This year, Proz.com’s celebration of the International Translation Day stretches over a whole week. It seems that the ambition and vision of the Proz.com staff has no boundaries and they keep raising the game.
While there is nothing better than a face to face interaction – these virtual conferences are an exciting addition (in the last 3 years) to the already broad range of networking/learning opportunities offered by Proz. We have seen by now two days of events focused around the site itself and issues of online promotion/collaboration of translators, while today is a big recruitment day.
It is not too late to join yet – we are currently starting day 3 with some more big events on the horizon. I am particularly looking forward to several sessions presented on the last day – 30th September – at the 2011 ProZ.com freelance translator virtual conference:
Data backup for translators – by Marek Buchtel
Creating a Marketing Plan for Freelance Translators – by Tess Whitty
Be Special II in a Nutshell – by Suzanne Deliscar
Negotiation – a little effort goes a long way – by Konstantin Kisin
I will be also interested to see other translators’ advice on SEO (Ioana Mihailas and Stanslaw Czech) and online promotion (Marcela Jenney, Tess Whitty, Stanislaw Czech).
See you there!
A year ago, while living in Germany, I applied to become a member of the Kuenstlersozialkasse (KSK) – an association of freelance artists, journalists and writers, which supports them financially by subsidising their state health care contributions (a significant expense in Germany) proportionally to their income. From what I heard, translators would normally be included in the ‘Artiste’ category as people who work creatively with language.
Does technical translation belong to the domain of the left brain hemisphere?
As a part-time freelancer, it seemed like a perfect solution for me and so I produced tons of documentation to prove my translator qualifications, professional memberships, samples of work, project history, etc., etc. – as stipulated by the KSK application guidelines. After some 2 months I received a request for some further details, which I duly sent back, and then received another request for even more details one of them being the following question:
What is the % breakdown of the types of translations that you normally carry out:
a) literary texts
b) journalistic/editorial texts
c) specialised texts, manuals, company reports
d) contracts, legal texts, private correspondence as well as interpreting.
Being primarily a technical translator, I marked c) 90% and d) 10% assuming that translation of specialised websites and software would most likely fit in the ‘specialised’ (fachbezogene) category. I do not translate literature nor do I translate for the press.
The reply to this last letter came very quickly. ‘We are very sorry, but we must turn down your application due to the lack of artistic/journalistic quality of your work (fehlender Kunstler-/ Publizisteneigenschaft).
What???
First of all, why didn’t you spare me the several hours it took to put documents together by asking this question sooner rather than later in the application process? Secondly, by asking a tricky question which I could have easily interpreted differently (websites=published (publizistisch) material after all) you disqualified me outright. Not only that, just because I do not translate Joyce or Yeats, you made me feel like my work was mechanical, brainless and had no creative qualities whatsoever.
It still makes me angry when I think about this, and I regret now not contesting this decision. I was so fed up by then that I had no appetite for further correspondence with KSK. It took about 7 months to get to this stage and by then we knew we were leaving Germany back for the UK in autumn, so I just put the letter to the bottom of the drawer and counted it as a lost battle with German bureaucracy.
