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.
As language professionals, we have a duty to keep up with training and education in our languages and specializations; with technology, legislation, and other developments important to our field; and with other people, both colleagues and clients. Attending a professional conference is a great way to manage all of these obligations. But conferences, by their very nature, can be big, overwhelming, and difficult to navigate. Simply showing up and hoping for the best is a recipe for exhaustion, failure, and wasting all the money we invested to be there. To really make the most of the conference experience, it helps…
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…
This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. When it comes to reviewing copy, translators are often at what I like to refer to as “the very end of the line.” By the time copy is deemed ready for translation, it has usually been reviewed and edited by a plethora of people, including a…
Savvy Diversification Series: Monolingual Editing
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. ATA’s certification exam was instituted in 1973. Its purpose is “to elevate professional standards, enhance individual performance, and identify translators who demonstrate professional level translation skills.”1 Every year, a large number of professional translators and aspiring translators take the exam in one of the 27 language…
As we are all trying to navigate our way through the disruptive changes that have taken place in our lives in the past year, it is particularly important to highlight the efforts of those making a difference in the day-to-day. In this article, the focus will be on two interpreters from Oregon working on language-related initiatives within their communities and…
What are ATA’s Mastermind Groups?
Mastermind groups are small peer-based groups formed to learn more about a specific topic. The members of Mastermind groups help each other solve problems and develop their professional objectives by sharing input and advice. The groups’ core value is the synergy of energy, motivation, and commitment, as well as everyone’s willingness to learn and grow together. The ATA Mentoring Committee…
This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. The old industry adage might be spot on: most interpreters are fairly extroverted, while most translators tend to be introverts. That’s an oversimplification and I know that there are always many exceptions, but during my years in the industry, I’ve noticed that translators struggle more with…