If you are a freelance translator or interpreter, you have received your fair share of emails requesting your services. While the scope and details of the project can vary, the objective for you as a translator or interpreter always remains the same—to provide your expert services and get paid for them. In an ideal world, every request you receive is perfectly legitimate and are genuinely asking for your assistance, but that is unfortunately not always the case. In this day and age, where it is increasingly encouraged for all of us to be connected via the internet, it is very easy to try and connect with someone even if you have never met them before.

This is both a blessing and a curse. Though you may be able to connect with someone who needs your services, you may also attract someone who is just trying to scam you into giving them access to your personal information so that they can make some easy money. Fortunately, there are ways to try and stop scams before they get too far, and make sure that you are able to continue working without having to worry about whether or not a potential client is just someone looking to scam you. In the beginning, they might appear to just be normal customers, but if something sounds suspicious to you during your communication with them, then you should stop communication and then they will stop as well.

First, some of the most recognizable scams are those that list illogical arguments or deals that are too good to be true. Either way, you should always be cautious of any suspicious links or files that are sent to you. If you are suspicious of something, do not open it. This is easier sometimes in the more recognizable scams. For example, if someone contacts you with an offer for translation services, but they need your bank account number so that they can directly deposit the payment, and they send you a link so that you can do so, then that should already be sounding off alarm bells in your head. If anyone asks for personal information, then you should begin to be weary of them. You should either just not respond at all or say that you are not available for their assignment, and move on.

If something sound too good to be true, you should also be cautious of whether or not it is a scam. While a juicy offer of maybe $.50 per word might make you reluctant to turn you down, if they start showing signs of asking for any kind of personal information that they don’t need to, then you should turn them down immediately and cease all contact.

Next, some scams are a little harder to detect because they seem like they are real people trying to actually enlist your services. They might have a real document for you to translate, a backstory where they say they need it for a specific event, and even give you their full name, company name, and phone number. Up to this point, everything seems normal and there is no reason to have any suspicion. However, remember that scammers are always after ways to get money. So when the conversation changes to payment, this is where you should start to look extra carefully at what they are saying. There are scammers who will agree to your price and then send a check to your address for maybe double what they said. They will say that it is a “mistake” and ask that you transfer the money to their account because they need the money for some kind of personal, family emergency. This is where you should step back, tell them that you are no longer able to work with them, and then block their email address.

There are also resources that you can access if you feel that you need more education or assistance with dealing with scams. For this, ATA has a wealth of resources that you can utilize, such as an alert page: https://www.atanet.org/membership/internet_scams.php. They also help to keep everyone more aware of scam attempts through their articles in the The ATA Chronicle, which is published monthly.

Phishing: How to Avoid Being Reeled In
The ABCs of Cyber Security: Spam—It Isn’t Just for Breakfast Any More
A Little Paranoia Can Go a Long Way

You can also report fraudulent businesses and/or activity to www.fraud.org. That information will be transmitted to the appropriate law enforcement agencies.

There are a lot of ways for scammers to try and get you to give them what they want, but the important thing is always to just cease all communication as soon as possible. Scams are possible to be avoided, and through our collective cooperation, we will be able to give each other the tools and knowledge to prevent us from having to go through the horrible ordeal of being scammed. Hopefully this post helps you to avoid scams in the future.

Working in the language industry as either an interpreter or translator means that you have to make yourself stand out one way or the other in the field. Just by promoting yourself as someone who can deliver high quality work in a timely fashion is not enough. Everyone can say that, so there is no way to distinguish yourself from other people in your field if you are all guaranteeing the same thing. This post is meant to point to several directions that you can follow to hopefully help you move up to a successful career in translation and interpretation.

First, it’s good to have a presence on major professional websites or social media. When hiring someone, it is common for managers or recruiters to look at the potential candidate online. It’s a way to get a preliminary look at a candidate and really get to know them better before deciding on whether or not to proceed with the hiring process.

Next, it is good to keep yourself familiar with a variety of different skills. If you have many different skills and are adept at all of them, then you can market yourself as someone who can work in a lot of different fields. However, it’s important if you could commit everything to one field and then promote yourself that way, as someone who is highly experienced in the specific field. Sometimes, recruiters look for people who have the most experience in the field, so if you show that you have more experience than other people in the field, you will be more attractive as a prospective translator or interpreter.

