iti scotnet newsletter august 2014
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August 2014
ITI SCOTNET NEWSLETTER
Photo
: M
oya
n B
renn
(Flick
er.
com
)
Isabel Hurtado de Mendoza MITI Tel: 07762 300068 ITI Scottish Network Newsletter Editor Email: [email protected]
Summer afternoons
It’s a Sunday today, and a summer
afternoon too. I could be out and about,
but I’m reading extremely interesting
event reports and articles submitted by
ScotNet members instead. And it’s a joy to
share with you all this knowledge and
passion for our profession.
While I work on this issue, I wonder about
summer time. How does it affect freelance
translators and interpreters? Do my
colleagues have more or less work
between June and September? Do they
take a long-awaited break, or do they
prefer to be there for their usual clients,
and even get new ones because their
regular translators are on holidays?
What about CPD? I have made good use of
the month of July and delved a bit further
into my specialisms, with three webinars
on literary translation, a webinar on
subtitling and a 20-hour intensive course
on dubbing. There’s plenty on offer for
traditionally slower months — whenever
those are for you!
Still, if you prefer to relax in the summer
and leave your working and training for
September, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of
inspiration in this issue. Just remember to
keep us in the loop!
Isabel ♦
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon;
to me those have always been the two
most beautiful words in the English
language.”
~ Henry James
Inside this issue
Dates for your diary 2
There's more to CAT tools than love and hate 2
Atwood in Translationland 7
‘Terps north and south of the border unite 10
BP14: International conference for freelance
translators and interpreters 11
Hyped up on Swedish coffee 15
Continuous professional development survey –
The results 18
But how do they do it? 20
Emotional Intelligence 22
Recognising your own “wall” — another
approach to staying productive 23
Your committee under the spotlight 25
Member news 27
ScotNet grants 29
Looking forward to the next issue… 29
Your committee at a glance 30
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 2
Dates for your diary
ITI ScotNet Autumn Workshop ‘Link In, Tweet
Up, Branch Out!’, a joint event with Tweet Up
Alba: 18th October, from 9.30am Radisson Blu
Hotel, 301 Argyle Street, Glasgow. Anne
Diamantidis will speak on how to effectively
promote your public image on social media.
See the recently issued call notice for full
details and registration form.
The Scottish Society of the Chartered Institute
of Linguists (CIoL): 20th September, 2 pm,
Queen’s Hotel, Perth. ‘Teaching English as a
Foreign Language’ with speaker Alison Thomas,
an experienced TEFL teacher who currently
teaches at the University of Edinburgh. For
further information, please visit:
www.iol.org.uk/membership/soc_scottish.asp
or email: Anne Withers [email protected].
Setting Up as a Freelance Translator ITI Online
Course: September-November 2014. Over
more than 20 hours of webinars and individual
sessions, you will learn how to develop a
freelance translation business and gain an
understanding of how the translation market
operates. For more information visit
www.iti.org.uk/professional-development-
events/iti-online-courses and read a report
from a SUFT Spring 2014 student on page 23.
ITI Conference ‘Renew, Rejuvenate, Regenerate
— Translating and interpreting in an evolving
world’: 23-25th April 2015. Two full days of
presentations, keynote speeches, panels and
fringe events, a pre-conference day of
masterclasses (23 April), and a conference
dinner. You can already find some preliminary
information and preregister here: http://iti-
conference.org.uk.
Translation Slam: 26th October at 5.30pm
(venue TBC). Scottish PEN are doing a series of
Translation Slams to promote the work of
translators and the value of books in
translation. The next event is part of the
Dundee Literary Festival
(www.dundee.ac.uk/literarydundee): Chiew-
Siah Tei, the Chinese-Malayan author of The
Hut of Little Leaping Fishes and The Mouse-
Deer Kingdom, will be providing a piece for
translation from Chinese into English. With the
participation of Esther Tyldesley who translated
the works of Xinran. For more information,
contact Rosemary Burnett at
www.scottishpen.org.
Language Show Live: 17-19th October, Olympia
(London). Sample the latest language products,
experience different cultures and discover a
wealth of opportunities to enrich your language
skills. Register to get your free tickets:
www.languageshowlive.co.uk/Content/Visit-
Language-Show-Live%20%20
For more events, remember to visit www.iti.org.uk, where you
will find the International Calendar of Events (ICE), or our
own website www.itiscotland.org.uk/diary.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 3
There's more to CAT tools than love and hate
Our network's spring event was bound to be controversial. Professor Philipp Koehn, Chair
of Machine Translation at the University of Edinburgh was going to talk about an old foe
of many translators — computer-aided translation. Did he cause havoc? Read Renate
FitzRoy’s report to find out.
On March 22nd, a good crowd of ScotNetters
and their guests gathered at Heriot-Watt
University to listen to one of the most
renowned researchers in statistical machine
translation (SMT), Prof. Philipp Koehn. Philipp
is the original author of the Moses SMT
engine, which forms the basis for so many of
the current commercial machine translation
services. SMT works by analysing the
statistical probability of a (machine-
generated) translation for a given source
text. Right now, he is working on
CASMACAT, one of two large EU-supported
projects on integrating SMT with tools for
professional translators (the other being
MATECAT) and a whole host of other related
and unrelated networks. With their huge
computing capacities and vast corpora of
texts in 110 languages, Professor Koehn and
his team are on the cutting edge of machine
translation. They are not part of the
linguistics department, but of mathematics
and computer science.
Having been a student in the early 1970s, I
am perhaps well placed to put this project
and its significance in a historical
perspective. In “my day” linguistics was all
the rage and Chomsky’s seminal publications
on generative grammar were hotly debated
— the idea that all languages shared a deep
universal grammar structure underlying the
very different grammatical surface structures
— something hard-wired into the human
brain. And would it be possible to replicate
that on computers? Linguists learned to
program computers and began to adapt
grammar and semantic rules. It became quite
complex and involved — all those never-
ending tree structures of sentences. And yet
the question remained: Would a machine ever
be able to tell the difference between “out of
sight, out of mind” and “invisible idiot” — the
standing joke of the day?
When I went back to University in the late
1990s, things had moved on considerably.
Rather like pre-Copernican astronomy, the
attempt to develop rule-based machine
translation systems had come to a dead end.
The rules were unable to cope with the
complexities of the translation process. An
approach using the statistical laws of
probability, however, had been very
successful in the very limited field of
meteorology — Canadian weather forecasts
relied on a very usable machine translation
system between French and English.
While this was happening, software
developers were also looking at human
translation and thought that enormous
productivity gains could be made —
especially in technical translation — if text
that was once translated could be inserted
automatically. This would also help
consistency of terminology — CAT tools were
born.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 4
We are now seeing the confluence of CAT
tools and SMT development. Machine
translation results are at our fingertips
without us having painstakingly built our own
terminology databases. Philipp began his talk
with a picture of the Rosetta Stone to
demonstrate that to the machine, the
hieroglyphs were one set of data, the Greek
letters a distinct other. By assigning a known
Greek word to a certain hieroglyphic symbol,
it was possible to decipher the Rosetta Stone,
and this is essentially the way machine
translation works. A Chinese text might be
reproduced by a machine translation system
as follows:
No, it is not your fault if you cannot make
much sense out of this string of words. At
this level of development, the system cannot
produce a recognisable grammatical
structure. It did much better with a French
text, where the structure is closer to English,
but still, to make sense, the example would
need quite a bit of human post-editing.
Basically, what machine translation is trying
to achieve is this:
Or, in words, taking a source text, analysing
it to produce an “Interlingua” version, from
which the machine generates the
corresponding target text. Interlingua
represents the “translating medium/agent”,
i.e. the machine translation process.
Research into SMT has considered this
problem according to the classical linguistic
divisions of lexical, syntactic and semantic
transfer. Professor Koehn introduced these
concepts by way of the problems the
machine may encounter at each of the
various levels:
Lexical: How does the machine distinguish
between the meanings of “bank” and
“interest” in the following two sentences?
