A Key to Freelance Success: Apply, Apply, Apply

It might seem obvious, but one key to developing a successful freelance career is applying for jobs. Constantly. Filling out applications, writing cover letters, and submitting bids for projects can be time-intensive and incredibly boring, but it really is the only way to get your career started.

When I first started freelancing, I spent hours each day looking through job postings and applying for anything and everything that seemed like it might fit my skills. While my goal was to work full-time as a translator, I also occasionally applied for copywriting and editing jobs as a way to supplement my income. I ended up getting a couple of long-term flexible copywriting jobs that weren't particularly interesting, but they were incredibly important because I always knew that if I didn't have any translation work, I could rely on them for income.

Over the past year and a half, I've done translation jobs of every type and size, from 200-word marketing translations to an ebook on web programming. Some clients have only hired me once, others have contacted me a second or third time, and a handful have become regular clients who send me work frequently. As a freelancer, the goal is obviously to have a group of regular clients who keep you busy full-time, but I think that's something that takes several years to attain.

While there are some weeks that work from regular and repeat clients manages to keep me busy, it's still incredibly important that I keep applying for jobs. However, now that I have more experience and know that I have some clients I can rely on to send work, I can be a bit more discerning. A year ago I was a bit more flexible in terms of rates, but now I have a better understanding of the value of my work, so I'm more confident in sticking to my standard rates, even if it sometimes means not getting a job because the budget is too low.

In any case, my advice to new freelancers out there is to apply for every job that a) fits your skills b) meets your payment expectations and c) you feel confident you can complete to a high standard. It may be monotonous constantly filling out job applications, writing professional cover letters, and emailing résumés to prospective clients, but it's the only way to grow your client base. It's easy to become complacent once you've found a few regular clients, but it's important to remember that you can't count on them to always send you work, since it's only natural in freelancing that clients will come and go over time.

3 More Tips for Translating Your CV or Résumé into English

On Wednesday, I covered three important tips for translating your CV or résumé into English so that it's appropriate for use in an English-speaking culture. Today I've got three more tips to help you make sure your new English CV is perfect.

#4: Make it easy to read: avoid flowery fonts and eye-popping designs.

It's really tempting to use fancy fonts and elaborate designs in order to make your CV stand out, but you should generally avoid this trap. Unless you're applying for jobs in a design-related field, it is the information included in your CV that should be making you stand out as an applicant, not design quirks that draw your eye to the page. Keep it simple, professional, and most importantly, easy to read! If you absolutely must highlight a particular detail, consider using bold font.

#5: Consider having more than one CV.

If you're going to be applying for a wide range of jobs in diverse fields, consider having a few different CVs that each showcase the skills, experience and education relevant to one particular area. For example, if you're a translator and a copywriter, you could have two CVs: one that highlights your past copywriting jobs, and another that focuses more on translation experience and foreign language skills.

#6: Hire a professional translator, or at the very least, ask a native English speaker to look it over.

This is the first impression a potential employer will have of you, so you need to make it count. Make sure your English CV shows that you're serious - it should be mistake-free, easy to read, and succinctly describe your skills, experience and education in a professional way.

There are tons of translators out there (including me!) that will be happy to translate your CV into English for a reasonable fee. However, if you need to save every single cent, at the very least try to find a native English speaker who can check the document for any glaring problems. If you aren't willing to take the time to make sure your CV is culturally appropriate and error-free, you might as well throw it into the recycle bin yourself.

3 Tips for Translating Your CV or Résumé into English

In today's global society, it's becoming increasingly popular to apply for jobs in other countries. Given the widespread use of English in the business world, it makes sense that many companies request that applicants provide a CV (or résumé, as it's known in the US) in English. However, many people don't stop to consider the cultural aspects involved in translating a CV.

As a translator, I frequently get requests to translate CVs from Spanish into English, generally so that the client can apply for jobs in English-speaking countries. While this may seem like a straightforward job, it can actually be quite complicated due to cultural differences in CV standards. If you're not from an English-speaking culture and are unsure of what to include in your English CV, the following tips, based on my experience translating CVs from Spanish to English, should help you get started.