Also, it is important to maintain good connections with the people you work with. Make sure to be as courteous as possible and project yourself as a professional translator or interpreter. Also be sure to make friends in the industry. If you have a network of colleagues, then you can help each other find work. There are a lot of times when translators or interpreters might be too busy with an assignment they are currently working on to take any new client requests. In this situation, they try to refer a colleague, and you might be able to be that colleague that they refer. If that happens, you will establish a connection with a new client, and maybe be able to connect with even more clients afterwards.

Growing your presence as an interpreter or translator is not something that you can just do overnight, it takes time and effort. But if you are able to grow your presence, then it will benefit you in ways that you might not expect. You will reach many new clients, and build your own network of clients that know who you are and would love to work with you on future assignments.

The pandemic has posed a number of challenges for everyone, especially for people that have jobs require them to be on-site. Of course, in order to stay safe and healthy during the pandemic, it has been recommended that everyone stay inside as much as possible. However, there is still a need and demand for interpreters who can be on-site. The need for on-site interpreters mostly comes from patients in hospital or for meetings where privacy and security are necessary. So what can you as an interpreter do to make sure that you are as safe as possible while being on-site besides wearing a mask?

Most work environments that need to be on-site have taken precautions to make sure that they make as safe an environment as possible. Most of the times, they will take your temperature, have an interpreter fill out a COVID-19 form in advance, supply hand sanitizer, indicators for safe distance, and sometimes even gloves that you can use. Even so, it is up to you to make sure that you stay safe. Here are some small tips to remind everyone.

First, keep in mind that anyone and everyone could be a potential carrier of the virus. This is not to say that you should be completely paranoid, but if you keep that mind, then that will help you to exercise caution and not let your guard down. This means that you will remember to avoid shaking hands, keep a safe distance from everyone around you, and carrying around hand sanitizer gel. However, this does not mean that you should treat people poorly just because you are scared of infection. They are most certainly just as worried as you. Remember, we are all in this together, so treat each other with compassion, respect, and kindness.

Next, though it is common courtesy to shake hands of the people you are working with, it is not advisable to shake hands during the pandemic since the virus could possibly be transferred to your hand and infect you if you accidentally touch your eyes, mouth, or nose. Instead of shaking hands, you can just wave your hand and greet them warmly.

When you can, make sure you wash your hands. Though hand sanitizer can do the trick of quickly cleaning your hands, it will not completely keep you safe from the virus. Put simply, the water will neutralize and wash away the virus while the hand sanitizer will only neutralize it. While hand sanitizer is a good way to quickly clean your hands, it is not the best way to stay completely safe.

Also be sure to avoid touching surfaces in general. The virus can survive on surfaces, and then be transmitted to you if you touch your face. So try to be extra careful about what you touch in the area that you are working. Alternatively, you could also bring gloves so that you avoid having to touch anything with your hands altogether. Or you could carry around a bottle of hand sanitizer so that you can clean your hands whenever you touch something.

Speaking of bottles, you should avoid bringing bottles of water or food to assignments. Whenever you put them down, they have a chance to pick up the virus, so it is better to just eat your food and drink how much ever water or liquid you want in your car and leave it there so that you don’t accidentally get infected.

Finally the best way to avoid being infected is to boost your own immune system, meaning to take care of both your health. For example, consider going on walks every day to stay active. The walks can be as short as half an hour. The important part is just to take time to move around and get your heart rate up. Next, make sure you have a balanced diet. Eating out and ordering delivery has become much more prevalent during the pandemic, but cooking for yourself or ordering healthier options is a great way to give your body the proper nutrition it needs. Having a healthy balance is important to make sure that you keep yourself in a good condition and avoid any problems that might arise from the new pandemic lifestyle.

Whether you’re a translator, a translation reviewer, or any other part of the translation team, odds are you have interacted with a translation project manager. Project managers are the glue that help to keep all the moving parts in localization and translation cohesive and together. But how does one become a project manager? Whereas a translator needs knowledge and experience with the language pair and area that they are translating, the knowledge and experience that a project manager requires is much different. A project manager can be considered a jack-of-all-trades, and they come from many different types of backgrounds. In this post, we will talk about what one can expect from the project manager role as well as the career path, and other aspects.

First, how does one become a project manager? There is no specific major or degree that clearly would put you on a path to become a project manager. What is necessary is mostly experience. But what kind of experience, you might ask. Project managers come from a variety of different backgrounds, but the majority of them have some kind of management experience or knowledge of the different moving parts in the translation process. To become a skilled project manager however, takes plenty of time and honing of skills such as attention to detail, organization, great communication, and assertiveness (willingness to take control of situations).

