“la parole exportée”

I’ve just posted a note on Facebook to call people’s attention to my Facebook Page here, the one that I set up for my professional service, not my Profile page.

Understandably, my Facebook Page doesn’t attract many visitors. Thanks to View Insights I know that there are a few visitors, they probably take one look, and move on in search of more interesting stuff. What’s in it for them? Nothing of value, unlike “10 Hot Tips To Get Caviar With Breakfast Tomorrow.”

Translation may be a boring topic, but that’s mainly due to the fact that people take translation for granted, so they have forgotten its real value. So the short comment I wrote to go with the note got me thinking. And this leads me to:

Imagine a world without translators. By now you know that I mean, of course, human translators.

photo credit: we-make-money-not-art

How would countries and people communicate, beside telepathy, smoke signals, or learning 6,000 different languages? Some argue that translators are not needed anymore, that machines are a cost-efficient replacement, that a universal language would be sufficient. Some believe in science-fiction and Santa Claus. But I don’t think that even in prehistoric times humans spoke one language. My guess is that they had translators already, back then. And translating is probably, probably, one of the oldest trades.

Back to our modern world: Take the current French PR mission in China. How could the French government hope to talk to the Chinese government, given the present situation, through robots and GTalk, and not start a war between France and China? A machine-translated document almost escalated into a diplomatic incident between The Netherlands and Israel last year.

Are you are a reader? If you read foreign fiction, how would you understand the plot, get a mental representation of the characters, unless someone, picking words with utmost care, weighing this one against that one, hadn’t for example produced the best translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Are you interested in what is going on in the world? Are you prepared to learn at least 5 or 6 equally difficult languages?

Are you a marketer, a businessman trying to sell goods and services in foreign markets? How are you going to convince the rest of the world of your intrinsic importance, unless someone, somewhere is there to relay your pitch? Do you think that Seth Godin wrote this in French?

So I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it difficult to imagine a world without translators. Or am I mistaken?

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When I started as a freelance translator many years ago, the only way you could approach the business world, and thus prospective clients, was by sending off masses of unsolicited mail that ended up in waste paper baskets if you were unlucky, or got a polite reply if you were lucky. I sent off hundreds of such letters, and I remember sticking hundreds of stamps on hundreds of envelopes. Alas, I didn’t receive hundreds of replies.

Fortunately, things change. They are changing fast, and part of the new business game has to do with making connections online.

To me –is it age? is it cultural?– this is not entirely satisfactory, because I like to meet people offline too. So it happens that after meeting a Facebook friend in person last month, and I had a genuine interest in meeting him, since I help him with the English version of his blog, I met an American LinkedIn connection today, and a connection of hers who is now a connection too.

To make it absolutely crystal-clear, I’m not expecting these friends to shower me with translations; this is networking, not client-chasing, but I believe that mixing with people from different horizons is one of the greatest things that has happened to me thanks to my professional choices. Being used to meeting new faces virtually throughout my working life, and working with different people all the time, I have no difficulty interacting. I have worked for clients from all levels of society and I am therefore quite open to social interaction.

photo credit: garybembridge

So we had our first International LinkedIn Paris Meeting, with a drink at Hotel Lutetia. Unfortunately a French LinkedIn connection could not attend. It was a real business meeting: we described our experiences (these ladies are in the travel industry), we exchanged business cards, we discussed the respective merits of websites, blogging platforms and social networks. We exchanged networking tips and sources of information…

Have you had a similar experience? If you have, would you like to share it with us?

My previous post on a new way I’m looking at for designing a translation/conference interpreting resume has attracted so many visitors recently, that I want to stop for a minute and give an update to those who are interested in its making.

photo credit: CJ Sorg

What am I trying to achieve?

Thanks to a client who has given me a list of contacts, I am trying to produce a powerful tool to attract these contacts’ attention by e-mail, other than the plain: ‘I am writing to you at so-and-so’s recommendation, and I would like you to read my resume….’

But I don’t want to use the e-mail itself as the tool. I take it that these people are very busy, and I need to arise their curiosity, but not by making them read two pages of boring stuff, that they will not read in its entirety. Of course, I’m the best! So I want to give them the choice to click on a link that makes some kind of lasting impression on them, that they can decide to read fully now or save for later, discard or retain, but preferably retain and forward to an interested party.

Why am I doing it?

I haven’t had to supply a resume in many years, except as a perfunctory way to prove that translation was indeed my job, not a sideline as is so often the case. This means that the last time I had to come up with a ‘real’ resume was about 4 years ago, and it was the first time in many many years.

