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I hadn’t heard of this great organization, Found In Translation, before, but thanks to my fellow Bryn Mawr College alumna Enid and her son Noah, I’m pleased to have now done so.
The organization’s mission is: “To help homeless and low-income multilingual women to achieve economic security through the use of their language skills” and “To reduce ethnic, racial, and linguistic disparities in health care by unleashing bilingual talent into the workforce”. It sounds fantastic, and I recommend that you look into the work they do.
In previous posts on negotiation, we talked about the process of negotiating from preparations to closing the deal. I’ve underlined that it’s important to argue your case when explaining to the client why the rates or the deadline should be what we’re saying, not what they’re saying. It made me think about the course I took at the university about techniques of persuasion and I realised that I’ve been using them in a variety of forms in my marketing materials, but also in negotiation. I thought I’m going to share some introductory ideas about how to be more persuasive.
It all started with Aristotle’s “On rhetoric” (which I read both in Polish and in English, great translations) who has laid the foundations of persuasion, in other words the art of influencing and convincing others. In business specifically, persuasion is aimed at changing a person’s attitude or behaviour towards an idea, or object. In other words, if we’re trying to change our client’s attitude to rates they reject we’re using persuasion.
Broadly speaking, Aristotle argued that persuasion is based on three modes of appeal: logos, pathos and ethos, and the right combination of those, appropriate in a given context and for a given client, is needed to achieve goals.
Logos is based on the logical appeal. It often employs facts and figures to support the claims. For example, I’m using the logical appeal on my home page with my slogan: “83% of buyers are more likely to choose your product if I do the translation.” It’s a statement of fact further underlined by the use of a tangible figure. A similar effect can be achieved if you tell the client how many words you’ve translated, or how many clients have trusted you so far. But logos is not only about numbers, it also involves the clarity of your argument and its value. If you manage to make a strong case based on facts, logos will have a great impact on your persuasive appeal.
Pathos is, in other words, the appeal to emotions. And by the way, I think it’s one of the most underused tools available to us when selling translation. Of course, pathos doesn’t mean that we want to make our clients cry or experience strong emotions. It’s all about appealing to the emotional, not just the cold rational side of a potential client. It can take the form of a metaphor, simile, a play on words, or anything that makes your client feel “connected” with you. To give you an example from my practice, once I convinced a client to work with me because I casually mentioned that a member of my family used to work in the same business and I remembered some facts about how they worked. A little thing, and perhaps in some cultures borderline acceptable in the business context, made me connect with this particular prospect. More.
According to our report from last week, Google announced that they had updated Google Now with multi-language support. This means that Google Now will be able to understand up to seven different languages at once, as opposed to the user having to keep switching back and forth in the settings menu.
Sounds good, right? Especially if you’re trying to search for things in a foreign language. That being said, it looks like support for multi-language support has since been delayed. In a statement made to CNET, a Google spokesperson told them that due to some bugs discovered in the final testing phase, they had to delay the feature.
According to the spokesperson, “Multi-language support is complicated stuff and they found some bugs during their final testing phase that they wanted to fix before making the feature generally available.” The feature is now expected to make its way to Google Now later this summer.
As part of the Google Now update, users will be able to use the feature from any screen just by saying “OK Google”. Previously it could only be done in the home screen, but with the update, it can be activated anywhere, even the lock screen, as long as the display has been turned on.
June 23, 2014, Arlington, VA – Rosetta Stone Inc. (NYSE:RST), the leading provider of education technology and language-learning solutions, today announced the results of a new survey of a cross-section of the company’s 12,000 global enterprise customers. The Rosetta Stone Business Employee Use Insights Survey–released during this week’s Society of Human Resource Management 2014 Annual Conference & Exposition in Orlando, Florida–finds that both employees and companies benefit enormously from language training programs in the workplace.
The Rosetta Stone Business Employee Use Insights Survey reveals that nine in 10 employees believe language training is relevant to their job duties, and 86% report a direct, positive impact on their job performance. As illustrated in the charts below, surveyed employees also report an increase in job satisfaction and loyalty due to their companies’ investment in their professional development. Based on the results of the survey, the languages studied most frequently in the marketplace are English, Spanish, Japanese, and German. More.
This morning I had lots of fun interviewing translation industry veteran Steve Lank (Monterey graduate, former ASTM translation QA standard subcommittee chair, longtime senior-level manager in agencies in the US, Ireland and Spain). Steve is currently Vice President for Translation Services at Cesco Linguistic Services, working from the Washington, DC office.
