dialogue or magazine style texts than, for example, context-less software translations. As I translate comic books, this is where VR really comes into its own. The bottom line, as they say, is that my productivity increases.

Myth 2 – You need the latest computer to run VR software
My computer is a trusty Thinkpad T42 with 1GB of RAM and a 32GB HD. It can be slow. But not that slow, in that as stated above, productivity increases. Obviously a faster computer would make the process a lot more satisfying to work with, however, I have found that my low spec has presented no obstacles in this respect.

Myth 3 – Voice recognition software costs too much for too little return
The latest version of the Dragon software, version 10, (non-affiliate direct link, amazon.co.uk) is only £40 in the UK and $40 in the US. Reviews and descriptions say it does not require training, with over 99% accuracy out of the box. I haven’t tried it yet, but look forward to doing so. I’ll import all of the training I’ve accrued over the last few years at the same time.

I find this excellent value for money, given the speed increase involved.

Fact 1 – Working with others in the room is an issue
Switching the software to “Off” in order to talk to someone in the room can be impolite, as if you’re finishing a conversation that the other person wasn’t aware you were having. Also translating intimate scenes between cartoon characters can be slightly embarrassing, although perhaps I’m in the minority of translators having to deal with that particular issue. General unavailability to talk and being a distraction to others make VR an antisocial piece of software.

A word of advice – don’t leave the room with the VR software and TV/radio on at the same time, it’s not fair on your computer.

Fact 2 – Typical VR errors are hard to detect
Homophones, words that sound similar, are the standard errors with VR. These are figured out with the help of context in the VR software. For example, wants vs once. Which, incidentally, is the kind of error I start to make myself when tired. On a slight tangent, this has started me thinking and googling about words being stored as sounds rather than letters, with spellings being a guide and mnemonic for how to write out the sound, but I haven’t got very far with that research.

Homophones are harder to detect than typos. They aren’t picked up in spell-checkers and even proofreading them can be tricky at times. I proof read every sentence after settling on a translation, and then the whole text again in context. I do this anyway, when not using VR, but keeping an eye out for these specific errors is an additional requirement to consider.

Fact 3 – VR is fully compatible with CAT tools
Wherever you can input text on your computer, you can use VR. Wherever the cursor blinks, the text is entered. All punctuation must be pronounced. This can take some practice. The software can be set to punctuate automatically, but in my case I’d rather have control of that.

As translation requires a stop-go text input method, while our brains search the memory banks for fuzzy matches, the productivity increases would be less marked than if reading from a book into the software. However the speed gains are still present, especially in larger segments, and it is for this reason that I’d still recommend its use.

Examples online
Plenty of examples of typing performance increases can be found through Google et al., here’s the first one I saw, including a video: Typing vs VR. The author found an increase in speed from 73wpm to 126wpm and a reduction in errors. Although as stated in the comments and above, VR errors are of a different nature.

If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them in the comments section below.

PS Contrary to most voice recognition related blog posts, this one was not dictated with VR.[/lang_en]

I am ever-so-slightly proud of the twitter hashtag #xl8 being used by many people around the world on a daily basis, with it’s succinct and unique composition, 10 months after I first proposed it to some of the more active members of the twitter translation community. I don’t want to be too proud, it’s not a big deal, but to have something that came from my mind being used as a common term for translation is somewhat pride-inducing.

Most of my friends seem to work in IT and I pick up a lot of trivia from them. One such thing was that ‘x’ is sometimes used to represent ‘trans’ (XMIT/XFER). The much loathed txt spk accounts for the last part of the tag. And there you have it. Four characters. Helps translators to find each other in the deluge of daily tweets.

Here’s the tweet I made back in January:

Instead of a mailing list, then, does anyone think #xl8: a translators hashtag would be worthwhile? How to start it?
5:53 PM Jan 13th from TweetDeck

http://twitter.com/spokk/status/1116171158[/lang_en]

The story itself gives you a protagonist who is held in an emotional bind about the action he has just carried out, implied in the denouement as something quite chilling.

The adjective-filled style may please the word-lovers of the world, but I’m starting to wonder if it didn’t contravene the point of the exercise: producing a short story in a limited number of characters. Did I just produce a scene? Is it better to pad out one single conflict in as descriptive a manner as possible or rather suggest a more complex scenario in the available space?

Here is the -132 character story in its entirety:

His eyelids slowly parted. Waves of joyous grief pulsed under his claret-speckled labcoat. In the distance, a blade met concrete.

RT via Confic[/lang_en]

Featured translator on Proz.com

It certainly has been a good week for exposure.[/lang_en]

- A translation of Jean Van Hamme’s Largo Winch that I worked on earlier this year has now been featured in the Wall Street Journal in an article about the celebrated writer Van Hamme’s thoughts on writing talent in Belgium. The article can be found here: WSJ Article.

Translation featured in the Wall Street Journal

- A favourable mention (in December 08) on the Comic Geek Speak podcast, Exploring Bédé at around 12 and 21 minutes. You can listen to the podcast here: BD podcast.

