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an archive of content from ≈ 2005 - 2015, relating to international business, translation, freelancing, and working online.

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Archives for 2008

5 Qs with Christian Arno, Lingo24

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Armed with a degree in languages, Christian Arno founded Lingo24 Translation Services from his bedroom in Aberdeen in 2001, with a view to harnessing internet technologies from day one. Today, Lingo24 operates out of London, Aberdeen, New York, Paris, Berlin, Cham, Christchurch, Tokyo, Timişoara and Shanghai… Here are Christian’s thoughts on building a ‘virtual’ business.

Sarah Dillon: Hi Christian. Can you tell us what a ‘typical’ day looks like for you (if there is such a thing!)? What kinds of tasks do you tend to take on as managing director of Lingo24?

Christian Arno: There really isn’t such a thing as a typical day (thank goodness)! My three main roles are to take the time to talk to Lingo24’s senior and departmental managers and help them formulate and deliver on ambitious development plans; to travel between our operations throughout the world helping to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymnsheet; and to monitor closely developments with our clients and within the industry making sure that we are always implementing the brightest ideas in translation quicker and better than everyone else!

SD: How has founding an online translation company differed from your expectations? What have been your greatest moments and biggest challenges?

CA: To be honest, I didn’t really have any expectations as to how things would happen. The core idea behind Lingo24 – to use Internet technologies to make translation more efficient – just seemed an obvious one at the time, and one existing translation companies weren’t taking advantage of. Now, of course, lots of companies are doing similar things, so it’s important that we continue to innovate.

The greatest moments are always when you see you’ve got a special culture going. We had one two days ago on a beach in Panama – there were ten people from our Americas operation and two from our European operation, and we had an absolute ball. Everyone got on so well, and you could see how good the atmosphere in the company is. That, to me, is what it’s all about. We have a ‘positive feedback’ reporting system and that is also hugely motivational for me. When you see clients talking about Lingo24 in glowing terms it shows you’re helping.

I’d say the biggest challenges have been coping with downturns in the business – I’ve hated having to let good people go, but am confident that won’t happen again. Other than that, the cultural differences between all the people we interact with are a constant challenge – but then, like everyone in the industry, I consider that part of the fun.

SD: Any tips for freelance translators on developing an online marketing strategy?

CA: I’d say there are two steps: firstly, decide on a niche area (language combination and subject matter) you’re interested in with good growth prospects, and become the best translator in the world in that area – a genuine expert; then, create a website based around the key phrases prospective clients (both translation companies and end clients) might use to find you, and blog continuously about your work. If you can get others in a similar but not competitive area to link to your site, and use industry sites and social networking sites to engage with your peers, you’ll soon build a strong online profile.

SD: At a conference I attended, your operations director spoke about developing a homeworking mindset among employees. Any insights or experiences you could share about that process?

CA: Lingo24 attracts strong, independent-minded individuals – and we need them, given our reliance on home-working. As a general point, I’d say if you go down this route, you need to be much more organised in terms of communication, and you need to make sure you’ve got well-defined means in place to measure performance.

SD: What do you read — in print and online — to keep up with developments in your field?

CA: I read the Common Sense Advisory blog and love John Yunker’s Bytelevel. I read pretty widely beyond that. My favourite publication is the Economist – I find it immensely informative and the wry humour behind it is refreshing.

Thanks for featuring in my first 5 Qs, Christian!

Drum roll, please…

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I’ll be starting a new series of occasional posts called 5 Qs with, where I’ll ask five questions of different people in the industry and then post their responses here for your delectation.

I must admit, I’ve been toying around with this for ages – over 18 months to be precise. In fact, ever since I saw a similar series by the excellent Urban Muse and got her blessing and advice on running a translator-specific series of my own.

The first post will appear next week – here’s hoping they’re as fun to read as they are to do!

4 tips on pricing to attract clients you’ll want to keep

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As a freelancer, specialising doesn’t only refer to the sector you choose to work in but also the kind of clients you take on. Here are a couple of hard-earned lessons on pricing to make sure your clients are the keeping kind:

1. Don’t say yes to everything that comes your way. Remember, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It may seem counter-intuitive (especially when you’re worried about keeping the wolves from the door) but if the price is not right, or if the work is bringing you into an area you don’t want to be in, then sometimes the best thing you can do is to turn it down. What happens if you accept the job, then the job of your dreams comes in tomorrow? Will you be able to give it the attention it deserves? Sometimes, no work really is better than crappy work.

