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…
Go National or Stay Local?
by Giovanna Lester in collaboration with The Savvy Newcomer Team Full disclosure: I am one of the co-founders and currently the president of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Florida (ATIF), an ATA Chapter. I am also a teacher, a mother and a grandmother. I am starting to see a pattern… Joining a professional organization is an investment in…
Social Media Strategies
By Catherine Christaki Reblogged from Carol’s Adventures in Translation with permission from the authors In order to get the most out of social media, you must develop an ever-expanding network. How do you do that? Who should you follow on Twitter and connect with on LinkedIn? The people I follow and connect with on a daily basis on Twitter and LinkedIn are…
How to Make the Most of Your Last Year at University? 7 Essential Steps for Translation Students
By Marta Stelmaszak My last year at university as a translation student was a blast. I was thrilled to see how the quality of my translations has improved over the years, my head was full of translation theory knowledge and I was excited to be thinking about developing my future career. But I was also a bit, just a bit anxious…
MIIS: A Day in the Life
By Erin Teske My first glimpse of what it would be like to be a student at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, formerly the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), came when I received the results of my Early Diagnostic Test (EDT), which is an essential part of the application process. The Spanish program coordinator suggested that I…
A tour of celebrations around the world through different time zones!
By The Savvy Newcomer Team and Friends The Savvy Newcomer is read in many countries, by translators and interpreters who work in many languages. As we consider Christmas and New Year around the world, we decided to explore some of those cultures by asking some of our translator and interpreter colleagues to take us on a selected world tour and…
University of Lund: A Day in the Life
By Marie Eriksson I came to Lund University for the first time as winter was just giving way into spring. My father drove me from one side of Sweden to the other in a shaky, noisy truck in a snowstorm, while I tried to sleep against the car window on an itchy old pillow. I arrived with no more than two…
Marketing to Direct Clients
Reblogged from the ATA Business Practices. Instead of working exclusively for agencies, many translators and interpreters are discovering that working for direct clients is a rewarding experience. However, the approaches that work for soliciting work projects from agencies are often not helpful when it comes to attracting direct clients. Dear Business Smarts: Business from some of my regular agency clients…
What to do when things slow down…
By Helen Eby As freelancers, we are thrilled when we get a lot of work! Then we go pretty crazy with the load, saying yes to every assignment that comes. Fortunately, there are down times. What do we do with them? Some colleagues get anxious about their cash flow. “I haven’t had a new assignment for a week! What am…
ATA Conference Through the Eyes of Newbies and Buddies
By The Savvy Newcomer Team It has been almost two weeks since we all returned from Chicago, but it already feels like the ATA Conference was a long time ago. Every year, those wonderful four days fly by in the blink of an eye, and attendees (all 1842 of them this year!) will find themselves looking for e-memorabilia to remember…
Lesson 94: 9 Negotiation mistakes every translator has been guilty of at least once
By Marta Stelmaszak Reblogged from Want Words with permission from the author I thought it was a very relevant topic to cover because of many misconceptions around negotiation, and even more little mistakes we’re all guilty of. Negotiation is often seen as something dodgy, perhaps close to haggling. Oftentimes we expect that when we give our price, the client says yes (hopefully)…