I put Steve in the hot seat and asked him:
Chicken/egg: how can beginning translators find their first clients?
What’s up with downward price negotiations? Why do agencies apply them, and how can translators best handle them?
What are the top dos and don’ts of translator resumes? What errors pop up again and again? How can a translator stand out among the many unsolicited applications that an agency receives?
How about following up on agency applications? How often should freelancers follow up, and using what method?
How does a translator turn a first-time client into a regular client, and become one of an agency’s preferred providers?
How about the increasing emphasis on specialization in our industry? Is the “learn by doing” mindset OK, or do translators need more formal training in their specializations?
How an academic field—marked by petty fighting, misguided ideological debates, and personal proximity to tragedy—doomed itself
[…]“Academic Yiddish is a very strange thing,” Dara Horn, a Yiddishist and novelist, told me. “There’s this self-consciousness to Yiddish. No one believes that it’s a language. The people who are speaking it don’t believe it’s a language. There was an inferiority complex attached to Yiddish,” Horn explained, because literacy and religious texts were associated with Hebrew, the status language in terms of scholarship and literature.
Enter Max Weinreich, the father of 20th-century Yiddish linguistics. Born in what is now Latvia, Weinreich was raised in a secular, German-speaking household. But he became enamored with the language spoken by the Jews around him at an early age, and after earning a doctorate in linguistics, Weinreich established the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut—Yiddish Research Institute, known as YIVO—in 1925, in his apartment in Vilna. Though YIVO acquired its own building in 1929, the destiny of academic Yiddish has remained fused with Weinreich’s own physical and intellectual journey. The outbreak of World War II found Weinreich en route to a linguistics conference in Denmark, so he made his way to New York, and so did YIVO. More.
Audiences around the world often struggle to find World Cup commentary in their native tongue
Late last year, the Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) of the small Mediterranean island of Malta decided against transmitting the matches of the 2014 World Cup in the Maltese language. Instead, the tournament will be shown in English commentary beamed live from stadia in Brazil. Many of Malta’s inhabitants are multilingual, fluent in English and Italian, so the broadcaster reasoned it could save the expense of offering commentary in the national language. It wasn’t just penny-pinching that motivated the decision, but sheer embarrassment: Maltese commentators, PBS suggested, were just not up to the job.
During two previous major football tournaments (Euro 2012 and the 2010 World Cup), commentary on the public broadcaster was littered with errors, odd digressions, and fuzzy ideas. A source inside PBS complained to Malta Today – an English-language newspaper – of the typically “poor quality” of Maltese commentators, who tended to “blabber on without describing what is going on in the pitch.” One match announcer was under the illusion that the country of Yugoslavia still existed. Sitting in studios far away from the action, the commentators seemed to be demonstrating their remove not only from the matches they were summarising, but from the world itself. These gaffes cost Maltese viewers the chance of hearing the 2014 World Cup narrated in their own language.
Speakers of large international languages (like English, Arabic, and Spanish) can take for granted their immediacy and ease of access to the World Cup. The tournament is lavishly packaged and expertly delivered to them in their own tongues. For speakers of small languages – particularly those that share media space with bigger languages – the experience of accessing a major event like the World Cup can be comical and frustrating. Sometimes, it can be even a wounding reminder of their own smallness. George Micallef, a much-respected Maltese sports journalist, protested PBS’s decision to scrap commentary in his language. “I am hurt by this decision,” he said. “I do not expect the national broadcaster to ignore the Maltese language in such a blatant way.” More.
ANAHEIM, California — YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced a series of new features for both fans and creators at Vidcon on Thursday, including a massive crowd-sourced translation effort, a virtual tip-jar that supports contributions up to $500, direct connections between videos and crowdfunding sites and a mobile app from which YouTubers can manage and monitor their videos.
Other new goodies for YouTube creators: An option for up to 60 frames per second (which will make video-game vloggers very happy), a free music and sound-effects library and a system for tagging contributors.
Speaking before hundreds of YouTube creators at the afternoon keynote — her first Vidcon since becoming CEO of YouTube more than five months ago — Wojcicki first announced “Fan Subtitles,” a crowd-sourced translation effort that encourages bi-lingual users to type in subtitles for their favorite videos.
Our goal is to make it that every video uploaded to YouTube will be available in every language,” she said of the opt-in feature. More.