#1: Don't attach a photo.

In Spain, as well as several other countries, it is customary to include a photo with your CV. If you're applying for a job in an English-speaking country, DO NOT do this. For some reason, this custom tends to lead to heated debates between people from cultures that address this detail differently. In any case, you should respect the customs of the target culture, in this case English-speaking countries. The main reason photos aren't included is that CVs are viewed as a way to assess applicants purely based on their skills, experience, and education. By removing photos from the equation, we can avoid being influenced by a person's appearance.

#2: Don't include your date of birth and gender.

Following the same line of thinking, don't include your date of birth or gender. This helps to prevent age and gender discrimination in the hiring process. Sure, if you make it to the interview stage, your potential new employer will have a pretty good guess at both, but we still don't include this information on a CV.

#3: Keep it short and sweet: 1-2 pages maximum!

One of the most frequent issues I've encountered while translating CVs is that clients tend to send me CVs that are way too long. If at all possible, try to keep your CV to one page in length, or two at an absolute maximum. There's no reason to include every job you've ever had, the name of your high school, or skills like "Microsoft Word" or "social media", which are now expected of most applicants anyway.

¡Hola, Amig@s! - A Unique Solution to Gendered Nouns in Spanish

Back in September, I wrote a post about how sometimes the "easiest" terms seem to be the hardest ones to translate, at least when it comes to Spanish to English translations. One of my main examples focused on the ambiguity of certain nouns used in relation to family members, such as hijos, padres, and hermanos. Without additional information, a translator has no way of knowing whether these three words are being used to refer only to males (sons, fathers, brothers) or if they are referring to people of various genders (children, parents, siblings).

While it would be lovely if languages like Spanish simply stopped using grammatical gender designations for their nouns, it seems pretty unlikely that such a huge linguistic change will ever take place. That leaves us with two options: either come up with a solution for these ambiguous examples, or just live with it.

One solution that has become increasingly popular in informal Spanish communication, especially online, is to use the at sign (@) when referring to a group of people that includes both females and males. For example, if you want to use a gender-neutral term to refer to a group of friends, you can call them your amig@s. Not only does this avoid the ambiguity of using the masculine plural ending -os for mixed groups from the equation, but the symbol also somewhat resembles an o and an a, which are the masculine and feminine noun endings in Spanish.

That said, while the arroba, as the symbol is called in Spanish, is frequently seen online, it certainly hasn't become standard practice. First of all, there's just the fact that using @ as a letter seems very informal, and indeed even "wrong" to some people, likely because it is so unusual and new. It also doesn't necessarily solve this issue when it comes to spoken language, since there is no widely accepted pronunciation for the at symbol. However, there have been some proposals for phonemes that @ could represent.

In any case, if you want to stick with recommendations of the Real Academia Española, the regulatory body in charge of the Spanish language, then you won't want to start writing words like amig@s, herman@s, or even bienvenid@s. Its Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, which addresses questions related to the use of the Spanish language, points out in its entry on gender that the arroba is not a linguistic sign, and that its use in such situations could lead to further grammatical inconsistencies, as in the example "Día del nin@", in which the "el" in the contraction "del" would only apply to the masculine half of "nin@".

Clearly this linguistic issue hasn't been solved, but at least people are thinking about it! Languages are living things that are meant to evolve over time, so hopefully one day someone will come up with a lasting solution that everyone, including the Real Academia Española, can agree on.

Why You Should Never Ask a Translator to Work for Free

I sincerely hope that you read the title of this post and said to yourself, "Why would anyone ever ask a translator to work for free? Surely they deserve to be paid a fair wage for their work just like any other professional!". However, the sad fact is that many people don't treat translators, as well as many other types of creative professionals, as if their skills are valuable.

My inspiration for today's post was the following video by an advertising agency called Zulu Alpha Kilo, which perfectly demonstrates how ridiculous and unfair it is to ask a creative professional for free work.

