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[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast — Episode 22 — Natalie Pavey on Scaling Your Freelance Business

ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

The A Propos LogoTo make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

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Episode 22 — Natalie Pavey on Scaling Your Freelance Business

Andie Ho: This is Andie Ho, host of the continuing education series, a podcast produced for the members of the French Language Division of the American Translators Association, offering educational content about the craft of French-to-English and English-to-French translation and the division.

Full-disclosure at the top of this episode, I am a subcontractor for the company whose owner we are interviewing today, although, as of this recording, I have not worked on any projects for the company, and, anyhow, it doesn’t affect any of the content that we discuss today, but I just wanted to let you guys know.

Today we’re joined by Natalie Pavey, a certified French-to-English translator who holds a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Pittsburg, and a master’s degree in French language and culture from King’s College, London. She translates for clients located primarily in Canada in the fields of business communication, marketing, the environment, and sustainable development. Since beginning as a freelancer in 2011, Natalie has worked with more than 300 clients, and since 2021, has been collaborating with other freelancer to become a one-stop shop for French-to-English and English-to-French translation services, which is what we are here to talk about today. Welcome, Natalie.

Natalie Pavey: Hi, Andie. Thank you for having me.

AH: Thank you. So, you brought something to my attention which I found very interesting, and so I wanted to talk about it on this podcast today. You have a company called NP Translations, or Traductions NP in French, and it’s a slightly different take on what most of us think of as a traditional agency. So, give us a quick overview of how your business works.

NP: Sure, well, I don’t think it looks too much different from the client’s point of view. I present myself as an agency, as well as a freelance translator, but freelancers know the difference in that the unique thing about my business is that translators, the freelancers, communicate directly with my clients through a dedicated email address, and that’s usually not the case with most translation agencies. Usually there’s a project manager who’s the middleman, and the companies don’t disclose the names of their freelancers. So, my agency is built on a collaboration. It’s like an informal translators’ cooperative. So, I work as a French-to-English translator, but I subcontract English-to-French translations, and I also subcontract French-to-English translations when you’re overloaded, so that I’m not turning clients away when I’m too busy. So, it’s a bit risky, in that I could potentially lose clients to my freelancers by putting them in touch person-to-person, but I feel like the benefit of attracting more clients, because we have a higher capacity, outweighs the risk.

AH: Yeah, so do you have any parameters in place to protect that level of trust with your fellow translators?

NP: Well, I have an NDA that everyone signs, and there’s a clause in there stating that they can’t approach clients for a certain number of years, until the contract expires. And I work with colleagues that I trust, that I—most of them I know personally—and I just think the translation world is pretty small, that if someone was taking clients from me, I don’t know, I’d, like, hear about it or, it just… the relationship wouldn’t be good, like, there must be something underlying it that the freelancer wouldn’t want to continue working that way to benefit both of us.

AH: So, they’d just be shooting themselves in their foot anyway since the community is small enough.

NP: Well, I’m thinking, I think that if I did lose a client to a freelancer, the client would probably be approaching them, or the freelancer would be approaching them, to work at a lower rate, so, in the end, the freelancer is losing out if they take a client from me.

AH: Ah, I see what you’re saying. Oh, that’s interesting. That’s a good point, a good perspective. So…

NP: I was advised not to subcontract, to put clients in touch with my freelancers because there have been stories of people who’ve lost clients but I don’t know anyone personally who has, so… I’m trying it out.

AH: All right. Well, yeah, you hear all these stories floating around the industry about various scams and whatnot, but on a personal level, anecdotally, I have never met anyone, I don’t think, who has fallen victim to them. So I think, in my opinion, people are pretty trustworthy.

NP: Yup. And then that’s the whole foundation of it is you have to trust the people you’re working with.

AH: So, why did you decide to go this route at all. Why not stay a freelancer?

NP: Well, at one point I was… just couldn’t keep up with the work that was coming in. So, I was realizing that I needed to subcontract some of my own work, but… I should explain that I live in Saint John, New Brunswick, which has a large majority of anglophones, even though New Brunswick, which is the province in Canada, is the only bilingual province in Canada, officially bilingual, and the population is about one-third francophone. So, there’s a need to translate a lot of content into French for that minority, and people were contacting me regularly for English-to-French translations. They were just seeing my business pop up on Google, and they’d just give me a call, so I was losing business by referring work to my colleagues.

And that was my original philosophy, was to refer colleagues… refer projects to colleagues who were in other fields or who translated in the opposite direction, because I felt like they would return the favor, but, in the end, people weren’t returning the favor. Maybe they just weren’t getting those inquiries. Maybe they’re not networking, so they’re not getting those potential clients. So, I just thought that I should take advantage of the opportunity of the high demand. And there’s also only one other English-to-French translator in Saint John, whose very selective about her projects and she doesn’t even call clients back if she’s not interested, so I really had heard that there was a need.

And I also bring a lot of experience to the table as being my own, as a translator, having worked for eight years as a translator at that point. I have learned how to network. I feel like I’m comfortable networking. I’ve learned to quote appropriately on projects and set the appropriate rates and determine the right turnaround time. And I’ve also established a network of colleagues that I’ve met at conferences, so I have a lot of experience and people that I can contact, which is my added value. Yup.

[both talking]

NP: Go ahead, sorry.

AH: You talk about, you know, learning how to quote and all these new things. What all sorts of new skills and new explorations did you have to do to set up this business?

NP: Well, I was just going to mention that in 2021, it was when I was really overloaded, and I realized that I needed some professional advice, so I got a little bit of funding to work with a business coach, Dave Veale, who lives in my own town. And he took me on because he has a similar business model with other business coaches. He’s the business owner and he subcontracts to other coaches who work under his company, but they are not employees. So, I’m sorry, I’m losing the question here.

AH: Oh, what did you have to do to set up your business?

NP: Okay, let’s see, I made some notes about that. I realized I needed a lot of help with project management. Just the process of assigning projects, managing deadlines, and keeping track of those, and making sure I was being billed correctly by the freelancers for their rates and number of words, it was just too much to track. I was using an Excel sheet. So I got translation project management software called Projetex, which is the agency version of Translation Office 3000, which I was using previously as a freelancer.

I also needed to find a better way to manage my accounting because of the billing issues, and I got a grant to get accounting consultant services. They set up QuickBooks for me, and they educated me on how to use QuickBooks to issue POs to subcontractors, so that I can easily subcontract revenues and make sure I was managing my billing right and paying people by the deadline, by their billing deadline.

And then, lastly, I worked with an intern for ten weeks. I had someone who was interested in working with me. She’s a translator and also has project management experience, so she helped me find—analyze my workflows and my project management process, identified gaps, and also, we figured out a way for me to maintain my translation memories and term bases in Trados, without paying for an expensive agency account with Trados. And we also improved my sales process, so I use a CRM now to track requests for quotes and to follow up on them. So, I became much more systematic in how I work.

AH: So, I don’t know anything about your—you’re based in Canada. I don’t know anything about Canadian business structures, but did this change your business structure at all?

NP: No, I’m still a sole proprietor, and I did speak to a lawyer—my accountant advised me to incorporate for tax purposes—but I spoke to a lawyer about it and he was… he advised me that it’s not necessary to incorporate because, as a—from a lawyer’s perspective—the risk is that I could be sued, and then that’s when you want to have your own business separate from your personal tax identity. But since I have insurance through the Quebec Translators Association—it’s professional liability insurance—it covers work performed by subcontractors up to two million dollars, one million dollars each incident per year, so it’s really… he told me that it was substantial enough that I don’t need to incorporate for accountability purposes. So it’s just… I can’t imagine paying a thousand dollars to file a business, incorporate a business tax return every year, which is required in Canada. So it just didn’t make financial sense either.

AH: Every year, wow! Okay. [laughter]

NP: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s how it is in the US. I know you can also be an LLC in the US, but we don’t have that here.

AH: Okay. So you said your translators who you subcontract to, they are in touch directly with the client. Can you tell me more about that? Why you made that decision?

NP: Yeah. I guess there are a few reasons. I thought it would be beneficial more than risky. So, the big risk is that I could lose a client once the client knows who the freelancer is, but the benefits are that I am not fielding questions, which is time consuming for me, and it also reduces the turnaround time because translators can ask their questions right away to the client and get answers faster. They’re not going through me. And if the answer isn’t clear enough, they can ask for more clarification, and it also helps build relationships between people, so that it’s not just me being like, “The translator has a question,” and, it’s just much more personal. So I feel that that’s a big benefit. And the freelancers get to know the client more, just… their way of communicating, and I think it just makes you understand their company more. So, that was the big reason.

AH: But you were still cc’d on all communications?

NP: Right.

AH: Okay, so you can kind of maintain, not necessarily control, but at least have oversight of what’s going on.

NP: Yeah, and then the risk is that the client could also contact the freelancer when they have another project, thinking that the freelancer will field the project, but since I get all the emails, I can intervene and take over at that point to give a quote and assign the project.

AH: So, from the client point of view, do they understand that your partners are not employees? Is that distinction important at all to them? Or does it even matter?

NP: Well, that was a point I brought up with my business coach. And he’s actually, after we started working together, he sent me a couple of things for translation. So I asked him his perspective on how it went as a client, and he was like, “[sigh] I don’t know, it just feels like,” well, at that point they weren’t using email addresses, but he said that from a client perspective, he doesn’t care who’s doing the translation. He just needed it done, and if you have trust in the company you’re working with, you’ll trust that it’s quality work.

So, now that I’m working with—freelancers are working with a dedicated email address, I’m transparent that they’re not employees. I call them my colleagues or my team. On my website, even in the “About” section, I have their bios, nine out of the ten people I work with regularly, including you, Andie… that they’ve agreed to use an email address and it’s clear on the “About” section that they are freelancers. So it’s clear to everyone. But I think that the added value I bring and the reason that people contact us still, or contact me, initially, is that I have experience in project management, I know who to contact for the right project—for each project, and they don’t have to go around looking for someone, which is really—there’s a lack of visible freelancers in New Brunswick. People just have trouble finding them. So, that’s the added value I bring is that I can find someone quickly and make sure they get the translation done, which is their main concern.

AH: So, how did you choose your subcontractors. You mentioned that you know almost all of them personally.

NP: Yup. Over the past ten years, I’ve gone to like at least one conference a year, usually two, and it’s the best way to meet people and start building trust. I don’t know, I consider the people I work with friends. Even the people I haven’t met in person, I’ve had a virtual call, a virtual chat with someone that I started working with, and I intend to do that with other people that I start working with that I haven’t met in person. Or they’re, they’ve been people that have been recommended to me by other colleagues that I trust and respect. And occasionally, if I’m in a bind, I’ll post something on one of the Facebook groups I belong to and people will tell me if they’re available and what their experience is, and I’ll assign a project to them and evaluate their work. But I also look for certified translators. The majority of people I work with are certified, and I feel that’s a gauge of quality, also.

AH: Um, so what are the pros and cons of this new way of working versus before, when you were “just” a freelancer?

NP: Yeah, I mean, I think as a freelancer it’s really lonely. I have to have double the social life because I don’t have colleagues, coworkers, that I see regularly. So, it’s nice to collaborate with people regularly, who understand you and your work and you can talk about the work together. So, you feel more like a team. Another major “pro” is that it’s more income for about the same number of hours per week, if you set your margins right. And there’s a potential for unlimited growth, whereas, if you’re a freelancer, you can only get paid for the number of words you can translate and there’s a limit to how much you can get done in a week. So, when you’re subcontracting, you can subcontract a large project and get a significant margin without putting in all the hours. That was the big benefit, I realized, when I spoke with my business coach was that, if I continued to freelance, I would be losing out on a lot of potential for growth.

But the “con” is that it’s hard to get away from work. For example, I signed a contract with my largest client to be available for all the projects they outsource. They have internal translators, but sometimes those two people are overloaded, so they’ll outsource work. And I signed a contract with them to be available at all times, so that’s a little stressful when you want to end the day and you have to assign a project, or deliver something. I’ve also worked with a virtual PM to manage that on two occasions: to take a vacation, which has been a way to deal with it, but it’s another cost, and then you need to train that person.

And there’s a risk, another “con,” that clients won’t pay you and you’ll lose money, because you have to pay your freelancers—it’s just a best practice. And that works to the freelancer’s advantage, which is a benefit of working with an agency, but it’s a big risk to me. And there’s also the risk of errors, that the subcontractors will make errors, but as I mentioned, I have NDAs in place and also professional liability insurance to cover subcontractors’ work, so there are… I think the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

AH: You mentioned at the top that you went for this business model to begin with because you wanted to capture all this excess demand that was floating around. Have you been successful in doing that, you feel?

NP: Uh, well, in Saint John there’s more of a demand for English-to-French because most of the people are English speaking. So, when they need translation, they need it translated into French. So, there’s been a lot of growth with the English-to-French side, but I’m still working on gaining more French-to-English clients. 2021 was a really busy year and the work has decreased a bit this year in that respect, but I really see the English-to-French side growing, so that’s a good sign. I just need to get out there more for French-to-English clients.

AH: Did you consider any other business models besides this one?

NP: Not really. The only other thing I considered was not subcontracting, stopping subcontracting, because my initial thought was, well, to actually do the translation is so much… you get so much more pay for it. If your project comes in and you do the translation, you get 100%. And I was just thinking it didn’t make sense to subcontract because the margin was so small, but, in the end, the more you subcontract, the more you’re making. So that’s why I decided to not really be the traditional freelancer anymore. And I’ve considered having an employee but I’m not at that point yet. I don’t have the consistent enough work coming in that I could pay someone, and there’s also a lot of time management that goes into managing an employee, so I’m not ready yet for that, but, for now, I’m just happy subcontracting.

AH: So, I assume that you personally are spending less of your time translating, actually translating, than before. Do you miss that at all? Do you like having that mix? I personally loved project management, so, you know, I enjoy that. What have you found?

NP: Yeah, it does feel like I’m translating less, but I think it’s that I’ve… I don’t think that I’m really translating that much less. I’m starting to track my time to see where my time’s going. Money-wise, I’m making the same amount as how much I normally make translating, because I’ve raised my rates over the years and I’m translating less but making the same amount, if that makes sense. But tracking my time, just the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been translating 25% of the time, and then the other time is spent with business development. I’m working on my blog, quoting, following up on quotes, planning networking events to go to, and then project management is probably about 15% of my time.

But I do enjoy it, and that’s another realization I had with my business coach is that I do enjoy business development. I enjoy getting a new client. That’s really exciting for me. And I like, when clients come back, I like knowing that they like working with me and my colleagues. So, yeah, I don’t know for sure that I’m translating less. I’m figuring out that right now, just to know, but, yes, so there’s a lot of different tasks that go into subcontracting.

AH: Interesting, interesting. Okay, I have to know, juicy question. Are you saving all the best projects for yourself to translate?

NP: Um…

AH: Because I would.

NP: Let’s see. I have, yeah, but actually, the strategy I learned is that there are lots of rush projects. I mean, I charge a rush rate. I feel that there’s a significant amount of projects that come in that I consider rush, like, delivering within 24 to 48 hours, and about, I guess, probably seven years ago, I started charging a rush rate. But when I was subcontracting, so much was coming in that I was like, well, I’m at my limit and I can’t take on anymore so I have to subcontract this rush project. First of all, it’s stressful to subcontract a rush project and, second of all, you’re giving a higher paying project to someone. So now I leave more leeway for myself. I’ll take on projects that have more of a longer, maybe a longer deadline, to leave room to take on the rush projects so that I’m getting the projects that are more high paying. So that’s a strategy I’ve learned, but I do sometimes subcontract things that I just don’t feel like translating.

AH: Yeah. Been there [laughter].

NP: Yeah. Sometimes it can be a challenge everyday to get the actual paid work done.

AH: All right. Is there anything else you want people to know?

NP: Well, I guess, I would recommend, definitely recommend this business model if you’re interested in—if you like business development and you’re starting to feel burned out, if you’re getting too much work and you can’t manage it, it definitely could be for you. That was the position I was in. But the model isn’t also for everyone. For example, I have a—there’s a colleague who doesn’t… he speaks French, translates into English, and he doesn’t like really communicating in English and especially negotiating. So he told me once that he appreciates that I do the negotiations, and that’s another benefit of working with me is that he just gets to do the translation. So, if you’re not into business development, or working with direct clients and you just want to translate, then I would say don’t go into this.

AH: Yeah, I was thinking about that, because you were talking about all the new things you had to learn and set up and put in place in order to make this business the way it is, and I thought, “You know, um, agencies earn their keep [laughter] you know.”

NP: Right!

AH: You know, that’s a lot of time and expenses.

NP: Right. Yeah. It is—that’s the one reason I justified subcontracting at one point, too, is that there’s work involved in getting clients. I have to keep my website up to date. I pay for my project management software. There are other expenses you have to have. So it’s just, yeah, I am just doing different work, but, in the end, I’m hoping that it will—I will grow and… I don’t know if I ever want employees, but I don’t want to limit myself, so yeah. There’s a lot to learn, and you really have to learn a lot about a lot of different things to make it work, so it’s not just translation, which I still love, but I do enjoy learning these new things about business.

AH: Well, fortunately, as a translator, you’re an expert in research and teaching yourself new things.

NP: Yeah, yup. It’s one of the great things about working for yourself, and not being told what to do.

AH: All right, well maybe we will record a follow-up episode in a couple years and see where you’re at then, huh?

NP: Yeah! That would be great. I also would love to talk about virtual project management, because I find that that’s a great way to go when you’re overloaded. So, another idea, for another podcast?

AH: All right! Stay tuned, everybody.

All right, well, thank you, Natalie, for your time today, and your very interesting story. We appreciate it.

NP: Thank you so much, Andy. I appreciate being able to talk about my experience.

AH: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the Continuing Education Series podcast on SoundCloud or iTunes by searching for “Continuing Education Series.” You can contact the FLD at divisionFLD [at] atanet.org. Visit our website at www.ata-divisions.org/fld or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie Ho signing off. Thanks for listening and à bientôt!

Natalie Pavey is a certified French-to-English translator specializing in the fields of marketing, sustainable development and business communication. She helps purpose-driven companies and organizations attain their professional objectives through effective communication in both French and English, whether their target market is Canada, the United States or an international audience. Visit her website here.