Robert Chandler on the necessity and enjoyment of collaboration and co-translation
Literary translation is sometimes thought of as an occupation for near-hermits. ‘Isn’t it difficult, sitting alone all day long with a few books and your computer?’ people ask. I usually reply that, at least during the last twenty years, I have seldom worked entirely on my own.
I collaborate in many ways and for many reasons. Often, I simply need help in understanding the original text. Few English-speakers of my generation (I was born in 1953) began learning Russian much before the age of 15 or 16, and few of us had the chance to spend more than a year in the Soviet Union. This is not long enough to acquire solid knowledge, either of a language or of a society. Things have, of course, changed, but it is still easier to live for several years in an EU country than in Russia. Also, every aspect of Soviet daily life was profoundly different from daily life in a western country. Shops, schools, hospitals, factories – all functioned in ways hard to imagine. The Soviet Union is long gone, but both mindsets and institutions have proved resilient. Even if one is translating contemporary literature, one will often come up against much that is hard to grasp. More.
I recently read the claim that many translators hate translation technology. In my experience, this is simply not true – in fact, many love it. Here are some of the reasons why.
We love tools that enable us to translate more effectively
Translators have always used technology to support the process of translation. We have speedy laptops and desktop computers with plenty of power to run the many software programs that we use.
Many translators have amazing office setups with multiple screens and the latest translation technology applications. We use computer-aided translation (CAT) tools to keep track of terminology, ensure consistency in our work and improve quality control. These tools are not cheap but, as professional translators, we know that they are well worth the investment.
We love tools that help speed up our processes
The technology that we use helps us translate faster and be more productive. CAT tools can speed up the process of translation, especially when used with speech recognition technology. These days, many tech-savvy translators dictate their translations via a headset directly into their translation tool, taking full advantage of the latest technology.
We love tools that help people communicate across language barriers
Most translators are absolutely delighted with the incredible opportunities that are available now to communicate across language barriers. Free online translation has made it much easier for businesses to find possible partners and customers around the world. These businesses are our customers, and we are glad that they are now more able to make connections internationally across cultures and languages. Businesses that use free online translation also quickly see the limitations of machine translation, and understand that human translation is necessary for their key business communications. This is good news for translators working in this segment of the market. More.
Common Sense Advisory, Inc., an independent market research firm specializing in the language service industry, has released its study of the market for translation, localization, interpreting and other language services in 2014. The report includes information on underlying market growth, key trends, fastest-growing services and average revenue per employee.
Type an SMS message in English and receive a text back with its Spanish or Chinese translation. Muuzii came out of AT&T’s developer program, but it plans to expand to more countries and carriers this year.
An interesting new Spanish and Chinese translation service called Muuzii has made its way to AT&T’s 2G network. Unlike other app-based translators, Muuzii performs its translations using the most basic data channel on the phone: SMS.
Subscribers simply type an English phrase in a text message and send it to a Muuzii short code, and get back a Spanish or Chinese translation (depending on which language you register for). The service will also preform Spanish-to-English translations, though not Chinese-to-English.
There are definite advantages to SMS as a translation tool: It’s nearly universally available and doesn’t rely on the phone’s fickle data connection. It also means the service works on even the most basic phones – all it needs is an SMS client. The company also offers an enhanced service called Muuzii Speak, which will return an audio translation embedded in an MMS message. That audio file can be played in either an MMS client or a separate Android Muuzii app.
An example of three Muuzii services: Spanish to English, English to Spanish and Muuzii Speak (Source: Muuzii)
The core SMS service costs $2.99 a month, while the MMS audio translation service is is $3.99. Both services will be charged directly to your AT&T bill. More.
Accurate scientific translation is vital, say Meredith Root-Bernstein and Richard Ladle
We all know that if you want to be a professional scientist in the 21st century, you have to communicate in English. This is not a problem if you are lucky enough to be born to English-speaking parents, but spare a thought for the majority of the world’s scientists who are forced to communicate the subtleties and significance of their research in an idiosyncratic foreign tongue.
A misplaced preposition or poor choice of verb can ruin a convincing narrative, reducing the probability of publication in a top international journal and limiting the impact of the research. Not only is this bad news for scientists struggling to communicate their work, it is also bad for science.
Science needs more trained personnel who can bridge the language gap. The need is particularly urgent in areas such as the environmental and agronomical sciences in which it is increasingly appreciated that regional and local interventions can have global impacts.