Alternatively, you can listen to the podcast right here:

[/lang_en]

In an article in the Svenska Dagbladet, Olle Josephson writes of a Scandinavian political convention bringing together Norwegian, Danish and Swedish youth movements for an exchange of ideas earlier in 2008. That exchange, reports Olle, now takes place in English. This is in part due to the way that the Scandinavian languages have now diverged further than ever, while still being easily understood on paper, the linguistically closer Swedish and Norwegian speakers can now have difficulty understanding spoken Danish. One solution, as proposed by Olle, would be to spend “10–12 hours of Danish teaching per school year, that should quickly allow students to reach a reading and comprehension level high above their second language choices such as German or French“.

And the French, seeking their own solutions to what they see as a threat to their culture, discussed the point in Le Monde this week as the French music festival Francopholies brought down the curtain on 130 French artists, 17 of whom sang exclusively in English. The internationally renowned Sebastien Téllier admitted, “I choose the language that emphasises my music best. If I’m in doubt, I google the expression to see if it exists or not… I want people to own my music themselves and give their own meaning to it“.

However the appeal of English may go beyond its simple artistic merits, as J.B. from the band Nelson explains, “on the European market, we’re equal and on a par with the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians“ in a tone more akin to an international group based in France than a mere French group. But with France’s strict quotas for French language music to be broadcast through the media networks, English language French music is largely being censored – although a loophole is occasionally exploited when a song adds a few lines of French in order to be classed as French culture, such as Camille’s album release Gospel With No Lord.

A movement in political and cultural terms is taking place throughout Europe, globalisation and culture exchanges are taking place in a tongue that has made no efforts to impose itself, yet has somehow become aspired to. The transatlantic expression, “two nations separated by a common language” may soon have to be adapted to something rather less elegant in order to keep up with the times.

Luke Spear

This article cited text that was translated from Swedish and French in the following publications:
SvD
Le Monde 

I’m actually just writing from your future, I’ve chosen this guy’s webpage to post to as he seems like he wouldn’t start running around claiming to be a “messiah” like that other guy did when I accidentally dialled in the wrong date. Seems to have caused a little confusion for you back there, but it’ll soon work out.

This all might seem a little unusual for you, dear reader, but it’s quite simple from here. I just fire up my retinal display, open a post page and start thinking out my message. Once done, I select the language I want - in this case English, British standard 2008 version – and the date I’d like to post to. See, science has recently discovered how to travel through time but only for sub-atomic and quantum sized particles. That led to some pretty interesting developments, this transtime mail for one, but I digress.

What I wanted to tell you about, not as a bleak apocalyptic message of destruction but as a gentle warning to human translators, was that things are going to change quite soon and you may suddenly find a lot less work being sent your way, for translation, at least. Computing and technology are gradually changing your lifestyle in imperceptible stages at the moment, (your moment, that is) so small that the change is almost undetectable. But due to the lowering cost of computer components there will soon be a surge in people connected and trading globally. A critical mass of people requiring just-enough-to-understand translations will be reached in a short time and machine translation will be in vogue.

Human translators will gradually be replaced by proof-readers who check machine text as it comes onscreen. They are paid by the hour at a minimum wage. The job will require editing a stream of text as it is piped onscreen as fast as the proof-reader can go, the slowest readers being replaced daily in the online network of millions. But what about the people who need legal contracts or mission critical texts translating? How can they trust a machine? I hear you cry. Well, AI improvements and processing power have come a long way in a short time and you wouldn’t believe what wonders await you. There’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to retrain, but it may be better to start thinking about your future now. Concentrate on your writing skills because your potential market is about to grow like you wouldn’t believe.

Don’t be disheartened, make the most of the opportunities coming your way, harness the power of your imagination because you people are going to need it when the information exchange really begins.

P. Francberg,
EuroNation,
2047 AD
(4,540,000,0047 ABB)

“For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

And rightly so. A concise work with protagonist, scenario and resolution punctuated and wrapped neatly into a oneliner that can justly be called a story. However a slew of copycat sixworders have hit blogs around the web, each as weak as the next with often pithy headlines that aspire to the American author’s genius only to consistently fall somewhat short.

Thankfully, in late 2006 Wired ran the scifi version and the Guardian the ‘contemporary authors’ version shortly thereafter. It’s a very interesting phenomenon and well worth exploring but far from suggesting additional asassinations be added to the messy fray; what could also be of interest in the eye of a language enthusiast is the challenge that translating these stories presents.

The additional problem of word limit may have been artificially created through people latching on to the fact that the Hemingway story is just six words long and deemed this to be its true mark of excellence. However he perhaps wasn’t counting when he wrote, aiming for concision while retaining his meaning. In translating, then, how concerned should the translator be with the quantity of text?

“A vendre : chaussures bébé, jamais portées”

At least in French, this doesn’t seem to be too much of a concern.