2. Don’t worry about over-pricing. Clients won’t think less of you if you lower your rates, but it’s much, much harder to increase your rates after you realise they’re too low, – especially when you’re starting out. Premium rates will attract premium buyers (of course, it goes without saying that standard of your work is also premium). Peanuts, on the other hand, will only attract monkeys :)

3. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. So don’t make the mistake of thinking that after a few low paid jobs your client will suddenly see the light and start offering you better paid ones. In fact, the opposite usually occurs – your clients will see you as either someone naïve who doesn’t know the value of their work, or quite simply cheap. Not the personal brand any of us really want, now is it?

4. Work for free rather than for cheap. If you are really struggling to find work in your field and are tempted to take on a poorly-paid job, resist the urge and look for some genuine pro bono work instead. (And by genuine I mean not-for-profit organisations, not just unscrupulous agencies or cheap-scate companies looking for a freebie). There are lots of perks to this approach. Geniune pro bono clients are often more flexible with their deadlines and are usually generous with feedback, so you can really take the time to hone your skills. Even if it means taking a part-time job in another field to tide you over financially, you’ll gain a lot more than if you’d taken on work from some shark offering below industry rates.

There are companies out there who are willing and able to pay for excellent professional services. So put a price on your time, and stick to it – it will pay off.

*for a wordier version of this post, see What are you worth? Don’t be a monkey.

Friday funnies: Home office fiction vs reality

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There’s a funny post over at new media producer Ian MacKenzie’s blog, contrasting what home office workers want you to think they are doing with what they are actually doing. Strangely enough, it reminds me more of my experiences working in a call centre than a home office. Much like working in the food industry, you really cannot imagine what goes on behind the scenes until you’ve worked in one yourself 🙂

Making sure you get paid: part II

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Jill Sommer over at Musings of an Overworked Translator makes the excellent point that there are two sides to the late payment game. Translators who send in their invoices late are just as guilty as their late-paying work providers.

I’m so embarrassed to admit that this is one of the weakest aspects of my business! In fairness, I’m usually on top of things and I email my invoices along the completed translation job, or immediately afterwards. But sometimes, maybe once a year, I lapse into a black hole for a couple of weeks and let all my invoices slide. And of course, the longer I leave it the harder it is to get back on top of things again because the effort required to pull all the details together feels enormous.

I have no excuse for why this happens, I know only that it has nothing to do with sense. I’ve been properly trained in invoicing. My dad is an entrepreneurial sort and I’ve understood from a young age how the admin side of a small business works. I’ve heard all sorts of helpful suggestions from Mr D over the years, who works as a data analyst to big accounting departments and is the sort that’s always itching to jump in and make order out of chaos. Now I’m relatively experienced at freelancing myself, I know the mayhem and stressed out feeling that descends when I let things slide – not to mention the implications on my cashflow. And I can’t bear to think how unprofessional it must seem…

Jill very rightly points out that it’s a question of having a system that works. Mine clearly doesn’t. I too have tried accounting and workflow management packages like Sage and Studiometry – great fun to learn and play around with, but the whole rigmarole of setting up job numbers, etc. proved too time consuming to maintain on a regular basis. Something kept bringing me back to the old Excel/ OpenOfficeOrg spreadsheet. I’ve always known that keeping it simple was the key, and it doesn’t get more straight-forward (yet powerful) than a completely customisable spreadsheet. But still, clearly I’ve been missing something.

So I had a little eureka moment when I read how Jill manages her invoicing process. Unlike Jill, I painstaking re-enter my data into a jazzed up Word document to send out as an invoice, because my ‘tracker’ spreadsheet doesn’t match up. When I read her post I realised, why on earth am I bothering to do that? That’s where the bottle neck is! Why not use a spreadsheet as my invoice, make the fields match up and copy and paste directly?! It can still look attractive and professional, espceially as I pdf my invoices anyway. Genius – yet so obvious… I’m off to give it a try. Thank you Jill!

(I’m sure the long-suffering Mr D is bashing his head against a wall as I speak. I hereby acknowledge that yes, he has always told me that a good system should never require you to enter the same data twice. Furthermore, I confirm that no, he has not been allowed to advise me in any way on this aspect of my business. Finally, I apologise for any damage caused to his professional reputation by the outing of my slovenly data-management ways…)

Blogging does not put us ahead of the pack

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KYOTO, JAPAN - FEBRUARY 9: Ichimame, an 19-yea...