To become a good project manager, it is important to have many different kinds of skills, but one of the most important ones are communication and a passion for the job. With good communication, it will be easier to effectively coordinate with your team so that there are no misunderstandings during work. In addition, with good communication, you are able to effectively converse with the client so that they feel valued and heard. Then, with a passion for the project manager job, it will be much easier to be careful with details, organized, and move things forward. If the project manager is passionate about their job, they will no doubt treat it with a good amount of care and effort.

So what does a project manager do specifically? Project managers are a jack-of-all-trades and help to manage projects from start to end with highest quality and as little issue as possible. Project managers work with clients to clarify project scope and details, so there would be no surprise to any part of the project as it is progressing. By doing this, the project manager promotes transparency and a level of trust that could not be gained without them. The project manager also helps create a single talking point for the client so that communication is simplified.

Project managers also help to oversee all moving parts in projects and make sure that they are operating with the best team within the allotted budget while staying on schedule. This means that the project manager has to have a clear picture of what is happening with each part of the team as well as their capabilities. Without a clear picture of the entire project, it is not realistic to expect that the project will be handled well. To have a quality plan is a key to project success.

Being a project manager can be a very busy and demanding job, but it is rewarding in the sense that you get to work with every part of the process and have control of the final product. With successful planning, the potential downside to a project can usually be avoided. But even if issues or problems did happen, an experienced project manager knows how to solve problems and makes everyone happy or understand. Being a project manager is an exciting experience that is rife with new challenges and people. If you stick to this career path, you will become confident with yourself, your work, and life ahead of you.

During this pandemic, it has become increasingly common, even necessary for jobs to be shifted from on-site to remote. Chances are, if you are a translator, you are spending most of your work time at home rather than in an office. Though working from home might not feel like too much of a change, besides being able to completely avoid having to commute, you are working in a new environment, with different expectations, so it is important that you keep in mind some best practices when working from home.

The first one is to be sure to have a separate space for your work. This might not be possible for everyone depending on where you are living, but it is important to have a space that you can identify as your workspace for multiple reasons. The first reason is for productivity reasons. Your home is traditionally your place to relax. It is pretty much a “no work zone.” But now, you are bringing your work into that space. This means your workspace and your relaxation space will inevitably mix together, and you will not be as focused when working, and you will be more tense while relaxing. The next reason is that, it will be easier for you to concentrate if you have a separate space where you can be as alone as possible. This will help to replicate you being in an office setting and allow you to focus more since you will be able to physically block distractions.

The next step is to make sure you get up, stretch, and walk around. Staying too sedentary is something very common among translators, and for good reason. But staying in the same spot, doing the same repetitive motions is actually very detrimental for your health. Just getting up and doing a few stretches every hour or so will help to refresh your body as well as your mind. You will also be able to prevent any kind of damage to your body that comes from prolonged immobility.

Next, be sure to have a good internet connection. There are a great deal of ISPs that have data caps on their internet, and if you are living with a family, you might already be getting close to that cap every month. Add in to the fact that you are now working from home and having to download files to translate, you might exceed that cap easily. You should make sure that you can operate within the means of your internet plan, and if you can’t find a better one so that you have reliable internet.

For the last tip, be sure to save your files both offline and online, and save frequently. With modern technology, it is increasingly common for everyone to save their files to a cloud service so that it is easier to share and access by multiple parties, but if there is a problem accessing the internet, then you will not be able to continue work anymore. Likewise, if something happens to your computer or device you are working on, and you are not able to use it anymore, having access to the file online will make sure that you can access it from a different device and thus allow you to continue work.

Remote work is a new work environment for most of us, so it is important to keep in mind what needs to be done so that you can comfortably continue to work from home. Be sure to stay healthy both mentally and physically so that you can continue to sustain this new work life without any problems.

If you are bilingual and looking for a way to use it in a professional setting, chances are you are eyeing a job as a translator or an interpreter. But as you might quickly find out, it is not easy to just become an in-house translator for your dream company or a regularly used freelance translator. Like with many other jobs, clients are more comfortable hiring translators and interpreters with experience or who have proven themselves in one way or another. If you are starting out in this industry, here are some tips to keep in mind while you are making your way.

To keep an online presence. This might seem a little strange, but think about it this way: if you are looking to accept a car ride from someone, would you go with the person who has a five star rating, many customer reviews, a profile picture, and a little blurb about who they are? Or would you go with the person who has no profile picture, no rating, no reviews, and no profile picture? Obviously, you would go with the former. You would have many reservations about going with someone you have no information about. It’s the same thing with work. Having an online presence will help people who don’t even know you quickly get a feel for who you are and how you operate. Just make sure that you keep your presence online professional and active.