- He deposited money in a bank account with
a high interest rate.
- Sitting on the bank of the Mississippi, a
passing ship piqued his interest.
Easy — it’s context! Feed the machine with
enough material, and the surrounding
context will help it decide what is meant. The
amount of material is no problem in this age
of the Internet, so to optimise results, it
helps to restrict the search to a well-defined
context.
Syntactic: The source text always comes in as
a string of words. Rendering the string “as is”
using a lexical approach would result in
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 5
examples like the translation from Chinese
above. So the machine needs some
algorithms that tell it the function of the
various “bits of string” — i.e. what represents
a subject, predicate/verb and object in a
sentence. It needs to consider the syntax.
Through this analysis, the string can be
replaced by a more “meaningful” tree, which
then helps to generate a corresponding tree
in the target language. Welcome back,
Chomsky! In a digital system like machine
translation, each binary decision takes time,
and the more complex a syntactic system,
the more choices must be made. Here is a
six-step example on how the system would
analyse, translate and re-order a relatively
simple German sentence:
In the case of English to German, English
syntax is pretty straightforward, whereas
German allows for a lot of variation.
However, if English structural rules are
imposed on the German syntactic tree, the
German output is still understandable. I
wonder what happens if the source language
is an agglutinative language like Turkish,
where some syllables in nouns and verbs
would have to be represented by words in
English?
Semantic: The research into semantic
transfer in SMT is still in its infancy.
Professor Koehn’s examples largely
resembled those from lexicography — one
word in the source language may be
translated in three different ways in the
target language, or idiomatic expressions
may be used that bear no resemblance at all.
The former problem may be resolved by big
data — e.g. how to translate the German
word “Sicherheit” into English — while the
latter would need human input. The rules for
machine translation may include the use of
equivalent syntactic structures and research
is looking at the development of Abstract
Meaning Representation (AMR) in the form of
algorithms. Right now and for the
foreseeable future, restricting the domain
(domain adaptation) of the text that goes
into the machine translation engine remains
the key recipe for success in terms of the
engine’s output.
Learning from data: On all three levels, Big
Data is vital for generating collocations and
fluency. The main corpora used for Professor
Koehn’s project come from the European
Parliament. These are high-quality texts,
with translations by well-qualified human
translators.
Recently, however, the European Parliament’s
translation service has no longer been able to
provide an entire corpus of all EU languages,
due to budget restrictions which have seen
translations produced only on demand. This
is quite a setback for researchers. We can see
from other online projects working with
corpora that quality is often quite an issue.
Other texts that are used for machine
translation trials include news texts, as they
are generally in the public domain and have
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 6
no issues concerning intellectual or
commercial property rights. Every year,
machine translation researchers pit their
systems against human translations (work is
commissioned from an agency) to measure
their success. Regular progress has been
recorded.
Working on machine translation is certainly
an intellectual challenge, and it is easy to see
that academics want to find out what can be
done. What is in it for big organisations (EU,
UN)? Mainly, they hope to speed up and
automate the translation process in order to
make more text available more quickly. This
is also why this project does not focus on a
few main languages, but is doing the
groundwork on 110 languages. What is in it
for the individual user? There are different
levels for different users: a user who just
wants to know the gist of something may be
tolerant of some errors — e.g. Google
Translate for websites. Another user might
want to communicate with somebody who
speaks a different language, in a situation
where any ambiguities can be sorted by
simply asking questions. Translations for
publication require higher quality and are the
domain of human translators. Researchers
hope that machine translation will also
facilitate human translation. What does this
development mean for individual translators?
We have already seen machine translation
plugins that work at lexical and possibly
syntactic levels in our CAT tools — these are
certainly handy, and the more context-
controlled these are, the more helpful they
can be. Increasingly, SMT research is going in
the direction of integrating with human input
and corrections in real time, so that the
machine can learn as the human translator
corrects it. Try it yourself with the
CASMACAT and MATECAT demos (these
provide an interactive front-end interface to
MOSES, Professor Koehn’s SMT system). But
beware — they won’t be the fastest of tools
running on a typical translator’s PC!
What is a bit unsettling for us translators is
the use of machine translation to produce
text. That is where the syntactic level comes
in. Having “productivity” in mind, big
organisations may want to save time —
putting a French text into the system to
produce an English translation. The English
version is then translated (hopefully by
humans) into other languages. The English,
however, largely follows French sentence
structures and is no longer an English
idiomatic text. Translators who work from
the English text must first restructure it to
get style and emphasis right before they can
even begin to translate. This is already
happening, and it’s annoying and frustrating
for trained translators who, after all, want to
get the meaning and tone of a text across. It
may well take longer than having the text
manually translated into English first.
What’s next? Well, in addition to interactive
or real-time human input/correction, the
next big thing is integrating with speech. As
statistical processes, both SMT and speech
recognition rely on maths, and the two
branches are converging. See the EU-BRIDGE
project for an example. ♦
CASMACAT: www.casmacat.eu
MATECAT: www.matecat.com
Moses: www.statmt.org/moses
SMT research: www.statmt.org
SMT Group at University of Edinburgh (Philipp’s
team): www.statmt.org/ued EU-BRIDGE: www.eu-bridge.eu
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 7
Photo
: Besh
ef
(Flick
r.co
m)
Atwood in Translationland
Back on the 18th of February, ScotNet member Robert Arnott couldn’t help biting the
apple of temptation. Being an amateur author and translator, he had to attend the Sebald
Lecture at the British Library, London, courtesy of the British Centre for Literary
Translation and the University of East Anglia.
Last November, when I learned that Margaret
Atwood, doyenne of speculative fiction, was
going to give a talk at the British Library
about her own work in translation, I couldn’t
resist the temptation to book myself a couple
of days in London. In writing my own
speculative novel (don’t worry — I’ll let you
know if it ever gets published!) I’ve
sometimes wondered how well some
passages or invented names might transfer
to French or Russian, for instance, and what
the etiquette is for communicating with
translators. I was intrigued to hear from one
of the world’s great writers about what
happens when otherworldly neologisms and
translation come together.
In front of a capacity audience of around
250, the British Library’s Kristian Jensen
introduced the 25th anniversary lecture
honouring WG Sebald, writer and founder of
the BCLT in 1989. The event was
enthusiastically facilitated by award-winning
author Naomi Alderman, who certainly
pleased the translator-heavy audience with
such opening thoughts as “We don’t think
enough about what important writers
translators are”. She recounted that she was
once involved in a workshop where 14
English to Italian translators tackled some
passages from her work in analytical detail —
she likened the experience to having 14
experts prosciutto-slicing her brain.
Robert couldn’t resist the temptation to hear
Margaret Atwood talk about translation.
Alderman then introduced Margaret
Atwood’s “wide-travelling mind”, and the
Canadian author embarked on her gently
paced, thought-provoking, informative and
highly entertaining talk. She promised to take
a “peripatetic, serendipitous, diversionary
and odd” approach. It was, and in the most
delightful way.
Atwood started off by mentioning the letters
of the late WG Sebald to his translators and,
evoking some common ground with Sebald,
she spoke about the period of her own life
spent in Norfolk, in the 1980s. Much hilarity
was provided by her descriptions of the
locals’ tales about the haunted old cottages
of the area, featuring such spectral
characters as a “headless woman — although
she was kept in the kitchen, as headless
women often are”.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 8
Margaret Atwood’s early life was spent in
Québec, but in a remote, indeed cut-off,
location, without the immersion of living in a
French-speaking community. She regrets not
benefiting from today’s language labs — or
indeed modern teaching. When she visited
France, she was stymied when wanting to ask
for, say, a cup of coffee or accommodation
with a bathroom — “neither of these having
been mentioned by Racine”.
Atwood told the story of a fellow North
American settling in a small French town,
puzzled as to why it was so difficult to find
the health food store that must surely be
around somewhere. Asking for “le magasin
de nourriture de santé” only provoked the
shaking of heads. Trying to explain further,
the foreigner asked where she could find a
shop selling “nourriture sans préservatifs”.