ATA Podcast host Andie Ho is a certified French to English translator specializing in the food industry. She earned her M.A. in translation from Kent State University and is now based in the Houston area. She currently serves as the ATA’s French Language Division administrator. You can follow her on Twitter at @JHawkTranslator or email her at andie [at] andiehotranslations [dot] com.

FLD Editor

[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast – Episode 30 – Museum Translations with Multitalented Susan Pickford

Photo of a wall in an art museum. There is an assortment of framed paintings on the wall. There are three black statues under the paintings.
ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

The A Propos LogoTo make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL EPISODE

SOUNDCLOUD: You can listen to or download Episode 30 and all previous episodes on Soundcloud here.

ITUNES: This episode and all previous episodes are available on iTunes here. You can subscribe or listen online. Like what you hear? Rate us and review us! It really helps get the word out.

Episode 30: Museum Translations with Multitalented Susan Pickford

Andie Ho: Today we’re joined by Susan Pickford, who is from the UK, but she’s been living in France since the late 90s after earning a degree in French and German. She worked in publishing for a short while before beginning translation in 2001—I guess she saw the light—using her publishing background as a springboard. She joined the Louvre translation team in the early aughts, when they were setting up the museum’s first big website, and the rest is history. Susan also has a PhD in Comparative Literature and taught English at various universities, before landing a tenured position in translation studies in 2007. And now she runs the English Unit at the University of Geneva, where I attended a semester. Fabulous memories there at the what is now called the Faculté de traduction et d’interprétation. Welcome, Susan.

Susan Pickford: Thank you. I’m so pleased to be here.

Andie Ho: So you have a very interesting and varied background and career, and we’re going to get to all of it. But let’s start with the beginning. So first you started working in publishing before parlaying that into a career in translation. So how exactly did you work that transition? How did you use your publishing world experience to leverage that into a second career?

Susan Pickford: Well, to start off with, I mean, I have to say I was pretty low in the food chain when I was in publishing. I was in Paris, and I only worked in publishing for a year. But it was, to be honest, it was an excellent grounding in sort of the whole publishing ecosystem, I would say, because I was pretty much the dogsbody who did, you know, did the photocopying and went to the other departments and so on. But it really gave me an overview of the whole thing, how it hung together, where translation in particular fitted into it. I was working in a department where we produced translation or translated books in house, illustrated books, coffee table books, I’d guess you call them. And so I sort of got a sense of the economy of it and how translation really slotted into that. While I was there, I did a lot of editing, sort of language editing on the translations that came in. And I also did a little bit of translation myself. And I would say that was also super helpful because it was really broad.

Susan Pickford: There were books on everything from, you know, rose varieties, model trains, lighthouses. It was a really good broad grounding in how to write for a general audience. And it also made me think about, who am I writing for? What do they need to know? So I’d say that was a really, really good place to start. And the other thing that it taught me is that I’m really not cut out for a 9-to-5 office job. So that kind of propelled me into further study, which is sort of my other strand in life, working in academia. So from there, I started, I went back and did my PhD, and I funded my PhD largely by working in translation, starting out mostly for the same publisher in Paris, but also then it snowballed from there as I built up contacts and worked a lot with a sort of informal network of people working in the same sort of sector in Paris at the time.

Andie Ho: So you said you learned where translation slots in into the publishing industry. Where does it slot in?

Susan Pickford: That’s a very good question. I mean, I think we tend to think to think of translation as sort of an isolated phenomenon, but actually it’s really much, very much a part of a chain of command where you have exactly as in business translation or in other sectors. When we’re looking at publishing translation, you have a commissioner, somebody who wants to buy the project. You have people who are going to be editing your text. You then have buyers who you have to write for, et cetera. So you’re never working in isolation, even if you’re doing literary translation, you’re always working in a chain of command. And I think we sometimes forget that and I think it’s important to bear it in mind.

Andie Ho: Now, speaking of literary translation, you were also on the French literary translators association board for 10 years. Can you tell us about that?

Susan Pickford: Sure. So, as I was saying, we do think of translators, you know, people think that we work at home in a kind of ivory tower, but that’s really not true in my experience. I mean, I’ve always worked in teams. It’s part of, I  think, part of the arts sector as well. That’s one of the characteristics, that they’re big projects and you’re often working, working to short deadlines. So I do work a lot in teams, and I’ve always had that sort of ethos of advocacy and service for the profession, because I’ve always thought that if you want to be taken, if translation wants to be taken seriously as a profession, it needs to foster that kind of collective shared ethos and values, which are sort of core, a core definition of what a profession is. We don’t sign a Hippocratic oath, but we can work towards having a collective shared set of values. And that’s really what I thought about when I was joining the French translation association. It’s kind of the idea of a rising tide lifts all boats. You know, if we’re all working together for better conditions, then it works for everybody. And I have to say, doing that, I’ve also had a lot of work through it. I’ve also passed a lot of work on from it. So I think that collective sort of seeing what we do in that collective perspective is super helpful all around.

Andie Ho: Yeah, it’s so super important when the majority of our days is us and the four walls. You know, talking to ourselves to really make it a point to get out there and connect.

Susan Pickford: Absolutely. It’s so important. You know, from a mental health perspective, fitness perspective, connecting with others, the human side of it is so important.

Andie Ho: Now, you have said that the majority of your clients currently or in the past even have been museums and opera houses, various cultural institutions. So I assume that decision was influenced by your early work on the Louvre project?

Susan Pickford: Pretty much. I would say it’s, I kind of fell into it, but it really suited me as well. So I think it’s, you know, it’s a good thing that I came into this from my perspective. I have always been interested in the arts. You know, I’m a keen museum-goer. So can’t say it was a deliberate decision to make that my speciality. But yeah, having worked on the Louvre project and having built up a network of people who are also working in similar areas. Yes. It just sort of fell naturally into place. And I have to say, it’s super interesting, super varied. You know, there’s a lot of work in the sector which is really very varied and very interesting.

Andie Ho: So in addition to museums and opera houses, who are your clients and what kind of projects do you do for them?

Susan Pickford: Well, at the minute, it really has been museums. I have been heavily working in that sector. I mean, do occasional things for record labels, operas, a little bit of music on the side as well. But the vast majority of my work is for a sort of core set, I would say, of six or seven museums that I have a good long-standing working relationship with. So, you know, big museums in Paris, which have a lot of work, obviously, because, you know, these are huge international visitor attractions. Also, now since I moved down to live near Switzerland, I work a lot with Swiss museums as well. So that’s really the bulk of where my work is now is in museums and the sort of thing I do, I do wall panels for exhibitions, temporary exhibitions. I do a lot of catalogues, a lot of website content, because obviously they have , you know, exhibitions that are constantly changing. They have to bring new visitors in with new attractions, new content. So there’s kind of an ongoing rolling stock of work that needs to be done. Plus the sort of bread-and-butter work of updating websites in terms of COVID restrictions and updated accessibility statements and things like that. So I tend to work less on those. But there is some of that as well, some more of the sort of pragmatic side of visitor attraction work.

Andie Ho: So you said there was a certain chain of command in publishing. Is that the same also in museum work?

Susan Pickford: Pretty much yes. A lot of the big museums I work for have their own publishing branches or their own publishing departments. I tend not to deal with those so much these days. I would pretty much be talking to one person who is often a curator at the museum, particularly if it’s a smaller museum. A lot of the bigger ones, as I say, the Louvre will have its own publishing branch and then I’ll be dealing with them. But since I stopped working in publishing, I have much less contact with that broader chain of command. It’s really now me talking to my contact at the museum.

Andie Ho: So how do museum clients or cultural institution clients differ from more commercial clients, would you say?

Susan Pickford: Well, I’d say there’s a question of status in that they tend to be nonprofits or state- run. So I have to say, in the French context, that means there can be a lot of admin involved in terms of billing, things like that. There are some real specific aspects to museum translation. So things like space constraints when you’re working on wall panels, you know that you’ve only got so many characters that you can play with. And you also have to be aware of the fact that you’re writing for often, in a lot of cases, a very international audience. So you know that Chinese visitors, for instance, will be mediating or will be accessing the art through the English. So you have to bear that in mind in how you write and how you gloss things. And, you know, you have to explain who various historical characters are that are in paintings for an international audience, but then keeping that within the space constraint that you have on the wall panel, that sort of thing. So that can be quite a challenge. I would say that another thing that is specific about the work is it can be highly technical when you’re talking, for instance, about pottery-glazing techniques, that sort of thing. But it could also be very, very creative when, you know, I had one project a couple of years ago, for instance, where it was an imaginary index of objects that you might find in a surrealist painting, and then it needed to be, there was lots of wordplay and the whole thing needed completely rewriting.

Susan Pickford: So you have to be sort of a master of a lot of skills. The things I’ve worked on in the last couple of years, philosophy of architecture for a journal that I work with regularly, 18th-century furniture, 19th-century photography. I did an exhibition on wampum beads for a place in Paris last year. So you have to be really on top of trends in the art world. I think that’s important contemporary art in particular. But you also have to be super skilled at getting very good at things you don’t know much about very quickly. Before I did the Wampum Beads exhibition, I could hardly have told you what they were. But, you that’s one of the skill sets, is really developing expertise very quickly with that sort of background knowledge of the fundamentals of art and art vocabulary. I think that’s one of the most important things. I would say that one thing that is specific about it as well is that I never use any CAT tools. I think it’s one of the rare sectors where they’re not necessarily very, very useful because kind of by definition, the repeatability of the kind of texts I work on is very, very low. So there’s not a lot of point in investing in CAT tools at the minute for me. So I do it all old school by hand.

Andie Ho: But what about glossaries? Do you maintain glossaries?

Susan Pickford: I personally don’t because I kind of started my career before they were a thing, 20 years ago. So I’ve honestly never quite got into it. I maintain them sort of informally, but don’t have any tools that do that for me.

Andie Ho: It’s all in your head, huh?

Susan Pickford: All in my head, yeah.

Andie Ho: Impressive. Yeah, the few times, you know, in my younger days, I accepted some projects translating some artwork because I thought it would be easy, I thought it would be “soft.” I think a lot of people do. And I was shocked by how technical it is. And I find, for me, at the time at least, it was even harder to find those technical terms than it would be for a piece of machinery.

Susan Pickford: Sure. Yeah. You have to be good. I mean, now, you know, when I started out, Google was barely a thing. So you did spend a lot of time doing research. Now, you know, 20 years down the line, it’s a lot easier than it was, looking up terms. There are good bilingual dictionaries out there that you can access. But by and large, when you’ve been working in the sector for a long time, you do know a lot of the background stuff. And I also know now to refuse projects where I’m not going to be comfortable with the level of technical language. So, for example, there are some architecture-type projects that would say no to these days, because I just know that I’m going to spend a lot of time looking up terms for 12th-century church architecture and I’m quite happy to pass that kind of text on to other colleagues who are very good at it these days.

Andie Ho: No matter how long I’ve been in translation, I’m still constantly shocked by the obscurity of the texts that we can receive. That’s part of what makes it fun.

Susan Pickford: It is. Absolutely. I mean, the sheer variety of jumping from subject to subject and being an instant expert in things, I find that instant, you know, it’s constantly super gratifying for me. Yeah.

Andie Ho: So you talked about the other half of your life. You also work at the Université de Genève in Geneva. So what exactly are your responsibilities there?

Susan Pickford: Okay, so I’ve been in Geneva now, this is my third year just starting. I run the English unit, which runs the M.A. in translation from French and Spanish to English in legal and financial and economic translation. Geneva actually has one of the oldest translation schools in the world, started back in the immediate post-war period, and it’s now become a full faculty. So I am head of a team of 10 translators who teach. I’m the full-time person at the university, and then my colleagues are all people who are working at the various international institutions that we have in Geneva. So people who are working at the World Health Organization, at the Red Cross, at the International Labor Organization and so on, who will come in and teach in their special area of expertise. So that, again, is super gratifying. And because I’m an academic as well, I do some research as well alongside that and I teach as well. I teach undergraduates translation. Yeah.

Andie Ho: So what courses do you teach?

Susan Pickford: At the moment? I’m teaching Thèmes, which is French, to English translation for undergraduates. And then I also teach translation, revision, and translation criticism later in the year.

Andie Ho: And what is your area of research?

Susan Pickford: So my research focuses on translation sociology, particularly translator sociology. So I’m super interested in, because I’ve always been at the crossroads of practice and research. I’m super interested in translator careers, how people, you know, who gets to translate what, what kind of content and in what conditions and particularly what sort of economic conditions. So I’m super interested in issues of workflow, timing, how people get to choose the,  do people get to choose the projects they work on? At what stage in your career can you afford to say yes or no to things you know? Can you work in literary translation particularly? Can you work in it full time? Can you describe yourself as a professional literary translator if it’s not your main source of income? So sort of theorizing around those issues is what I’m working on at the minute.

Andie Ho: That is so interesting. Do you also look at the geographical level? Because just off the bat, I mean, for instance, Europe and America, the landscapes are so different.

Susan Pickford: Absolutely. I work mostly in the European context, to be honest, because, you know, that’s where I am. But I know the landscapes are very different. I mean, even just things like, aspects that are very little discussed, but things like the tax setup, health care setup, which means that in Europe you might be able to afford to start a career in a different way than you would in the States. And that’s not even getting into other parts of the world where I really don’t have the knowledge to talk about them. But these are interesting and important questions that I think we need to spend more time talking about in the profession.

Andie Ho: Absolutely. Okay. Final question that I ask everybody. What do you want to leave the listeners with? What would you like them to know?

Susan Pickford: I do have one thing that is quite exciting, the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in my translation career so far, is that last year, I translated a novel for the first time, a full-length novel by a Belgian author called Barbara Abel. And the book is called Mother’s Instinct, and it’s coming out soon as a film, a Hollywood film starring Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway. It’s been a little bit delayed by the strikes, but you know, you’ve got to support that. So it’s out soon. Look out for that. And I’m super stoked that that’s happened.

Andie Ho: Oh my gosh, that’s so exciting.

Susan Pickford: I know, I hope I get invited to the premiere. I mean I’m looking out for an invitation.

Andie Ho: I forget what movie I was watching recently. Oh, it was A Man Called Otto. That’s the English, American title. A Man Called Ove is the Swedish title. And I watched the trailer, I read the English version, and then I watched the trailer, and I recognized the exact dialogue from the English translation of the book spoken by Tom Hanks. So do you know if Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway are speaking words that you wrote?

Susan Pickford: I suspect not. They’ve got someone else, they got someone to do the screenplay, and then they bought the rights to the French book, because it’s actually a remake of a Belgian film from a few years ago. So I have to say, my involvement in the film is kind of peripheral. So, you know, that invitation may not happen, but still it’s…

Andie Ho: They might have taken it though from your…

Susan Pickford: Yeah, yeah, I’m going to gatecrash. If not, I’m going to take the train to Paris and gatecrash.

Andie Ho: All right. Well that’s very exciting. So everybody check out that book. What’s the French title of the book?

Susan Pickford: Derrière la haine.

Andie Ho: Okay. All right.

Susan Pickford: Yeah, complete change of title.

Andie Ho: Translated by Susan Pickford. Check it out.

Susan Pickford: Absolutely. It’s out there.

Andie Ho: All right, well, thank you so much, Susan, for joining us today and telling us all about your very interesting career.

Susan Pickford: Well thank you, Andie. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

FLD Editor

[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast – Episode 28 – Belinda Stohner on Miami Fun

Photo looking through palm trees at a blue sky with some clouds.
ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

To make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL EPISODE

SOUNDCLOUD: You can listen to or download Episode 28 and all previous episodes on Soundcloud here.

ITUNES: This episode and all previous episodes are available on iTunes here. You can subscribe or listen online. Like what you hear? Rate us and review us! It really helps get the word out.

Episode 28: Belinda Stohner on Miami Fun

Andie Ho: This is Andy Ho, host of the Continuing Education Series, a podcast produced for the members of the French language division of the American Translators Association. Offering educational content about the craft of French to English and English to French translation and the division.

Belinda Niling Stohner is a professional violinist based in Miami, FL. She has an unorthodox attitude towards the role of string players in the art world. Her groups Baby B Strings and Sugar & Scotch, and her innovative project Musical Fairytales blur the lines between classical music and pop culture. She has performed with Shakira at Super Bowl 54, Usher at the Victoria Secret Fashion Show, and alongside the likes of R&B artist Maxwell, and bluegrass fiddler Mark O’Connor. Also, she’s my sister. Welcome, Belinda.

Belinda Stohner: Hi!

Andie Ho: So, the reason I have asked Belinda here today is because she lives in Miami, has lived there for 20 or so years, and since the ATA64 this year will be in Miami, I wanted to pick her brain about what we should do for fun in Miami when we get there. Belinda, you originally went to Miami for college and then stuck around. We are originally from Kansas, so this was quite the change of scenery. What made you stay?

Belinda Stohner: Number one, the sun! That’s a no-brainer. I hate cold weather. And when I first came to do a college visit, I think it was like in the middle of February, and I was, like, sold! I don’t need—there’s no question I want to be here. That and also it’s a mid-sized city. You know, it’s not quite the very intimidating city like New York or LA or even Houston, but it’s very metropolitan and exciting, and a lot’s going on here. Things are changing all the time.

Andie Ho: There is a lot going on. It’s funny, though, The last time the ATA was in Miami, I heard someone say, Oh, I’m not interested in going because there’s nothing to do in Miami. It’s not much of a tourist town. Which struck me as crazy. When people think about Miami, obviously, they think about the beaches and all that stuff, but what other stuff is there to do there?

Belinda Stohner: There’s so much stuff. Something for everyone. If you’re really into the glam of things, there’s high-end shopping. You can go see celebrity houses on Star Island. But also, if you’re into art, there’s so many private collections and art galleries. The Pérez Art Museum is one of our big draws. But also, if you enjoy just being outdoors, there’s the Everglades National Park, which is amazing. There’s so many animals there. You can go kayaking, paddleboarding, snorkeling. The world is your oyster. It’s very diverse. You just have to go find it.

Andie Ho: You mentioned celebrities and Star Island. What are some of the celebrities who have homes in Miami?