If you don't work in translation, design, copywriting, or any of the many other creative fields, then you might not be aware of how frequently this happens. As someone who is relatively new to the translation industry, I encounter this issue frequently. In the past, prospective clients have asked me for everything from free sample translations to providing them with discounted rates in exchange for the promise of them sending me "lots of work".

It's usually pretty easy to tell from the prospective client's language whether they're trying to take advantage of you. If you're contacted by a client whose job posting simply says "Translate 1500 words Spanish to English" without any other details, then it's definitely a good idea to be wary. If they don't even care enough to tell you what type of text you're translating, then they probably aren't willing to pay much.

However, when you're first starting out as a translator and don't have much in terms of a portfolio to demonstrate your skills, it can sometimes be beneficial to do a short free sample. In my first few months as a freelance translator, a few of my biggest jobs came from clients who originally asked me to translate a small excerpt of their documents for free. That said, you should set up your own strict set of rules for what types of samples you are willing to do. I generally don't mind translating a short paragraph for prospective clients with technical texts, but if they ask for anything that will take more than a few minutes of my time, I carefully consider it before saying yes.

For example, one of my first clients needed to have a technical document translated, and wanted to be sure that I could provide them with an accurate translation. Since I hadn't done any related work in the past that I could submit to demonstrate my skills, I translated the 200-word excerpt for them for free, and ended up being hired for the project (as well as later projects). Obviously there was no guarantee that they would hire me, but I felt it was worth my time to do the sample since the full document contained 4,800 words. Since they did hire me, I was also eventually paid for the sample since it was included in the word count of the project.

That said, there is a big difference between translating a short excerpt for a project that requires special skills or technical knowledge and doing an entire translation for free. Luckily, this has been asked of me less often as of late, but occasionally I do still get requests to do a first translation for free with the promise of more work in the future. I obviously always say no.

Translators are also often asked to provide discounted rates for the promise of long-term work relationships, which is almost as bad as asking someone to work for free. You wouldn't ask your doctor for a discount because you've been going to them for years, so why would you ask a translator for a discount when they'll be putting in the same amount of effort and providing you with the same services as always?

Sometimes it's hard to say no to prospective clients, especially for freelancers that are just starting out in creative industries, but we have to remember that our skills do have value. I usually take the time to explain to clients in search of free work that I need to make a living just like everyone else, and that my professional skills do have a value. It may not always get me the job, but I do hope that it at least makes them stop and think about what they're really asking of me.

Why Restaurants Should Never Trust Machine Translation

A few days ago, my family was planning to go out for dinner in celebration of a special occasion. By the end of the day, we were all so exhausted that it sounded like a much nicer idea to just order some Chinese food and relax at home instead. We pulled out our stack of carryout menus and found the one for what is widely considered to be the best Chinese restaurant in town. The restaurant is actually owned and operated by a Chinese family, and the food is great - none of those tasteless, oily noodles you might find elsewhere. However, there was just one problem: the menu.

If you're at least somewhat adventurous when it comes to cuisine, then you've probably encountered a poorly translated menu before, be it at home or in a foreign country while you're on vacation. Sometimes there's just an item or two on the menu that sounds a bit off, like the time I discovered "sawdust" listed as a dessert on a menu in Portugal. Other times, however, the whole menu has clearly been thrown into Google Translate, with a horrible end result.

I'm pretty sure this was one of those times.

I can honestly say that I've never seen such a horribly translated menu before in my life. The issues were seemingly endless, which resulted in lots of confusion as to what we should order, as well as plenty of laughs. Here are some highlights:

A section of the menu in question.

"Ricer & Noodle" and "Beef Lamb": These section headings could easily have been corrected if the menu had been proofread before printing.

"Three Ingredient Potstickers" vs. "Potstickers": I love potstickers. They're one of my favorite items, and I was intrigued by the promise of "three ingredients". However, this translation didn't do the restaurant any favors. It was so ambiguous that I decided not to take the risk, since I didn't want to order potstickers that might be filled with something I don't like, which lost them an additional $4.