Homing in on literary translation at last,
Atwood declared that “Choices that bedevil
the writer bedevil the translator 10 times
over”. With relief, she added, “At least I don’t
have to translate my own freaking books”,
and she admitted, “I am sometimes [the
author corrected this to ‘always’] a nightmare
for my translators”. With all those puns and
neologisms, who could argue?
Now we were getting into the nitty-gritty of
word choice, both in the writing and in the
translation: we simply have to get it right, as
“books are language, and nothing else”.
Photo: University of East Anglia website
The questions familiar to all of us as
translators, especially literary translators,
were soon covered. What is wanted? Plenty of
colourful foreign phrases, or a cultural
translation so complete that people reading
the original and the translation wouldn’t
know which is which? And the old chestnut of
deciding whether to explain something in the
body of text, or using footnotes or a
glossary. As Margaret Atwood recognises,
“such questions keep translators awake at
night”. Indeed, the author is convinced that
some of her books are a little longer in the
translated version precisely because of the
unavoidable need for extra explanation
compared with the original. There will be
instances where the translator has no choice
but to render an essential source word with a
double meaning by using two words or
phrases instead of just one.
We all know that translators are alert to fine
detail, and the audience was delighted to
hear how our fellow professionals often
highlight errors in the original text that
might be overlooked by the professional
editor or proofreader. “Nobody is going to be
reading your text more minutely than a
translator.” It’s not just linguistic points that
get picked up — one translator was intrigued
to note that a lift boy in a story was
“Choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator 10 times
over."
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 9
apparently the same person as the important
ministerial adviser. Was this high-ranking
official working in the hotel undercover to
spy on people? What an extraordinary plot
development! No, the author had to admit —
the use of the same name was simply an
error.
For the translator, plot-driven works are
generally easier to work with but, with the
fantastical, inventive words of Margaret
Atwood to contend with, extensive queries
from translators are inevitable. Atwood spoke
about the large volume of letters she would
receive from her translators — and now of
course emails. The questions might be on
what the precise relationship of an uncle or
an in-law is, there being different words in
some languages. There is the culture-
specific: “What is granola?” Or even, “Is this
sentence funny?”
Communication comes in from translators in
some places, but not others. Atwood’s
experience is that texts simply get changed
in certain countries, and she has to rely on
whatever feedback she can get. Perhaps not
surprisingly, Franco’s regime would not allow
the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale in
Spanish, so its first publication in that
language was South American. The novel is
published in Iran, the author said in response
to a question — but don’t expect to find it as
a set text in every US school…
What about Atwood’s poetry? Yes, it has been
widely translated too, although, inevitably,
the result tends to be either good poems that
are not good translations, or accurate
translations that “didn’t hack it as poems”.
Atwood nevertheless believes that achieving
both is possible.
Margaret Atwood had praise for
simultaneous interpreters too, and wondered
just how much they improved international
relations, changing the dialogue from rude
into diplomatic when necessary.
If there is one fundamental thought from this
lecture to close with, it is to remember how
writing from scratch is a way of capturing,
indeed translating, experience, place, objects
and people with our choice of words — “All
writing is an act of translation”.
PS — I did spot Eyvor Fogarty leaving the
auditorium, and I was pleased to read her
column reviewing the event in the May-June
2014 issue of ITI Bulletin. As Eyvor
mentioned in her article, the whole lecture is
available on YouTube, at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4_K3EkPHr4 —
I can promise you an entertaining and
affirming hour and a half. ♦
Writing from scratch is a way of capturing, indeed translating, experience, place, objects and
people with our choice of words – “All writing is an act of
translation”.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 10
‘Terps north and south of the border unite
It’s a time of trouble for interpreters nationwide, and the National Register of Public
Service Interpreters felt like they needed to raise their profile. When they came up to
Scotland in March, with a clear agenda in mind, Anne Withers was there to listen.
For those of you familiar with interpreting,
and public service interpreting in particular,
the NRPSI does not need an introduction. For
others, a brief outline might be helpful. The
NRPSI was, from its conception until April
2011, administered by the Chartered
Institute of Linguists as a register of
professionally qualified and experienced
interpreters in the field of public services —
police, courts, health, social services, etc.
Now an independent, not-for-profit
organisation, NRPSI Ltd continues to maintain
this register and to promote standards in the
profession.
Despite its name, the NRPSI does not have a
significant presence in Scotland and it was
with a view to raising its profile that the
Chairman of the Board of Directors, Ted
Sangster, and the CEO, Stephen Bishop, came
to Edinburgh at the beginning of March for a
series of meetings with Heriot-Watt
University, interpreters from the register,
members of professional bodies and
agencies providing interpreting services.
As well as wishing to increase awareness of
the register, Ted and Stephen were anxious
to find out how the NRPSI can be made more
relevant and more supportive to those
working as public service interpreters in
Scotland. Like their counterparts south of the
border, PSIs here have found themselves
increasingly disillusioned by the way their
professional standing has been undermined
following the awarding of a Scottish
government contract for the provision of
interpreting services in the criminal justice
sector to a single agency. When the same
situation arose in England and Wales, it led to
many highly qualified interpreters refusing to
work for lower rates of pay and some high
profile instances of unqualified interpreters
being used resulting in court cases
subsequently being postponed or even
collapsing (see the House of Commons
Justice Committee Report from February
2013
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm2012
13/cmselect/cmjust/645/645.pdf and the
government’s response
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/u
ploads/attachment_data/file/192487/jsc-
report-interpreting.pdf).
NRPSI Ltd, the Chartered Institute of
Linguists, the Institute of Translation and
Interpreting and other interested bodies have
been working together to campaign for the
provision of properly funded, professional
interpreting services in the justice sector
under the banner Professional Interpreters
for Justice (PI4J). For the most recent
document outlining the approach to
improving the provision of interpreting
services in the Scottish criminal justice
system, see www.copfs.gov.uk/
images/Documents/Equality_Diversity/Skills
%20for%20Justice%20report.pdf. SITA
(Scottish Interpreters and Translators
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 11
Association), a body set up to campaign as
PI4J has done in England and Wales, has been
working to reverse the undermining of
professional interpreters in the public service
sector in Scotland and the situation here has
improved with the government contract for
court work now awarded to a different
agency.
There are likely to be follow-up meetings
and visits involving representatives of NRPSI
Ltd here in Scotland with some collaboration
on continuing professional development for
interpreters also mooted. For more
information about the organisation, see its
website at www.nrpsi.co.uk. ♦
BP14: International conference for freelance translators and
interpreters
As you all know, ScotNetters like travelling far afield to attend CPD events. Corinne
Durand and Alison Hughes are among the most avid travellers as regular readers will
know. Back in early May, they went to Budapest for what turned out to be two hectic days.
Alison reports.
What attracted me to BP14? Apart from the
fabulous city it was being held in, the
conference promised varied topics and
interesting speakers and the organisation
looked impressive. I would also have the
chance to meet many translators I engage
with on social media.
BP doesn’t actually stand for Budapest but for
business and practice and, over the two days,
I picked up one consistent message: good
translators and — even more importantly —
good writers, will survive and be very much
in demand.
Machine translation, as we know, is here to
stay and will become increasingly
sophisticated. There will be a split, with MT
handling bulk texts, social media content and
even (perhaps) repetitive technical content.
Marta Stelmaszak summarised it very nicely
in her session The Powerful Freelancer:
Knowledge workers will be in demand.
Knowledge workers (and this very much
applies to translators) are paid for what they
do with their brains and not what they do
with their fingers.
We should aim to be experts in our field:
Experience
Xpertise
Passion
Excellence
Recognition
Transferability
To do this we must think like an expert, feel
like an expert, act like an expert, master the
topic and create our niche. Most importantly
we need to position ourselves like an expert
and change our mindset. We need to get
better at selling our services. If we are
worried about sending our brochure to
prospective clients, we should turn the
concept around and decide we would be
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 12
failing the clients who could benefit from our
services if we didn’t send them the brochure.