Belinda Stohner: Who doesn’t have a home in Miami? Shakira is the latest one to move here. David Beckham and his wife, Victoria, moved here fairly recently and started a soccer team. If you’re into international soccer, Lionel Messi is basically the world superstar currently, and he just signed with Miami. Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump, one of the Jonas Brothers, Pharrell. A lot of people have houses and live here mostly full time.

Andie Ho: Have you ever seen a celebrity when you’re out and about in town?

Belinda Stohner: One time I was at the mall and Shaquille O’Neal walked by with a horde of people. It was just like a whole bunch of people and then this head sticking out, because he’s so big. He’s larger than life.

Andie Ho: Well, and you did play in the Super Bowl with Shakira, so.

Belinda Stohner: That, too. Jennifer López lives down here as well. So I saw her as well.

Andie Ho: So what is the weather going to be like in October? You said you like the sun. Will there be sun?

Belinda Stohner: We are the Sunshine State. You know, we don’t really have typical seasons like most other places. We say we have wet season and dry season. Late October is kind of the tail-end of the peak of hurricane season. So it could rain or it couldn’t rain. For example, today there was no rain forecasted and it poured for a few minutes. The thing that would be guaranteed, though, is bring sunscreen and that it will be warm and humid.

Andie Ho: Okay, and for those of you who are keeping score at home, the ATA is October 25th through the 28th, as a reminder. Speaking of the Sunshine State, what is this Brightline that I’ve been hearing so much about?

Belinda Stohner: Oh, man! So Florida is a peninsula, and for the most part, there’s maybe one highway, which is I-95, that goes north, and then one that goes west to Naples. It can get very congested. So in the last several years, they’ve been developing the Brightline. Currently, you can go from downtown Miami to Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. The Orlando stop is supposed to open later this year, and I believe they’re working on a Tampa stop. So you can kind of traverse and go to like Disney or Universal and come back down south and not really need a car, which is amazing.

Andie Ho: Okay, so it would be easy for, say, conference attendees to fly, say, into Orlando and then come down for the conference and go back up and fly out — or vice versa, fly into Miami, go up to Orlando and come back?

Belinda Stohner: Yeah, it’s fairly inexpensive. It looks very clean from the outside and it’s quite frequent. I don’t know if it’s every 15 minutes or every half hour that there’s a train. I believe there’s probably free wifi on there. And in terms of public transport downtown, kind of where the conference is going to be, there is a free trolley that runs till 11 p.m. so you can kind of get around the downtown area. There’s also tons of rideshares like Uber and Lyft. You can rent scooters or Citi Bike if you’re into that. And it’s quite walkable downtown, you can reach a lot of things. I believe there’s a Whole Foods across the street from where the hotel is. So there’s a lot of things downtown.

Andie Ho: The conference is being held at the Hyatt Regency near Brickell? Brick-ELL? How do you say that?

Belinda Stohner: BRICK-uhl.

Andie Ho: Brickell. Okay, so that’s considered downtown?

Belinda Stohner: Yeah. Yeah. Brickell specifically is usually a bunch of high-rises. There’s a lot of banks and condos and other businesses downtown. But yeah, I would say that the Hyatt Regency is on the edge of Brickell. So you could either go to Brickell and kind check out that area or like proper downtown, which is a little more industrial and less, less flashy, I should say.

Andie Ho: Brickell, Isn’t that the area with tons of restaurants? We’ve been there before.

Belinda Stohner: Yeah, but there’s tons of restaurants everywhere. If you’ve ever seen the documentary Cocaine Cowboys, you’ll see kind of like where all the money came from to build downtown and why it’s so beautiful.

Andie Ho: All right. So what is the food scene like in general across Miami? Not just Brickell.

Belinda Stohner: Okay. Well, we do pretty well food-wise. You know, we are a very diverse city. Obviously, there’s a lot of Latin food, like Cuban, Caribbean food, South American food. But if you want to eat $200 sushi, you can do that. Or you can go to a quick corner store and eat a sandwich for a couple bucks. For Cuban food, because that tends to be a draw for a lot of people, if you go to Calle Ocho in Little Havana—that means “eighth street”—Versailles is the popular destination for a sit-down restaurant. It’s a little bit more touristy. I like La Carreta, which means “the cart,” it’s like an ox cart. It’s a little more homestyle. They describe themselves as “abuela-style.” If you like ceviche or if you like seafood, because we’re obviously a coastal town, ceviche is really good. Near the hotel, there’s Ceviche 105. There’s also one on the beach. That’s really good. You can go get a Pisco sour and some Peruvian food and get some ceviche. And then the other thing that I really like, which is pretty local to Miami, is the Jamaican food. That’s not an obvious choice for people that come to Miami, but there’s really good Jamaican food here. Clive’s Cafe is really cool. It’s a small hole-in-the-wall place. There’s a little old lady named Miss Pearl. She runs the counter and you can go in and get like some Jamaican patties for a few bucks or they have oxtail and ackee and saltfish. That’s really interesting if you’re a little more adventurous food-wise.

Andie Ho: Now, just to be clear, folks. Versailles. Yes, it is spelled like the Palace of Versailles, But it is Cuban food, not French food. Correct?

Belinda Stohner: Yeah. I’m not really sure what the historical context on that is, but I know it’s featured in a lot of things, and that’s the one that people always talk about.

Andie Ho: So what about the French food scene? Because our listeners are largely French-speakers, people interested in francophone cultures. So what’s the French food scene like?

Belinda Stohner: You know what’s interesting? There is a pretty decent-sized French diaspora here, but the really good French restaurants are kind of scattered about. You know, there is a French cafe called Cafe Crème in North Miami. The owners have had several restaurants around Miami. That’s kind of our favorite. Kind of closer to the hotel is Buena Vista Deli. Again, it’s a kind of a cafe where you can get like a quiche or a soup and a salad. And they have like a really beautiful dessert showcase that is very French. If you’re in Coral Gables, there’s Frenchie’s Diner, which, again, the name doesn’t sound like it’s an amazing spot, but it’s quite fancy inside. You can get foie gras, but also you can just get roast chicken or duck confit or steak and potatoes. So those are kind of my favorite. Frenchie’s Diner, Cafe Crème and then Buena Vista Deli.

Andie Ho: All right, moving away from the food talk, reluctantly. You talked about some of the outdoorsy things like paddleboarding and whatnot. What about indoorsy things for us nerds?

Belinda Stohner: Well, it’s important to have indoor things because if you can imagine, the heat and the sun can get quite oppressive here, especially now in the summertime. We have things like the art museums, which is really cool. Like I mentioned before, Perez Art Museum, which is near the water. There’s also the Frost Science Museum, which has a really cool aquarium. You can see sharks, you can touch a starfish and manta rays, and it’s just really beautiful. And if you’re into science, there’s that part of it too. Um, yeah, those are kind of two of my favorite things to do.

Andie Ho: So on that topic, what do you and your husband do for fun? I mean, as local residents who live there every day and obviously are not going to the touristy areas, what are some of the things that you like to do? Places to go, places to eat?

Belinda Stohner: We’re also kind of pretty book nerdy. So there’s Books & Books. The flagship store is in Coral Gables downtown. It’s very quaint, has a cafe, wooden floors, beautiful. They have a whole section dedicated to just beautiful coffee table books, if you can imagine. And it’s cool just to go there and hang out. There’s a really cool alcoholic ice cream store. I shouldn’t really call it a store, but it kind of feels like a speakeasy almost, or a bar. And they only sell alcoholic ice cream, but it’s really good, well done. It’s not gimmicky. And that’s in the Design District, called Aubi & Ramsa.

Andie Ho: Cool. All right. I think that about covers it. It sounds like there’s something for everyone in Miami. Last question that I ask all of my interviewees: What would you like to say to our audience? What would you like them to know about life, the universe and everything?

Belinda Stohner: Everything everything? Uh, work hard and be a good person. Come to Miami. It’s a beautiful place!

Andie Ho: There you have it. Words of wisdom. All right. Well, thank you very much for telling us all about Miami today. And we hope to see you soon. And I’ll definitely see you at Christmas.

Belinda Stohner: All right. Thanks for having me.

Andie Ho: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the Continuing Education Series podcast on SoundCloud or iTunes by searching for Continuing Education Series. You can contact the FLD at division@atanet.org, visit our website at www.ata-divisions.org/fld, or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie Ho signing off. Thanks for listening and à bientôt!

FLD Editor

[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast – Episode 26 – A Chat with the SPD & KLD

Close-up of a microphone against a purple background
ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

To make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL EPISODE

SOUNDCLOUD: You can listen to or download Episode 26 and all previous episodes on Soundcloud here.

ITUNES: This episode and all previous episodes are available on iTunes here. You can subscribe or listen online. Like what you hear? Rate us and review us! It really helps get the word out.

Episode 26: A Chat with the SPD & KLD

Andie Ho: This is Andie Ho, host of the Continuing Education Series, a podcast produced for the members of the French Language Division of the American Translators Association, offering educational content about the craft of French-to-English and English-to-French translation and the division. Hi and welcome back to the podcast. We have a very exciting episode for you today. I have two guests, Paul Gallagher and Edna Santizo. They are here from the Korean Language Division and the Spanish Language Division, respectively, here to talk about what it’s like to run the largest and smallest language divisions of the ATA. Now, normally we here at the ATA or at the FLD podcast focus on French subjects, because obviously that is of interest to our memberships. But thought also, you know, we don’t talk to the other language divisions that often. So I wanted to reach out to them and see what their lives were like and kind of compare them to each other and to ours. So a brief bit about our guests today. Paul B. Gallagher is a Russian-to-English translator celebrating his 38th year in business in May. Congratulations, Paul. He has a master’s in linguistics from The Ohio State University and has also studied French, German, Polish, Bulgarian, Hebrew and Sanskrit at the college level.

Andie Ho: He took up Korean in 2007, soaking up Korean dramas, K-pop, Korean cuisine and working with Koreans in his local community to increase voter registration and engagement. As he’s gotten more into the Korean language and culture as his main hobby for the last 16 years, he was recruited by the to be its administrator in 2019 and is now finishing up his second term. Edna is a court-certified interpreter with the California Judicial Council, a conference and community interpreter and a translator. She was first elected administrator of the Spanish Language Division and is also on her second term and as an ATA and SPD member since 2010, Edna was invited to join the division’s Leadership Council in 2016 as a member of the Digital and Social Media Committee. And then the next year she was appointed chair of the committee, and that offered her a platform to learn about the inner workings of the ATA’s largest language division by far, as we’re going to discuss. So welcome, Edna. Welcome, Paul.

Edna Santizo: Thank you.

Paul Gallagher: Thank you.

Andie Ho: So, quick numbers for you. I pulled this from the ATA’s member directory. Edna, the Spanish Language Division has currently 2,073 members. French is a little less than half that at 931. And then Paul, the Korean Language Division has 98. So that is quite the disparity. That is a factor of 10 or 20, really. Edna, we’ll start with you. What is it like to run a language division with so many people from so many different places all over the world?

Edna Santizo: It’s fun and it’s challenging, as you can imagine. The Spanish Language Division, aside from being one of the largest divisions of the ATA, is also one of the oldest divisions. A lot of colleagues know each other because, you know, we run into each other at the conference. So we know a pretty good size of the members of the SPD, and that helps run the division. Aside from that, I’m blessed to follow on the steps of some amazing leaders that have, that did a lot of very good work in establishing the division, you know, creating committees, working on the website and what-have-you. And also, I’m very lucky to have a group of volunteers that are committed and that are always, you know, willing to lend a helping hand when we have activities or what-have-you. So overall, I would say it’s very fun and challenging.

Andie Ho: And Paul, what about you? What is it like to have a much smaller group of people to work with?

Paul Gallagher: Well, I would like to start with one small correction. We just added a member, so we’re at 99 today. Yeah, it is very interesting. Um, I enjoy working with Koreans, but there are certain cultural challenges because their mindset is often very different from the American mindset. They tend to be cliquish. If you want to deal with Korean, it’s best if you get an introduction from somebody they already know. But once you get in, they’re very tight. I really enjoy working with them. And the size has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage, of course, is that you basically know everybody. The disadvantage is if you need if you need somebody to do a particular task, it’s harder to find someone if you have a smaller group to choose from. But we get by, we’re fine.

Andie Ho: So that was going to be one of my first questions is would you each describe your divisions as close-knit? Obviously it’s going to be much harder, Edna, for the Spanish Language Division for everybody to know each other. But are there, you know, very close groups within that as well?

Edna Santizo: I would say so. And this is something that I’ve heard over the years and, you know, I’ve been a witness of it where people have met during an conference and they become very good friends. They share, you know, work opportunities and they look forward to the next year to meet again at a conference. And they met because, you know, they attended the annual dinner of the SPD or they attended an event of the SPD or because they found out that they’re both SPD members. So I don’t think, you know, all 2,000 members know each other. That would be very hard. But yes, like you described, there are groups of people that are very close-knit that have met at a SPD activity and that they remain, I mean, they become very close friends and work colleagues over the years.

Andie Ho: Paul, you said some of the members tend to be cliquish. Would you view the world as one big clique or are there sort of some sub cliques within it?

Paul Gallagher: In any organization with more than about 10 people, there’re going to be sub-cliques. It’s just by default. I would say that. The Koreans compared to Americans. Again, the Koreans tend to be hardworking, very diligent, very committed to their duties. So once you get somebody on board for something, they will push the limits to get it done. Americans by comparison—and of course, any group has a mix—but Americans compared to Koreans, I would call myself a shirker. And I mean, I think I’m working hard and then I look at them and. Wow.

Andie Ho: So some of the advantages and disadvantages of the sizes of your divisions are obvious. But Paul, for your small division, do you have trouble finding volunteers, or do you have more volunteers stepping up because it’s so close-knit and everybody feels part of the group?

Paul Gallagher: Yes and no. It depends on how we approach them. And I didn’t know this at first, but when I first got started, I would send a broadcast to my Leadership Council, which even though we’re recommended to have about 10 people, we at the beginning had about 12 or 13. I would send a broadcast to all of them and say, if anybody is interested in doing this, if anybody can help, please contact me. And I was getting no response. And I realized, and people within the division clued me in, that I have to approach each one of them personally and say, you know, Kyung-ah, can you help? Or can you do this? And make a specific ask to a specific person. And then they will answer. And more often than not they’ll say yes, but if I just send a broadcast, they’ll each wait for someone else to step up.

Andie Ho: You know, I have found that in the French Language Division as well and also in other organizations I volunteer for. That may just be human nature. But Edna, I mean, you tell us, you have the biggest division. Is that also true for the SPD?

Edna Santizo: Yes, I know. Can you repeat the question? I’m sorry.

Andie Ho: If you send out a general call for volunteers, do you have millions of people stepping up, you know, leaping up to volunteer because you have so many people? Or do they just sort of hide behind each other because there’s so many of them?

Edna Santizo: Well, you know, actually, I think we are very lucky. We have a total of nine committees on the SPD. Each committee runs between three to seven members per committee. And like you mentioned at the beginning, this is the third year that I’ve been an SPD administrator and I haven’t had any issues in finding volunteers as to asking for a specific task because we are very well structured. Each committee has their area and they know what they need to do and they do it. I do very little work. I will say, thankfully, in guiding the everyday operation, we have special activities and special projects that we do. And that’s where we get together and we plan and we decide who’s going to be doing what. But it’s been pretty good so far, As to calling for volunteers, usually we at the conference, the administrator, the assistant administrator, we are always talking to people, to new members. And if they show interest in joining the Leadership Council, we try to take them in. We don’t say no. We take volunteers because we need them. And usually that’s the case at the ATA conference. People approach us and they ask us if they can help. And we always say yes. And we tell them we have these committees. Let us know where you think you can help us, and then we take it from there.

Andie Ho: So what are some of these subcommittees that you have, or committees?

Edna Santizo: We have the Digital and Social Media Committee. We have the Intercambios, which is the SPD bulletin. We have a website committee, student involvement, hospitality and relationships and, let me see, podcast. We also have a podcast committee.

Andie Ho: Paul. What about KLD? Do you guys have a newsletter or podcast or anything like that? Social media?

Paul Gallagher: We have a technically we do have a blog and we do have a Facebook page, but there isn’t a lot of activity there. As you know, any blog is successful if there are frequent posts so people have a reason to come and visit. Most of the stuff, most of the activity that we have goes through our listserv, where somebody posts a message and all the members of the listserv get a copy in their email box. So they don’t have to go looking for it. It comes to them.

Andie Ho: What is your relationship, Pau, the KLD’s relationship to some of the other language divisions? Do you ever partner with, say, Chinese or Japanese or any of the other divisions?

Paul Gallagher: We have explored connections with Chinese and Japanese, who are our natural partners. If if you know English, obviously half of what you know is from French because of the Norman conquest. And so if we want to say “go back,” we can also say “return,” and “return” is the French equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon “go back.” In Korean, the corresponding parent language, so to speak, is Chinese. They’re not genetically related, but Korean has borrowed thousands and thousands of Chinese words, and they pronounce them pretty close to the middle Chinese version, in about 500 AD. The Korean pronunciations sound a lot like the Cantonese pronunciations, which have not changed a lot, but Mandarin because of the Mongol influence and the conquests over there has changed a lot. And so you know, the common name Kim, which originally sounded more like “come,” is now Jin in Mandarin and doesn’t sound like Kim in Korean. Similarly, Japanese has borrowed thousands and thousands of Chinese words and they’ve also borrowed the writing system and supplemented it with their own. So you can look at a character in Japanese and understand the meaning, but maybe not be so sure about the pronunciation. So there is this natural cross-cultural — and I should also say Buddhism and Confucianism have migrated from the continent onto the peninsula and the Japanese islands. So there’s a lot of that. The mindset, the thought process has similarities. We have tried a couple of times to put together a joint presentations at ATA. So far it hasn’t worked out and it won’t work out this year. You know, everything has been set. But I do hope that someday soon that CJK will join forces and put together a joint presentation.

Andie Ho: Edna, what about you?

Edna Santizo: Yes, we have collaborated with other divisions. I know that we have collaborated with the Audiovisual Division. We are looking forward to collaborating with the Interpreters Division this year. I’m hoping that that happens and, I can’t remember right now, you know, specific collaborations. But yes, we usually reach out to other divisions because our members, you know, we’re Spanish Division, but our members are — their specializations are you know, audiovisual, medical, they’re interpreters, they work into the legal fields. So we have members in other divisions, and that’s why we try to collaborate. Also, we try to publish on the Intercambios bulletin articles related to those specializations. And usually members from other divisions are the ones who are contributing to those articles.

