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 post originally appeared on sciword and it is republished with permission. I was reading one of Kevin Lossner’s blog posts from 2010, titled “No Monkeys!”. He gives 12 pieces of advice—a twelve-step program, as he calls it—for those getting started in the translation business. All of it is great advice and I think everyone should follow it, newbie or…
One of the main reasons we encourage students to join ATA is to take advantage of the wellspring of knowledge surrounding best practices—the kind that make working for yourself a smooth ride rather than one riddled with potholes. Over the years, I have assembled a collection of ATA materials that I share with students and mentees alike. Because when we…
Three Lessons: Humility, Collaboration, Perseverance
This post originally appeared on Word Prisms and it is republished with permission. All three – in that order – hold the key to becoming a world-class translator. An interviewer, who was also a writer, once asked me how many words I’d translated before I published my first translated book for the American Institute of Physics. I imagined he expected an…
International Translation Day: It Wouldn’t be Possible without Translators and Interpreters!
2020 has been a year of changes and “new normals” but one thing hasn’t changed: translators and interpreters still power the world’s communications. ATA wants to celebrate International Translation Day this year by reminding the world just how critical translators and interpreters really are. Have you ever wondered how your smartphone went from an idea in an engineer’s mind to…
This post originally appeared on Just Translate It and it is republished with permission. Searching for a balance between creativity and routine As an old school Star Wars fan, I can safely say now: “All is well that ends.” The 42-year legendary saga ended in phews and negative remarks. For me, it’s a reminder that we should not try to…
Freelance Finance: Setting Rates
Here at The Savvy Newcomer we understand that it can be intimidating to talk about money. It’s often a sticky subject, but we feel it couldn’t be more important to address as small business owners. One major component of succeeding as a freelance translator or interpreter is managing your finances well. If you don’t master your money, your translation career…
This post originally appeared on Gaucha Translations and it is republished with permission. Interpreting is a professional field. What was once done by whoever was bilingual now has an established certification process. There are less and less reasons to work with unvetted providers. This timeline tells the story on the West Coast, where I live. I am from Oregon, where…
During my undergraduate degree in translation, I felt like I was very prepared for a career in translation. I excelled in my language classes and the translation classes prepared me to thoroughly read a translation brief and identify tone, audience, and purpose so that I could carefully craft a beautiful translation. What more is there to know? Oh, how unprepared…
This post originally appeared on Multilingual and it is republished with permission. As a senior localization manager, I spend a lot of time finding and hiring translators for my client’s projects. Over the past 15 years, I’ve discovered that the translators who consistently deliver the highest quality adhere to certain helpful and professional business practices. Whether you hire translators or…
Pursuing the Translation Dream: Promoter of the Profession
Since we last visited ATA’s Self-Evaluation Questionnaire for Translators we hope you’ve had a chance to practice the items we discussed in section 4, “Professional Demeanor.” It can be a challenge to develop a professional mindset and apply it to all your business interactions, but we’re confident that you’ve done so skillfully. Now that you’ve mastered what to know before…