In terms of writing skills, in her talk Writers
Worth Paying For, Rose Newell began by
asking us what we call ourselves: writer,
translator, wordsmith… Different attendees
liked different concepts for different reasons,
but I particularly liked the term ‘commercial
writer’, which avoids the negative
connotations associated with the term writer
(struggling artist, nowadays everybody is
writing a book…).
Following on from Martha’s point that
knowledge workers will survive in the
increasingly competitive translation market,
Rose drew a distinction between accurate
translations and effective translations. She
suggested we need to
hone our writing skills
and sell:
• entry to new markets
• new ideas
• new strategies
• cultural knowledge
• results
• the client an image of
where they want to be.
This fits nicely with Marta’s idea of becoming
an expert in our field. But why should we do
this? Can we not just continue to operate as
translators? Surely there will always be
agencies we can work for?
Of course you can, but the market is
changing. Ralf Lemster opened day 2 of the
conference with a session on specialisation
with this very message. There is a gap
opening up between the huge
agencies/companies and boutique
agencies/freelancers, and he was quick to
point out it’s a global trend. It’s not just
happening to us “poor translators”.
He used the example of a taxi app that has
been developed in Germany. The app is
being widely marketed. With the onset of this
technology taxi drivers were forced to sign
up to continue to operate. Then the
goalposts were moved and they were being
asked to pay a higher commission to the app
owner and finding themselves working for
less and less money. Alongside this, one
enterprising taxi driver bought himself a new
cab and started offering premium services.
He takes older people right up to their door
with their shopping and delivers for
businesses (sending text messages to
confirm the delivery has been made). He has
remained in business without having to pay
commission to the app
owner.
Ralf then handed over to
a panel of translators
who each spoke a little
about their specialisms:
Percy Balemans: fashion
Valeria Aliperta: legal and fashion
Ralf Lemster: financial
Tess Whitty: IT
Konstantin Kisin: legal, financial and video
games
The discussion was then opened up for
questions.
The general consensus was that you should
be an expert in your field, or at least know a
lot about it, before you market yourself as a
specialist translator. Percy mentioned she
started out working in a field in which she
The general consensus was that you
should be an expert in your field, or at
least know a lot about it, before you
market yourself as a specialist translator.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 13
wasn’t an expert but about which she knew a
lot. She continued to learn and the turning
point was when she felt comfortable
attending an industry event and exchanging
with other professionals on their level and
using their language.
How do you choose a specialism?
Unsurprisingly the consensus was that you
choose something you love but make sure
there’s a market for it. Our own Corinne
Durand suggested it could be more profitable
to choose something you’re good at. Ralf
suggested specialists in niche markets
should market themselves slightly broader to
attract customers to their website. He himself
is a specialist in the language of the financial
markets, but markets himself as a financial
translator and passes on any work he can’t
handle to other financial translators. When
marketing your services, don’t talk about
yourself but what you do. Build networks
with colleagues, clients and potential clients.
This leads nicely to the topic of forming
small cooperatives with other translators.
Tanya Quintieri gave us a concrete example
of how this is done in her talk The Lone
Freelancer no more: network with fellow
freelancers to create “teams on demand” and
market your cooperation at a professional
level. The key to success is obviously
working with people you trust, on a give-
and-take basis, and using intelligent
workflows and internet tools. But the key is
to market your cooperation:
- set up a website or landing page
- produce business cards for the
cooperation
- if possible share a workspace
- transparency.
From a legal perspective it’s best to create a
company with a legal agreement. In her case,
for each project 10% of earnings go to the
company and the remainder to the
translator(s) working on the project. The
translators earn different rates and know
what the others earn (transparency).
In the afternoon of 3rd May, Nigel Saych told
us about his “family” of translators and the
tool he had developed to manage the
workflow in his two-part Team up for
Success workshop. In his case, a condition of
the collaboration is that all translators
involved are paid the same hourly rate. With
97 translators and counting, it’s the only
manageable solution and a condition of the
collaboration. The tool (Word Team —
www.wordteam.eu) is available for use by
other groups (free of charge for groups of up
to 5 translators and 5 clients and then for a
monthly fee). The idea is that a team of
translators can work together without
employing somebody to do the PM’s job.
Groups are normally set up by a small
number of translators and the founder
translators become admins. There must be a
main admin who liaises with the client but
this function can be assigned to any one
admin at any time. The idea is that the group
decides its own terms and conditions and
modus operandi and the tool provides the
means to put it into practice. Indeed, the
“terms and conditions” are mandatory and
clients must accept them (tick box) before
confirming a job. One question both Tanya
and Nigel struggled a little to answer was:
How are you different to an agency? The
conclusion drawn was that it is very much a
collaboration with more transparency and
less of a “them and us” approach.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 14
In this changing world where the “middle
man” is disappearing, collaboration might
just be the way forward. And to collaborate, a
group will need tools. Inevitably these will
need to be cloud-based and Anne-Charlotte
Perrigaud’s session entitled IT security, big
data and cloud computing explained just
what that meant. We’re all familiar with
Dropbox, Facebook and many other cloud
applications. To explain the cloud-based
concept, Anne-Charlotte used the
buying/renting a house analogy. If we buy
software packages we’re stuck with them but
if we rent (cloud computing) we can stop
using them when we no long need them or
only pay for the ones we need when we need
them. And of course access from anywhere is
also a plus.
With advances in technology, compatibility is
no longer an issue (think xml for CAT tools)
but of course security is paramount. She
drew a distinction between SaaS — software
as a service (CAT tools, TM tools, etc.) — and
infrastructure as a service (cloud storage).
Many agencies have adopted automated
systems and the downside is that all your
assets (TMs etc.) belong to them. If you are
working with direct clients you need your
own cloud. Unfortunately I had to leave
before the security part to attend another
session but I did catch one essential tip. If
you are storing data on the cloud, you must
never use a free application.
Regrettably I missed Tess Whitty talking
about websites for freelance translators and
Inga Michaeli’s session about translating
guidebooks, but I did have the pleasure of
listening to Anne Diamantidis on SEO, which
I’ll not go into because she’s coming to talk
to ScotNet in the autumn. Believe me, she’s a
great speaker and you’re in for a treat.
There were so many sessions I didn’t attend
(and some I attended that weren’t worth
reporting on) but the messages I took home
from BP14 are:
- be an expert and act like an expert
- learn what the client wants and learn how
to sell in your target market
- hone your writing skills
- don’t moan, do something.
And last, but not least, we enjoyed a wide
range of social activities including a walking
tour of Budapest, a dinner cruise on the
Danube, a farewell dinner at a spectacular
venue and a city bus tour. There were 150
attendees from all over the world with a large
contingent from the Eastern European
countries. Contacts were made, business
cards exchanged and friendships forged. It
was truly an unforgettable event. ♦
ScotNetters Alison and Corinne relaxing after the
conference [Photo: Corinne Durand]
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 15
Hyped up on Swedish coffee
On these pages, we usually recommend ScotNetters to venture abroad for CPD events,
but we might refrain from doing so in the future. On 9-11th May, Marion Greenway
attended the Swedish Association of Professional Translators (SFÖ) Conference in
Jönköping, Sweden. She learned, networked and had fun; but she was also at risk of heart
failure!
The title of the SFÖ Conference 2014 was
Pride and Enterprisingness and the theme
was pride in our profession and raising its
profile in industry. It was held in Kulturhuset
Spira, built by Jönköping County Council and
opened in 2011 as a new municipal space for
theatre, music and dance. It is an impressive
building with flowing lines and plenty of
light. The conference began on the Friday
with a welcome speech from the Mayor of
Jönköping, who gave us a very enthusiastic
summary of the history of the town and its
matchstick-making and weapon-producing
industries, complete with PowerPoint
presentation.