Andie Ho: Do either of you have special events for your divisions at the annual ATA conference besides the annual meeting for members?

Edna Santizo: Go ahead, Paul. Oh, thank you. We do. We have what we call our annual dinner. The annual dinner is called Muchas culturas un solo idioma, many cultures, one language. And it is very well known in our division, I think with other divisions too, we usually have about 100 people in our annual dinner. We have a very famous raffle that takes place at the end of the dinner and we have, you know, so many prizes. We have licenses for Trados, for Wordfast, books, webinars, workshops. What we try to, you know, celebrate our members at our annual dinner. And it’s a networking event. It’s an opportunity to be, you know, outside of the conference setting and just relax and enjoy a dinner and get to know one another. And it’s very fun. And it’s one of the traditions that we have for the annual conferences.

Andie Ho: Paul?

Paul Gallagher: Yes.

Paul Gallagher: We do also have an annual dinner and it draws a substantial, I would say typically two-thirds or more of the attendees go to or come to our dinner. Korean food is delicious. If you’ve had it, you know. If you haven’t, one of the things I especially like about it is what they call banchan, the side dishes. You don’t just serve an entree and a drink, but six, seven, eight, ten, sometimes more little side dishes. So you’ve got six, seven, eight, ten or more different flavors mixing in with your entree.

Andie Ho: I had read about banchan. I don’t know how you say it, but the first time I actually experienced it, it was overwhelming in the best possible way. It just kept coming and so much of it and they were so different. It was—I thought, why doesn’t every culture do this? This is amazing.

Edna Santizo: I used to work for Koreans before I became a translator and interpreter. And yes, I love the Korean food like I’m a witness of it.

Paul Gallagher: I’d be interested to know, Edna. Korea is a small country, well-populated, but relatively small, and pretty much everyone can understand everybody. But I understand that there are a lot of Spanishes across the world. I was especially impressed when I saw the movie Walk the Line. The Spanish title is La Locura de Johnny y June. It’s about Johnny Cash. And I discovered that it has not only Spanish subtitles but Spanish audio as well. But they were done by people from two different countries, one from Mexico and one from Peru. So if you turn them both on, you get two different sets of, two different scripts.

Edna Santizo: Right. Uh huh.

Paul Gallagher: Did you find any difficulty understanding Spanish speakers from other countries?

Edna Santizo: It varies. Yes. There’s people from Spain versus people from Argentina and from Guatemala. So it’s a very different dialect of Spanish. But Mexico, Mexico also has like many different dialects within Mexico. But we understand each other. I think there is something that not everybody agrees on, but there is something called neutral Spanish, and we’re able to understand each other. Obviously, there are nuances, especially with, you know, jokes, humor or bad words, you know. But then, you know, each country has its own twist to that. So that may be difficult. And obviously there’s, you know, those words that have one meaning in one country and a completely different meaning in another country. And, you know, we all make fun of those words. And of course, we use them because we know, you know, they’re going to be a very good conversation topic. But I think overall, we’re able to understand each other pretty well.

Paul Gallagher: Thank you.

Andie Ho: All right. Well, final question that I ask all of my interviewees. Is there anything else you would like people to know at all? Edna, I’ll start with you.

Edna Santizo: Well, I think there is this conception sometimes, that’s what I’ve heard, that because the Spanish Division is so big that it’s not approachable sometimes or that, you know, the volunteers are handpicked or that we are not willing to collaborate with other divisions because we are so big. But that’s not the case. Please reach out to us if you need any help, if we can support in promoting your events, your content, if you have a podcast and you want us to help you, please reach out. And if you want to volunteer also, you will be more than welcome to join us. Yeah.

Edna Santizo: That’s it.

Paul Gallagher: I was going to say much the same thing. So thank you, Edna, for saying it so well. The Korean Language Division always welcomes new members. We’re happy to have you to join with you, to welcome you in. What should I say? [speaks Korean] When somebody arrives and you want to welcome them, typically that’s what they say, [speaks Korean], which is literally “quickly come,” in a polite form. It would be like usted in Spanish or vous in French.

Andie Ho: I love it. Thank you guys for being here. I think we should maybe think about some collaborations with each other.

Edna Santizo: Absolutely.

Paul Gallagher: I’m ready.

Edna Santizo: Yeah.

Andie Ho: Excellent.

Andie Ho: Maybe stay tuned, people. And also, if you want to be the one hundredth KLD member, sign up now.

Paul Gallagher: Yeah. You get a you get a free toaster.

Paul Gallagher: Just kidding. Kidding.

Andie Ho: Thank you.

Paul Gallagher: Thank you, Andie, for hosting this.

Edna Santizo: Thank you, Andie. Appreciate it.

Andie Ho: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the Continuing Education Series podcast on SoundCloud or iTunes by searching for Continuing Education Series. You can contact the FLD at division@atanet.org, visit our website at www.ata-divisions.org/fld, or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie Ho signing off. Thanks for listening and à bientôt!

FLD Editor

[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast — Episode 25 — Matt Bunczk on Paralegal Certificates

A pile of three books on the left and an open notebook on the right. There is a pen resting on the notebook.
ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

The A Propos LogoTo make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL EPISODE

SOUNDCLOUD: You can listen to or download Episode 25 and all previous episodes on Soundcloud here.

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Episode 25 — Matt Bunczk on Paralegal Certificates

Andie Ho: This is Andie Ho, host of the Continuing Education Series, a podcast produced for the members of the French Language Division of the American Translators Association, offering educational content about the craft of French-to-English and English-to-French translation and the Division. Matt Bunczk is an FLD member and translator who is ATA-certified in both German- and French-to-English. He specializes in business, legal and financial translations. He’s based near Philadelphia, where he obtained a BA in French from Ursinus College and a certificate of proficiency in paralegal studies from Delaware County Community College. His undergraduate studies have taken him to places including Strasbourg and Senegal. He’s been translating full time since 2015. Welcome, Matt Bunczk.

MB: Thank you, Andie. It’s great to be here.

AH: Now, I’ve already spilled the beans on why I asked Matt to speak with us today. And it’s because of that certificate of proficiency in paralegal studies from Delaware County Community College that I wanted to talk to him about it. One of our colleagues put me on to the fact that you earned this paralegal certificate, and my interest was immediately piqued because I had never heard of such a thing and didn’t know such a thing existed. So I want to hear all about it today. Why, when, where, how,, everything. And maybe our colleagues will be inspired to get one as well. So first things first. How did you learn about this paralegal certificate? Since I’ve never heard of it.

MB: I was, well, when I started freelancing back in 2015, there were just a lot of different projects coming at me, and there were some that I was that I was able to do just with my business background and as a project coordinator and an executive assistant. And then there were others that were kind of out of reach for me. But I would have liked to be able to translate them and understand the documents and everything. And so I really got into the paralegal program because I wanted to explore those documents that I was interested in translating.

AH: Did you want to specialize in legal right off the bat? Is that what made you get it or was it just because you were receiving legal and wanted to understand more about it?

MB: I think it was because I was receiving the legal documents and I wanted to understand more about them. And I think I also had the impetus from setting out on my own as a freelancer and no longer being an employee of a company and just understanding how the law affected me as an independent contractor. And in that process, I also learned a lot just about my rights and my obligations as a person. So there’s been a lot of enlightening moments along the way.

AH: So you got it from a Delaware County Community College. You got your certificate from there. Is that near you?

MB: Yes. It’s about a half an hour away from me. And Delaware County is not the county that I live in. I actually live in Montgomery County, but at Montgomery County Community College, they don’t have a paralegal certificate program. But in neighboring Delaware County, even though I would have to pay more to attend that community college, I found it very affordable still, and I was able to drive there and attend the classes.

AH: Okay. So it was in-person?

MB: Yes. And they also had a hybrid model where they wanted you to show up in person, but if you couldn’t show up in person, they streamed the class online.

AH: And this was in in what year? I mean pre-COVID?

MB: Yes, this was. I started the program in 2019 and then I completed it in 2021.

AH: So they were a little bit just ahead of the curve, huh?

MB: Yeah, absolutely.

AH: Do you know, do they happen to be full online at this point?

MB: I’m not sure about that. I would venture to say that they went back to in-person classes, but I’m not sure about that.

AH: So you said 2019 to 2021. Was it a two-year program or one-and-a-half or, I mean, how did they count it?

MB: Yeah. So technically, there are two tracks to this program. If you don’t have an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree, you could obtain your associate’s degree in paralegal studies. If you have an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree, you could take their certificate of proficiency program, which is just the classes focused on the paralegal studies. And so since I had a bachelor’s degree already, I was able to do the professional certificate program. And that was a little shorter than two years. That was about a year and a half.

AH: Taking how many classes at a time?

MB: I just took one or two classes at a time. And I was able to fit that comfortably into my schedule and still have a social life.

AH: That was going to be my next question is, how did you balance working full time, running your own business and then being in school at the same time?

MB: Basically, I took a class or two in the evenings and over the summer, and like I said, it was just one or two at a time. And it was just for each class. It was about three hours of class time each week. And then probably the same, if not a little more, more hours for homework. But it was definitely doable working full-time.

AH: And all the classes were in the evening?

MB: Yeah. Yep. There was no problem there.

AH: Okay, so that sounds like it lends itself to working professionals, people who are already working a full-time job.

MB: Exactly, yeah.

AH: Okay, so what was the curriculum like? What kinds of classes do you take to get a paralegal certificate?

MB: So they start out their program with an introduction to paralegal studies, and that gave an overview of our legal system in the United States. And then after that, I took two classes in legal research and writing, and that was followed by contract law and then another class called Technology in the Law, which made sure that we were able to draft documents in Microsoft Word and create PowerPoint presentations and work with software that you would find in law firms. And then after that, I took a real estate law class. I took an accounting class because they want their paralegal students to have some general idea of how accounting works. I took civil litigation and tort principles, civil litigation and toward applications, criminal law. And then at the end of it all, I had — it was almost like an internship, but it was geared toward working professionals so you didn’t have to show up at an internship every day. But in the evenings we would go to our professor’s law firm. She had a private practice and she would give us real live cases to work on.

AH: Oh, wow. That’s really neat.

MB: Yeah, it was really neat and really eye-opening and really humbling.

AH: Wow. So how many of those classes did you choose, and how many of them were mandatory for everyone in the program?

MB: So most of those classes were mandatory. There was one elective that we had to take, but we had a choice of which elective we took. And the choices were family law, there was one called elder law, there was bankruptcy law, there was business organizations, administrative law. And the one that I took, I actually took it at Montgomery County Community College, and I had the credit transferred in, and that was a business law class.

AH: All right. Okay. So I don’t know if you have a full answer for this, but how does a paralegal certificate differ from full-blown law school? Is it…I mean, did you… Do people in law school take the classes that you took and then continue on? Or was it like a pretty separate program?

MB: Right. What I heard from the chairperson of the paralegal studies department when I was first being received into the paralegal studies program was that this program was almost like the equivalent of the first year of law school, and it touches on most areas of the law. I would say it doesn’t go as in-depth as a law school curriculum would go, but it still gave you still went pretty deep with everything.

AH: You mentioned tuition being relatively affordable. I mean, we don’t have to go into specifics, but you found it was affordable for your case?

MB: Yeah, absolutely.

MB: I don’t mind sharing how much it cost for me as an out-of-county student. I paid about $1,000 a class, not including the books. So with 11 or 12 classes, that was around $12,000. And I wasn’t paying that all at once. I was just paying as I went.

AH: Okay. And then you mentioned that you could go into the certificate program even if you don’t already have an associate’s or a bachelor’s. So what are the qualifications to get in?

MB: You would basically have to apply to the program, like, just apply to the college and declare your major as a paralegal studies major.

AH: Okay. So you could just be straight out of high school, for instance?

MB: Absolutely, yep.

AH: Okay. Well, how many of your fellow students were straight out of high school or traditional college age? And how many of them were older or non-traditional?

MB: I would say it was split half and half. So half the students were straight out of high school and then the other half were working professionals.

AH: And how big were the classes?

MB: They were, I would say, they kind of ranged between probably between eight and 15 people in a class, I’d say.

AH: Oh, that’s a nice little size.

MB: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we had great discussions that way.

AH: Oh, good. So did you feel like you got some good personal attention from your professors?

MB: Oh, yeah. Lots of personal attention. Yeah.

AH: You mentioned going to your professor’s actual law firm. That’s pretty cool.

MB: Oh, yeah, Yeah, that was. And, yeah, she trusted us with her cases, and she was okay with asking her clients if it was okay if we sat in on the discussions and helped with the cases and everything and yeah, it was really a wonderful opportunity.

AH: So what kinds of backgrounds did your fellow students come from? I mean, were there lots of other translators like you or people who actually, you know, wanted to work as a paralegal afterwards? Where did they come from?

MB: Most of them, they were seeking employment as a paralegal. For me, I was kind of the oddball. I mean, they were very interested in my translation work and everything. I definitely felt out of place because, you know, I kind of didn’t have it in my mind that I would be working as a paralegal after this. And I still don’t because there’s a level of stress in the work that I’m personally like, I don’t feel like I’m up to it. But yeah, most people in the program were working toward working as a paralegal.

AH: I can definitely relate to being in a room and being the oddball translator there.

MB: Exactly.

AH: So the big questions. How has this helped you in your translation work, if at all? Like, how have you been able to use this in your translation career?

MB: I would say the most important thing that it’s given me is it’s enabled me to translate the documents that I’ve wanted to work with, and then some. There are lots of moments where I’m saying to myself, oh my God, I’m so glad I took these classes. And I don’t feel so lost when I’m facing certain documents or certain situations.

AH: Have you been able to actively use your certificate as a selling point to potential clients?

MB: Oh yeah.

AH: Or is it more of a personal…

MB: I do put myself out there as someone who specializes in legal translations. I’m not necessarily actively seeking out legal translation, but it is something that interests me very much. It’s something that I think I’m pretty good at. Those are my feelings about that. Does that answer the question?

AH: I think so, yeah. And yeah, it makes sense. If you also specialize in business and financial, you’re probably going to see a fair amount of legal coming at you as well.

MB: Absolutely. Yeah.

AH: Okay, Well, this has been very interesting. Um, last question that I always ask all of my interviewees. Is there anything else you want listeners to know about life, the universe and everything?

MB: [laughs] Well, I guess in terms of the paralegal program and paralegal studies, I guess I will end by saying that I know it’s not for everyone. I know there’s one listener in particular who won’t touch legal translations with a 10-foot pole. But if you are interested in legal things, if you would like to learn more about our legal system in the United States, it’s definitely an interesting program. Linguistically, you do so much mental gymnastics, working with words and dealing with terminology and statutes and court cases. So it’s definitely an exercise in working with your words, and I think it would definitely improve your skills as a translator even if you don’t go into legal translation. Um. And, I think that’s it.

AH: All right. Words of wisdom from Matt Bunczk. Thank you so much, Matt, for this perspective. Very interesting. I may be googling paralegal certificates near me soon. We’ll see. But thank you for your time today. We appreciate it.

MB: Great, thanks a lot for the opportunity, Andie.

MB: Appreciate it.

AH: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the Continuing Education Series podcast on SoundCloud or iTunes by searching for “Continuing Education series.” You can contact the FLD at division [at] atanet.org, visit our website at www.ata-divisions.org/fld, or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie Ho signing off. Thanks for listening and à bientôt!

Matthew Bunczk is an ATA-certified German-to-English and ATA-certified French-to-English translator specializing in business and legal texts.

ATA Podcast host Andie Ho is a certified French to English translator specializing in the food industry. She earned her M.A. in translation from Kent State University and is now based in the Houston area. She currently serves as the ATA’s French Language Division administrator. You can follow her on Twitter at @JHawkTranslator or email her at andie [at] andiehotranslations [dot] com.

FLD Editor

[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast – Episode 29 – 2023 ATA Conference Sessions

Microphone against a tie-die-colored background
ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

The A Propos LogoTo make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL EPISODE

SOUNDCLOUD: You can listen to or download Episode 29 and all previous episodes on Soundcloud here.

ITUNES: This episode and all previous episodes are available on iTunes here. You can subscribe or listen online. Like what you hear? Rate us and review us! It really helps get the word out.

Episode 29: ATA 2023 Conference – French Sessions

Andie Ho: Hello, hello! I’m your podcast host, Andie Ho, and for this episode we don’t have any guests. Well, we sort of have one. You’ll find out. But what I want to do this time is talk about the French conference sessions that are going on at ATA 64 in October, October 25th through 28th of this year in Miami, Florida. Now, we’ve got six sessions this year that are labeled as French or having to do with French. Four of them are the traditional hour-long sessions that we all know and love. But this year there are some new formats for some of the sessions at ATA. Some of them are 30 minutes long and we have one of those for our French talks. And then we have one that is 15 minutes and that’s called a MicroTalk. There’s going to be some MicroTalks sprinkled throughout ATA that are 15 minutes and they’re supposed to be something like a TED Talk. I’m very excited about this new format. It’s going to be interesting to see how it goes. And I’m very pleased that the Board and other people organizing the ATA are innovating and trying new things. Now, for the first session, I will let one of the speakers herself tell you what it’s all about.

Liza Tripp: Bonjour, tout le monde! My name is Liza Tripp, and I’m a certified French-to-English translator. I’ll be presenting with Denise Jacobs at this year’s 64th ATA conference in Miami on Thursday, October 26th at 10:45 a.m. Our session’s entitled “Est-ce Que Ça Cloche?! Coping With Culture Clash in French to English Fashion Translation.” In this session, we’ll be delving into French fashion language and in particular, noticing how terms in this sector often fluidly evoke not just concrete fashion words, but more abstract and culturally charged concepts such as art-making legacy. And English? Well, not so much. Using recent translations from fashion and gallery exhibits, fashion books, and marketing materials we’ll learn to identify where linguistic gaps can signal cultural gaps and how we can add back just a bit of that cultural je ne sais quoi when translating these materials into English. This year we don’t have the last session on the last day, so I hope to see everyone alert and energetic in Miami. À tout!