In an effort to disseminate their work, many foreign scientists spend precious research funds on private translation services. But standard translators may not understand the science, the structure of scientific papers or the technical language. The only alternative is to rely on bilingual colleagues to provide translation services as a favour.
But in a recent article in the journal Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, we suggest that university departments in non-anglophone countries could hire professional translators with a science background, just as they hire statisticians and technical specialists. Alternatively, they could offer attractive positions for bilingual or native English-speaking researchers, with a percentage of their time earmarked for assisting colleagues with translating, editing or writing papers and other research outputs. Such positions could be permanent or offered on a fixed-term basis to visiting academics. More.
OAKLAND, Calif. – When Khanh Trong Vu, 85, went to Summit Medical Center here with sharp abdominal pains three years ago, doctors and nurses there couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell them in his native Vietnamese. So in desperation he called a Vietnamese friend, Phuong Hang Phi Duong, to interpret for him.
A series of blood tests later, he was quickly wheeled into surgery to remove an inflamed appendix.
“I was luckily at home when he called,” noted Duong, whose timely arrival at the hospital Vu believed saved his life.
Though medical interpreters play a vital role in providing medical care, there’s a shortage in these professionals, in part because the state currently does not reimburse language interpreters.
With health care coverage expanded to an additional 2 million Californians through the Affordable Care Act, community clinics are seeing a need for interpreters like never before.
“There are a number of newly eligible with huge language needs,” asserted Cary Sanders, director of policy analysis with the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network.
A new state bill seeks to boost the number of medical interpreters in the state.
Vu, as well as one other patient, Ti Wu, a native of Myanmar, shared his experience at a June 20 discussion hosted by Assemblymember Rob Bonta, the Democrat who represents the state’s 18th district, on the critical need for interpreters. California has the nation’s largest immigrant community, and 40 percent of its residents speak a language other than English at home.
For people like them, Bonta said, as he stumped for former Speaker John Perez’s bill, AB 2325, which would create a system – called CommuniCal — to improve Medi-Cal beneficiaries’ access to interpreters at physician offices and hospitals in the state, interpreters could make the difference between life and death. Medi-Cal is California’s health care program for its low-income population, known as Medicaid in the rest of the nation. More.
You read and hear all these horror stories on social media and translation blogs about translation companies. How the owners or project managers have no knowledge about the translation industry, how they only care about profit, how impersonal their emails are (Dear translator/provider) and so on. Some freelance translators and/or translation company owners tell positive stories sometimes about great working relationships with agencies, high rates, communication, I even wrote a thank-you letter to my favorite agency client a few years ago.
I want to tell you about a lovely person, a translation company owner, that I met recently. It was such a positive experience in so many ways that I had to share it with you. In my 13 years of experience in this field and the thousands of emails I have exchanged with clients, never have I seen such a communication style in the first and second contact emails. I’ll quote some parts of his emails (in Italics) but without personal details to avoid embarrassing him
…I am a member of XXX group on LinkedIn, so I thought of you when this translation project surfaced…
If you’ve known me, read this blog before, read one of my interviews online, followed my social media shares and/or attended one of my presentations: this is a great example of making great contacts through LinkedIn groups! I don’t even participate much in discussions of that specific group; I just share our Weekly Favorites every couple of weeks so group members can discover great content from fellow translation bloggers.
…I am attaching our non-disclosure agreement
It was half a page, clear and concise. I have never read such a nice and short NDA before!
… my broader interest would be to establish a working relationship with you going forward in the future, beyond this most immediate project.
I think that should be the ultimate goal for both freelancers and clients; to establish mutually beneficial relationships. And he is the first person I’ve know who said that in his very first email! After I happily replied to his email, he went into even more trouble to write a long and honest reply, parts of which I quote below and I would love you to read carefully. It will change your faith to humanity, at least with regard to translation company owners. More.
The buildup to the mistrial in New York state Sen. Malcolm Smith’s bribery case wasn’t just courtroom drama. It became a whole megillah.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas had ordered prosecutors to turn over 93 hours of a cooperating government witness’s telephone conversations to defense attorneys because the recordings might help the defense. But complicating matters, 20% of those conversations were in Yiddish.
Though the New York region is home to more than 75% of the nation’s 159,000 Yiddish speakers, according to U.S. Census data, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has but a single interpreter on call.
That is down from five in 2009, according to Edward Friedland, the district executive for the court, which handles Manhattan, the Bronx and several counties north.
After the judge’s order, prosecutors scrambled to assemble a full team of Yiddish translators over the June 15-16 weekend to create transcripts of the calls for defense attorneys. The mistrial came last week. More.