Are Gen Y committing the cardinal sin of believing our own hype? I’m afraid we might be. Blogging may be a great way to get noticed in our respective fields, but let’s not allow our mastery of fancy technology to lull us into thinking we’re achieving something we’re not.

In a radio interview  a few years back*, career advisor Penelope Trunk said something that made me think, “No, no, no, NO!”. She said:

The people who are blogging about their careers are the top performers, because it is so hard to blog. It’s so hard to be constantly thinking about your profession and to be gathering new ideas and putting out new ideas and having conversations about it, that only the best people, only the best employees are blogging and following blogs…

There are lots of things that make someone a top performer – hard work, talent, experience.  But blogging? I really don’t think so. It may be a common denominator among successful or highly motivated employees, but I bet it’s also common among employees who are bored, or disillusioned, or really, really ticked off too.

Penelope does a great job of giving a voice to a sub-culture and I really admire the time and effort she puts into helping young bloggers find their voices. But in this particular case, I think she’s in danger of mis-managing expectations. I think it’s dangerous to believe that just because someone blogs, they’re a top performer or the best kind of employee. And it’s especially dangerous for younger bloggers to believe this, as it plays into all the worst kind of stereotyping of Generation Y-ers.

There’s no doubt that it’s hard to be constantly thinking about your profession, and formulating ‘new’ ideas. But who’s to say we’re coming up with anything really new? An idea or concept might be new to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s new to everyone else in my field too. I’d be embarrassed if anyone thought I was under the illusion that I was contributing to my field in anything other than a general way. (And by general I mean that if someone learns from my mistakes, then all the better).

The main issue here is that we’re in danger of confusing style with substance. Blogging is just a tool we can choose to employ for any number of purposes. Personally, I blog to learn, not because I’m any kind of ‘expert’. Blogging is simply one way to consolidate all the information I come into contact with everyday. It doesn’t in itself make me any different to another professional translator who might choose to use a different set of tools to track their development.

Blogging with an authoritative voice is an accepted means of writing for the web, but let’s not fall into the trap of believing our own hype. That’s just setting ourselves up to look dumb when it turns out that we’re only learning what a lot of other people have already worked out for themselves – and in a much less painful and self-absorbed way. I’d heartily advocate using blogging as a means of developing professionally, but I’d also recommend being clear on how sure you are of your ideas, and at what stage you’re at in the opinion-formulating process. Anything else and we’re just giving blogging a bad name.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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Sept 2012: This interview was with Peter Clayton on Total Picture Radio in the latter part of 2008 – no longer available online. 

The MT's top 5 contemporary women translators

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The Masked Translator, ‘Zorro of the translation blog world’, has posted a list of the top 5 contemporary women translators here, along with some excellent links to interviews and other details. The list includes Sawako Nakayasu (Japanese into English), Sevin Okyay (English to Turkish), Nora Gal (French to Russian), Tiina Nunnally (various Scandinavian languages into English) and Edith Grossman (Spanish to English). This is excellent stuff, do check it out.

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Making sure you get paid

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This one has been around a few months already but is still worth mentioning: a post evaluating various agency rating lists over at About Translation.

Agency rating lists are sites or groups specifically devoted to collecting information about translation agencies from translators. These ratings are then made available to other translators, either for free or for a small fee. The idea is you check these lists before taking on a new agency client to avoid being caught out by bad or late payers.

Riccardo gives an excellent summary of the pros and cons of each of the following services: Payment Practices, Translator Client Review List, ProZ’s Blue Board, Translators Café’s Hall of Fame and Shame, the WorldPaymentPracticesFree group, the Translation Agency Payment group and TranslationDirectory.com’s Black List. Well worth a look!

Hello to the Brazen Careerists

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A big hello to readers linking through from my recent Brazen Careerist article on life in London. You might find these articles of particular interest:

  1. There’s dumb and then there’s dumber – my response to a Gen Y critic
  2. My personal productivity nirvana – a write-up of my search for the perfect productivity tool
  3. Being your own boss may not be as hard as you think – for anyone feeling they may lack sufficiently brazen credentials 🙂
  4. Portfolio careers deserve a closer look and 6 tips for building your portfolio career – as featured on Brazen Careerist
  5. And write-ups of two of my favourite career books: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies For Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra and Laura Vanderkam’s Grindhopping: Building A Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues.

Enjoy!