"Pine Nuts w. Wheat Gluten & Peppers": I imagine this item doesn't sell very well, given the current popularity of gluten-free diets. Based on its name, I envision chopped pine nuts and bell peppers in some sort of mushy paste, perhaps. Even stranger is the fact that this item is listed in the "Seafood" section...

"Fine Shred Potato w. Spicy Capsicum": If you know a bit of Latin, you can figure out that this vegetarian dish has some kind of hot peppers in it, since Capsicum is the plant genus that contains pepper species, but it still doesn't sound very appetizing.

"Crab Yolk & Bean Curd": Since when do crabs have yolks? Or does this contain crab, egg yolk, and bean curd?

"Lamb in Thin Wrap": This item was my personal favorite. It's probably some sort of thin rice wrap with lamb in it, but I imagined an adorable lamb with a thin shawl draped over its back to keep it warm.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The menu was a bit of a disaster. After spending ages looking it over, laughing, and trying to decide if we were feeling adventurous enough to order various poorly worded items, we finally made our relatively safe selections.

The food was indeed delicious as usual (including the potstickers), but I still felt let down by the menu. I love trying new things, but I also like to know what I'm eating, which is why I ended up ordering beef lo mein as my main dish instead of something new and exciting.

I can't help but think that this restaurant and the thousands of others like it who use Google Translate to translate their menus are missing out on great opportunities, both to earn more money and to expand their customers' culinary horizons. The worst translations on these machine-translated menus generally correspond to the most expensive items, since more complex dishes are harder to translate. It's not hard to find translators nowadays (especially with the help of the internet), and the cost of hiring a professional to translate a menu would be relatively small compared to the profits it could lead to in the future!

So if there are any restaurant owners out there, I beg you, please hire a professional to translate your menu instead of using a machine translation. The next time an adventurous diner visits your restaurant, they'll be much more likely to try your finest items if you're marketing them with well-worded translations.

Why the "Easiest" Terms Can Often Be the Hardest to Translate

One of the things that has most surprised me in my work as a translator is the fact that it's often basic vocabulary and tiny words that cause the most trouble. If you're doing a good job as a translator and paying close attention to detail, you will certainly have to ask your client for more insight into the text from time to time.

When a translator asks a client for clarification, it doesn't mean that they're bad at their job. In fact, it often means the opposite! The job of the translator is to convert the text into their native language in a way that accomplishes the client's goals. For example, the goal of a marketing text is generally to sell a product, while scientific texts often focus on conveying detailed information.

I've been working on lots of legal texts lately, and have been amused to notice that it's not the complex legal terminology that requires me to ask for further clarification, but instead tiny words in Spanish that can sometimes be ambiguous, especially when immersed in legalese.

In my experience, two of the worst Spanish words in terms of ambiguity are su and le. The term su is the third-person singular possessive adjective ("his"/"her"), while le is the third-person singular personal pronoun ("him/"her"). However, in many Spanish speaking countries they use the third-person singular as a way of formally addressing someone, which allows these terms to also mean "your" and "you" respectively.

While it certainly makes sense for legal professionals and their clients to address each other formally, if they don't also use the formal term for "you", usted (also written Ud.), elsewhere in the text, it's only natural to think that the text may be referring to some other person. Context can often help, but sometimes it can be so unclear that you simply have to reach out to your client and ask.

If you don't ask for help, you risk horribly mistranslating the entire text, which can have a large impact on something of a legal nature. There is a big difference between saying "I informed him" and "I informed you", and so on.

Basic vocabulary words can also cause problems from time to time when translating between Spanish and English. I've particularly noticed this in relation to terms for family members found in literary texts, such as hijos, padres, and hermanos. In Spanish, there is no specific neutral term that refers to "children", "parents", and "siblings". Instead, they use the plural of the corresponding masculine family members, which can also be translated as "sons", "fathers", and "brothers".

In some cases, the ambiguity of these terms doesn't matter at all because it is unnecessary to distinguish between genders, so you can use the neutral English terms. However, sometimes the genders of the people involved can matter, especially in a story. When a character is being introduced at the beginning of a story and it says that they have five hermanos, they could be referring to siblings of both genders or brothers. If you translated it as five "brothers", you could later learn that they actually have four sisters and a brother, which could subtly change how readers view the character.

