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…
Escaping Lockdown
Reblogged from SJB Translations’ blog, with permission (incl. the image) How (and how not) to cope with big projects A couple of weeks ago I won my freedom, or at least that’s what it felt like. I finally completed a series of big translation and revision projects that had kept me in what amounted to professional lockdown for more that two…
EU recruiting translators and proofreaders on fixed-term contracts
A few weeks ago, the European Union opened a process to recruit translators and proofreaders on fixed-term contracts to work within the EU institutions, primarily at its offices in Brussels and Luxembourg. Translators must be able to translate from two different official EU languages into one other EU language; under the current rules, the first of these two source languages must…
American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) Conference 2018 Review
What does a medical translator and interpreter have to learn from medical writers? Especially if you write in Spanish, and the conference is for people who write in English. I went to the AMWA conference curious, and came back changed, having learned so much that I am going back for sure. Oh, and it was so much fun! As a…
The Mentor’s Bounty: How Mentoring Enriches both Mentor and Mentee
During the 59th ATA Conference in New Orleans, a colleague asked me, “What was the motivation that drove a group of translators to create an audiovisual division in the ATA?” I sat for a minute, pondering. “Many different factors motivated each of us,” I said. He then asked, “Well, what do you think was the single most important thing?” I…
I asked translators and interpreters what their biggest website challenge was; what I learned is that it’s not website-related at all
In the fall of 2018 I ran a survey to see what are the biggest website-related challenges of freelance translators and interpreters. In addition to four closed questions, there was one open-ended question. Responses to that question show that the biggest challenge is not copy, design, or even SEO. It’s strategy. Here are the responses and my answers to them.…
Translation Slams: Can You Benefit without Working in the Source Language?
Reflections on the ATA59 Spanish-to-English Translation Slam Inspired by poetry slams, translation slams are a forum for comparing multiple translations of the same source text. The participants are usually a moderator and at least two translators, or “slammers.” The translations are done in advance of the event, so that each of the translators, the moderator, and the audience can jointly…
Why Provide a Forensic Transcription Translation?
Reblogged from the ATA Interpreters Division blog, with permission (incl. the image) Recently, I was asked if I could be an expert witness regarding whether the interpreting provided in an interview that was recorded on video was accurate. I would go to the attorney’s office, watch the video and be deposed regarding the accuracy of the interpreting in this video,…
The Certification Toolbox: Get Ready!
Reblogged from The ATA Chronicle, with permission Late fall and early winter are traditionally a slow time for ATA’s Certification Program, since no exam sittings are scheduled between ATA’s Annual Conference and the beginning of the new exam year in March. Certification graders take advantage of this respite to select new exam passages, fine-tune grading standards, and tend to other…
The Seven Virtues of the New Translation Era
Building on the Rubble of the Shattered “Poverty Cult” This article was first published in 1997 on the NCTA (Northern California Translators Association) website in the earliest days of the web. It’s a window into the translation industry as it existed more than 20 years ago, but the advice is more important than ever in today’s supercharged technology and business…
Chapter Conferences: A Great Place to Start
For me, fall means conference season. There’s the American Translators Association (ATA) conference in late October or early November, but even before that is the conference organized by my local ATA chapter, the Midwest Association of Translators and Interpreters (MATI). I started attending MATI’s annual conferences when I was a graduate student, and I’ve been a regular attendee ever since.…