With a good online presence, you can also network. Networking is incredibly important for many reasons, but the most important one goes back to the previous example of a driver who you can easily read up about versus a complete stranger. When you submit your resume and cover letter to a company, especially a big company, they have to make a decision based off of the information you give them. If you don’t give them enough information, they will give the position to the person who they have a better picture of. Networking helps to get your foot in the door since you will have an opportunity to display who you are in a different, more informal setting. Networking will also help get your name into conversations making it easier for prospective clients or companies to identify you in the midst of other applicants.

You should be sure to start off small and get as much experience as you can under your belt. You would be surprised what an opportunity here or there will be able to get you in the future. Just be sure that when you do the work, you always treat it with as much care as possible. This means taking the time to ensure you have no errors, have translated everything perfectly and do not have any formatting issues. Just in case, you should have someone proofread your translation. Even if you are confident with the translation you have put out, it would be a good idea to have a pair of fresh eyes go over the work that you have done. They might have a new perspective or be able to point out some simple errors that you might have glossed over.

The last tip for this post is to set aside a specific time to do your translation. This might seem simple, but you do not want to be spending too much time or too little time on the translation. It is better to have a set time to work on the assignment than to just do it whenever you feel like it. With a schedule, you will be more committed to finishing the job, and will have clear boundaries where you can ensure you are not interrupted or distracted.

Starting out as a translator or interpreter is simultaneously exciting and frightening, but no matter where you start, you are sure to end in a good position if you persist. These tips are to provide a good starting point as well as a good base to build off of. We hope this helps anyone looking to break into the industry.

As a modern translator, there are many tools that are available now that translators in the past could only dream of having. Tools such as machine translation, spell check, macros, and online dictionaries are regularly used, leading to faster and even more accurate translations than translations of the past. However, one tool that translators might not take enough advantage of is Google. Translators might use it to generally search for articles or websites that might have information related to the subject that they are looking for, but that is only the start to what Google can help offer. In this post, we will highlight some of the most helpful tools that translators can use to enhance translations.

The first one is how to search for an exact phrase. While a dictionary can provide the exact word you want, there are often times where the word might not be used the way you think it should be, or there might be specific contexts in which it can be used or it might just be an outdated term altogether. To find out if a word or phrase you want to use can be used the way you want it to be, you can perform a Google search and put the term or phrase in quotation marks. So, for example, if you wanted to search for only the phrase raining cats and dogs, you could put it in quotation marks, “raining cats and dogs,” and then every single result will be websites that have the words in that exact order. You can also use the “verbatim” search function to search for only the word that you enter.

Next, if you want to find alternatives to words in phrases, you can use Google to search for alternatives. For example, if you wanted to search for different types of machine translation in one search, you could search like this: neural OR statistical OR rule-based machine translation. When you do that, Google will generate search results for machine translation that includes the words neural, statistical, and rule-based. This is handy if what you are searching for has numerous variations to it, but you only need a few alternatives as opposed to all of them.

On the flip side, there is a way to exclude search results from appearing. So in the case that you want all the different variations of a phrase but not something else, then you can use the minus sign to exclude the results that you don’t want. So if you want all the different kinds of machine translation, but don’t want statistical machine translation, then you can search –statistical machine translation and it will exclude all mentions of statistical machine translation. This is great if you know that you don’t want a search result to appear and are looking for other things instead.

One of the simpler tricks that does not require any special input is just comparing the amount of results that one version of a phrase generates versus another. So if you were wondering which spelling of versus is more commonly used, you could search for “vs” first and see how many hits are generated and then search “versus” and then see how many hits are generated. After comparing which one generates more, you can more confidently say that the one with more hits is the more commonly used word and therefore, safer to use in your translation.

The last trick is searching within a specific website for a specific phrase. If you wanted to look for the phrase “machine translation” on SDL’s website for example, you could search it as follows, site:sdl.com “machine translation” and then Google will generate all the instances of machine translation being mentioned on SDL’s website.

With the turn of the year, we at Monterey Language Services look forward to greeting the new year with our friends and colleagues! We can now look towards the future and remember that 2021 is a fresh start and will hold great things for all of us!

Happy New Year from everyone here at Monterey Language Services, and we wish you good health, happiness and success in the coming year!