This is why every detail matters to translators, no matter how small. If you ever do hire a translator and they ask for clarification regarding a term like this that seems simple or unimportant, keep in mind that they're actually hard at word deciphering each and every ambiguity that exists in your original text in order to ensure that they convey your ideas as accurately as possible.

Why Translation Is A Fascinating Career

If you're not a translator, you might think that translation would be a really boring career - after all, a translator's primary task is to take someone else's writing and convert it into a different language (which should be their native language, if you want the translation to sound natural). On the surface, it doesn't sound like a particularly fun or creative job. However, I'm here to tell you that if you think translation is boring, you're completely wrong!

Since I completed my master's degree in translation, I have translated all kinds of texts, and each one has taught me new things and required the use of different skills. When I translated a tourism brochure for a Spanish town on the Mediterranean coast, I spent the week learning about different types of fish that they use in all kinds of delicious recipes, many of which I had never heard of before. If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be researching fish species for work, I would have told you that you were crazy.

A few weeks later, I translated an entire e-book on agile web development. I certainly wasn't an expert on the topic when I started (I didn't even know what "agile" referred to), but through extensive research while translating, I became at least somewhat knowledgeable about the subject. Soon after, the topic randomly came up in conversation with friends, and I was excited to be able to apply that new knowledge.

I spent an entire week on a translation related to industrial lubricants used in machinery. Sure, it was boring, but there was still the occasional amusing moment when I would use Google to verify certain terminology and end up getting results related to other types of lubricants. I've translated marketing materials for furniture sales, cover letters for people applying to jobs, magazine articles about famous artists, and each one has allowed me to dive into new topics and learn new things, as well as increase my Spanish vocabulary (and occasionally my English vocabulary too!).

One of the most fun projects was translating a short story about a dystopian society that is struggling to survive after a cataclysmic event. While most translation projects do have an element of creativity simply because there are always linguistic choices for you to make ("Should I use terrific or fantastic here?"), literary projects are often brimming with opportunities to be creative. As I translated the story, I had to imagine the world the writer had invented, consider how to translate the names of items they'd created that don't exist in reality, and think about how the characters' dialogue should be written, all so that the eventual reader would get just as lost in the story as I had been.

Throughout my degree program, we were told that the best way to be a successful translator is to choose a specialization, and many translators do this. There are people who only translate official documents like CVs, those who stick to legal documents, and people who build an entire business around translating financial reports.

I can certainly see the benefit of doing this, since specializing in one type of translation means you can focus on learning the specific terminology related to it. For example, a legal translator would (hopefully) quickly become an expert in legal terminology and the format of legal texts, and therefore be able to complete translations more quickly, and most likely to a higher quality.

The problem is, I love the variety that being a translator can provide. They say that "variety is the spice of life", and I wholeheartedly agree. I love that one day I can be translating a dry academic paper, and the next day I can be working on a literary translation filled with metaphors. I never know what I'm going to learn about next, which I find exhilarating. I know that I'm new to this business, and perhaps in a year or two I'll decide that I'd rather zero in on one specific topic in order to make my life a bit more routine and the translations more predictable. For now though, I'm just going to enjoy going where the translations take me.

The Problematic Nature of the Word "American"

During last week's Fourth of July celebrations in the United States, I saw something very interesting on the internet: someone wishing their "fellow USians" a happy Independence Day. The use of this incredibly awkward-sounding term led me to start thinking about why they used it, which I can only imagine is due to the problematic nature of using the word "American" to refer to people from the United States.

While many people in the United States have never stopped to think about it, our use of the term "American" as our traditional demonym was probably not the most culturally sensitive choice. Why, you ask? Well, that would be because the "America" in "United States of America" refers to the Western Hemisphere where our country is located, which is also known as America or the Americas since it includes the continents of North America and South America.

