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Autumn is in the air again. For me, the beginning of the season means mountains covered in brightly colored trees, fresh apples—along with apple pie, applesauce, and apple cider donuts—and a new briskness in the air. It also means I’ve spent too much time on the ATA65 website, poring over descriptions of too many fantastic-sounding presentations and wondering how I’ll ever narrow down the choices to just one per time slot. To help solve this problem, at least partially, for the last two years I’ve created fictional language professionals, each with their own career needs, and chosen business practices-related sessions…
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Translators read all day long in their second language and interpreters speak all day long in their working pairs. As language professionals, we want to make sure that, after the workday is over, we keep feeling the joy that originally attracted us to the languages we know. Many of us also enjoy the process of discovering new ideas from different…
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This post is a reblog, originally published in the Slator Tool Box. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. My translation clients are primarily based in Europe, so my project flow tends to slow down quite a bit in July and August every year. Europeans, it turns out, take their summer breaks much more seriously than Americans. With decision-makers…
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Recently, a colleague with ample translation experience contacted me with some questions about breaking into book translations. For freelance translators, fiction and non-fiction books present an opportunity to expand our offer and to learn about the publishing business. Our exchange focused on the business end, not the challenges of the translation itself. “Book translation” can be as small as a…
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This post is a reblog, originally published on the Training for Translators blog. It is republished here with permission of the author. How to narrow down, when you want to do everything? I don’t think I’m the only freelancer with this characteristic (I refuse to call it a problem, it’s just a characteristic!). I always tell my family that my…
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From the Next Level team: At some point in their professional lives, many linguists consider adding a new service to their portfolio. A major change like adding an entirely new line of work can seem daunting and potentially disastrous, but what if it’s successful? In this week’s post, Anne Connor discusses how she took up a former service and made…
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This post is an updated version of article that originally appeared on the LION Translation Academy blog. It is published here with permission of the author. In the ever-evolving landscape of professional language services, new technologies such as neural machine translation (NMT) and generative AI (genAI) have inevitably sparked debates about how we should be pricing our services. Many freelancers…
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This post is a reblog, originally published in the Slator Tool Box. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. An agency that occasionally gets in touch sends me an email with four image files attached. Taken with a phone, the pictures show separate pages of a medical patient record. No attempt has been made to redact personal data,…
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BOI is short for Beneficial Ownership Information, meaning, information about who actually owns or controls a company. On January 1, 2024 a new Federal regulation went into effect in the US that requires many companies to report this information to FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury. This new regulation was devised…
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Insights from the Advocacy and Business Practices Education Committees of the American Translators Association on the DOL’s final rule on worker classification under the FLSA. Employee or independent contractor? In recent years, many professions that include a high number of independent contractors, the language services industry included, have been rocked by the passage of oftentimes problematic legislation aimed at imposing…
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I’d like to say I’m fascinated by every aspect of my work as a freelance translator, but it wouldn’t be an honest statement. The translation part of the job is easy to love, but the administration and paperwork? Not so much. Still, we all know we need the paperwork to help us keep track of clients and jobs, bill appropriately,…
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