{"id":4729,"date":"2026-05-04T03:56:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T03:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/?p=4729"},"modified":"2026-04-12T03:57:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T03:57:19","slug":"transcript-ata-ces-episode-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/FLD\/2026\/05\/04\/transcript-ata-ces-episode-24\/","title":{"rendered":"[Transcript] ATA Continuing Education Series Podcast \u2014 Episode 24 \u2014 Ben Karl on Getting an MBA"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Over-the-shoulder
Photo credit: Unsplash<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"TheTo 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 \u00c0 Propos<\/em>. Many thanks to our volunteer transcriptionists, who are credited at the bottom of each transcription. If you\u2019re interested in helping us transcribe podcast episodes, email divisionFLD\u00a0[at]\u00a0atanet\u00a0[dot]\u00a0org.<\/p>\n

HOW TO LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL EPISODE<\/strong><\/h3>\n

SOUNDCLOUD<\/strong>: You can listen to or download\u00a0Episode\u00a024<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and all previous episodes on Soundcloud\u00a0here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

ITUNES<\/strong>: This episode and all previous episodes are available on iTunes\u00a0here<\/strong><\/a>. You can subscribe or listen online. Like what you hear? Rate us and review us! It really helps get the word out.<\/p>\n

Episode\u00a024 \u2014 Ben Karl on Getting an MBA<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

Andie Ho: <\/strong>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. Ben Karl is a certified translator and copywriter based in Long Beach, California, specializing in corporate communications, marketing and user experience with more than a decade of experience crafting amazing copy for companies that want to make an impact in North America. He serves on the board of directors of the American Translators Association, edits the FLD newsletter and chairs the ATA Advocacy Committee. He also chairs the Translatio standing committee of the International Federation of Translators. Welcome, Ben!<\/p>\n

Ben Karl: <\/strong>Thank you, Andie. It\u2019s really nice to be here.<\/p>\n

AH: <\/strong>I have gathered you all here today (you meaning Ben and listeners) to discuss Ben\u2019s MBA. He has an MBA, a master of business administration, and I know a number of ATA members have this, but I chose Ben to talk about it today, because this is not a qualification that I personally have ever considered getting, and I just wanted to explore his experience with it, what it was like and whether he thinks it\u2019s been worth it. So, Ben, start us off. First of all, basics: what exactly is an MBA?<\/p>\n

BK: <\/strong>Thank you for the question. An MBA is, you know, there are hundreds of programs around the world. There are a variety of different things you can focus on, but essentially a master of business administration is a degree that\u2019s meant to train management or executives in how to run a business, how to analyze a business, how to create new businesses, how to manage finances better. There are all these components that make up an MBA that you can focus on. I focused my MBA on entrepreneurship and venture creation and then had all these other components that were a part of it, including corporate accounting, corporate strategy, marketing\u2014all sorts of different components. Asking what is an MBA is kind of like asking like what is a French literature degree; it\u2019s what you make of it and the program that you go to, but, in my case, it was an entrepreneurship-focused, executive-level training in business and management.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: OK, you say entrepreneurship. Why did you choose that? Were you already a freelancer when you went into this?<\/p>\n

BK:<\/strong> I was, yeah. I had started my freelance practice in 2013 and I started pursuing a master of business administration I think it was in 2015 and so I was working really heavily in corporate communications. I was translating and editing a lot of corporate registration documents and things that publicly listed companies need to submit to various financial authorities predominantly. So, to me, it made sense to, one, pursue an MBA to understand what my clients were doing better and to have that language in my target working language, English, and to run my own business better. I think a lot of translators think of themselves as wordsmiths and not so much as business people. For me, I had the wordsmith background already and I thought that the best place for me to beef up my knowledge was in business.<\/p>\n

AH: <\/strong>So did you choose your program based on the fact that it specialized in entrepreneurship or is that just something you kind of did within your program?<\/p>\n