This means that technically, every single person from the northernmost point in Canada to the southernmost point in Chile is an American. While our friendly English-speaking neighbors to the north don't seem to mind our appropriation of the term for our own personal use, Spanish speakers throughout the many countries to the south are not always of the same opinion.

In fact, if you've ever studied Spanish or visited a Spanish-speaking country, you might have been surprised to learn that the Spanish demonym for someone from the United States is estadounidense, which rolls off of the tongue so much more nicely than "United Statesan" ever could. In Spain, for example, if you say that you're americano or americana, you might be asked what country you're from, since those terms are generally applied to anyone from the Americas. The Real Academia Española, the official language institution of Spain, even suggests that use of the term americano to refer to people from the United States should be avoided.

Throughout most of the rest of the world however, the terms used to refer to people from the United States are often cognates of the word "American", such as américain in French and Amerikaner in German. They may have chosen these terms because it was easier than trying to create a nice-sounding demonym from their translation of "United States", but they also probably didn't care much about using it to refer only to people from the U.S. since most of their speakers don't live in the Americas, and therefore couldn't be upset by it.

With that said, while I do think it is incredibly unfortunate that the United States has been using a culturally insensitive term to refer to its people since the late 1700s, I don't think there's much we can do to change it now. People have tried to popularize alternative terms for centuries, but they've never caught on. They include Usonian, the aforementioned USian, Washingtonian, and worst of all Columbian, based on the poetic name for the United States, because what the world really needed was confusion as to whether they're referring to people from the United States or Colombia.

In the end, I think that all we can do is accept the mistake that was made centuries ago and try our best not to offend the millions of other Americans throughout our hemisphere. When visiting other countries in the Americas, it shouldn't be too hard to use estadounidense instead of americano or to simply say that we're "from the United States" instead of using the word "American".

The Plight of the Mockingjay: Translating Film Titles

Throughout my recent trip around Europe, I was frequently reminded of my interest in translation, particularly in relation to film titles. As I slowly made my way from the Netherlands to Spain, I encountered numerous film posters in various European languages. However, the one promotional poster I saw everywhere was for the latest addition to The Hunger Games series. I found the translation of its title in various European languages particularly fascinating, so today I've decided to look into a few of the many ways it was translated worldwide.

For those of you who don't know what film I'm referring to, it's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, which is based on and named after the final book in the extremely popular series The Hunger Games, written by Suzanne Collins.

     A mockingbird, or sinsonte in Spanish.

If you haven't read the books, then you might be wondering what on earth a "mockingjay" is. (Don't worry, no spoilers!) It is a fictional bird in the novel which is said to be a cross between a mockingbird and a "jabberjay", a fictional bird that can memorize and repeat human conversations.

While in Spain,  I saw posters for Los juegos del hambre: Sinsajo - Parte 1 everywhere, and I kept wondering what the term sinsajo meant since I'd never seen it before. After doing some research upon my return home, I discovered that the Spanish translator had actually translated the fictional term "mockingjay"! They arrived at the word sinsajo by combining sinsonte and arrendajo, the Spanish words for "mockingbird" and "blue jay". Without doubt, this is my favorite foreign title for the film since the translator took the initiative to create a new term just as Collins had instead of merely borrowing the term "mockingjay" into Spanish.

However, most other translators seemed to take a different route to translating the title. The French, Italian, and Portuguese titles all refer not to the fictional bird, but instead to a "revolt" or "rebellion". The English title, Mockingjay, refers to the symbolism of the mockingjay as a sign of rebellion, so this decision does make sense... it is just a far more direct reference to the plot of the book/film than the more subtle original title.

In French, the film is known as Hunger Games: La révolte - 1ère partie, in Portuguese it is called The Hunger Games: A Revolta - Parte 1, and in Italian it is named Hunger Games: Il canto della rivolta - Parte I. Interestingly, while the French and Portuguese versions translate literally as "The Revolt" or "The Rebellion", the Italian version is slightly more complex and creative, referring to the "call" or "song" of said rebellion.

If any other translators can provide insight into other interesting translations of this film's title, please let me know! I'd also love to hear about other film titles you know of that have been translated into other languages in a particularly fascinating way.