In the last post, we spoke a bit about the different types of machine translation as well as their advantages and disadvantages. For this post, we delve a little deeper into one of the more exciting machine translation methods, Neural Machine Translation. As a quick recap, Neural Machine Translation is where deep neural networks are used to convert a sequence of words form the source language to a sequence of words to the target language. To accomplish this, Neural Machine Translations use neural networks to learn a statistical model for machine translation. Specifically, Neural Machine Translation uses an artificial neural network to predict a sequence of numbers when provided with a sequence of numbers. Simply put, words are encoded into numbers and then the numbers are input into a neural translation model and then outputs numbers which are then decoded into a translation.

How the neural network works and defines the inputted numbers to produce an output is perfected by training the network with millions of sentence pairs. So for example, if you are trying to train a Neural Machine Translation engine for English to Spanish, you would need to feed the engine a great deal of data to help tweak and refine its framework and make it more accurate. Each sentence pair that is given to the engine slightly modifies the neural network while it uses an algorithm called back-propagation. Back-propagation consists of fine-tuning the error rate that comes from the previous iteration. By properly tuning, the error rates can be reduced and the accuracy can be improved.

So what is the advantage of using Neural Machine Translation? Some of the biggest limitations of other machine translation is that they have difficulty when it comes to more complex or nuanced phrases. However, with Neural Machine Translation, it becomes much more possible to translate these kinds of phrases since the number of parameters and rules that can be given provided are much greater and therefore it is more possible to generate translations that are much more natural sounding and closer in meaning.

Neural Machine Translation is without doubt the future of Machine Translation, but there are still reasons as to why it is not widely being adopted. The biggest reason is the sheer cost and time sink that the engines require to actually become useful. As mentioned earlier, millions of sentences need to be entered into the engine for it to start to really output translations that can be considered good quality, and that means using more manpower and time. Not every company is able or willing to invest that many resources to develop a Neural Machine Translation engine, and that is perfectly understandable when weighing the cost versus the reward.

Overall, Neural Machine Translation is a complicated system, but has the most potential out of all of the Machine Translation methods. It is very possible that Neural Machine Translation will be developed to the point where it can accurately be used in a variety of situations for which it is specifically trained, but it is unknown when exactly that might happen. There have been many advancements in its development, but due to its cost and time consumption it will be quite some time before it will be able to be commonly used.

When machine translation is mentioned, the most common thing to jump to mind is Google Translate. To most people, this is the face of machine translation and any other type of machine translation is just the same as Google Translate, but inferior or superior in some shape or form. However, there are actually four different types of machine translation that exist. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages that will entice people to either use or not use them.

First, there is Statistical Machine Translation, or SMT. The best example of statistical translation is Google Translate. SMTs such as Google Translate use statistical models that draw on a large amount of bilingual text that is provided to them. Through this, they try to find statistical matches for how many times something has been translated as something. For example, if the word “apple” has been translated as “manzana” in Spanish enough times, then that becomes the SMT’s pick for the word apple. It does this for every word in the source and target language before it finally outputs a translation. SMTs can be useful for translating basic words and phrases. However, for more complex sentences, SMTs are not a good pick because they do not factor in context. This means that you can end up with some very strange sentences that do not properly reflect what is being said in the source sentence.

Next, there is the Rule-Based Machine Translation, or RBMT. As the name implies, with RBMT, the machine is translating based on the rules of grammar that it is given. It goes over the source language to analyze its grammar and then looks through the target language to see what kind of grammar rules need to be followed when translating the sentence. After it is done, it translates the sentence according to the rules that it looked up. While this might sound as if there might be fewer problems than SMTs, RBMT translations still need a great deal of proofreading to ensure that there are no problems with the text.

Third, there is the Hybrid Machine Translation, or HMT. The HMT takes elements of RBMTs and SMTs and then uses a translation memory. The addition of a translation memory makes the overall quality of the translation higher than that of SMTs and RBMTs, but there are still problems with using a HMT. For one, it still needs extensive editing, meaning that human translators will be needed to review all the translations.

The fourth, and final type of translation is Neural Machine Translation, or NMT. This type of machine translation uses neural network models that are based on the human brain to make statistical models for translation. When they work, NMTs can provide some of the most accurate translations that would need little to no editing potentially. One of NMT examples is DeepL.

Overall machine translation can be used as a tool to expedite translation, but whether it can produce clear and accurate translation for high level discussions, complex concepts, nuances and context that is still in question and requires time to advance it. This once again proves that the value of professional human translators is not replaceable just yet!