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Many of you may know Russian-into-English translator Lucy Gunderson from her leadership with the ATA Divisions Committee and the Slavic Languages Division. I had the pleasure of speaking with Lucy last month, and hearing about how she has navigated her career among shifting geopolitics was very moving. The challenges she has experienced in her business are relatable, and she has met them with resourcefulness. Read on for more. How did you learn your languages? I started studying Russian in college. I had studied French for eight years in school and wanted a change. Despite struggling mightily through the first semester,…
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This post is a reblog, originally published on Training for Translators. It has been republished here with permission from the author. From the Next Level team: For a different perspective on whether or not to start an agency, see “Should You Start a Translation Agency?” by Sara Maria Hasbun. Lots of freelancers wonder about whether it’s a good idea to…
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Autumn is in the air again. For me, the beginning of the season means mountains covered in brightly colored trees, fresh apples—along with apple pie, applesauce, and apple cider donuts—and a new briskness in the air. It also means I’ve spent too much time on the ATA65 website, poring over descriptions of too many fantastic-sounding presentations and wondering how I’ll…
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Translators read all day long in their second language and interpreters speak all day long in their working pairs. As language professionals, we want to make sure that, after the workday is over, we keep feeling the joy that originally attracted us to the languages we know. Many of us also enjoy the process of discovering new ideas from different…
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This post is a reblog, originally published in the Slator Tool Box. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. My translation clients are primarily based in Europe, so my project flow tends to slow down quite a bit in July and August every year. Europeans, it turns out, take their summer breaks much more seriously than Americans. With decision-makers…
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Recently, a colleague with ample translation experience contacted me with some questions about breaking into book translations. For freelance translators, fiction and non-fiction books present an opportunity to expand our offer and to learn about the publishing business. Our exchange focused on the business end, not the challenges of the translation itself. “Book translation” can be as small as a…
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This post is a reblog, originally published on the Training for Translators blog. It is republished here with permission of the author. How to narrow down, when you want to do everything? I don’t think I’m the only freelancer with this characteristic (I refuse to call it a problem, it’s just a characteristic!). I always tell my family that my…
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From the Next Level team: At some point in their professional lives, many linguists consider adding a new service to their portfolio. A major change like adding an entirely new line of work can seem daunting and potentially disastrous, but what if it’s successful? In this week’s post, Anne Connor discusses how she took up a former service and made…
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This post is an updated version of article that originally appeared on the LION Translation Academy blog. It is published here with permission of the author. In the ever-evolving landscape of professional language services, new technologies such as neural machine translation (NMT) and generative AI (genAI) have inevitably sparked debates about how we should be pricing our services. Many freelancers…
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This post is a reblog, originally published in the Slator Tool Box. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. An agency that occasionally gets in touch sends me an email with four image files attached. Taken with a phone, the pictures show separate pages of a medical patient record. No attempt has been made to redact personal data,…
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BOI is short for Beneficial Ownership Information, meaning, information about who actually owns or controls a company. On January 1, 2024 a new Federal regulation went into effect in the US that requires many companies to report this information to FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury. This new regulation was devised…
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