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

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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!

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. 

Yes, but will it do my ironing?

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I’m interested in new technologies and I enjoy jumping in and giving something a try. But I’m definitely not a techie and I often get bored by the trumped-up buzz around the latest virtual bells and whistles. So I had to chuckle when I saw Robin Blandford’s plea to would-be inventors last week:

Go get a hobby off your computer and solve a real problem…

If your idea is technology for technologists it probably won’t go anywhere. Go find a real problem that real people have and solve that.

Makes me think of something else I read recently, which said we should divide software manufacturers’ claims by ten to get a remotely realistic idea of what an application might actually offer us.

Gotta love those straight-talking Irish bloggers.

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Moved house!

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It’s official! My blog has moved house and is now self-hosted on my new website. Please update your bookmarks to www.dillonslattery.com – feeds should redirect automatically.

For those of you interested in gorey details, this is what has been going on back-end chez the naked translator this week:

1. New hosting package bought with Aplus.net, to go with my long-owned dillonslattery.com domain. I settled on this domain after much dithering and, as is often the way, came full circle to the decision: sarahdillon.com was the preferred option, but it’s taken and has been for some time (I know, I’ve been cyberstalking it for nigh-on 4 years now). A .co.uk is too region-specific for me personally, a .ie is outrageously expensive and only available to purchase for specific kinds of businesses registered in Ireland (i.e. not me). and a .com.au comes with hosting restrictions which turn me off… but I don’t want to have to change my email address, and I want consistency too, so why not stick with what I have?!

2. Installed wordpress.org onto my server. Sense of achievement. Found out afterwards that it came pre-installed with the hosting package.

3. Settled on a template that would allow me to have pages (for my website part) and posts (for my blog). Requirements: clean, widget-friendly, easy to read when filled with content.

4. Customised layout, added widgets, wrote a couple of pages for the website element.

5. Imported all posts and comments from www.dillonslattery.com with one easy, painless click. Changed a few settings and voilà, my blog was comfortably settled in its new home.

6. Tried to establish a redirect from each individual post on my old site to its corresponding post on my new site. Of course, Blogger (who host my free www.dillonslattery.com site) don’t want you to be able to do this, so it involves much cloak-and-dagger coding. This is difficult when you can’t do coding, full stop. The idea is not just to spare readers the dreaded http 404 error, but to preserve what is known in the business as my Google juice, i.e. all the Google goodness that my old site has built up over the past 2 – 3 years, which combines to push my site higher and higher up the list of Google search results. Two days of fiddling about with redirect codes, php files and MySQL tables and the idea of starting from scratch on the Google juice front didn’t seem so bad after all. So I set up a simple redirect and left it at that.

7. Deleted all posts at www.dillonslattery.com (to avoid duplicating content and therefore being sent to Google hell). Hovering over the big red delete button at first made me feel a ripple of fear, but this quickly turned to a sense of omnipotence at the thought of the destruction I was about to wreak, albeit within my own small domain. Of course, I’d already checked that my backup had worked.

8. Cleaned up. Requested old site be removed from Google indexing, submitted a Sitemap of new site. Changed feed at Feedburner and started a new listing at Technorati.

All that remains now is to make a couple of more design tweaks over the coming weeks as the site beds in, and to start the slow climb back up Google’s ranking system.

House warming party, anyone?

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PLEASE IGNORE:

Technorati Profile

Is Skype overrated for business use?

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UPDATE: One year on from writing this post and I’ve renewed my SkypePro service. I had no issues at all with the service in the year following this post, and while I still wouldn’t recommend relying on them 100%, I am impressed with the flexibility the service has offered me. Here’s hoping Skype have upped their game for good.

Skype is running an advertising campaign with a difference. They’ve kitted out Rebecca, their 26-year-old Australian travel nomad, with some mobile Skype gear. She has to remain in perpetual motion for 33 days while travelling around the world, using Skype to blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace her way into our hearts and minds. And she’s a copywriter, so we should expect some readable writing too (Twitter constraints aside).

Now, I know translators are a crazy bunch of early adopters when it comes to technology (ahem), so before anyone gets too excited, I feel it’s my duty to sound a cautionary note: Be sure you know what you are letting yourself in for before relying on Skype for your business needs – and always have a Plan B!

Let me explain. I’ve been using Skype in a non-work capacity since early 2006, but as a handy-to-have novelty, rather than a key part of keeping in touch. There were a couple of things I didn’t like about it in the early days which stopped me throwing myself whole-heartedly into the revolution. But hey, it was a reasonably cheap way of making calls to my many family members and friends overseas, and Skype never pretended to be a fixed landline replacement (you can’t use them to make emergency calls, for example).

Technology moves on, of course, so in view of my pending move to Australia in February this year, I decided to upgrade to the paid service to give it a more serious (read: business) try. I’d heard some horror stories, but I’d also spoken to a few people, including other translators, who use it in a work capacity to great success. I signed up for a package which allowed me to set up a fixed UK line-land number and a voicemail service in a couple of very quick and easy steps. Skype is not always the cheapest way to make or receive calls when you involve landlines or mobiles, so it wasn’t really about saving money (although that’s always welcome, of course). But I figured the benefits of having a local number for my clients to call would be enormous, especially as I’ve had a couple of jobs on the go over the move, and given the time change of 10 hours, a voicemail service was definitely a welcome service too. The set-up cost for this particular package was only about €20 a year. So far, so good.