Kulturhuset Spira [Photo: Marion Greenway]
This was followed by a coffee break with
Swedish coffee and fika (Swedish cake). In my
absence, I had forgotten how strong the
coffee is there. It was served on arrival, at the
morning coffee break, after lunch and at the
afternoon coffee break and again after
dinner. After drinking four cups the first day,
I was totally wired and remembered I was not
used to it. So on Saturday I cut down to three
cups and had only two on Sunday. It was very
hard to resist as it is so good.
During the frequent coffee breaks there were
ample networking opportunities. I met other
ScanNet members, Rob Williams and Janine
Roberts, who were very friendly and helpful. I
also met an ex-colleague and friend from
when I worked in Germany, as well as a
project manager who works for STP Nordic,
an agency in Southampton that I work for,
and another couple of clients.
A wide range of workshops was available
with three options for every time slot. On
Friday afternoon I attended “Sluta jobba!”
(Stop work!) by Micael Dahlén, Professor of
Economics at Stockholm School of
Economics, also known as the rock star
professor. Dahlén has been ranked number
10 in the world among researchers in his
field of consumer behaviour, creativity and
marketing, as well as being an author and
internationally acclaimed speaker. He spoke
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 16
engagingly about life, happiness, love, career
and why it is a bad idea to work. He was
inspirational in a crazy sort of way.
On the Friday night, there was a buffet and
storytelling event in Jönköping County
Museum for our entertainment. Before dinner
we had the chance to look at the exhibits and
were offered an alcohol-free welcome drink;
the other Brits and I were obviously
wondering where the booze was. We soon
discovered we were allowed one glass of
wine with dinner and after that we had to
pay, not surprisingly considering the cost of
alcohol in Sweden. We were fed lovely
Scandinavian food: salmon with chilli cream
and potato gratin, followed by forest fruit
panacotta. The after-dinner entertainment
consisted of tales and sagas from Småland,
told by the excellent storyteller and founder
of The Museum of Legends in Ljungby and
the Ljungby Storytelling Festival, Per
Gustavsson. Dressed as the legendary
storyteller, Mickel i Långhult, he told folk
tales from Småland of poor farmers,
enterprising crofter boys, clever princesses,
bewitched children, masterful thieves and
rogues.
After an early morning coffee, I was ready for
more. Saturday began with “Manage your
own affairs” by Ian Hinchliffe, who had been
a university lecturer in England and Wales
and teacher at a private school in Norway
before joining IKEA in 1984 as corporate
language manager. Most excitingly, he is also
the co-author of Swedish: A Comprehensive
Grammar. He spoke very eloquently in
Swedish from his 30 years of experience
about how to make a professional impression
with your customers as a freelancer and
small business owner.
My next choice was “Develop your strengths
at work and in life” by life coach Charlotte
Hågård. Charlotte has written several popular
books on career development, she is a
speaker, entrepreneur and inspirational
coach. She is often interviewed in Swedish
media as an expert on career and leadership
questions and has worked as a columnist for
the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
Charlotte talked about how to find your
strengths and how to strengthen your
personal brand through increased insight.
Her main message was that we all have
talent; we just have to find it.
Hovrattstorget [Photo: Marion Greenway]
After an excellent lunch which was paid for
by Jönköping County Council, the afternoon
workshops began with “Linguistic self-
confidence — is it necessary?” with Ann
Cederberg from The Language Council of
Sweden. She spoke about Swedish language
Life coach Charlotte Hågård talked about how to find your
strengths. Her main message was that we all have talent; we just
have to find it.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 17
policy and how it can affect the individual, as
well as the Council’s work to promote the
use of Swedish in Sweden to make it a
national, practical, everyday language for all
inhabitants. I also managed to sneak into the
second half of SDL’s Studio 2014 seminar —
a presentation of the new features, tips,
tricks etc.
After another pleasant coffee break, it was
time to nip back to the hotel to get ready for
the Saturday evening entertainment, which
was a banquet and live music in the Elite
Stora Hotellet, a beautiful old hotel with
lovely ceilings. Unfortunately I had a dizzy
spell and had to go for a lie down so I missed
the dinner and music (the theme was the
history of the juke box with 60s music and
dancing). Apparently the three-course meal
was tasty but a bit skimpy. Back in my room I
watched Eurovision but only made it through
the first half hour or so before I decided I’d
reached my pain threshold and had to switch
it off.
On the Sunday morning, Cecilia Enbäck, from
Translator Scandinavia, and Anders Uddfors,
CEO of Semantix, gave a talk on the role of
translation companies in promoting
translation as a profession. They answered
questions and spoke about the issues that
are pertinent to the industry from their point
of view. They mentioned price pressure and
cheap rates from India and China etc. at the
expense of quality. According to a survey,
their customers said that quality is the most
important factor for them, followed by
deadline and last of all price. These findings
were received with some scepticism by the
freelancers present.
This was followed by “Structure and
package!” by Elisabet Sannas, a management
consultant who works with business
development for small and medium-sized
businesses. She works mainly with sales,
marketing and customer relations and spoke
about how to find, package, market and get
paid for all small services. The final seminar
of the day was “Anatomy for translators” with
Sture Axelsson, who gave us practical advice
on choosing medical terminology according
to the target audience and naming body
parts in Swedish, English and Latin.
The conference concluded with a closing
speech by the Convenor of SFÖ, Ingrid
Olsson, and another lovely lunch in
Kulturhuset Spira. I spent the rest of the
afternoon doing a bit of last-minute
shopping to get a couple of novels and some
Scandinavian food from the supermarket,
including flat bread, coffee, cheese and
Maribou chocolate. All in all, it was well
worth it, I had great fun, met lots of people,
spoke lots of Swedish and reacquainted
myself with one of my favourite countries.
Next year the SFÖ conference is being held in
Eskilstuna from 8-10 May and I would
heartily recommend it to any Scandinavian
linguists. Now I have a dilemma as I also
want to go to the ITI conference in
Newcastle… ♦
Ostra Storgatan [Photo: Marion Greenway]
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 18
Continuous professional development survey – The results
You might remember that Barbara Canton recently conducted a survey about continuous
professional development undertaken by translators in Scotland. Having had a good
response from ScotNetters, she kindly agreed to share the results of her study with us.
Readers of this newsletter will have received
my email via the ScotNet mailing list looking
for participants for my online survey about
continuous professional development
undertaken by translators in Scotland. In
addition to ITI ScotNetters, the request to
participate also went out to the mailing list of
attendees of the regular Proz.com powwow
meet-ups in Edinburgh to ensure a balanced
input from translators who are members of a
professional body and those who are not. I
would like to use this opportunity to thank
everyone who took the time to answer the
survey. I had 39 responses in total. The data
has now been analysed and has revealed
some expected and some rather unexpected
results.
Members of professional bodies undertake
more CPD than non-members
I was impressed by the amount of CPD many
translators undertake to brush up existing
skills or learn new ones. When asked about
the number of days they spent on CPD over
the past 12 months, almost 40% reported
that they had dedicated more than five days
to training. 13% had not undertaken any CPD
in this period at all, with the rest of
respondents being spread out between these
two responses.
Before I conducted the survey, I had expected
to find that members of a professional body
tend to undertake more CPD than translators
with no membership, but I was surprised by
just how big the difference was. While 60% of
the non-members reported not having
undertaken any CPD, the figure was under 7%
for members. Membership categories,
however, did not play a significant role.
Less predictable was the finding that female
translators are much more conscientious in
developing their knowledge and skills than
male translators. According to their
responses, about 44% of the latter did not
develop their professional expertise during
the last year. It also came as a surprise to me
that part-time translators on average spend
more time on CPD than full-time translators.
None of the part-timers dedicated less than
two days to continuous training, and 60%
even reported having spent more than five
days on CPD.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 19
At a first glance, it would seem that the rate
of translators not undertaking any CPD is
slightly higher the more experienced a
translator is. Some translators with many
years of experience commented that they
found it very difficult to find training suitable
for their high level of expertise, which would
explain this finding. However, given the few
responses in this category, more data would
be required to validate this hypothesis.