Andie Ho: Now, of note, Liza and Denise’s session is also labeled as “Book and Literary Translation,” “Localization,” and “Other T&I Topics.”

Now, the next session we have is called “Chemical Name, Chemical Structures: What’s a Translator to Do?” And it’s being put on by Matthew Schlecht. It is from 1:45 p.m. to 2:45 p.m. on Thursday. And here’s the description. “Translators and interpreters encounter chemical names in many subject matter areas, including medicines, cosmetics, and food additives. They can appear in news items, school assignments, and everyday conversations. There are proper official names for all of them, but these are honored mainly in the breach. Finding the right chemical name to fit the register of a document is a challenge, but sometimes even getting the correct spelling is daunting. This session will cover the translation of chemical names from German, French, Japanese, and Spanish into English, describe strategies and approaches, and show how to capture and generate chemical structures for inclusion.”

Now it’s also labeled as “Science and Technology T&I,” “Medical T&I,” and “German,” “Japanese,” and “Spanish.”

The next one is from 2 to 3 p.m. on Friday. And it is called “Québec: The Gift That Keeps on Giving.” The speaker is Claire Kusy. I’m not positive how to pronounce her name, so pardon me, Claire, if I mispronounced it. And here’s the description. “The practice of translation in the Francophone province of Quebec provides a fertile landscape in North America. Quebec is at the crossroads of so many fascinating elements: history, culture, politics, law and, of course, language.

From a translator’s perspective, the unique Quebec context and experience makes the profession a highly stimulating one, reaffirming the translator’s role as more than a simple conduit. Through the lens of legal translation (the speakers area of expertise), this session will delve into some of the more intriguing aspects of a Quebec translator’s practice.”

This one is labeled as “Legal T&I” in addition to “French.”

All right. The next one runs from 3:30 to 4 p.m. This is one of our half-hour sessions and it takes place on Friday. It is called “Le Repas des Fauves to The Beasts’ Feast: A Translator’s Linguistic and Cultural Feat.” Now, interestingly, no speaker is listed, so I guess it’s a mystery. We’ll find out when we get there. Here’s the description. “Julien Sibre’s play Le Repas des Fauves describes the conflictual interaction between friends who are trapped in a Parisian apartment during the German occupation of France. How does the English translator mediate between the two texts to convey the linguistic and cultural essence of a psychological drama deeply rooted in specific historical and psychological circumstances? The speaker will discuss the challenges she experienced while translating Sibre’s work into English to demonstrate that compromise is often the only strategy available to the literary translator.”

Unsurprisingly, this one is also marked as “Book and Literary Translation” and sounds very interesting.

The next one is the only ATA MicroTalk labeled as French, and it runs from 8:50 a.m. to 9:05 a.m. on Saturday. It is called “Civic Engagement in the Translation Classroom: A Virtual Exchange Experiment.”

And the speaker is Kathleen Loysen. “The speaker will discuss a semester-long virtual exchange between two groups of university students of French to English translation (in France and the U.S.). In these virtual classes, students were guided through a project involving research on the history of slavery in both New Jersey and Bordeaux and its relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement. Students performed research, translated documents, and created content for a video documenting their experience. Students also discovered how seemingly universal notions of democracy, citizenship, and diversity have evolved in both countries. The session will be delivered in English with selected examples in French that will be translated and explicated.”

This session is labeled as an “ATA MicroTalk,” of course, as well as “Educational T&I” and “T&I Education and Training.”

And last but not least, from 4 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, we have a session called “What’s Cooking: An Introduction to Culinary Translation” by Olivia Singier. “Over the past few years, interest in food and cooking has become more popular thanks to globalization and the expansion of food-related media. How difficult could it be to translate menus and cookbooks? Chicken with pasta and tomato sauce—that sounds easy enough to translate! The truth is, it’s anything but. Using examples from past projects, the speaker will discuss the various techniques used to translate food and specialized terms in cookbooks. In this interactive session, attendees will receive tips on how to develop their skills and perhaps add culinary translation to their specialties.”

This one is marked as “Book and Literary Translation” and “Other T&I Topics.”

Now, those are the six sessions that are labeled as French for this year’s ATA conference. But of course, there are going to be so many more sessions. On a personal note, although we want to support our fellow French speakers, there are so many more sessions to check out. And in fact, I encourage you to go to ones that you think have nothing to do with your career or your language or your specialty. Some of the most interesting sessions I’ve ever been to are ones that have nothing to do with what I do on a daily basis. And honestly, I didn’t really get anything out of them on a professional level, but they were just so much fun and so interesting. And you get to meet new people outside of your usual circles that you might not meet in other circumstances. Yeah, it’s really interesting and there’s so much to explore, especially if you’ve been to ATA number of times now. I’m not going to say it gets “samey,” but you know you’re comfortable, and if you’re looking for something new and a new way to stretch yourself at the conference in a way that you haven’t done in a while, it’s definitely a quick way to do it. Anyways, I will see you all soon and I hope you enjoy the rest of your summer.

FLD Editor

[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast – Episode 27 – Jean-Baptiste Joachim on Teaching French Online

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ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

To make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

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Episode 27: Jean-Baptiste Joachim on Teaching French Online

Andie Ho: This is Andie Ho, host of the Continuing Education Series, a podcast produced for the member of the French Language Division of the American Translators Association (ATA), offering educational content about the craft of French-to-English and English-to-French translation and the Division.

Andie Ho: Aujourd’hui, nous allons parler à Jean-Baptiste Joachim, qui est professeur de français, d’anglais et d’espagnol. Professeur, mais pour les adultes. Son activité principale, c’est l’enseignement du français, et plus principalement le français oral. Je l’ai invité aujourd’hui à nous parler parce que ses activités sont proches de la traduction et de l’interprétation. Jean-Baptiste Joachim, bienvenue, merci d’être là !

Jean-Baptiste Joachim: Bonjour Andie. Merci de m’accueillir !

Andie: Bon, quand je pense à un prof de français, normalement je pense à une école, une maîtresse, les cours de récré. Pour moi c’est ça un professeur de français. Mais toi tu ne fais pas ça. Donc explique-nous ce que tu fais exactement.

Jean-Baptiste : Effectivement, c’est vrai que ma vision des cours de français n’est pas exactement la même que celle dont on a l’habitude. Et pourtant c’est peut-être une approche qui est assez commune, assez fréquente, même si on ne s’en rend pas forcément compte.

Aujourd’hui, on apprend les langues grâce à Internet. Il y a des centaines et des centaines de chaînes YouTube pour apprendre des langues. Il y a énormément de vidéos de qualité, des podcasts, des sites internet et de plus en plus de personnes sont maintenant capables d’apprendre seules, de manière autonome. Donc parfois elles commencent dans un cours et puis elles décident de passer à la vitesse supérieure, de commencer à explorer elles-mêmes différentes ressources. Et très rapidement, elles arrivent à un niveau qui est beaucoup plus élevé que le rythme proposé par la classe. Elles essaient alors d’avoir des cours particuliers pour pouvoir améliorer leur communication et avoir une approche un peu plus personnalisée.

J’ai donc surfé sur cette vague des cours privés et des cours particuliers suivis par beaucoup de ces personnes, qui parfois étaient un peu frustrées de ne pas pouvoir communiquer à un niveau plus élevé. Et donc je leur propose une approche personnalisée, avec la réalisation de leurs objectifs de manière beaucoup plus sérieuse. Voilà comment j’ai commencé à travailler.

Andie: Donc comment t’es-tu lancé dans ce chemin ? Est-ce que tu es professeur de formation ?

Jean-Baptiste : Alors, à l’origine, je suis plutôt linguiste de formation. Mais pas « véritablement linguiste » : j’ai suivi un cursus à l’université qui s’appelait « Langues étrangères appliquées ». L’objectif, c’était d’étudier les langues étrangères, mais dans un but professionnel. Donc par exemple faire de la traduction commerciale, faire de la traduction de notices, ou alors travailler dans une entreprise d’import-export avec une bonne connaissance de la culture et des langues des pays dans lesquels on serait amené à travailler.

Et quand j’ai terminé mon master, j’ai commencé à travailler dans l’import-export. J’ai travaillé dans différentes entreprises, mais je me suis rapidement rendu compte que je n’étais pas forcément fait pour travailler en équipe : je suis plus un travailleur solitaire qu’un travailleur en équipe. La raison en est que je suis très facilement distrait. Comme je te l’avais déjà raconté, je suis très facilement distrait et quand je suis en équipe, eh bien je passe plus de temps à rigoler avec les collègues qu’à véritablement travailler. Pour pouvoir travailler correctement, je dois être dans un cadre vraiment très calme et silencieux, en face-à-face avec une personne et, comme ça, je suis sûr de pouvoir avancer.

Donc quand je me suis rendu compte que ça n’allait pas dans les entreprises, j’ai réfléchi un petit peu, et à l’époque où j’ai commencé à enseigner, je travaillais au Luxembourg et au Luxembourg, c’est assez fréquent d’avoir une deuxième activité. Certaines personnes ont un poste durant la journée dans une entreprise et le soir prennent un deuxième petit boulot, généralement en relation avec leur passion pour pouvoir, eh bien voilà, vivre un petit peu de leur passion.

Et donc j’avais une amie qui était professeure de sport. Pendant la journée, elle était responsable financière et, le soir, elle donnait des cours de sport dans une salle de sport. J’étais assez impressionné. Je me dis « Waouh, quand même, avoir une journée de travail et ensuite enchaîner ! ». Et j’ai participé à un de ces cours. J’ai vu à quel point elle était heureuse et à quel point c’était une autre personne. Et je me dis : « Pourquoi est-ce que, moi, je ne ferais pas quelque chose comme ça ? ».

Et je me suis rapproché de différents instituts qui enseignent les langues au Luxembourg. J’ai proposé ma candidature et j’ai commencé à donner quelques cours comme ça, à droite à gauche. Et puis au début de l’année suivante, l’école m’a demandé si cela m’intéresserait de devenir professeur à temps plein. Et j’ai répondu, « Pourquoi pas, comment est-ce que ça se passe ? ». Mon interlocutrice m’a donné les conditions et m’a dit « Tu sais, toi, si tu t’installes en tant que professeur indépendant, je peux te garantir que tu auras 30 heures de cours dès la première année. » J’ai dit banco. J’ai accepté de quitter mon poste pour m’installer en tant que professeur indépendant. Et depuis, je n’ai pas arrêté. Je n’ai pas arrêté et j’en ai fait mon activité principale !

Andie: Et cela se passait quand ?

Jean-Baptiste : C’était 2014. J’ai commencé à travailler en tant que professeur en 2014. J’avais déjà fait auparavant du soutien scolaire, quelques activités comme ça, à droite, à gauche, mais jamais dans les entreprises. Et jamais de manière clairement organisée, comme un professeur de français, avec le matériel pédagogique nécessaire.

Andie:  Donc tu as commencé par être prof de français. Tu es toujours prof de français, mais tu as beaucoup plus de contenu. Tu as des podcasts, des vidéos YouTube… ? Parle-nous de ça.

Jean-Baptiste : Effectivement, aujourd’hui, j’ai essayé de développer mon activité pour créer du contenu. Disons que la création de contenu, c’est d’abord pour satisfaire ma curiosité personnelle, parce qu’il y a beaucoup de matériel dont j’ai besoin et que j’aimerais utiliser, que je ne trouve pas forcément. Et avec un petit peu de formation en linguistique, je me suis rendu compte qu’il y avait beaucoup d’aspects du français qui n’étaient pas forcément pris en compte dans l’enseignement. Donc j’ai exploré tout ça, et je me suis créé des ressources qui correspondaient à ce dont j’avais besoin. Ressources que j’utilise pendant mes cours.

Mais une autre des raisons principales qui m’ont poussé à développer tout ça, c’est qu’aujourd’hui le marché de l’enseignement des langues est très concurrentiel. Il existe des plates-formes qui mettent en relation des professeurs et des élèves, mais qui bien évidemment prennent des commissions au passage. Et la seule manière, en tant que professeur indépendant, en ligne, de trouver des élèves, eh bien, c’est de créer du contenu, de créer une communauté. Donc moi, j’ai choisi YouTube. J’ai tâté, beaucoup.

Au début, je ne savais pas véritablement sur quelle plate-forme concentrer mon attention, mais finalement, c’est YouTube qui a eu le plus de succès. Et un petit peu plus tard, j’ai créé un podcast, mais c’était principalement pour faire passer les utilisateurs de YouTube à un produit un peu plus sophistiqué, un petit peu plus développé que ce que je proposais sur YouTube.

Donc en fait, aujourd’hui, les réseaux sociaux et mon activité en parallèle de mon activité de professeur de français ont deux fonctions. Premièrement, créer du contenu nécessaire pour l’enseignement, et aussi attirer de nouveaux clients et me faire connaître et faire connaître mes aptitudes professionnelles à mes futurs clients potentiels.

Andie: Donc qui ? Qui sont les cibles pour toi ?

Jean-Baptiste : Alors en fait, j’ai deux cibles principales. La première cible, ce sont les étudiants qui apprennent le français, les personnes qui désirent apprendre le français, qui vivent à l’étranger et qui ont pour projet de venir s’installer en France. Ces personnes-là, souvent sont passées par des structures comme l’Alliance française ou des cours de langues à l’Université, ou parfois par des professeurs privés.

Et une des frustrations qu’ils rencontrent quand ils arrivent ici, c’est de réaliser que le français tel qu’il est parlé en France est assez différent du français qu’ils ont appris dans leurs cours. Et la raison en est que, aujourd’hui, les professeurs ont tendance à favoriser l’enseignement du français standard, qui est compréhensible et compris dans tout le monde francophone, que ce soit en Afrique, au Canada et en France. Plutôt qu’une variété plus régionale, plus locale du français, que ce soit le français parisien ou le français méridional comme on le parle ici, là où j’habite, dans le sud de la France.

Et donc, après avoir rencontré plusieurs apprenants qui se plaignaient de leurs difficultés à comprendre les films, à comprendre des séries, ou qui étaient parfois perdus quand ils communiquaient avec des personnes, j’ai décidé de proposer des cours spécialement pour ce public avec un point de focalisation sur le français plutôt oral, le français régional ou le français local.

Ça, c’est donc mon premier public, les personnes qui veulent venir s’installer en France.

Et mon deuxième public, c’est un public de passionnés. Ce sont des personnes qui aiment la langue française, qui aiment la culture française mais qui n’habitent pas dans une région où il y a des francophones. Et donc ils cherchent une personne avec laquelle discuter et mettre en pratique ce qu’ils ont appris en français.

Et c’est très intéressant parce que c’est une approche qui est assez différente d’un cours de français traditionnel. C’est à dire que généralement, avec ces personnes-là, je ne fais pas un cours à proprement parler, avec de la grammaire. Ça nous arrive de parler grammaire et de parler vocabulaire, mais très souvent, ce qu’elles cherchent, c’est plutôt une relation sociale, et donc on développe certains liens d’amitié. On parle beaucoup de la vie quotidienne, des passions des gens, ce qui les intéresse, ce qui les motive à apprendre le français.

On parle aussi beaucoup de stratégies d’apprentissage, pour amener leur niveau de français à un niveau supérieur, et puis voilà, arriver à alimenter la progression. Mais d’une manière générale, c’est une sorte d’expérience du français à distance.

L’objectif, c’est de se rapprocher d’un francophone, et de le faire dans des conditions, agréables, plaisantes, qui donnent envie de continuer à apprendre, et surtout qui donnent une justification à l’apprentissage.

Parce que si on passe sa vie à apprendre et à mémoriser du vocabulaire sans jamais le mettre en pratique, on peut avoir une certaine frustration qui se met en place, et ce n’est pas très bon pour pouvoir continuer.

Tandis que si on a une personne avec laquelle on a plaisir à discuter régulièrement, et bien ça pousse à avancer. On se rend compte des lacunes qu’on a, du vocabulaire qui nous manque et puis voilà, c’est une manière aussi de… C’est une expérience humaine ! On peut dire que c’est une expérience humaine aussi !

Andie: Donc les podcasts, les vidéos, tout ça, est-ce qu’ils rapportent de l’argent en soi, ou est-ce plutôt pour financer tes autres activités ?

Jean-Baptiste : Alors, je pense que, dans une certaine mesure, ça pourrait rapporter beaucoup plus que ça ne me rapporte pour le moment. Par exemple, le modèle économique sur YouTube, c’est principalement la publicité, une petite partie, mais la grande partie, ce sont les sponsors.

Donc quand on a une chaîne YouTube avec un très large public, on peut être contacté par des entreprises qui veulent qu’on fasse, nous, la promotion de leur produit pour un public spécifique. Ça n’a pas été mon choix.

La première raison est que, moi, je n’ai pas réussi à développer une communauté énorme. Quand je compare avec d’autres youtubeurs qui ont des chaînes YouTube, ils auront parfois 60 000, 100 000 300 000 1 million d’abonnés. Moi, avec mon modeste 8500 abonnés, c’est déjà beaucoup plus de personnes que certainement je rencontrerai dans toute ma vie, mais c’est très modeste par rapport à d’autres chaînes YouTube qui elles, doivent générer un trafic important et de la publicité, avoir des revenus publicitaires assez importants.

Donc je n’ai pas misé ma stratégie sur le modèle YouTube habituel. Mais en revanche, j’ai essayé de proposer une offre de valeur en parallèle de ma chaîne YouTube. Comme je le disais au début, l’objectif de ma chaîne YouTube, c’est de me présenter, de présenter mes solutions et d’attirer des personnes qui, se sentent en accord avec ce que je propose. Et donc généralement pour moi, le modèle économique, ce sont les cours que je donne.

Donc les gens me contactent pour prendre des cours. Et je suis en train de développer une collection de livres. Pour l’instant, il y a un seul livre qui est publié. Il y en a un deuxième en préparation et il y en aura bien d’autres après. Et les gens aussi sont amenés à découvrir mes publications et à en faire l’acquisition. Donc ça, ça fait une source de revenus pour moi.

Enfin, pour la partie podcast, et bien c’est aussi principalement un outil, un outil de promotion de mes propres services, puisque le podcast est proposé gratuitement sur les plates-formes d’écoute. Et jusqu’à très récemment, on ne pouvait pas faire de publicité sur les plates-formes de podcast comme iTunes ou Spotify. C’est très récemment que ça s’est mis en place.