BK: <\/strong>Yeah, that was kind of a happy accident. I decided to pursue an MBA at the University of Nevada, Reno, which is where I was living at the time. It also happened to be where my husband was a faculty member. I was very lucky to qualify for a tuition benefit, so I got a nice little discount on my degree and decided to do that program in particular, one, because it was a night program so I could work full time while also being a student full time, and that was very challenging, but my classes were from 6\u00a0p.m. to 10\u00a0p.m., Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so I could balance my work and my studies. And entrepreneurship was one of the areas that the program was particularly good in. They had some really great instructors in the entrepreneurship program. There was a really cool kind of venture creation competition that students could enter, so it kind of clicked with me that I wanted to do that, as opposed to, you know, it\u2019s a program that\u2019s located in Nevada, so there\u2019s a gaming specialization that you can do. So, you can focus on the gaming industry and casinos. There\u2019s also a bunch of different sorts of areas that each MBA program focuses on and it just happened that they had one that also appealed to me beyond, you know, I wasn\u2019t so interested in doing the casino one, but yeah it worked out in that sense.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: Is an MBA something you had always thought about and then you thought, you know, the opportunity arose and you thought this would help my business and I want to do it? Or did you look at your business and say, I want to take it to the next level; what would get me there? Oh, an MBA.<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: That\u2019s kind of a cart and a horse question. I think it\u2019s a combination of both of those things. I was always interested in pursuing a degree that was more advanced than my bachelor\u2019s degree and throughout my budding career as a non-freelance linguist. Then, when I started my freelance practice, I was looking for ways to take my knowledge to the next level and I considered a translation master\u2019s or a language or literature master\u2019s. An MBA master\u2019s also got added to the list. I think I thought, \u201cWhere am I going to get the most value for money?\u201d Also, as you do, you take your living situation into account; you take other factors, you know? I happened to live near a university that had a program that I was interested in. My husband happened to work at the university where they offered it. There were all these factors that compounded and it seemed like the most logical, best next step for me. I think, depending on where you are, your decision or your thought process might be a little different, but it\u2019s what worked out for me. Ultimately, I am very happy that I did it.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>:\u00a0For the actual program itself, what were some of the, what I call gen ed, mandatory courses that everybody has to take? What were some examples of some electives that you chose to take to customize your program?<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: That\u2019s also a really good question. There\u2019s the common body of knowledge that they expect everyone to come into the MBA program with and a lot of those are courses that you get to skip if you were a business major in your undergraduate studies, which I was not. I was an English-to-French translation and French literature student and an East Asian studies student, so I did not have financial reporting and analysis under my belt. I took a course called statistics for decision-making where I learned how to run regression models on financial data or marketing data\u2014knowledge that I have not used and would rely on a someone else to help me with these days. But I did take and pass a pretty advanced statistics course, financial management. There was a kind of business economics course, organizational science. The kind of things that you typically learn, I think, in an undergraduate setting. There were some others, like core plus courses. There was a course on IT and communications technology for businesses. They want everyone to kind of have an idea of what computer infrastructure needs to look like for a company of any size really. Then there were a lot of different elective courses that I could take and so I focused a lot on entrepreneurship courses like venture creation or value creation. Then there were courses; I took a really amazing personal branding course; I took a bunch of really interesting marketing courses, but I could have taken commercial bank management, managing banking products, you know financial products that are typically offered in the retail banking and corporate banking areas, things like that. A lot of programs are what you make them. Then, at the end, there\u2019s the capstone course, which is a big strategic management and corporate strategy course, and you got a big paper to write at the end.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: How long was the program?<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: My program. So, it was a full-time program and it was a two-year program, so it was four semesters or four full semesters and then, I think there were two summer semesters, too. It was a good two full years of pretty intense work.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: And you say you were also working at the time. So how did that go?<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: Honestly, it was actually very challenging. It takes a professional toll; it takes a personal toll. Your relationships can suffer to a certain degree, because you can\u2019t be available or as available to your friends or your partner or your family. It\u2019s a major commitment. It\u2019s not a decision that people should take lightly, especially because in a lot of cases and, still in my case, it costs a lot of money to pursue a degree like an MBA. I was lucky that because I didn\u2019t have to take time off of work and because I qualified for a tuition benefit that it was much more affordable for me than for other people. It\u2019s definitely, I mean, it\u2019s a slog. Especially with night classes. You get home at 10\u00a0p.m. and you\u2019ve still got homework to do and then you have to wake up and be awake and on the ball for your own clients and that\u2019s tough, but I lived through it and I think I am a better person for it. I learned a lot and, you know, it all worked out.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: Yeah, I don\u2019t want to talk about student loans unless I have a glass of alcohol in my hand.<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: Right! I was very fortunate. I mean, in all frankness, I was very fortunate that I did not have to take out a loan to do this program. I managed to, you know, there were some like payment plans through my university that were not credit necessarily, but I could pay my tuition for the year on a monthly basis and I had a nice discount and could still work, so it all worked out. But yeah, I\u2019m very fortunate that I did not have to take out a loan and I think if I went back and someone said, \u201cYou can do this program, but you\u2019re going to have to take out a loan to do it,\u201d I don\u2019t know if I would make necessarily the same decision that I made. I think everyone has to do their own value calculation, but, to me, student loans are one of those things that kind of stick around for a really long time. I wasn\u2019t interested and I\u2019m still not interested in taking out a student loan.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: Given your initial goals, do you find the degree fulfilled your expectations? Did you gain the knowledge you needed to better understand your clients and run your business?<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: It really did. I\u2019m very, very happy that I did it. I think it shifted my mindset in terms of the kind of decisions you need to make to run a business, the investments you need to make in the long-term health of your business. Those three little letters after my name are a valuable signal to the kinds of clients I work with and the kind of clients I want to attract. At the end of the day, it is just a piece of paper and these days, with online learning and books and this wealth of knowledge that you can find for yourself sometimes, maybe it could be difficult to justify shelling out for. But for me, it has been a valuable signal to the people that I want to work with that I know what I\u2019m talking about, that I\u2019ve put in the work and that I understand the pressures that they\u2019re under, the work that they\u2019re trying to do. Ultimately, I think that has been very valuable and, at the same time, it\u2019s allowed me to be smarter about how I run my own business. I think we don\u2019t learn how to run an income statement in language school or, even doing a certificate program, there aren\u2019t a lot of courses on professional practice or just really basic things you need to run a business well and I think maybe that was the most successful part of it for me. In the aggregate, I\u2019m very happy that I did it and it\u2019s been very valuable to me.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: I\u2019m just going to put this out there, whether to you or our listeners, that I think there\u2019s a market out there for some sort of minicourse, a condensed\u2014not full-on MBA, but concepts from an MBA that would be useful for freelance translators. I\u2019m just going to put that out there and then not comment on it.<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>:\u00a0Right? There are so many great resources, even through ATA and the Back to Business Basics webinars, for example. Just really good tidbits and valuable bits of information that are like a build-your-own mini-MBA for translators. There are resources out there and there are even some great books that pop to mind that aren\u2019t even necessarily linguist focused (some of them are, some of them aren\u2019t) that have a lot of really valuable information and are like condensed little MBAs in 200 pages.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: All right, last question, as always: is there anything else you\u2019d like our listeners to know?<\/p>\n