Out of the skills enhanced in CPD, subject
knowledge was most popular followed by
language and business skills.
Face-to-face events very popular
Given the vast variety of languages and
specialist fields translators work in, it comes
as no surprise that tailor-made informal CPD
such as reading a specialist publication is
very common. 67% of all respondents said
they had undertaken this form of CPD in the
past 12 months. Webinars proved equally
popular. More than 70% of all translators
asked attended a webinar (either live or on
demand) in the last year. But in-person
events did not trail much. 63% of the
respondents stated that they had attended an
in-person seminar and 30% had been to an
in-person conference. In view of the fact that
most in-person events tend to be centred
around Edinburgh, I find this finding quite
remarkable, all the more so as a postcode
comparison revealed no significant
relationship between the remoteness of a
translator’s location and their preference to
participate in online or in-person events. The
popularity of in-person seminars and
conferences is consistent with the finding
that 66% of all translators participating in the
survey stated networking with colleagues as
one of their reasons to undertake CPD.
ScotNetters will also not be surprised to hear
that the ITI was by far the most popular
organiser of CPD events with 64% of the
respondents participating in an event
organised by them.
Overall, the intrinsic motivation to develop
new skills and knowledge seems to be much
stronger than formal requirements. Thus,
62% of translators responded that they felt
they needed additional skills to do their job
well, and 75% said that they wanted to learn
something new out of interest. Only 13%
reported that CPD was a requirement for
their membership in a professional body,
while 25% were keen to demonstrate their
professionalism to their clients. It became
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 20
Photo
: danis
abella (
Flick
r.co
m)
obvious from some of the respondents’
comments that they view continuous training
as an essential part of their job.
More than 70% of all translators asked attended
a webinar in the last year
To sum up, the survey has confirmed some
assumptions such as the relationship
between membership in a professional body
and the amount of continuous professional
development a translator undertakes, but has
also produced some unexpected findings.
When interpreting the data, it has to be taken
into account, though, that there is always a
risk of bias as those translators most
dedicated to and interested in CPD were
more likely to take the time to answer the
survey. The largely quantitative data
gathered in this survey also has its
limitations when it comes to explaining the
findings. Other more qualitative research
methods would need to be employed, for
example, to explain why women outdo men
in terms of the time they spend on CPD.
If you have any questions about the survey or
would like to get more information about the
results, please write to
But how do they do it?
Successful translators have to start somewhere. Read on to learn
about what the ITI Setting Up as a Freelance Translator course
meant for ITI Spanish Network member Cynthia Gandeborn.
Life before the course
I decided that I wanted to work in the
translation industry four years ago, while
participating on a leadership project in Italy. I
had joined an international group of
representatives from different charities,
NGOs and think-tank organisations. The
nationalities involved were Polish, French and
Macedonian, and I, Peruvian-born,
represented the UK. English was the
language of communication; however, on this
specific day the only members of the host
organisation who could attend did not speak
any English. No one
else in the group
spoke Italian, but
as a Spanish
speaker, due to the
similarities of the
languages and
because they spoke
very slowly, I
managed to understand most of what they
were saying. Without giving it a second
thought I interpreted in both directions and
we were able to communicate! The incident
Cynthia Gandeborn of
Ryhall Translation &
Language Services (www.ryhall-tls.com)
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 21
went unnoticed, I think, because we just got
on with the rest of the schedule and
successfully completed two weeks of
training. But not for me, I realised that I
wanted to learn and train to work as a
translator — I definitely wanted to build
communication bridges.
This is why I spent the next few years of my
life studying for an MA in Translation, while
still holding on to my part-time job. I
obtained my degree after two years of hard
work and little sleep, and thought that I was
ready to face the translation industry. I had
my degree, but did not know what to do
next; I did not know how to tackle the egg-
or-chicken dilemma of getting translation
experience to support
applications to acquire
translation experience.
Does this sound
familiar?
The course
The ITI SUFT course was
just what I needed: an
eye-opening, informative, highly practical
and useful course for new graduates and
entrants to the profession, through which the
ITI offered a new graduate like me much-
needed coaching and advice. It was delivered
by eight experienced and successful
translators, who were exceptionally
supportive and highly approachable, and who
shared their experiences and offered
individual advice and tips to all participants.
Each one of them delivered a live
presentation, in the form of a webinar, which
was followed one or two days later by an
online discussion. It was an intensive and
demanding course, as each presentation
included at least one time-limited activity
generally due before its corresponding
discussion — in order, of course, to benefit
from timely feedback. The course offered me
guidance in recognising my unique selling
points. It provided me with advice on making
the most of the experience gained through
pro bono work and offered me great tips for
producing a translator-specific CV and cover
letter to showcase my abilities. I gained an
insight into communicating with clients and
much-needed advice on social media dos
and don’ts; and among other things, we
discussed specialisation and the value of
networking. To conclude, each individual unit
equipped me for the final task, which was to
put together my own business plan.
Life after the course
I learnt to take a good
look at myself to
acknowledge my key
strengths, the very
same strengths that I
had ignored when
comparing myself to
experienced, successful and younger
translators. I came to value the experience I
had gained through my previous career, a
fair share of knowledge and understanding
that I could bring into the field of translation
as a starting point for potential
specialisation. I was now ready to take a step
forward; and I took that step. Thus, with my
family’s support and armed with my business
plan, I am now a full-time freelance
translator working in the areas of literature
and general communications, human rights
and social policy, and, in the near future,
telecoms, the environment and technology as
well. ♦
The ITI SUFT course was just what I needed: an eye-opening,
informative, highly practical and useful course for new graduates and entrants to the profession.
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 22
Emotional Intelligence
It’s the section you’ve been waiting for — another instalment in the series on thriving as
a freelancer and avoiding “the wall” by Karen Tkaczyk and Laura Ball. Shall we start off
with Karen?
When a project manager emails and calls you
four times in fifteen minutes at 5pm on a
Friday, do you recognise their stress and
respond graciously? Or are you indignant?
When you have too much work this week, do
you find a way to say no to customers that
brings them back the next time they have a
suitable project? Do you come across as dry
or dismissive in your emails, and less
approachable than a peer who the client
contacts instead next week? Do you
recognise when stress at home is affecting
your work or vice versa? Do you see the
difference between how you responded to
the email from Ms Jones and to the one from
Mr Brown based solely on how you were
feeling that day? If so, will you control it next
week?
These examples show the need to recognise
and understand emotions in yourself and
others. We can all work to improve this in our
lives. My impression is that when we
understand our emotions better we are much
less likely to hit a wall. I also think that
understanding how we react and interact
helps our performance at work (and
elsewhere, but I’ll limit this short piece to the
T&I context).
Emotional intelligence analyses each
individual in four ways: two look at how we
function internally, and two look at how we
interact with others. Here they are.
We need to be self-aware (have the ability to
perceive aspects of our personality,
behaviour, emotions, motivations, and
thought processes) before we will be able to
apply the concepts to other people. It is hard
to be objective about ourselves, so if you
have never used psychometric tests on
personality type (e.g. Myers Briggs) or team-
working preferences (e.g. Belbin) that is a
good place to start looking at yourself. If that
is unappealing, how about writing down
portions of your life story every day?
Analysing experiences can help show why
you behave the way you do in certain
contexts. Once we understand ourselves, we
can move onto self-management. The aim
would be unconscious action but to work on
ourselves we usually have to take conscious
action to change behaviour and recognise a
potential mistake as it is happening. Then we
can adjust our behaviour accordingly. Social
awareness is about understanding the
dynamics between individuals and in groups.
Areas you might consider would be
compassion and conflict, and how
comfortable you are socially. The final
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 23
quadrant, one to work on once you have
some grasp of the first three, is Relationship
Management. Once you have that one down
you might maintain good relationships,
communicate clearly, inspire and influence
others, work well in a team, and manage
conflict. People who have all that mastered
would handle the examples I began with
calmly and constructively.
