The Savvy Linguist serves a worldwide community of translators and interpreters who are looking for practical solutions to everyday problems, ideas for growing their business, and support as they achieve their career goals. With high-quality, peer-reviewed content, you will find the answers to the questions you face as an innovative language professional.
We have published the ATA Savvy Newcomer since 2013 and ATA Next Level since 2021. Each blog has made unique and helpful contributions to our members. Savvy Newcomer was founded to help translators avoid the “school of hard knocks” that many of us went through. It has been helpful to new and experienced translators alike as we published articles on a variety of topics. Over the years, the blog team found that newcomers to the profession, our intended audience, were not necessarily a large majority of our readers. We were reaching a worldwide community of translators and interpreters who were…
This article originally appeared in the ATA Chronicle-Online. Once upon a time, in a land that now seems very far away, many parents were able to work as freelancers from their homes. They did this in part by sending their children to another, much larger building five days a week. The children would gather with friends and adults called “teachers”…
Savvy Diversification Series: Don’t Be Scared! How to Add Ghostwriting to Your Portfolio of Services
“It was a dark and stormy night. A strange figure appeared in the window of the haunted house on the hill as a bloodcurdling scream echoed in the distance…” Let me start with the bad news: today’s blog post is not about how to craft a spooky story to tell around the campfire. Instead, we are going to look at…
The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. With this in mind, we’ve invited a series…
This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. While the demand for translation services is at a record high, many freelancers say their inflation-adjusted earnings seem to be declining. Why is this and can anything be done to reverse what some have labelled an irreversible trend? Over the past few years globalization has brought…
What the Business Practices Education Committee is Doing for ATA Members
An earlier version of this article appeared in The ATA Chronicle. Have you ever asked yourself: What’s the Business Practices Education Committee up to these days? Probably not. In fact, you are more likely wondering: What is the Business Practices Education Committee? For the uninitiated: The Business Practices Education Committee was established in 2005 to provide ATA members with information…
The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. With this in mind, we’ve invited a series…
This post originally appeared on Translation Times and it is republished with permission. We oftentimes get questions about how to get started in the profession, and that’s a long answer. Actually, part of this blog is dedicated to answering precisely that question, and we have a long list of articles that we’ve marked for beginners. However, a dear friend of…
Savvy Diversification Series: From Text Translator to Film Subtitler in Just a Few Months
The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. With this in mind, we’ve invited a series…
Setting a Fair Price: It’s All about You
This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. We are freelancers. We don’t need to maximize profits for invisible stockholders, who tend to only care about their dividends or capital gains and not a whit about language or what we do. For us, the definition of being rich is not to want for anything.…
The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. We’ve invited a series of guest authors to…