Et donc, de la même façon, ça a été pour proposer du contenu de qualité, ou du contenu que j’espère intéressant pour mon public, et les amener ensuite à acheter des ressources complémentaires sur mon site internet, puisqu’avec chaque épisode de blocage, je propose des ressources spécifiques et éventuellement, voilà, réserver un cours avec moi.

Donc mon modèle économique n’est pas exactement le modèle idéal, si l’on compare à d’autres youtubeurs ou à d’autres influenceurs, mais moi j’ai pris, comment dire, l’étiquette de commerçant plutôt que celui d influenceur, et je fais la promotion de mon propre matériel plutôt que du matériel d’autres entreprises.

Andie: Donc comment arrives-tu à sortir de la concurrence ?

Jean-Baptiste : Oh ça c’est très difficile. [Rit], Comment j’arrive à sortir de la concurrence? Disons que, sur YouTube par exemple, c’est assez difficile de sortir de la concurrence car il y a un tel volume de contenu que j’ai envie de dire que tout a déjà été fait. On ne peut peut-être pas dire que tout a déjà été fait, mais énormément de choses ont déjà été faites.

Au final, c’est surtout la personnalité qui joue beaucoup sur, comment dire,  le potentiel, sur la capacité à attirer un nouveau public ou pas. Certaines personnes seront parfaitement adaptées pour jouer un rôle social sur YouTube. Elles savent très bien faire le présentateur, l’animateur motivé et donc ça attire beaucoup de gens sur leur chaîne.

D’autres personnes ont choisi une autre stratégie, qui est de donner une vision de leur vie personnelle. On parle beaucoup de « vlogs », où ces personnes montrent leur vie quotidienne. « Venez cuisiner en français avec moi », « On part en vacances en français avec moi », « Je fais ma valise avec vous », etc.,

Et ni l’une ni l’autre de ces options ne m’ont convaincu. La première, où on fait un peu l’animateur, ça demande un peu de sortir de sa zone de confort, de faire un peu le clown et je ne sais pas toujours faire ça. Je crois que lorsque je suis face à un large public, j’ai du mal à « me lâcher » suffisamment pour être une personne assez drôle et une personne charismatique.

Alors qu’en face à face  j’essaie de l’être beaucoup plus. En tout cas, j’essaie de rendre ça plus agréable pour les étudiants. Et je n’étais pas non plus prêt à renoncer à ma vie privée en montrant trop de choses que je considérais personnelles. Parce qu’il faut aussi savoir garder une distance entre sa vie privée et sa vie publique.

Jean-Baptiste : Donc la troisième option que j’ai choisie, c’est d’essayer de proposer du contenu sérieux, du contenu travaillé qui puisse apporter une valeur ajoutée qualitative au des apprenants.

Et donc, sur YouTube, je propose des petites capsules de grammaire pour aider les utilisateurs à modifier leurs habitudes de prononciation, ou certaines erreurs qu’on fait quand on apprend une langue, qui sont souvent des calques de la langue maternelle.

Et pour le podcast, j’essaie de proposer des conversations en français réel, c’est à dire des conversations qui n’ont pas été modifiées, ni adaptées pour un public d’apprenants, et de faire en sorte que le contenu soit premièrement intéressant, qu’il reflète certaines tendances de la société française actuelle. Et qui montre aussi des manières de parler qu’on ne présente pas forcément ailleurs, ou qui sont présentées d’une manière peut être un peu trop, je ne vais pas dire « simplistes », parce que ce type de vidéo est nécessaire, mais qui montre du français oral, mais à un rythme lent.

Et je partais du principe qu’il y avait tout de même un public qui a été maintenant habitué à écouter ces vidéos qui présentent les caractéristiques du français oral, mais lentement, qui étaient prêtes à écouter du français à vitesse normale.

Et que plus ces personnes s’habitueraient à écouter du français à vitesse normale, plus elles seraient à même de mieux comprendre les conversations en français quotidien.

Donc voilà, ça c’était un peu ma valeur ajoutée : essayer de proposer quelque chose de sérieux, du travail, comment dire, basé sur une logique linguistique, et pas seulement une logique de loisir ou de plaisir.

Andie: Donc tu as dit que tu préfères parler. Tu préfères travailler seul, mais est-ce que tu travailles avec une équipe ?

Jean-Baptiste : J’ai travaillé pendant un moment avec une équipe, surtout pour le lancement de ma structure. Parce que quand j’ai commencé, il a fallu que je crée un site internet, et j’avais toutes les questions légales à mettre en place. Puisque, aujourd’hui, on doit avoir une politique de confidentialité clairement définie, on doit avoir certains [critères]. Pour la partie cours que je donne il fallait aussi un cadre légal pour pouvoir définir dans quelles situations on pouvait annuler un cours, et combien de temps sont valables les leçons une fois qu’on les a achetés, etc.

Donc j’ai fait appel à une professionnelle.

C’était une amie à moi, qui justement était en train de finir un MBA en business et qui avait besoin d’un projet en création d’entreprise. Donc elle a fait son stage avec moi et ça nous a donné l’occasion de lancer l’activité.

J’ai beaucoup bénéficié de sa structure, de son organisation au niveau entrepreneurial, et on a beaucoup clarifié les procédures de travail au niveau de la relation client. Et ensuite, elle a repris sa vie professionnelle, donc on s’est séparés à ce moment-là.

Et il y a eu une période où, au début, j’avais vraiment beaucoup de choses à faire, et j’étais passé par une stagiaire qui, elle était en licence marketing et qui m’a beaucoup aidé aussi pour tout ce qui était communication sur les réseaux sociaux. Donc au début, quand je ne savais pas encore sur quel canal me concentrer, on avait ciblé Instagram, LinkedIn et YouTube comme chaînes de com comme ressources principales, pour pouvoir faire de la promotion.

Et on a eu du mal à trouver une stratégie qui fonctionnait. Mais ma stagiaire, qui était donc en licence, a testé beaucoup de choses. Elle a clarifié beaucoup de stratégies qui fonctionnaient ou ne fonctionnaient pas, et donc on a continué à travailler un bon moment après la fin de son stage. Et ensuite a eu un bébé et elle a arrêté de travailler le temps qu’elle s’occupe de son bébé.

Et finalement, comme moi de mon côté, les choses s’étaient beaucoup stabilisées, et puisque j’arrivais à reprendre le rythme correctement, et bien j’ai continué à travailler tout seul. Et ça, ça me convient très bien pour le moment.

Mais je pense que si, aujourd’hui c’était à refaire, je referais exactement la même chose, parce qu’on peut très facilement faire des erreurs, ne serait-ce que sur le cadre légal. Il vaut mieux ne pas se tromper. Donc je recommande vivement de passer par d’autres personnes.

Mais je crois que je ne suis pas le type d’entrepreneur qui serait capable de gérer une équipe. Je préfère bénéficier de ce qu’on appelle la « gig economy » qui est très facile à utiliser. Il y a beaucoup de plates-formes aujourd’hui qui permettent de faire appel à des professionnels d’un domaine spécifique pour un projet spécifique, et donc on leur expose ce dont on a besoin.

Ils nous filent un coup de main pour temporairement pour le projet en question, et puis après on peut continuer son existence comme ça. Donc, moi, en tant que petit autoentrepreneur, ça a été une véritable aide précieuse de faire appel à ces professionnels grâce à ces différentes plates-formes.

Andie: Et pour toi ? Quel est ton but ultime ? Quels sont tes projets ? Tu penses à monter une boîte genre Berlitz ?

Jean-Baptiste : [Rit] Je ne pense pas. Je ne pense pas parce que, moi, ce qui me motive dans mon travail, c’est de pouvoir communiquer avec les personnes avec lesquelles je travaille. Je vois certains de mes collègues, ou certains de mes homologues sur YouTube qui eux ont créé des plates-formes où ils mettent à disposition du contenu. Ils créent des communautés et finalement ils sont exclusivement à distance. Ils gèrent des forums, ils répondent aux questions sur des forums ou sur les réseaux sociaux, et ça leur convient très bien.

Je crois que moi, si je n’ai pas, à un moment, un contact en face à face avec une discussion de vive voix avec ces personnes, ce n’est pas ça qui me motive en fait, si je n’ai pas cette relation-là.

Donc pour l’instant, mon but est de continuer à donner des cours, et d’avoir des cours en face à face. Et je pense que c’est aussi quelque chose qui est très demandé par les personnes qui font appel à mes services.

Et mon autre but, c’est donc de créer cette collection de ressources, et d’essayer de travailler avec des instituts qui existent déjà, des écoles de langues, peut être les Alliances françaises, pour proposer du contenu qui permette d’aborder le français oral.

Plus spécifiquement le français oral de manière un peu plus structurée pour les étudiants. Plutôt que de leur dire « ah bah, parfois on dit comme ci, parfois on dit comme ça ». Il existe des règles de construction des phrases et de la syntaxe du français oral, et qui ne sont pas forcément bien connues du grand public.

Et donc si, avec les ressources que je crée, et j’ai quelques projets de ressources complémentaires que je pourrai ensuite commercialiser, à des formateurs et non plus à des apprenants, et bien d’essayer, de devenir une petite référence dans les ressources pour le français oral.

Andie: Donc tu enseignes le français, l’anglais et l’espagnol. Mais je sais en fait que tu parles plusieurs langues. Tu parles combien de langues en fait ?

Jean-Baptiste : Je suis démasqué ! [Rit] Alors les langues, effectivement, c’est ma petite passion. Alors on va dire, le chiffre, c’est à peu près douze langues, mais il faut relativiser : je ne parle pas toutes ces langues à un niveau de d’expert.

Je ne maîtrise pas toutes les langues que j’apprends. Les langues que je parle le mieux sont le français bien évidemment, puisque c’est ma langue maternelle, l’anglais, l’espagnol.

Ce sont des langues que j’ai étudiées à l’université. J’ai vécu dans ces pays, j’ai une bonne connaissance des cultures de ces pays. Donc voilà, j’ai un niveau suffisant dans ces langues pour pouvoir les enseigner.

Mais après, à titre personnel, les langues que je parle bien aussi sont l’hébreu, l’italien, le portugais, le chinois aussi. Il y a, ensuite à un niveau un peu moindre : le japonais, l’hindi, le malais, le thaï.

Voilà, je me suis intéressé à pas mal de langues. Et j’aime autant…, comment dire, comprendre la logique derrière ces langues, trouver des relations entre ces langues. Ça c’est ma grande passion : de voir comment on peut, à partir d’un mot français, trouver l’équivalent en italien, ou à partir d’un mot allemand comment on peut retrouver un mot en anglais.

Il existe beaucoup de passerelles entre les langues. J’adore chercher tout ça. Et donc il m’arrive parfois de passer beaucoup de temps à apprendre une langue mais, sans véritable objectif de communication. C’est juste pour le plaisir d’apprendre les langues. C’est seulement un travail intellectuel. Donc voilà, c’est ce qui me motive aussi : une démarche pour satisfaire un peu cette curiosité, pour comprendre les différents systèmes linguistiques.

Andie: Donc, pourquoi ne pas être traducteur ou interprète ? Parce que c’est le meilleur métier du monde.

Jean-Baptiste : [Rit]. Alors figure toi que j’ai eu une formation de traducteur et d’interprète quand j’étais en licence LEA à Paris. Et je suis parti une année en Erasmus en Espagne, et ma spécialisation pendant cette année d’Erasmus était traduction et interprétariat. Interprétariat de conférence. On a appris à utiliser les cabines d’interprétariat et à transcrire, interpréter des textes qu’on entendait au fur et à mesure.

Et la traduction, j’en ai fait beaucoup, aussi bien à l’Université qu’ensuite en boulot complémentaire. Même quand j’étais au Luxembourg, quand j’ai commencé à donner des cours, il m’est arrivé de prendre des cours de traduction à côté.

Mais il y avait deux choses. La première chose est que j’aimais beaucoup le travail de traduction à titre personnel, pour enrichir mon vocabulaire, pour enrichir mes connaissances, parce que les documents que je traduisais étaient souvent très intéressants.

J’étais amené à traduire des choses un peu loufoques parfois. J’ai travaillé pour une entreprise Internet qui écrivait des horoscopes. Donc j’ai traduit des horoscopes, j’ai traduit des thèmes astraux, j’ai traduit des divinations, et j’ai même écrit des horoscopes en anglais pour cette entreprise.

Mais comment dire ? Il y a un moment où j’ai été un peu frustré puisque, comme je te le disais précédemment, le travail un peu solitaire derrière l’ordinateur me va pendant une période, mais j’ai besoin de ce contact avec les personnes.

Et finalement, je crois que j’étais beaucoup plus satisfait en accompagnant des gens, en étant un peu coach motivationnel, pour des personnes qui apprennent les langues, plutôt qu’en faisant de la traduction.

Mais mon activité de traduction reste tout de même très présente dans ma vie quotidienne, puisque pour les ressources que je propose, aussi bien pour le podcast que pour les publications que je fais, il y a toujours de la traduction. Par exemple, mes vidéos sont proposées en français et en anglais.

Alors je dois reconnaître que pour YouTube, il est de plus en plus rare que je fasse moi-même la traduction : je passe par une traduction automatique qui est tout à fait satisfaisante.

Mais pour les ressources que je propose sur mon podcast, là, oui, je fais une traduction de qualité : je suis obligé de trouver des équivalents culturels, des équivalents linguistiques.

Donc en fait, je n’ai jamais véritablement arrêté de faire de la traduction, mais je ne la fais pas tout à fait dans le même contexte. Je ne la fais pas pour une autre entreprise, je la fais toujours pour moi et  donc pour faciliter l’apprentissage à partir des ressources que je propose.

Andie: Tu as bien « encadré » la vie du traducteur : solitaire mais toujours intéressante.

Jean-Baptiste : Est-ce que, toi, tu apprécies ce travail solitaire de traduction ?

Andie: Pfffffffffff Non, pas trop [Rit].

Jean-Baptiste : Non [Rit].

Andie: Mais mon mari travaille à la maison maintenant aussi, donc c’est…

Jean-Baptiste : Donc, vous vous soutenez mutuellement ?

Andie: Oh oui, bien sûr.

Jean-Baptiste : Je pense que s’il y a peut-être quelque chose qui me fait moduler ce que je viens de dire c’est que, pour l’instant, j’habite une petite ville dans laquelle il n y a pas forcément de structure pour les travailleurs indépendants.

Dans les grandes villes comme Paris, on trouve beaucoup d’espaces de « coworking », dans lesquels on peut aller travailler une journée ou même louer un bureau, pendant pour une longue période.

Et donc, dans ces cas-là, j’aurais peut être envisagé de faire de la traduction plus fortement, puisque je n’aurais pas été tout seul dans mon coin. J’aurais eu la possibilité d’avoir d’autres personnes, de voir d’autres visages toute la journée, et de satisfaire mon besoin de bavarder.

Mais ici, là où j’habite, il n’y a pas du tout de structure comme ça. Ou alors il faudrait que je fasse 1 h et demie de voiture, et là tu imagines que ce n’est plus du tout rentable de faire ça. Donc je pense que c’est aussi le contexte matériel qui ne se prête pas aujourd’hui au fait que je fasse de la traduction à plus grande échelle.

Andie: Bon. Donc, dernière question que je pose à tous mes interlocuteurs sur ce podcast : quel est ton conseil sur n’importe quel sujet pour nos auditeurs ?

Jean-Baptiste : Un conseil, sur n’importe quel sujet ? Mon conseil sur la vie ? Alors ça… [Rit]

Andie: N’importe quel sujet, l’univers [Rit].

Jean-Baptiste : Pas facile ça, pas facile ! Hum…  Peut-être quelque chose. Une leçon de vie que j’ai toujours retenue… Allez, est-ce que je peux en donner deux ?

Alors le premier, c’est ma grand-mère qui me l’avait dit un jour. Elle m’avait donné une phrase qui était « On ne fait jamais l’économie d’un apprentissage, tout ce qu’on apprend pourra servir un jour. »

Et je me souviens très bien de ça, car elle m’a dit cette phrase quand j’ai commencé l’université pendant ma licence. C’était une licence trilingue, donc anglais, espagnol et suédois. Et ma mère m’avait regardé avec des grands yeux : « Qu’est-ce que tu vas apprendre le suédois, à quoi ça sert ? » Et bien, crois-le ou non, tous les boulots que j’ai eus au Luxembourg et avant le Luxembourg, quand j’ai terminé mes études, c’est parce que je parlais suédois que je les ai eus.

Donc finalement  ça a été utile d’apprendre cette langue-là. Et donc j’ai toujours retenu que, même si on a l’impression que ce qu’on fait n’a aucune utilité, ou ça ne sert à rien, et bien on trouvera toujours un moment, que ce soit dans un contexte social, un contexte professionnel, ou même pour créer des relations cérébrales pour comprendre quelque chose un peu mieux, on finira pas s’en servir.

Et le deuxième conseil, c’est mon papa qui me l’a donné : c’est que c’est toujours bon de mettre son intelligence au service de sa paresse. C’est à dire que quand on est paresseux, mais quand on aime quand même bien profiter de la vie, et qu’on n’a pas forcément envie de passer toute sa vie au travail, et bien ça demande un effort organisationnel supplémentaire pour trouver des manières de travailler qui soient peut être plus efficaces, de créer des automatismes pour ne plus avoir à tout faire d’un seul coup, soi-même à la main. Donc voilà, il faut arriver à chercher des stratégies de travail efficaces pour pouvoir ensuite profiter de l’existence à côté. Je ne sais pas si ça servira, mais ce sont mes leçons de vie.

Andie: C’est une bonne philosophie. Donc moi j’ai étudié, ce n’était pas des études formelles, mais j’ai étudié le suisse allemand.

