Your professional translator

Hi there, good people :) I am happy to go on with my Meet the Linguist series and I would like you to meet Sergey Bessonov ! Here's how Sergey describes himself: " Active, young and constantly developing interpreter and translator. New challenging projects are welcome". I had a chance to see the amount of energy and enthusiasm Sergey puts into his work during the three-week course for Russian translators I taught back in April. You can follow Sergey on Twitter ( @sergeybessonov ) or become his fan on Facebook .  As usual, I asked Sergey to answer a few questions. Here are his replies:

Fist of all, I am amazed at how popular my previous post became. There have been over 5000 views of it already. It has never happened to any of my posts before, which tells me that the article really struck the chord with my colleagues. We need to be honest and open about mistakes we make! That's how we can learn from one another! Thanks for all your comments here and in social networks. Your opinion and your experience matter! One of my readers asked to render an account of the ways to remedy those mistakes . I think it's a great idea, and, besides my experience, I am also going to use the experience of my colleagues, shared publicly in their blogs or in comments to the previous post.

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Sir Winston Churchill Image granted by my colleague and friend Magda Phili If Sir Winston Churchill was right, then I should be very successful. We all make tons of mistakes. And I am not an exception. My mistakes nowadays may not be as big as they were at the beginning of my freelance career, but I still make them and do my best to learn from them. I also watch others make mistakes and I do my best to learn from them, too. So here's the list of major mistakes in freelance business I made since 2007. Hope it helps other colleagues to learn and grow. And you are welcome to share the mistakes you made, so we can all learn from one another!

Thanks to my friend Magda for this badge! This is the third post in the series. As usual, I found tweets with most retweets and mentions with the help of the website called topsy.com. April was especially fruitful on language tweets, but translation messages were no less interesting and useful. So check them out! I am sure you'll find something worth reading and sharing :) Language tweets first: slate Slate Moist. Slacks. Crevice? Why do certain words sound so awful? http://t.co/YAnLPfFvoC #language #WordAversion

Today I was asked by a colleague to evaluate a translation that seemed absolutely horrible to the client. As I was reading the translation and the client's remarks, it dawned on me that the client actually needed transcreation , not translation. But since the term "transcreation" is fairly new, not all clients realize that that's what they actually need when they ask for "translation". So would you like to do a little research with me about it? Let's start then :)

There are obviously numerous different paths that can be followed in order to become a fully qualified translator or interpreter. No one definitive route exists that is considered the standalone, perfect way to forge a career for yourself in the industry. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of working for a translation agency is that I get to meet linguists from all sorts of different backgrounds besides the obvious cultural ones. Many have always operated as freelancers, while others have had careers as translators in the private or public sector or have worked more directly in their specialised field. Some have little more than a bachelor’s degree to their name; others have more qualifications than you can shake a stick at! One experience that countless translators I come across have benefitted from and speak highly of is completing a master’s degree. Again, master’s graduates I have the pleasure of meeting have done their degree at different stages in their career. Go...

I am so very excited to share the news about this webinar. I am sure it will be very useful for both new and experienced freelance translators. Joy has a lot to share! We are going to explore the vital issues for all freelance translators : Feast and famine cycle - is it really the norm? Not having enough work and having too much work Having trouble finding high paying clients Having unreliable freelance income You can sign up for the event FREE if you click here The event will take place on Tuesday, June 12th. You can learn more about it here . I hope to see you at the webinar!

I just finished reading a great book written by Joy Mo called " Say Goodbye to Feast-or-Famine ". Here's how it looks:

After my first webinar recording , I started thinking more about freelancer-client relationship and those cases when we should say 'no'. And I came to the conclusion that sometimes we have to say 'no' temporarily, to a project, but sometimes we have to refuse to cooperate with a client forever. I came up with 3 main reasons for each of those cases. So, when do we have to say 'no' to a particular project?