A number of recently discovered jobs listings on Apple’s website hint at future Siri localization, with the company looking to hire native speakers of languages used in burgeoning markets like Brazil and Russia.
According to Apple’s “Jobs at Apple” website, the company is seeking “Siri Language Engineers” fluent in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Russian, all of which are currently unsupported by the voice recognizing digital assistant. The job postings were first uncovered by MacRumors.
Along with the nine new languages, Apple is looking to enhance Siri’s existing lexicon with hires fluent in Australian and British English, Cantonese and Japanese. All listings ask not only for fluency, but for native speakers to handle colloquialisms locals may use when speaking to Siri. Apple also strives to make Siri’s own speech as natural as possible, meaning the potential hires will likely be working on responses to user queries.
Most listings, posted between June 10 and June 19, also require candidates to have strong software development skills to be plied toward speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and speech synthesis.
Tasks for many Siri Language Engineers include developing natural language processing code and providing input toward new features applicable to a target market, suggesting location-specific Siri assets may be deployed in the near future. More.
Can you distinguish language translation from language interpretation? In what may be the first ever tri-lingual TEDx talk, Laura Burian, Barry Olsen, and Miguel Garcia demonstrate the power of human cognition as they explain the subtle but important differences between professional translators and interpreters with assistance from Weihao Zhang (Chinese) and Beatriz Rodriguez (Spanish).
In the previous article, I tried to convince you that negotiation should be a part of each new project coming in, but I also explained that negotiation is not about bargaining or getting the most out of the client. Just to reiterate, negotiation means arriving at a win-win situation for both parties.
Right, but it still may sound daunting and complicated. How do we actually negotiate? Let’s look at a very straightforward negotiation process and see how it applies to negotiating for translation project. It’s an easy 6-step process that you can implement in your business almost straight away. What I’d encourage you to do would be to test it first with some new clients or new requests to make yourself more comfortable with using it – you have nothing to lose after all.
1. Have clear goals
Before we even approach any negotiation exercise, and in fact before we even begin to think about accepting a project, we need to be clear on our goals and expectations. It may sound trivial in the beginning, but the more you think about it, the more you’ll see that very often, when we get a project request, we don’t tend to assess it against our business (or even personal) goals. Money and our income is of course a primary goal, but it’s also important to consider the project in terms of your time and availability, specialisation and whether it furthers your career development, or even simply whether it’s interesting enough for you.
The most important question at this stage is: how much money in exchange for your work you’d feel comfortable with?
2. Do the research
Ok, ok, I am a research freak and I do believe business is largely about knowing stuff on the other party. This is especially true in negotiation. If you manage to find out as many details about your potential client as possible, you’re increasing the likelihood of making an attractive offer, but also presenting convincing arguments. Before you reply to a client’s request, start as simple as taking a look at their website, LinkedIn profile, do some sniffing online, try to build an image of them as a potential client. The more information you have, the easier it is for you to gauge the value of this particular translation to the client.
The most important question at this stage is: what does the client want the most?
Data unveils 46% of millennials more likely to purchase if information is in their preferred language
According to a new study released by SDL (LSE: SDL) today, 32 percent of millennial consumers in English speaking countries prefer a language other than English, and 46 percent are more likely to purchase if information is presented in their preferred language. These new findings demonstrate that it is imperative for brands to speak to consumers in the language they desire to improve the overall customer experience, foster brand advocacy and ultimately drive increased sales.
SDL’s fourth report of the “Five Truths for Future Marketers” series is titled “There is Only One Language,” and features results from SDL’s global survey of more than 1,800 millennials (ages 18-36). The data indicates that language is directly tied to purchasing behaviour, but is not always tied to geography, and calls on marketers to realise that we live in a multilingual world where customers expect to be communicated with in their preferred language.
Today’s millennials are part of the “always-connected” generation and therefore expect content to be delivered to them across devices, channels and in the language they prefer. For brands, a localisation strategy can drive both international business expansion and engagement in domestic markets if done correctly by joining the customers’ culture and conversation, rather than just selling into markets. Marketers looking to create a compelling and engaging customer experience need to leverage customer data to ensure the language strategy accounts for preference rather than just location when it comes to the buyer. SDL research finds:
1 in 2 respondents in Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway speak a language other than the local language in their household
1 in 3 respondents in the UK and Australia speak a language other than English at home
1 in 4 U.S. millennials speak another language at home
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