Jean-Baptiste : Ouais…

Andie: Donc tu peux parler d’une langue pas très utile…

Jean-Baptiste : Pas très connue…

Andie: Non, mais mon premier boulot dans la traduction, c’était être gestionnaire de projet dans une agence de traduction. Et justement la propriétaire était suisse et a noté sur mon cv que j’avais étudié [le suisse allemand]. J’ai fait un tandem pendant trois jours avec une fille à la fac. Mais oui, elle a noté que j’ai étudié la Suisse allemand et elle a dit, « Ah oui, tu aimes vraiment les langues ? Tu appartiens vraiment  au monde des langues. »

Jean-Baptiste : Oui, je sais que toi aussi tu as cette passion pour les langues et tu m’avais dit que tu apprenais le cantonais aussi, c’est ça ?  Ou c’était le mandarin ?

Andie: Le mandarin, le russe, l’arabe et l’allemand.

Jean-Baptiste : Oui, tout à fait. Donc toi aussi tu as cette curiosité à satisfaire, j’ai l’impression ?

Andie: Ah oui, oui. Bon, merci d’être venu, Jean Baptiste.

Jean-Baptiste : Je t’en prie, avec grand plaisir. Merci beaucoup pour l’invitation.

Andie: Merci.

Andie: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the Continuing Education Series Podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes, by searching for Continuing Education Series. You can contact the FLD at Divisionfld@atanet.org. Visit our web site at www.atanet.org/divisions/fld  or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie, signing off, thanks for listening and À bientôt!

FLD Editor

FLD Virtual Coworking: What It Is and Why You Should Consider Doing It

Aerial view of three women working on laptops at a table
Photo credit: Pexels

The A Propos LogoLast year, the French Language Division (FLD) of the American Translators Association organized a series of virtual coworking sessions for the 2023 rentrée. They’ve been such a hit that the FLD has continued to host them ever since. But what exactly is virtual coworking? If you struggle with accountability, are craving a connection with colleagues, or just need to set aside time to finally check that pesky task off your to-do list, you may want to consider joining our next session. Let me tell you why.

What is virtual coworking?

Virtual coworking is very much what it sounds like. A group of people meet on an online meeting platform for a set period of time to work on an individual task of their choosing. Participants do not work on projects together; rather, they each work separately on something they’d like to make progress on that day. The purpose is multifold:

  • Provide a structured environment where everyone can hold each other accountable
  • Boost productivity while fostering a sense of community
  • Enjoy time with colleagues you might not otherwise get

It’s such a popular model that you can even pay to do it. Thankfully for FLD members, these coworking sessions are completely free. What’s more, your coworkers will all be fellow French translators and interpreters!

What happens during the FLD virtual coworking sessions?

The FLD virtual coworking sessions start with a five-minute check-in where we all introduce ourselves and briefly state what we’re going to work on. Then, we work uninterrupted for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, and work again for another 25 minutes. During the work periods, everyone is muted, but attendees can keep their cameras on for extra accountability.

The sessions end with a five-minute wrap-up where we share what we worked on and answer an optional question. In past coworking sessions, these have been questions like, “what are your goals for the year?” or “what is a helpful resource you recently discovered?”

What should I work on during a virtual coworking session?

The beauty of coworking is that you can work on anything you want! Some of the tasks past participants have worked on include:

  • Marketing
  • Accounting
  • Finally responding to that email
  • Tracking down and following up on unpaid invoices
  • Working on an ATA conference presentation
  • Drafting and issuing a quote
  • Personal tasks, like scheduling a doctor’s appointment (they don’t always need to be “work” related!)
  • And last but not least, writing this article

Coworking sessions are a great opportunity to tackle tasks you’ve been neglecting or ones where you find yourself getting easily distracted. However, you are also free to work on regular day-to-day work in the virtual company of your peers.

What are the benefits of virtual coworking?

I attended nearly all of the coworking sessions organized in 2023 and found them to be very beneficial. To me, the main benefits of coworking are:

Accountability

Since we all state our goals at the start of the sessions, there is an extra dose of pressure to accomplish them. I find that if I verbalize a goal to others, I am much more compelled and likely to actually do it. The Harvard Business Review agrees!

Focus

Working in the company of others makes it harder to give in to distractions. You don’t want to be the only one “procrastinating” when you can see everyone else working! You probably won’t be checking your phone, finding something else that needs doing around the house, or getting distracted on social media, which means you actually make progress toward your goal.

Productivity

These coworking sessions are structured into short bursts of time, ideal for accomplishing things you’ve been dragging your feet on. Working against the clock can also make certain tasks more palatable and attainable. For example, instead of the looming, intangible concept of, “I will work on marketing today,” you can work on marketing for the duration of the session and maybe even set a more tangible goal (like “I will send three marketing emails”).

Connection with FLD colleagues

These coworking sessions are also a chance to check in with all your fellow FLDers. And it’s a nice break from the isolation of work-from-home life.

The connections don’t have to end when you leave the Zoom meeting, either! During the sessions, I discovered two French translators who also live in Chicago. I’ve met up with one for coffee and have plans for an in-person coworking session with the other.

How do I sign up?

Attendance is open to all FLD members. The FLD aims to host one coworking session a month. Stay tuned for the next one!

Elizabeth Eckardt is a French and Spanish to English translator based in Chicago who has been translating since 2014. She is ATA-certified in both language pairs and has an MS in translation from New York University. She specializes in medical, legal, and official document translations. For more information, visit elizabetheckardt.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.

FLD Editor

Maximize Your Direct Client Marketing by Leveraging French Competitiveness Clusters

Aerial view of Paris La Défense
Photo credit: Unsplash

By Amber Marcum Combaud

À Propos: The FLD Newsletter logo

As freelance translators, marketing and prospecting are part and parcel of the job, whether we enjoy them or not. Regular, consistent investment can make a big difference in your workflow and keep your pipeline flowing, so you can worry less about dry spells.

In this article, you’ll learn more about French pôles de compétitivité and how researching the ones relevant to your specializations could help you do more targeted marketing and expand your client portfolio.

First things first: what is a pôle de compétitivité, or competitiveness cluster?

Competitiveness clusters were devised by the French Directorate General for Enterprise, or DGE, in 2004 to encourage growth and job creation in flourishing markets. DGE cluster policy objectives include fostering R&D, developing and implementing new technologies, and strengthening innovation ecosystems. Clusters were set up to help businesses strengthen their innovation muscles and overcome market challenges. Designed to be regional hubs bringing companies of all sizes, research labs, and training establishments together according to common denominators like core business or sector, strong networks between top clusters have helped encourage more collaborative R&D.

Cluster members benefit from guidance as they grow and develop, enhancing the value of their products, services, or processes and helping them launch new ones onto the market. National and local authorities are closely involved in clusters, which are firmly embedded in their local landscapes—with many hosted on business park campuses and in public buildings.

For detailed information about what competitiveness clusters have achieved, see the report published by France Stratégie in French in August 2020 and the English-language version that followed in 2021.

How can competitiveness clusters boost my direct client marketing efforts?

Using cluster member directories can help you save time sifting through search engine results pages to build your target company list—making them a critical element for maximizing the time you invest in your marketing. And with a message template at the ready, you’ll be able to tailor your pitch and reach them more quickly (and effectively).

In addition, many cluster websites have news pages with posts and articles that provide interesting information about smaller companies that may not have a person handling their marketing and communications full-time yet. They can also be a good way to learn about upcoming events and opportunities to meet people in the cluster. When companies are in their early stages, the founder/CEO may also be the main salesperson—and end up running the booth at a trade show or conference.

How do I conduct research on pôles de compétitivité in my areas of specialization or interest?

Aerial view of Paris La Défense

You’re in luck, as the DGE page has a list of no fewer than 55 competitiveness clusters with a total of 14,000 innovative companies at the time this article was drafted.

Link to map

Here are a few niche clusters that I found interesting:

In addition, on the France Cluster website, the ‘Mapster’ directory app features other similar groupings. I picked out several gems to share:

Tips for targeting your results

If you don’t find what you’re looking for among the ones listed there, or after you’ve identified French competitiveness clusters that you’d like to follow, you can always expand your search to professional associations and unions. Use keywords like ‘syndicat+profession X,’ ‘association d’entreprises du secteur Y,’ ‘centre de recherche (universitaire) industrie Z,’ and so forth in your favorite search engine. I pulled up a couple well-known examples, such as GIFAS, the French aerospace industry association, and La French Tech, for startups. Last but not least, reading a well-crafted email from you about your excellent translation and English writing skills could also make French PR professionals’ eyes light up!

And don’t forget about overseas departments and territories. The Cap Energies cluster is one example that has active groups in Guadeloupe and La Réunion, though it is based in Aix-en-Provence. Speaking of DROM, or département et région d’outre mer clusters, Qualitropic focuses on the bioeconomy. Mayotte, another overseas department, happens to benefit from quite a strategic location. There, the ADIM international cluster aims to reach countries in Eastern Africa and as far away as the UAE.

To broaden your scope beyond France’s borders, you might also find it worth your while to consider European clusters in other Francophone countries. Expanding your search to a broader geographic area could bring you more diverse results. You can use the EU Cluster Collaboration Platform (ECCP) map-based search tool to find names and websites. Who would have thought that Luxembourg has its own maritime cluster? Another surprising find for AV translation and creatives is the media industries Twist cluster in the Walloon Region of Belgium.

Putting your favorite French clients’ company registration codes to work

I will share one more technique based on the French company registration system that can help you identify new potential prospects. When a business is registered, its legal representative must select an APE or NAF code that corresponds to its core business from the INSEE (French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) classification system. Its website has a search tool based on this classification system, also available in English. You can browse them to find a few NAF codes for the sectors you work in. Here is an example of how it works (translated by yours truly):

Let’s say you run a convenience store. To determine the APE code for your core business, here’s the classification system you would follow:

  • Section: G Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles
  • Division: 47 Retail trade, except of motor vehicles and motorcycles
  • Group: 47.1 Retail sale in non-specialized stores
  • Class: 47.11 Retail sale in non-specialized stores with food, beverages, or tobacco predominating
  • Sub-class: 47.11C Mini-markets

The APE code for your convenience store is therefore 4711C.

Here’s my step-by-step guide to using NAF codes to find new prospects:

Step 1: Select one or more NAF codes. For translators and interpreters in France, the code is 7430Z.

Step 2: Go to verif.com and enter the NAF code into the search engine. When I enter the code for translators and interpreters to search for companies in the Bouches-du-Rhône department/PACA region, I found over 3,000 registered with this as their core business, including my own!

Alternative: If you do not know the NAF code, you can also type in the name of a company and find out which code is used on its profile page. Then, go back to the search engine and enter the code and any other parameters to create your own list. If you want to search for your clients’ competitors in another region, be sure to select the relevant region from the dropdown.

Step 3: Use your sleuthing skills to find the company website, LinkedIn page, or employee profiles to locate a point of contact and email address. If you like, you can also pay for verif.com to compile lists of companies for you using this basic data.

Step 4: Add companies of interest to your list.

Step 5: Modify your message template to fit the company you’re contacting. Don’t forget to put a reminder in your calendar to follow up!

Some final thoughts

To avoid going down rabbit holes, marveling at the many new companies you discover, I find it helpful to set some parameters for my marketing time and quantify goals.

For example, if I want to spend one hour developing new leads, I can break up my time as follows:

15 minutes – Search for five new companies using a relevant NAF code on verif.com.

15 minutes – Peruse company websites to evaluate whether they might need my services.

15 minutes – Identify three people to contact at those companies and try to find direct email addresses or their LinkedIn profiles.

15 minutes – Send personalized emails or direct messages to the contacts whose information I was able to find.

I hope this article has given you new ideas for drumming up new potential leads and reinvigorated your direct client marketing plan!

If you have had luck doing something similar in the US, Canada, or elsewhere, the À Propos team wants to hear from you! Contact the À Propos editor, Ben Karl, at ben [at] bktranslation [dot] com with your ideas or submission.

Amber Marcum Combaud is an ATA-certified French to English translator specializing in corporate and brand communications (including CSR), academic translation and editing, and certified translation of official documents. After obtaining her B.A. in French and Linguistics from the University of Virginia, she became a translator in 2007. She completed the professional certificate in Translation program offered by New York University in 2010. Since 2016 when she began freelancing, she has served a wide range of corporate clients, translation and communications agencies, as well as local businesses and individuals seeking to expand their horizons abroad. Amber lives and works in Marseille, France, where she is always pleased to connect with colleagues in person and virtually. Drop her a line directly amber [at] amc-communication [dot] com or find her on LinkedIn.

FLD Editor

[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast – Episode 21 – Interview with Ruth Simpson

A glass of white wine
ATA FLD Podcast. Photo Credit: Unsplash

The A Propos LogoTo make our Continuing Education Series Podcast more accessible and searchable for FLD members and the general public, we are now offering transcriptions of our episodes right here on À Propos. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you’re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD [at] atanet [dot] org.

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL EPISODE

SOUNDCLOUD: You can listen to or download Episode 21 and all previous episodes on Soundcloud here.

ITUNES: This episode and all previous episodes are available on iTunes here. You can subscribe or listen online. Like what you hear? Rate us and review us! It really helps get the word out.

Episode 20: Interview with Ruth Simpson

Andie Ho: This is Andie Ho, host of the continuing education series, a podcast produced for the members of the French Language Division of the American Translators Association, offering educational content about the craft of French-to-English and English-to-French translation and the division.

A brief comment here, my dog, Huckleberry, makes a cameo in this episode with his signature howl, so if you hear some background noise, that’s him saying “hi,” to everyone.

Today we’re joined by Ruth Simpson, a freelance French-to-English translator since 2008. Ruth is based in France, currently, and she specializes in beauty and cosmetics and wine and spirits. She has a diploma in wine and spirits, which I’m very excited to talk about, is a qualified member of ITI, with certified translator status, and, apparently, is a keen musician, as well. Very multitalented. Welcome today, Ruth.

Ruth Simpson: Thank you so much! Multitalented, I don’t know. I certainly like to try lots of new things. Um, so, yeah, that’s… I love playing all different instruments. I’ve got ukuleles, I’ve got a violin, and I love singing, as well, so, yeah, my husband would probably say not so multitalented, just “multi-interested.”

AH: Well, isn’t that the prototypical translator? Interested in a little bit of everything?

RS: Yeah, yeah probably. That’s true, yeah.

AH: So, let’s dive right in. The main thing I wanted personally, selfishly, to talk to you about today is your specialization in wine. Now, I translate for the food industry, but I specifically do not translate wine, because it is, as I’m sure you’re going to tell me, is its own deal.

RS: Um, right.

AH: I’m sure it’s a specialization, a dream specialization for many people. How did you get into it?

RS: Well, both of my specializations, cosmetics and wine, both could seem like dream specializations to a lot of people, but they really do all involve urgent translations, demanding clients, tricky words, just like everyone else’s specialist fields. So, wine, and cosmetics also, come under the variate umbrella of what I like to call whipped cream or fluff translations, um, they’re very much in the nonvital category when you compare them with, like, the important work done by medical translators or legal translators, and that has the benefit of taking the pressure off mentally, but you’d be surprised, actually, how many cosmetic brands take lipstick as seriously as they do a drug trial, as the pharmaceutical industry would take a drug trial.

Um, well, how did I first get into wine translation? I was working in Paris doing English teaching. I was actually working at L’Oréal’s luxury product division, which is how I got into cosmetics translation, and my boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, he was also working in Paris in advertising, but he had a family wine estate in Chablis, and he knew that at some point in the future he was going to take on the wine domain, the wine estate that belonged to his family. But we were still living in Paris at that point, so the Burgundy countryside was pretty far away from our thoughts. One thing, he’d decided he’d had enough of the métro-boulot-dodo lifestyle, and he decided to start a year-long training course in a specialist college near Chablis, and so, I went down to three days a week in Paris, and two days a week in Chablis, and I created my business and began contacting agencies, and, from that point, I was working just in cosmetics.

I eventually took an interest in wine when I moved here more permanently in 2009, when I had my first child, and I was struggling to keep up with conversations at the dinner table. My husband’s family and the friends we’d made here got to talking about wine, and I couldn’t follow along. I was a bit struggling with the vocabulary, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. I’d always enjoyed drinking it, like lots of people, but I didn’t quite know how to get to grips with the technical and more descriptive vocabulary. That was in French, let alone in English, so in neither language. I researched some qualifications in the field and I wanted to do the qualification in English, so I found the WSET, which is the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. Um, so, that’s how I first got into specializing in wine was through my family connection with my husband and my qualifications with the WSET.

AH: Okay, well, so that kind of answers my next question about which came first, the chicken or the egg, the wine or the translation.

RS: Right. The cosmetics definitely came first, because that was, for me, the most obvious choice, having spent… I spent four years working in the offices of L’Oréal’s luxury products division, so I was working with marketers and people… people… coming into daily contact with the English of the beauty industry. And so, that really gave me a big jumping off point for setting up as a freelance translator in that world.

AH: So, tell me more about this wine and spirits diploma that you obtained. How did you find out about this diploma, what did it involve? What kind of people take this diploma, and what all did you learn?

RS: Um, well, I learned so much. How I got into was, when I contacted… I contacted the WSET and I explained my situation. I’m living in Chablis, starting to become a bit familiar with the world of wine, and they suggested that I start at their Level 2, which is what they call the intermediate level. The intermediate level is a short, three-day course in London, and that… it was very quick to do; it’s quite accessible, then I was encouraged to move on to the Level 3, the advanced course, which is five days, in London again, and then, after that—this is about a year-long time span between the two—I was encouraged to do the Level 4 diploma, which is a very, very different beast. The diploma is two years long, well, the one I did was two years, and it involved four week-long classroom sessions split up over the two years, and a dissertation on a subject, and lots and lots of three-hour exams, and tastings, as well. So, it was very, very intense for those two years, and my son was only, I think, eighteen months when I started, so that was a very full-on time, as well as translating full-time by then. Um, the people doing the course with me were all wine enthusiasts, obviously. Lots of them were from Majestic, which is a UK-based wine merchant. Some of them were retirees, they just wanted to learn more. There was a journalist, there was an Italian winemaker there, too, and people working for other wine merchants. So, lots and lots of different backgrounds. But not one single translator except me.

AH: So, actually, I was going to ask, um, did that help with any networking? I mean, did any of your classmates end up, you know, being sources of work for you?

RS: Yeah, that’s a good question. Uh, it could have been, couldn’t it? But it actually wasn’t, no. I didn’t… I kept in touch with, I would think, three or four people from the course, one, especially, who came to visit me in Chablis, and we’re good friends, but, uh, actually, no work came from that initial training period. But after that it was a different story because, um… Shall I go on to say what I developed after that?

