The following excerpts are from About Translation blog:

Main ideas:

• Translators are writers

To be a good translator, you have to remember you are a writer. That means concentrating on making your target text effective. Translate accurately, of course. But that, by itself, is not enough to craft an effective, well-written target text that does not feel translated: If you only concentrate on accuracy, neglecting effectiveness, you’ll produce, in Chris Durban’s words, “a description of a text, rather than a text in its own right”.

Sometimes (or at least in certain fields) your translation may need to wander rather far from the source to achieve the desired effect in the target language. Sometimes, you’ll need to shorten, lengthen or even change your text, because often what your customer needs but cannot articulate is rather different than a run-of-the-mill translation. A translator who sees himself as a “humble servant of the source text” (Ros Schwartz’ definition of this gun-shy attitude) is unlikely to be as effective as one who makes the text her own.

In certain fields at least, use of translation memory is a hindrance – unless you find ways to ensure the target text flows well and is effective. I’ll suggest a technique to achieve this in a later article.

• Techniques to achieve more effective translations

Use statistical analysis to see what a translated text should look like, comparing it to similar documents written originally in your target language.

To give an example presented by David Jemielity, if in translating into English CEO’s letters to shareholders you follow your source language conventions, you might refer to the company in the third person. You may even be asked by your customer to follow this path… after all, they are French (or Italian), and they are accustomed to writing of themselves this way (“Nel 2010 ACME ha fatto questo e quest’altro…”). However, if we can show our customers that CEO’s letters written originally in English are overwhelmingly in the first person (“In 2010, we did this and that at ACME…”), we may convince our customers to let us translate their letter this way, to make it more effective for them.

Similar strategies, buttressed by clear documentation, may show us other ways to improve our translation: sentence length and variety, use (or not) of the article before a company’s name, use of nominalizations, and so on.

• Marketing ideas

Look for direct customers by taking part in their industry’s events. When you attend such events, don’t ask if they need translations. Try other tactics, such as asking questions, complimenting the speaker, letting slip in the fact you are a translator. Gently point out to someone you have met at such an event, that something in their presentation was unclear, or that it should be phrased differently in your target language, offering (for free) to suggest improvements to the text. Don’t do this, however, in an aggressive way (“gotcha!”), nor when you are asking a question during an open session.

And let’s not market against ourselves: Be careful in what you say in online fora, tweets or blogs. Translators all too easily fall into bitching mode (about bad agencies, expensive software, opaque tools, cheap wannabe translators, or whatever). Remember, however, that what you write online may come back to haunt you.

See: About Translation blog

The hashtag to see the tweets about this event is  #catskills2011