I've already shared this news on Facebook and Twitter, but I thought that I need to write about it here as well. A couple months ago I accepted a position of a Russian country leader in the Sharp End Training  Company. I love the vision of the company and I think it is a wonderful opportunity for me to do something really useful for my dear colleagues, freelance translators .

Some time ago I noticed some of my colleagues on Twitter and Facebook publishing interesting links via scoop.it . I remember clicking on the link for the first time and seeing something like an online jornal with lots of other links and pretty pictures all in one page. I liked what I saw, but didn't register there. It was a bit later when one of my friends asked if I was using scoop.it and was very surprised that I wasn't because it's almost a must for a freelance professional. That's when I got "hooked". I registered there in the last days of January and at the same time investigated what the others are saying about it.

I've had a bit more time than usual this week, since I've been sick. (Who else can get the flu at -30 when all viruses sleep? Only me!) So I've been mostly in bed, thinking about global life issues ;) But it's been a good time that helped me to think back and define some basic mistakes that beginning freelance translators often make. This post is about mistakes in business. I kind of assumed that everybody knows already about proofreading their work, etc. ;-) I tried to come up with some advice about each point in the list. Let me know what you think about the list, what you can add there and what advice you would give to new freelancers if you already have some experience in freelance translation.

When you read translation blogs, especially advice from more experienced translators to their less experienced colleagues, the most popular topics are: setting your rates and keeping them, defining your fields of specialization, working on your quality, productivity and marketing. But I think there's one more thing we need to think about from the very first days as translators: topics that we won't cover, no matter how much money we are offered for our services. Those things differ from person to person. What you will or won't do really depends on your personality, views, religion, life experience and a lot of other factors. I don't translate texts that promote any occult practices, pornography, abortions, prostitution, smoking, drinking or any illegal actions. Please don't think that I am trying to impose my views on you! I don't work with such texts because of who I am and my priorities. My goal is helping people with my work , not doing them any har...

For the past two weeks I've been mainly doing proofreading and editing projects. I would like to share a lesson that I learned through one of my editing projects. There were two proofreaders who worked with the text. (The project was huge, so the proofreading work was divided between two people). The first proofreader obviously thought anyone can proofread translated texts . After all, if you speak two languages why not earn some extra money? That was the first time in my freelancing career when I realized that a proofreader can actually make a text worse, not better. How? Well, this person didn't check the spelling or grammar, and if he did, he obviously didn't bother about being consistent with the changes he made. He even changed the right grammar into wrong (!) and did everything possible to make the translation sound as literal as possible. (The client needed the text that sounded natural, not funny. So I was quite surprised that this proofreader actually thought t...

Every translator needs to keep working on the quality, otherwise we will quickly lose our clients. They want us to be reliable, because their business depends on our quality and promptness. So I have been striving for better quality from the very beginning of my freelance career. There are two dimensions in this process: the first is working on your quality "here and now" to make sure you send the best possible translation to your client; the second is working on improving your writing style, your spelling/grammar and other skills that you need in order to progress in your freelance career. Here are some ideas that have helped me and may be helpful to you: Keep a list of mistakes that you often make. Thus, next time when you need to type this difficult word, it will be right there before your eyes! That will definitely save you time that you normally spend on looking for the same word in a dictionary or typing it wrong and then correcting it. Do a thorough research ...

First of all, I would like to say that it is my own opinion based on my own experience . There can be more or less Internet fraud depending on the country you are from, our language pairs and your profficiency level. Well, in the former Soviet Union there are quite a few people specialising in this shameful business. They like getting professional services for free. I met another person like that just a couple days ago, but thank God I had enough experience already and immediately saw that something was wrong in the way that person communicated with me. He contacted me on one of Russian translation portals, so I wrote to other translators there and asked if he had contacted them, too, and, in case he had, if they got the same test assignment. As soon as we found out that each of us got different pieces of one big project as a test translation, his intentions became clear. This person is now banned on that portal, hopefully for good. But I have quite a few friends who are just thinking...