AH: Please.

RS: So, I developed some training courses for different associations. It actually started out as a tasting session at the end of a Wordfast conference. I did an hour of a brief A to Z of the year in the vineyard, then some tasting exercises for the people, just as a fun end to one of the days of training with Wordfast, and that was picked up by another association, the MET—Mediterranean Editors and Translators Association—who asked me to develop it into a sort of half-day workshop, which I did, and then ITI, the… another association, picked up on that, and afterwards it developed into a full day, so all of that, um, just from a very short, hour-long, fun, tasting session, it developed into quite a serious few rounds of specialist wine translation training for other translators, and that did sort of establish me as a specialist wine translator, and then I started getting work, yes, references from other translators and people in the wine business who noticed that I was offering those training courses.

AH: Okay, so indirectly then.

RS: Um, yeah, indirectly. Nobody actually, at the course, said, oh, I want you to translate something that I’ve been asked to do, but certainly, as a result, yeah.

AH: All right. I just want to point out to our listeners that this is networking at its finest. It’s not always about direct connections, but about one thing leading to another, so…

RS: Absolutely. Yeah, and in those training courses that I gave, I was often asked, “Yes, but how do we get into wine translation,” and I’ve probably done five or six sessions of training, including cosmetics, as well. I also do a cosmetics training course for other translators, and, at the end, or in feedback, people will often say, “Well, how do I do it, though? How do I get into it?” It’s so different for everybody. All I can do is say what I did and how it worked for me, and that’s the only advice I can give, because I can’t give you a list of people to contact, obviously. Um, so, that’s… It’s sometimes quite frustrating because I really want to help people, but I don’t quite know how to go about doing that, other than telling them to look for themselves.

AH: Yeah, there’s not a single pathway to success in freelancing, which is both wonderful and devastating, I find [laughter].

RS: Yes! That’s true! Yeah, and actually, the very best client that I’ve ever had is a publishing house which led to six books, which is a whole other story, but I met at a party, I met someone at a party, who ended up being my very best client, so, it’s a strange world. [laughter]

AH: All right, I’m just writing this down. If I want six book deals, I should go to parties and drink wine.

RS: That’s right! Yes! Six books [laughter] That’s the exact advice I would give. Yes, six book deals. Go to a party. And talk! Talk to people. But that is a good piece of advice. Always talk to people about what you do because you never know when it’s going to be really, really useful.

AH: Absolutely. That’s a really good point, yeah, always, I always try to drop in conversation what I do, just to plant seeds.

RS: Yeah, absolutely!

AH: So, back to your courses, um, everybody thinks about the wine tasting aspect of learning about wine, but did you learn about technical aspects? What else did you learn? It couldn’t have all been fun and games, or we’d all be doing it, right?

RS: Oh, no. No, it really wasn’t fun and games. And, especially, it was quite a convivial atmosphere, and we were there for a week, and we were all in London, and we did sort of have a few evenings out, so I can tell you that tasting vodka at 9:00 a.m. on a hangover is really not for the fainthearted. [laughter] But, uh, that wasn’t a particularly technical session, but there were very, very technical sessions. Um, it covered viticulture, so, all about growing grapes, how grapes are grown, how to prune a vine. Or in different places they have different pruning techniques, so that can be quite a struggle to remember all the different places and all the different pruning techniques. So, here in Chablis we have a pruning technique called the Guyot, which is just one cane or two canes with a double Guyot, and in a place, for example, such as Beaujolais, they have another form of pruning, which is called gobelet, which is more like, the vines are grown like a bush, rather than like a single cane, so all of that technical aspect has to be covered. And that’s just in France, the differences there. And the course covered the whole world, so there were more than a few different pruning techniques to remember. Then you’ve got the chemistry of vinification, of fermentation, all of that, so you have your history and your geography of viticulture; you’ve got your chemistry in vinification, and then your creative writing in the tasting, tasting notes… how to write an objective tasting note, which is quite difficult at first because, as you can imagine, there is a big difference between, “Oh this wine tastes great,” and “This wine is high in acid, low in alcohol,” etc., etc. You really have to learn how to do an objective tasting note. And then, all the vocabulary to do with marketing and how to sell a wine, as well, and the food pairing, so there’s a lot, a lot, a lot to learn.

AH: Okay, I’m starting to see the similarities between translating wine and translating cosmetics because it seems to me that both seem very light, and like a daily item we can all relate to, but can be surprisingly technical, as well. But then, there’s still the transcreation/creative aspect.

RS: Absolutely. That’s so right, and it actually has quite a lot of cross-over, especially in terms of, I mean, very specifically in terms of when you’re writing a tasting note and describing aromas, and you’re describing the perfume, it’s so similar. There’s a lot of cross-over there. But, absolutely, in cosmetics you’ve got the chemistry part as well, and the medical, almost medical side to it, if you’re dealing with the cosmeticovigilance, the people working on side effects of cosmetics, that can be very, very chemistry based, just like vinification, and yeah. So, there’s lots of cross-over there.

AH: So, what do you find to be some of the hidden challenges of translating wine, then? Is it the creative aspect, or the technical aspect, or something else?

RS: I think that depends on the translator. For me, it’s not so much the creative writing part, because I love a bit of whipped-cream, as I said, fluff translation. I love that. For me, it’s really knowing your stuff. So, when you’re translating wine, you really have to have a full grasp of the whole process. I’ve got a great example for you. I had a text, I have texts, several, regularly, in French, that say things like “Le vin est ensuite fermenté dans les fûts ou dans les cuves,” which can seem to be quite a straightforward sentence. But when you look at it, you think, they’re saying that the wine is fermented. You don’t ferment wine unless it’s the second refermentation. You ferment juice, or must. So, you have to know that, at this point in the production process that you’re writing about, this is when you’re dealing with juice, and not proper wine, so you then… I always flag this up, and I always say, look, this is a problem, because we’re not fermenting wine, we’re fermenting juice, and they regularly come back to me and say, “Oh yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. We’re going to change the French” because it’s wrong. So this is when the original source text is not written by the producer, obviously, it’s written by a communication agency, or a journalist or some other nonspecialist, not by a wine journalist, I’d like to think that they never would write something like that, but definitely some kind of communication agency writing things like that that don’t seem to be wrong when you read them, but then when you know the process, they are wrong, and you really have to flag it up, and that just creates immediate added value. As a translator you’re very valuable because you can improve the source, as well.

AH: All right, you are validating my decision not to translate wine, because, clearly, I don’t even know what I don’t know. [laughter]. I would never have picked up on juice versus wine. Wow.

RS: Well, I mean, when you’ve seen it once, and you’ve realized it once, then after that it’s very easy. And, you know, there aren’t a hundred examples of that. I’m not constantly finding errors in people’s texts, but there’s actually another challenge I could talk about, which is knowing when not to translate. Um, there are some words in the world of wine which have to stay in the source language quite frequently, and that’s often the case when you’re dealing with French. You’ve got words like terroir, which is the whole environment around the vineyard, not just the land, the soil, but also the weather, the exposure, the slope, which direction the slope is facing, all of that can be called terroir. And there’s also a stage in the champagne making process which is called prise de mousse, which is often left in French. Um, again, going back to the pruning techniques, Guyot is left in French as well. But you can find that out yourself by looking at a bit of target language information if you go to winery websites based in California or Australia you can find those terms left in the French or even used in French on those websites.

AH: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I know, obviously a lot of this stuff comes from the French, um, terroir, I feel like a lot of people know, even if you’re not a wine connoisseur, but some of those other terms you mentioned… does it take a bit of a wine connoisseur to know them, or is it really that widespread in English?

RS: That’s a good question, because you have to think about your audience, as well. It’s really when you would be using a word like prise de mousse, you would think, well, is the audience going to understand that. So that would be a case of, well, let’s look exactly at who it’s aimed at, and then we’ll see if it’s people that are supposed to understand those terms, then let’s leave it. But maybe you could add a simple explanation to the sentence, like “prise de mousse-comma-the period in the production process in which the champagne forms its bubbles,” something like that. But, yeah, I think know your audience.

AH: Yeah, now that I think about it, you’re, obviously you’re right. That’s very key. I’m thinking about my mother, who doesn’t know the difference between red and white. [laughter]

RS: Oh, okay! That’s more of a problem [laughter]

AH: And then, you know, a true wine connoisseur, who I’m, you know, they can get pretty pedantic and persnickety sometimes.

RS: [groan] I know, I hate that though. In the beginning, when I do my translation in the wine industry workshops, one of my first slides is a snob, a wine snob, and I put a big red cross through it, and say there’s no wine snobbery. It’s a specialism just like anything else. And just because it has this reputation doesn’t mean it has to be dripping with snobbery. And that’s really—getting back to the objective tasting notes—that’s really the… what you can use as your foundation. Its… You’re not saying it’s good or bad. You’re not saying “You know this” and “I know that,” it’s “Is it high in acid or low in acid?” “Is it… Can you smell cherry, or can you not smell cherry?” And this is how you can eradicate that snobbery that is rife, yeah.

AH: So, I want to go back to this 9:00 a.m. vodka tasting [laughter]. So, your diploma is in wine and spirits. Do you actively translate for the spirits industry, as well?

RS: Yes, yes, yes. It is… It could be said to be a separate field, but, at the end of the day, it’s still fermentation, and then the distillation part. So, it’s just a new… it’s an added extra onto the process. With wine, yes, you’re only dealing with grapes, and with spirits you’re dealing with all manner of raw materials, but there is a lot of cross-over again. Talking about cross-over, there’s a lot of cross-over with wine and spirits. Um, I think there’s probably less focus on the production process when you’re dealing with translating materials for the spirits industry. They tend to be big-brand clients rather than small producers. Like the wine industry… a lot of small producers doing their own websites, whereas spirits tend to be big brands doing their marketing campaigns, so the emphasis is more on their image. Um, spirits translations, I find them to be more creative, more journalistic in style, and they focus on experience around the spirit, rather than how it’s made. When I first started out, I did a lot of translating for Cointreau, the spirits brand, the orange liqueur, and that was a really fascinating mix because they did talk about their production process, but it was always the same thing: sweet and bitter oranges and the distillation and everything. It was a lot of boilerplate text for that. But there were all these different experiences with, like, star mixologists coming in to Paris, and there was a campaign with Dita Von Teese, and there was a lot of really creative opportunities there, which is quite… very different from viticulture in rural Burgandy. [laughter]

AH: Huge generalization here: would you maybe say that wine is for nerdy introverts and spirits is for extroverts?

RS: Oh, no. Definitely not.

AH: Okay

RS: No, [laughter] no, you have to look at the… just think some of the big California brands like Screaming Eagle and some of the Australian… like Penfolds in Australia. These are no shy violets. I mean, they’re big brands with a lot to say. So, yeah, no, definitely not. But there’s probably a little more subtlety in wine, um, than there is in spirits because spirits generally taste the same every year.  Um, probably I’m generalizing there. I think Hennesy and… would disagree with me because that’s the… cognac changes year to year and there’s a lot of difference there, but generally, big brand spirits taste the same every time, every year, and wine is, obviously different each vintage, so that’s a big difference there.

AH: So, um, what are some misconceptions from fellow translators about what you do. I mean, clearly, I have stuck my foot in a couple of them, but, what do people assume about, um, about your job?

RS: I think one of the misconceptions is that there is some of elite group of people that have been born into this wine specialism, and they can’t possi… and other translators can’t possibly permeate into that world, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Um, I know I do have the advantage of my husband being a winemaker, but I really did start out from scratch when I decided to contact WSET, and I was 35 at that point. I was… you know, I wasn’t an enfant du pays as they say around here. Um, I mean, it doesn’t do me any harm, admittedly, that my company, my freelance company has its address in Chablis. I live in Chablis. But it’s really not impossible to learn a specialization from scratch. I mean, doesn’t everyone learn their specializations? Nobody is born specializing in medical, for example. So, I think that’s one of the misconceptions, is that it’s only for this restricted group of people who already know everything about it. That’s really not the case.

AH: That’s comforting. Um, I have another friend who works in wine. She’s a buyer for a major retailer here in the United States, and it seems like the more you get into wine the less snobby you are about it. It’s the people like me who don’t know anything about it who assume that it’s a very highfalutin sort of career, but, um, she’s very ecumenical about it, you know.

RS: But I think when you really love something, then you want everyone to share in it, so you obviously break down all those snobbery barriers when you want to share your passion and your fascination with something. Um, definitely, I don’t know why it’s the case. I think it’s to do with maybe wine waiters or sommeliers in the 1980s perhaps smirking at people when they don’t order the correct wine. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me, but maybe it’s because it’s being paired with fine food in this sort of rich, elite atmosphere. Maybe that’s why. But it’s a shame.

AH: All right, so my New Years’ resolution is to drink more wine and just enjoy it.

RS: Yeah, exactly! Just enjoy it, which is also a question you can ask yourself. Once… If you are translating or if you’re working in the wine industry, you could do your objective tasting note, but then at the end of the day, is it… do you enjoy it? Is it nice? Is the taste pleasant? And that is where the pleasure comes from, so, I think you should definitely, yeah, try more wines. And, what I don’t like is when people say “Oh, I don’t like red wine,” or “I don’t like white wine.” It’s like, have you tried a selection, because they are so different. You really try all different ones, and then decide. I mean, nobody likes… not everyone needs to like everything in the world, but definitely reds can be heavy and powerful and… heavy, whereas they can also be light and fruity and—crunchy almost—if you’ve got this red cherry kind of strawberry flavors coming through with… it’s perfect with some fruit salad even, which you’d never… a snob would never say that, right?

AH: All right, so, um, a couple final questions: we touched on your translation of cosmetics, but you also translate for personal development, which is very interesting. Are there, just very quickly, so, um, give me a brief overview of that, and then tell me about any overlaps between cosmetics and wine and spirits and personal development.

RS: Um-hmm. Well, personal development got started because I had a contact who was working at Dannon, the yoghurt and dairy, lots and lots of different products, company, and Dannon organized this seminar, which is twice yearly, three times yearly, called Eve, and it’s all about… it’s for women, and they invite a majority of women with some men, so that the men feel like what it’s like to be in the minority, and it’s all to do with daring and taking the first steps and breaking through the glass ceiling, and ways of doing that, and that… they publish lots of different articles on their blog to do with resilience and, uh, well, all different feminist issues, and I’ve been lucky enough to translate for them for several years now. The cross-over there is really… not a lot of overlap between cosmetics and personal development there, but also, the books that I’ve been translating, that started out with a person development book, as well, called Nudge Management, all about how you can make small changes in a business environment to change people’s behavior. So, some would say manipulation, but I like to say nudge. Um, so this is, for example, sticking a little fly on a urinal to keep men’s aim clear and keep mess off the floor. So that’s would be an example of a nudge, and that book was all about bringing those kinds of initiatives into business to improve efficiency and that. And employee satisfaction as well. So, I mean, that’s just a brief overview of my personal development translation. But that varies a lot.

AH: All right, [laughter]. Sorry, I’m still getting over the fly in the urinal.

RS: [laughter]

AH: Maybe we’ll call it incentivization and just working with people…

RS: “Incentivization,” I like that. Yeah [laughter].

AH: That’s hysterical. All right, well, final question: Is there anything else you want people to know about you, about your work, about the world.

RS: I would say, don’t be scared to specialize because it’s really rewarding when you get recommended for a job from someone who has heard about you but you don’t know, that’s a really lovely seal of approval. Um, if you manage to become the translator that springs to people’s minds when they think of an area, then that’s definitely a time that you’re doing something right. Also, I’ve found that sharing knowledge is a wonderful thing, giving workshops to other translators really did set me up as a reference, as I said earlier, in those areas. Um, and, yeah, they brought me more work and, you know, contrary to what you might think, it’s really not about creating competitors because I know a lot of translators would hesitate to give training because they’re like, well, if they know how to specialize in that industry, then I’m going to get overtaken. But it really isn’t the case. I haven’t found that to be the case at all. Quite the opposite. People see you in a more authoritative light when you’ve been a tutor for them. Um, so, yeah, what else would I like people to remember, is, uh, try wine. Try all different kinds of wine and don’t be scared of the wine world.

AH: All right. Words of wisdom from the Queen of Wine herself. Pay attention, guys.

All right, well, thank you so much, Ruth, for your time today, uh, excuse my dog in the background. He’s mad that he’s penned up right now, and…

RS: That’s fine. It’s real life.

AH: Thank you so much for your words.

RS: And thank you for listening to me. Thank you.

AH: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the continuing education series podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes by searching for continuing education series. You can contact the FLD at divisionFLD [at] atanet.org, visit our website at www.ata-divisions.org/FLD, or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie Ho signing off. Thanks for listening, and à bientôt.

Ruth Simpson has been translating professionally since 2008 in the fields of wine & spirits, beauty and personal development and holds the MITI certification from the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. She lives on her family’s wine estate in Chablis and is a graduate of the WSET Level 4 Diploma in wines and spirits. Before moving to Chablis, Ruth was an English trainer at L’Oréal’s Luxury Division in Paris, facilitating workshops and tutoring business and marketing professionals. She has a degree from the University of Warwick in the UK, and in addition to studying French, she spent her time there singing with the chamber choir and musical theatre society. Also a keen scuba diver and violinist, Ruth started playing the ukulele in 2019 and has begun to suffer from UAS, ukulele acquisition syndrome. You can follow her on Twitter at @ruthinchablis.

ATA Podcast host Andie Ho is a certified French to English translator specializing in the food industry. She earned her M.A. in translation from Kent State University and is now based in the Houston area. She currently serves as the ATA’s French Language Division administrator. You can follow her on Twitter at @JHawkTranslator or email her at andie [at] andiehotranslations [dot] com.

Transcribed by Joan Wallace. She has been a full-time freelance translator for nearly 30 years. She holds ATA certification from French to English and Spanish to English, and also translates from Thai to English. She works primarily in medical and pharmaceutical translation, although she occasionally wanders further afield, including an ongoing collaboration with a historian involving
French-English translation of 19th-century handwritten documents. She is based in Madison, Wisconsin. You can connect with her on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/joanwallace.