Most of my marketing, whether for translation or conference interpreting, is usually of the viral kind, and I don’t have to do anything about it. Because I am not a translation agency, I don’t have to endlessly market my services to complete strangers. One client will have a colleague in the same company or field, who happens to need a translator, and that’s how they reach me. It might be because they are not happy with their current vendor, or because they have no clue on how to find a good translator, so they rely on their colleagues’ opinions. At one point, I had four different entry-points within one company, and I am still on their ‘preferred vendors’ list, although that does not generate an endless string of projects.

Furthermore, the status of professionals like me in France means that we are not normally allowed (understand: we cannot deduct as expenses) advertising costs. This is enough to stop anyone from using that usually costly channel, and this is why we usually end up having lame and/or boring resumes. That’s the reason why I don’t have a proper website yet, I want to ‘do it well’.

Incidentally, the good point about designing a resume later in your working life is that you have enough experience that enables you to sift through it in order to come up with the most essential and hopefully interesting points. I read one resume posted on a website recently by an apparently very young translator, and I realized how you can kill your own image by overdoing it. Unfortunately, as a seasoned professional, I would not feel inclined to outsource jobs to that person, because the resume is simply not credible. If I did, I would have to be extremely cautious, or extremely lucky.

So: what about the When and the How?

I’m still working on it when my workload permits, but not rushing it means that I am gathering very interesting feedback and insights from exchanging with visitors. Some of this is taking me way beyond the famous comfort zone, yet I’m willing to explore and experiment.

As the saying goes… watch this space!

Yes, despite the fun and criticisms leveled at Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation tool, I have decided to launch into a totally new -for me- project: designing my own MS PowerPoint resume!

This was triggered indirectly by a client who has kindly given me names and e-mail addresses of several of his contacts, and I needed to use something to attract at least a fraction of their attention; business people, as we all know, are very busy.

I have been mulling this since last weekend, and yesterday, eurêka, I think I had an idea.

The hitch here is that I have never designed a PowerPoint in my whole life, although I have had my share of PowerPoints for translation or as presentation aids at conferences, these are useful tools for interpreters, as I pointed out here. I am not a PowerPoint expert, but I have been able to help out fellow translators who were not familiar with the tool, and felt quite intimidated. I must admit that the flexible fonts got me in a panic the first time I translated a PowerPoint, but I’ve got over it now I was introduced to presentation tools, in fact, by working on Lotus SmartSuite’s Freelance Graphics quite a while ago.

So there was I last night, when I should have been taking a deserved rest, between 10pm and 2am, working at my PowerPoint resume.

I enjoyed myself so much that I didn’t realize it was 2am until I decided to let it rest for a little while! Learning by doing is what works best for me (except for house-cleaning, which I willingly delegate to my cleaning lady, she’s the expert and I’m hopeless!), so I happily played with layouts, right to left, left to right, image here and text there, one column? no, two columns is best… Wow. Maybe I’ve discovered myself yet another passion… who knows?

For those who believe that needlecraft and business have nothing in common, let me tell you that several years of patchwork and quilt design, working on visual effects and colors, is an extremely useful introduction to designing presentations. The best effects are achieved by streamlining, not piling up information (be it visual or literal). Ideally, PowerPoints should be Modern Art with a readily accessible content.

And even in terms of content, the limited space offered by a slide should force you to include only the most relevant information, not your entire pedigree, which is a problem when you have been in business for as long as me. You have to be selective: Young translators tend to want to list everything they have done (if not more) as they are trying to build confidence, older translators like me have to sift through projects and tend to have much shorter lists, as they can concentrate on the essential.

The result so far is not exactly as I envisioned, and there is always that additional element that you want to cram into the presentation, but I think I’ll get there after a few more days of mulling (my favorite activity), sifting, reworking and playing with the tool. I have a couple of ideas I want to implement, but to do this I need to research PowerPoint’s features… or delegate that part to someone else. One thing that is surely easy to do is adding my blog’s header image as background, for communication consistency. Don’t laugh at me if you know how to do it, just give me a hint. I love that image immeasurably, it has its own story and it belongs to me.

Who said that PowerPoints are boring? That may be so for the audience, but the author can have a really good time. And provided that you focus on the result (grabbing your audience’s attention while making it work for your own interests), and not on the exercise itself (producing the best, prettiest, fullest, etc. slide show), I feel you can produce something that you’ll be proud to show.

And so much more interesting than a bland resume on MS Word (sorry, Word, I love you, but there you are…).

Can’t wait to go back to it…