The concepts I discuss here are based on
material by Travis Bradberry and Jean
Greaves, and are widely available in books,
quizzes, courses and other “self-help”
materials by them and other authors. For
instance, you could take a look at
www.talentsmart.com. Googling the concept
will provide a huge number of resources on
the topic.
So one freelancer succeeds and another fails.
One translator hits a wall routinely, leading
to low (or slow) patches. Another has a
struggling practice. Yet another appears to
thrive, gaining new clients year on year and
speaking out on how much they love the
industry. Looking at experience or habits or
knowledge or intellectual capacity rarely
explains all the differences. Analysing
emotional intelligence can often be helpful to
fill that gap. How do you feel today? ♦
Recognising your own “wall” — another approach to staying
productive
And here is Laura’s take!
Following on from the previous article, I'm
fairly sure that, regardless of your individual
level of emotional intelligence, you will
probably still be familiar with the pattern of
going through cycles of enthusiasm followed
by general fed-upness, periods of energy
followed by fatigue, and times of
productiveness followed by stress. It can
however be difficult, if not impossible, to
predict when and how these cycles will occur.
This is made harder by the fact that our work
is not constant or predictable and may itself
come in irregular bursts that don’t coincide
with the times that we naturally feel
motivated. Equally, it isn’t just work that
affects how we feel — the emotional aspects
of life, from relationships, looking after
children and stress with bills to what you ate
yesterday, how well you slept last night and
forgetting to buy milk and running out will all
affect your resilience and ability to work
effectively.
As mental blocks can’t therefore be predicted
based on the work you receive, and as the
other aspects of life are also unpredictable,
rather than maintaining an organised
schedule and being disciplined, another
approach to avoiding the “wall” is to learn to
listen to your “inner voice”, or intuition. A key
factor to gaining emotional intelligence is to
learn how to catch that spontaneous reaction
to something and then acknowledge it.
Rather like an early-warning system, you can
pick up on little “clues” that you are
approaching the “wall”. These clues will be
different for everybody, so it might be
helpful to practice noticing your responses.
One way of doing this is to keep a “response
diary” — whenever you get an email, send off
a piece of work or find yourself struggling
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 24
Photo
: Je
s (F
lick
r.co
m)
with a hard word, note down one or two
words that describe your feelings at that
particular moment. As you become more
self-aware through doing this, you may well
find that certain feelings are more recurrent
than others or that certain feelings are
associated with certain thoughts. Once you
understand your responses more thoroughly,
you will be able to act more effectively to
stop negative feelings building up and, in
fact, building a wall for you to hit.
As hinted, however, listening to your
intuition isn’t quite enough — you also need
to acknowledge how you feel. Regardless of
what you think “should or shouldn’t” be
happening, it can help enormously to let go
and simply accept that however you feel is
fine. Whether you are managing 4,000 words
a day with no stress, or struggling to finish
1,000 — that’s fine. Before even beginning to
work out why you may feel a particular way,
it is important to notice your feelings and
simply accept them with no judgement —
struggling doesn’t mean that you’re a bad
translator, or that you’re losing your grip; it
simply means you are struggling — no more
and no less. Conversely, flying through your
work doesn’t mean you are an excellent
translator and getting everything right — it
merely means you are currently doing well. It
may sound like a simple truism to say “just
be”, but recognising and accepting your
feelings, and then behaving towards yourself
in way that acknowledges them can actually
have quite a profound and positive effect on
your attitudes towards work, yourself and
other people.
In a way, it’s rather like looking after a child
— if your child is tired and grizzly, you put
them to bed, even if it is an hour earlier than
usual. In fact, analytical psychology works
Another approach to avoiding the “wall” is to
learn to listen to your “inner voice”, or intuition.
with the idea of one’s “inner child”, which is
understood to be the “childlike, usually
hidden part of a person’s personality that is
characterised by playfulness, spontaneity and
creativity, usually accompanied by anger,
hurt and fear attributable to childhood
experiences”1. We never quite lose the
imprint of our childhood as we grow up, so
learning to recognise how your “inner child”
is feeling, and then caring for that “child”,
may help you to avoid that wall, or at least
prevent you from hitting it at top speed.
Working out the best way of caring for your
“inner child” is not always easy, but just as
children learn by experimenting, you too can
be open-minded and try out different
activities each time you notice you are
flagging2. You are an individual, with your
own idiosyncrasies, so there really is no rule
as to what you could do; whatever you feel
might be really *nice* right now is worth a
try. Every time that you start feeling
overwhelmed by it all is another time to try
out something new to take care of yourself.
So what do you feel like doing next? ♦
1 Merriam-Webster: www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/inner%20child
2 See also:
kerrybrook.ca/resources_articles_books_counselling/inner-
child
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 25
Your committee under the spotlight
This time, it’s Marian Dougan’s turn to be interviewed in her
capacity as ScotNet’s Deputy Webmaster. With my unfinished-
sentences interview, I tried to find out if she had any skeletons
in her cupboard, but she let me see a lot more than that!
As a child, I used
to love… Night-
time: reading in
bed. Daytime:
meeting my Dad
at the corner when he came home at
lunchtime with comics and a Milky Way for
us. He’d always give us a “swing” too.
I fell in love with languages… When I
discovered etymology at university, and all of
the borrowings that go on between
languages. The language I truly love is
English, for its variety and melting-pot of
influences and for all of the cultural
references that everyday speech contains
(without our realising it). In her novel “Moon
Tiger”, author Penelope Lively expresses this
much more eloquently than I ever could:
“Language tethers us to the world; without it
we spin like atoms. […] We open our mouths
and out flow ancestries whose origin we do
not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a
simple sentence of idle chatter we preserve
Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a
museum inside our heads, each day we
commemorate peoples of whom we have
never heard. More than that, we speak
volumes — our language is the language of
everything we have not read. Shakespeare
and the Authorised Version surface in
supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and
television. I find this miraculous. I never
cease to wonder at it. That words are more
durable than anything, that they blow with
the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter
parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive
and survive and survive.”
If I had to choose two cities in the world… I
can’t narrow it down to two so, in
alphabetical order:
Boston: Great beaches nearby, wonderful fish
and seafood, and a great martini.
Lisbon: Great beaches nearby, wonderful fish
and seafood, and a great caipirinha.
London: Great just about everything.
My life changed when… Oh, that’s a hard
one. There have been several milestones in
my life: getting my degree results (better
than I expected, and a great boost to my
self-esteem/confidence), moving to Italy
(which I hated!), meeting the man who’s now
my husband, having my children. They’re the
main events.
I sometimes dream… of setting off and
travelling the world and spending a few
weeks/months in any place I particularly
liked. With my laptop, as I’d still want to
work. And my huz Vito — I’d let him come
along too.
For me social media is... fantastic! Twitter in
particular: it’s brought me friendship and a
sense of community (people I’ve met on
Twitter and then in real life, and some that I
only know on Twitter but feel a bond of
friendship with). I’ve also had Twitter-friends
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 26
refer work to me. And it’s great for keeping
up with news and events, in the translation
world and the world at large.
My favourite word… Again, I’m being greedy.
There are 4:
almond (for the sound of it. I also love the
taste, especially salted almonds);
glamour (for its sound and its meaning,
which encompasses scholarship and occult
learning (it’s related to “grammar”),
enchantment, magical beauty, female
fascination and alluring charm);
gloaming (partly for its sound, but mainly for
its meaning — see the photo below).
I seem to have a fondness for “soft” words
with various combinations of “a”, “l”, “g” and
“m”.
My 4th favourite is: ginandtonicwithlime.
My biggest contribution to the world… On a
personal level, I think my two kids are great
people (most of the time) so I’d say they’re
my contribution. On a “giving something
back” level, I campaign for language learning,
and give talks in schools to encourage pupils
to continue their language studies. I’ve also
provided internships and work experience for
about 10 school pupils, students and
graduates (we work at our kitchen table, as I
don’t have an office any more).