A couple of months in and I have to say, I still have my reservations. Calls out (i.e. me making calls) are great – no complaints there. I’ll certainly continue to use Skype to make business and personal calls.

But the call-in service (i.e. me taking calls) is still not reliable enough for my liking. The fixed-line numbers are occasionally down and my voicemail is frequently out-of-service. And that’s just the times I’ve “caught” it. Realistically, I’ll probably keep the landline numbers until my subscription runs out, given the lack of alternatives that suit my needs, but I’ll be withdrawing the numbers from circulation in the meantime. And I definitely won’t be having them printed onto my new business cards.

I’m not complaining, mind you – I was aware of the pitfalls before I signed up and I knew not to rely on their non-existent customer service to bail me out either. It’s just that personally, I’d rather not have the hassle of wondering if it is or isn’t, so I’ll do without until the next best thing comes along. Fair enough. With all this in mind, my little trial has not had too much of an impact on my business either – I’d given clients some other non-Skype numbers to reach me just in case, and we tend to communicate mainly via email anyway.

So is Skype worth giving a go within your business? Definitely – in fact, you’d be crazy to ignore it. But just don’t say you weren’t warned.

I’d love to hear about your Skype experiences – please leave a comment and let me know.

HT to WebWorkerDaily for the Skype Nomad story.

Blogrushing Translators :)

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You may notice I’ve added a new widget to my sidebar called Blogrush – the idea is it will display links to similar blogs, so if you enjoy There’s Something About Translation… then hopefully, you’ll see something you like there too. It’s still very much in its early phases and I expect it may take a bit of fiddling with before it becomes really useful – I’m willing to give it a chance but will be keeping a close, beady eye on it!

Of course, it should also help boost my traffic, and I’m curious to see what will happen there too.

If you have a blog yourself and are interested in getting more information about Blogrush, click here. It’s very easy to add and there are some excellent video tutorials on setting it up.

In defense of Facebook

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I’m SO tired of reading articles like this about how social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo are a waste of work time. It’s almost as stupid as the argument that translation memories make for bad translators! Applications are mere TOOLS people (and we all know what a bad workman does with his tools). And yes, as with all new tools, of course there may be a bedding-in period while users develop effective working habits*, but that does not mean they are a waste of time.

I also find the hypocrisy of employers more than a little irritating. Since when is cultivating human contacts a waste of time? Do you not hire us for our people skills? Do you not benefit from the industry contacts made during our pricey postgraduate degrees? When someone in my network comes through with business and/or other useful information, why does it matter the way in which I maintained that relationship? Or would you rather I spent hours flicking through a Rolodex filled with dog-eared business cards, or devising search queries for my snazzy little database of names, numbers and conversation pointers?! Clearly, what really annoys these people is that we’re doing things differently to The Way They Have Always Been Done.

Online networking sites create and nurture opportunities for human interactions, they don’t replace them. I mean, I’d be only too happy to arrange to meet all my friends face to face, only I don’t have the time – I’m already expected to work longer hours than anyone else in Europe…

With so many employers with attitudes like this, is it any wonder that many of us are turning our backs on traditional forms of employment?

* If you have been affected by any of the issues discussed in this post i.e. excessive time on social media, then I suggest you check out Chris Brogan’s post for an excellent approach on managing your social media tools. In complete confidence.

Credit where credit is not due?

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Apparently, I’m an e-expert…

Our research suggests the following:

e-experts are well above average in their understanding, exploration, and use, of the digital universe. An active online consumer, you really appreciate the benefits of digital devices to your life, which includes work, leisure, keeping in touch, shopping, travel, and entertainment. You are keen to share your enthusiasm, and are already thinking about your next e-nlivening e-xperience!

…but I’m not sure appreciation, enthusiasm or even thinking comes into it – I’m just a perfectly “normal” Gen Y-er.

I’ve put a link to the survey in the right-hand column of my blog. Have a go and let me know what you think.

What to look for in a translation course

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If you are considering further study or qualifications in translation, then this little article will be right up your street! It’s been around a while, but is still very relevant: in it, Anthony Pym explains a conflict he found himself faced with given the recent explosion in courses offering training in CAT tools :

As a teacher, I want to convey the whole range of skills required by the labour market. And yet, I admit, my critical students have a point: when they sign up for translation, they should expect to translate, on the basic level of an interface between languages, the stuff of linguistics. So is translation competence really the same as it always was (as those students expect)? Or has it radically altered in the age of electronic tools (as the nature of my course would suggest)?

Pym then goes on to discuss four different models of translation competence, and basically concludes that while good CAT skills are undoutedly key to finding a job in the current market, it’s important that translator trainers remember that they are merely tools and don’t in themselves constitute a “translator competence”. Worth bearing in mind when reviewing those translation courses!

My view? Focus on getting your language and translation skills up to scratch, and keep an eye out for some hands-on sessions with different CAT tools too – the technical knowledge will follow. If you don’t remember a time before internet and email, chances are you’ll just wonder what all the fuss was about anyway … 🙂