11.28.08
Stay in Touch
To become successful a professional translator, you need to stay in touch. You need to be easily reachable to your boss or client. Today, many translation companies will send out emails to several professional translators once they get a job order. If you are not the first to respond, chances are, you might pass up a good job opportunity to someone else. So how can you be sure to be always the first to respond? One excellent way on how to accomplish this is to divert all your emails as text messages to your cellular phone. Call your mobile signal provider about this kind of service.
If you have one of those more advanced phones that pretty much function like a computer, then you can just check your email every hour or so. You, however, must be sure to get an internet provider that is reliable, meaning their connection is fast and does not fluctuate whether you are on the road or at home. Customers who see your promptness in answering their inquiries will have a greater tendency to depend on you; thus, entrusting you with more work.
Using fancy gadgets is only one of the ways to keep customers happy and to build your career. You may have all the technology in the world, but if you lack communication skills, you will still lose customers. You are most likely the same as any professional translator – transfixed to the computer monitor the whole day, living by yourself in your own little world. Such solitary lifestyle can be detrimental to your interpersonal communications skills, which consequently, can ruin relations and lead to loss of customers. Prevent this from happening. Be sure to take breaks when doing a project. Talk to your officemate or friend; this will strengthen your relationships and develop your communication skills at the same time.
When talking to customers always practice patience and kindness, especially if problems arise. If you are angry about something, settle it in a diplomatic, peaceful way. Flush out your anger by taking a deep breath or by taking a short walk. As much as possible, always make sure you maintain a professional and kind tone when discussing matters with customers. The same goes to emails. Writing emails when you’re enraged can prompt you to use unpleasant words, capital letters and exclamation marks excessively. Doing so will not settle an argument, but rather impel customers to look for other translators.
11.26.08
Be Sure to Get Paid
You toiled to finish a translation job for weeks, and then suddenly, your customer ran off with your hard-labored work without paying you a dime. This scenario may only be an offshoot of the imagination but it can happen to if you don’t know how to distinguish trustworthy customers from those who are not. True, by providing an excellent job you have a greater chance of getting repeat customers who pay on time and in a reliable manner; but still, taking extra precautionary measures will help you prevent problems in the future.
Researching a customer is perhaps the most commonly practiced precautionary measure of translators. Check your client’s tax records and reputation through various forums modulated by other translators. Another option is to check if the customer provides a PO (purchase order) or a binding contract that is worded according to the law of the county. A purchase order is often a PDF or Word file, or simply a statement within the body of a regular email. When checking a statement, make sure that it includes payment schedule and penalty policies.
When researching your customer make sure to check their email address. A customer, especially someone representing a large corporation, normally uses a corporate email address and not a Yahoo or Hotmail account. Write to the company to verify if your customer truly works for them and if he has permission to outsource the work.
An effective strategy you can do, in addition to researching, is to demand a partial payment for partial delivery. Don’t be too harsh though in your demands or your customers will be put-off and pass the work to other translators. The best thing you can do is to accept a smaller amount of work and wait until your customer pays. After trust is established, you can accept more work or perhaps bigger projects.
11.17.08
Is Proofreading the Final Stage?
After proofreading and editing your work, don’t be hasty in meeting up with your client. There is still one last task that needs to be done to complete your work, and that is checking specific terminologies. This is the time when you pull your incredibly thick dictionary out of the shelf, or look for the best electronic dictionary. In this age of course, you, just like many translators, will most likely choose electronic dictionaries over bulky paperbacks. Reasons for this are understandable. Electronic dictionaries are easier to use and far faster than leafing through hundreds of pages. Furthermore, installing an electronic dictionary in your computer allows you to save and compile terms that are not available in paper dictionaries.
Online dictionaries are also an option you can consider. You can use Google or your favorite search engines to find an appropriate translation for a term. The web actually has myriad of ways to help you translate or even define a term; it can introduce you to the company that uses the term or lead you to translation forums. The choices are limitless.
Larger documents may introduce you to terms that are difficult and require more of your time. Talk to your client. Tell him that you still need a few days or weeks to do more research, so you can provide a flawless translation. Your extra effort will greatly help win the favor of your client. Who knows? He might even increase your pay.