I love it when a client… thanks me when I
send them their translation (it’s amazing how
few of them do). Pays on time or even before
time. Recognises and acknowledges the
added value that a good translator provides
(such as noticing mistakes in the source text
and pointing them out).
The satisfaction of a job well done…
1. Reading the text before delivering it to the
client and thinking “Wow! That actually reads
quite well!”
2. Receiving a compliment for my translation
from another translator who’s outsourced
work to me. I’m always on tenterhooks
submitting work to another translator — no-
one else will judge it the way they do.
I’m quite good at… Communicating. City life.
I’m horrible at… Domestic things. Country
life.
In my handbag… Too much. Emergency
supplies: paracetamol, plasters, Germolene,
sun-protection stick, salt, tissues, hay-fever
tablets. Plus the basics: phone, notebook,
pen, house & car keys, purse, make-up bag,
a book, an umbrella. Sometimes my laptop.
Suitcase, more than handbag!
My house… I love it. It’s one of a block of 4
flats, each with a tiny garden, built around
1900. Lovely high ceilings, large windows,
elaborate cornicing. Needs a lot of work and
de-cluttering but I still feel good every time I
come home.
The one thing about my family… We’re
bilingual (Italian & English) and a mixture of
Scottish-Irish and southern Italian. Yikes! ♦
‘Gloaming’ [Photo: Marian Dougan]
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 27
Member news
With the introduction of the new ITI membership structure recently, quite a few people
have recently moved category within ITI. If this applies to you, please remember to notify
the Membership Secretary of any changes to your ITI membership status since you joined
the network. In particular, let the MemSec know when you upgrade to MITI, as your
details will then be made available to Joe Public online.
New members:
Yueshi Gu: Originally from Beijing, I have
lived in Edinburgh for 12 years. My BA from
Beijing Language and Culture University is in
Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, and
I gained an MSc in Translating and
Conference Interpreting from Heriot-Watt
University in 2007. I also have a DPSI in
Scottish Law. Although I worked full-time at
Collins Dictionaries (HarperCollins
Publishers) as a lexicographer, editor and
project manager for six years, I have always
been keen to hone my craft as a translator
and interpreter. Currently a PSI practitioner in
all three criteria (legal, medical and local
government), I am also a conference
interpreter. My translation clients include
New Oriental Education and Technology
Group, China Central Television, Beijing 2008
Olympic Games, the International Labour
Organization, Wood Mackenzie, Martin Currie
Investment Management and the City of
Edinburgh Council. I recently became a
member of the Society of Authors.
Dominique A. Mason: MA in Applied
Languages and Translation (French and
German) from Heriot-Watt University,
Edinburgh 2012 and MSc in Applied
Linguistics from The University of Edinburgh
2013. A personal and intercultural approach
to providing translation services to
international development organisations has
given me an excellent reputation with clients.
I am well known for my friendly, fast and
professional touch. Born and raised in
Edinburgh, Scotland, my native language is
English. French and German are my studied
tongues. I have lived in Grenoble, France and
Innsbruck, Austria. I also have some useful
Spanish. Work to date has covered a variety
of sectors, including marketing and business,
humanitarian project support, education,
journalism, library services and literary
translation. I currently work in the library at
the French Institute in Edinburgh. The ITI
Scottish Network should be a lively
networking opportunity and I look forward to
forging new associations and friendships.
Inga Sempel: I’m an Italian mother tongue
translator, interpreter, writer and
screenwriter based in Glasgow. Given my
education background in humanities and law,
my main fields of expertise are the arts,
entertainment, law (international law,
criminal law and human rights), social
sciences, web contents and tourism. Along
with many Italian and English private clients
for whom I translate screenplays, websites,
press releases and legal documents, I also
collaborate with major online magazines
such as Global Voices Online and Asymptote,
and charities like Translators4children. In
2011 I founded my own independent film-
making company Storm and Light Pictures,
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 28
where I hold the position of writer and
screenwriter (The Crow’s Legacy, award-
winning Poor Unfortunate Souls, The Melted
Heart, The Starmaker, A Fabulous
Nightmare). My latest work as a writer, the
novel The Parrot Man (L’uomo pappagallo), is
due to be completed in 2014.
Jenni Syrjala: I am originally from a small
town in the archipelago of southwestern
Finland, and I studied English and French
translation and interpreting at the nearby
University of Turku for 5 years. During my
studies I also did an Erasmus exchange for
one term at Middlesex University in London,
and spent 6 months living in Edinburgh “just
for fun”. A year before graduation I also
worked as an intern in a Finnish translation
agency, mainly translating EU-related texts.
After graduating in the spring of 2013 I
started freelancing full time, and decided to
use my newfound freedom to return to my
beloved Edinburgh for the summer — two
weeks during which I decided to make the
move permanent. Having grown up in a
bilingual family and a bilingual town, I am a
native speaker of both Finnish and Swedish,
and because of the high demand for that
language combination, I have found myself
working mainly with those two languages,
but also occasionally with English. So far, I
haven’t come up with anything that I would
like to specialise in, but hopefully it will come
to me one day!
Andrea Wieler Goodbrand: I am from
Switzerland and have lived in Scotland for a
few years now. Firstly, in Edinburgh to
complete my MSc in Translation and
Conference Interpreting, and in 2011 I
moved to Glasgow. I did a BA in MFL and
Literature at the University of Bologna in
Italy. I currently work in different roles: I
teach German as a Foreign Language at the
Goethe-Institut and at the University of
Glasgow. Furthermore, I work in projects
encouraging young learners to study German
and improve their chances on the job market.
I am also a freelance translator and
interpreter working from English and Italian
into German and I specialise in marketing
translation and medical interpreting.
Others:
Congratulations to Katrin Frahm and
Audrey Langlassé, who have both recently
become MITIs. Well done! ♦
So who needs a translator anyway?
Contributed by Margret Powell-Joss. Please send your
own So who needs a translator anyway? photos to
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 29
ScotNet grants
The ITI Scottish Network offers 2 levels of
grants to members as a contribution towards
the costs of attending ITI events:
1) Grants of up to £30 are available for
attending Scottish Network meetings.
2) ScotNetters may also apply for grants of
up to £70 for attending national ITI events.
How to apply for a grant
Contact our treasurer (currently Norma Tait)
at [email protected] before
registering for the meeting. Subject to
availability and meeting the eligibility criteria,
she will approve the grant and notify you.
In due course, forward her a copy of the
receipt for the event or transport expenses
and provide her with your bank details. She
will then pay the respective amount into your
account.
General conditions: Maximum one grant per
person per subscription year. You must be a
member of ITI, so Friends of the Network are
not eligible. Also members living in the
central belt are not eligible to receive grants
for network meetings in Edinburgh/Glasgow.
All recipients must be willing to contribute a
report on the event they attended to the ITI
ScotNet Newsletter.
The level of grants is reviewed every year at
ScotNet’s AGM. Under the current budget, 10
grants of £30 and 10 of £70 are available
each year. From time to time the committee
may also decide to offer additional grants to
enable ScotNetters to attend particular
events, such as they did for the 2013 ITI
Conference. ♦
Looking forward to the next issue…
It's really amazing how many things ScotNetters have done in the past few months. Thanks for
keeping us posted! And, guess what, some of your colleagues are already volunteering pieces for
the next issue of this bulletin. Can you believe it? If you also feel like contributing a piece, please
don’t hesitate to drop me a line ([email protected]). ♦
ITI ScotNet Newsletter Page 30
Your committee at a glance
Convenor
Pierre Fuentes
0131 4557499
Treasurer
Norma Tait
0131 5521330
Newsletter Editor
Isabel Hurtado de Mendoza
07762 300068
Membership Secretary
Ute Penny
01368 864879
Deputy MemSec
Nathalie Chalmers
01888 562998
Events Coordinator (East)
Angelika Muir-Hartmann
0131 3334654
Events Coordinator (West)
Ann Drummond
0141 2219379
Webmaster
Iwan Davies
01738 630202
Deputy Webmaster
Marian Dougan
0141 9420919