[Ben laughs.]<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: That\u2019s such an open-ended question! Where would I begin?<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: It\u2019s intentionally open-ended.<\/p>\n

[Ben and Andie laugh.]<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: Yeah! Doing an MBA was a really valuable choice for me and I endorse it fully for myself and maybe for people who are interested in taking their business skills to the next level. MBAs are not the end-all be-all of graduate degrees for anybody or by any stretch of the imagination, and you can learn most of what you can learn in an MBA from the internet and from really great online courses, mentors, belonging to a professional association like that ATA that has really strong continuing education offerings, things like that. There\u2019s a lot that you can learn from doing it on your own. You don\u2019t necessarily need an MBA. For me, I am glad that I did it. I derived a lot of value from that experience. When people ask me, \u201cShould I get an MBA?\u201d, I think you got to do what\u2019s right for you. If it\u2019s the right time for you to do it, then it would be great. I don\u2019t know many translators or interpreters who\u2019ve gotten MBAs, but the ones that I do know, they seem to have careers that they really like. If that\u2019s any indication, then maybe it is a good step for people to take. Who knows!<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: Very interesting. Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Ben. A lot of food for thought here. I don\u2019t fancy myself going back to school, but maybe one day!<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: Right, maybe, yeah! There are just so many resources out there. Whether you go back to school or not, I think professionalizing our language practices is a really important step for all sorts of things. Maybe next on the FLD podcast: why professionalizing is important! But I think becoming better professionals and better business people, it\u2019s always a good thing. So, whether you go back to school or not, highly recommend adding some of those behaviors to your practice.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: All right. Thank you very much for joining us today. Appreciate it!<\/p>\n

BK<\/strong>: Thank you, Andie for having me, and until next time.<\/p>\n

AH<\/strong>: This concludes our episode for today. You can subscribe to the Continuing Education Series Podcast on SoundCloud or iTunes by searching for \u201cContinuing Education Series.\u201d You can contact the FLD at divisionfld [at] atanet [dot] org, visit our website at www.ata-divisions\/fld or get in touch with us on social media. This is Andie Ho, signing off. Thanks for listening and \u00e0 bient\u00f4t.<\/p>\n

Ben Karl, MBA, CT <\/strong>is a corporate and marketing communications and UX translator and copywriter with more than a decade of experience in the language services industry. He is ATA-certified for French to English translation and also works from Mandarin into English. He helps international companies find and refine their English voice, attract new customers, and communicate with all their stakeholders. He currently serves on the ATA Board of Directors, chairs the ATA Advocacy Committee, and is a member of the ATA Membership Committee and the Chronicle Editorial Board. He is also the chair of the International Federation of Translators\u2019 (FIT) Translatio<\/em> Standing Committee and edits \u00c0 Propos<\/em>, the ATA\u2019s French Language Division blog. Visit his website<\/a> or follow him on Twitter at @Bentranslates<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ATA Podcast host\u00a0Andie Ho<\/strong>\u00a0is 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\u2019s French Language Division administrator. You can follow her on Twitter at\u00a0@JHawkTranslator<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0or email her at\u00a0andie\u00a0[at]\u00a0andiehotranslations\u00a0[dot]\u00a0com<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Transcribed by Crystal Crow<\/strong>, who has been a member of the ATA since 2011. Crystal is a Canadian-American translator, writer and poet. She has published poetry in the Eastern Iowa literary magazine Weird Cookies<\/em>. She translated Marie Dupuis\u2019s Etuk et Piqati<\/em> into English for Manitoba-based Parenty Reitmeier Inc. Her current writing project is a lyrical collection of eco-fiction short stories. She lives in Quebec, Canada, with her two dogs and partner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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