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.
In professional associations, you can often publish a public profile. Clients use this profile to decide who to work with. It should be brief, but it has to tell your story. However, sometimes our public profile is not visible. Go to your profile settings on the platform your association uses and verify that your profile is visible. You can generally select items from your profile to share publicly, such as your phone, address, email, and social media profiles. Be intentional about what you share. This information can be seen by the public. That means both your clients and other people…
Certification Exam Changes
Reblogged from The ATA Chronicle, with permission There are major changes ahead for ATA’s certification exam in 2017. Eligibility Requirements Education and experience requirements needed to take the exam will be discontinued in January 2017. Why? Because they failed to predict the chances of an individual passing the exam. And that was the whole point—to ensure that exam candidates were…
9 Useful Questions by New Professional Translators
Qualifying is a massive part of becoming a professional translator. But once you’ve finished your training, how do you get started? This article answers nine of the most popular questions by budding professional translators when they get to the end of my Spanish-to-English translation course.
Linguist in the Spotlight: An Interview with Corinne McKay
This fourth installment of our “Linguist in the Spotlight” interview series features Corinne McKay, French-to-English translator and current president of the American Translators Association (ATA). If Corinne’s name is familiar, it may be thanks not only to her visible role in the ATA, but to the fact that she is a regular contributor to The Savvy Newcomer and also the…
Dear Savvy: I Want to Work in Culinary Translation
Recently, our inbox has seen a number of thoughtful questions from readers. In lieu of shipping off worthy advice to lone recipients, we decided these exchanges could benefit a broader audience. Without further ado, we are pleased to inaugurate our new question-and-answer series à la “Dear Abby,” titled “Dear Savvy” (get it?). Our first reader question is on how to…
Transitioning from Student to Freelance Translator
Reblogged from the SDL Trados blog, incl. the image, with permission from the author In November this year at ATA’s 57th Annual Conference in San Francisco, Meghan McCallum and Sarah Puchner, both French to English translators, co-presented a session on “Transitioning from Student to Translator: Strategies for Success.” After the conference we reached out to Meghan to discuss this topic…
Year-one Chronicle: My First Twelve Months as a Professional Translator
A few days before Christmas I got a thick, imposing envelope in the mail from the Washington State Department of Revenue. “ACTION REQUIRED: Business Tax Return due January 31” it shouted in bold, red font across the front. Yikes! What have I gotten myself into? Inauspicious beginnings Two years ago, I didn’t even know that document translation was a real…
ATA’s First Virtual Conference Has Arrived
Did you miss out on ATA’s 58th Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.? Or maybe you attended but weren’t able to make it to as many sessions you would have liked. Don’t fear! The ATA Virtual Conference is here. What is the Virtual Conference? The Virtual Conference is a collection of 49 sessions given at ATA58 in Washington, D.C. There are…
Linguist in the Spotlight: An Interview with Frieda Ruppaner-Lind
English-to-German and German-to-English translator Frieda Ruppaner-Lind is among those intrepid linguists who count their experience not in years, but decades: in her case, three of them. Indeed, translation has existed for at least as long as the Rosetta Stone, but few would disagree that the act of translating itself has never changed more than it has over the past few…
The Greatest Challenge Facing Translators
Reblogged from Academic Language Experts blog, with permission from the author A friend, wishing to polish his translation skills, recently asked me the following question: “if you had to give one tip to a new translator, what would it be?” Without hesitation I answered “avoid literalisms.” As editor of Academic Language Experts this is the most frequent issue I encounter…
Email Best Practices: How Not to End Up in the Recycle Bin
It’s bound to happen sooner or later in our careers. That moment when someone thinks you have enough seniority and may be interested in subcontracting. Or your email address somehow ends up on a mass-distribution list. Or you just become the target of scammers. Whatever the case may be, a message like the one below pops up in your inbox: Complete…