Slavic Languages Division (American Translators Association)
The 2019 season continues on the SLD Podcast with Alaina Brandt, a business owner, Spanish-to-English translator, and expert on project management and processes. Ekaterina and Veronika chat with Alaina about best practices in project management, sources of communication failure, and the state of localization training in the US.
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Review by Ekaterina Howard
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash
At ATA conferences I make attending Chris Durban’s sessions a priority (even SLD’s Ru>En slam could not tear me away), and to me they invariably become one of the highlights of any conference.
This year’s session tied in nicely with the session on blind spots at ATA57, which effectively became the primary source of my business development plan for 2017 (as easy as that!).
In the “Working with Direct Clients. For Real.” Session Chris Durban addressed the most common constraints that prevent translators from moving out of the mass-market segment (although some direct clients can be mass-market, too) into the premium segment (which is where recognition, satisfaction and high rates come together).
The main constraints are:
To start working with direct clients:
If you are considering working with direct clients, for real or hypothetically, you might want to look up The Prosperous Translator — Advice from Fire Ant & Worker Bee at https://prosperoustranslator.com/, follow Chris Durban’s blog at https://chrisdurbanblog.com/author/christinedurban/, or read a review of the first Business Acceleration Masterclass for Translators and Interpreters by Jayne Fox: https://foxdocs.biz/BetweenTranslations/business-tips-translators-chris-durbans-masterclass/.
Even if you feel that you are not quite ready yet, it is not too early to start getting ready to move towards working in the direct client segment. I believe that one of the most important things you could do is not learn how to market yourself (although this won’t hurt), but continuously work on your translation and writing skills.
If you are an SLD member, you can join the SLD Certification Exam Prep Group to exchange translations with other participants and discuss the challenges on a monthly basis. If you would like to up the ante, consider participating in SLD translation slams, either by submitting a slam proposal for the next ATA conference, or by volunteering to join a virtual slam. Those are all great starting points for working on your translation skills, and I hope that someday there will be an event similar to “Translate in…” (in 2017 it was in Quebec City – https://www.ontraduitaquebec.com/en/about/) for Slavic languages.
On that note, I invite you to share your collaboration experiences, your stories of growing as a translator, and your tips on working with “dream” direct clients.
Ekaterina Howard is an English to Russian and German to Russian translator working with marketing materials. She is the current Administrator of the Slavic Languages Divisions. You can follow her blog at https://pinwheeltrans.com/blog, stay in touch on Twitter (@katya_howard), or connect with her on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekaterinahoward). If you would like to become SLD’s next translation slammer, you can reach her at ekaterina@atasld.org.
Review by Tyler Langendorfer
Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash
Last month at the ATA’s 58th Annual Conference in DC, John Di Rico presented the session “Selling Your Translation and Interpreting Services,” a talk focused on the techniques required to successfully acquire and retain direct clients. Di Rico, a French-to-English translator as well as Sales and Marketing Manager for WordFast, advocated a “customer-centric” approach that encouraged sellers to rethink their own views on the buyer-seller relationship.
Di Rico began his talk with a sample email from a prospective buyer and asked audience members to form groups in order to discuss how they might respond. After each group shared their ideas, Di Rico would outline his recommendations, then ask the groups to again brainstorm solutions to another series of questions. During the initial rounds of discussion, Di Rico drew attention to the most important details a seller ought to obtain initially: the name, title and company of the prospective client; how they found out about the seller; the buyer’s present goal; and the challenges they have with their current process. Once these have been identified, the seller can move on to the next step and compose a champion letter for the potential client.
A champion letter is perhaps the most important communication effort in the buyer-seller relationship, as it underscores why the buyer should choose the seller’s services. It also demonstrates a strong degree of professionalism and courtesy. According to Di Rico, it has five parts: a statement of goals (or shared goals), a summary of the current situation and the capabilities required to address it, at least one potential benefit from the seller’s services, and the next steps should the buyer maintain their interest.
Other advice of note included Di Rico’s statement that sales is a conversation, one that requires patience and a strong willingness to find solutions for the buyer. Also, to build a strong, personable relationship with a buyer early on, Di Rico advised that the seller try to schedule a phone call in their first email response. Lastly, the seller should not invest too much time in obtaining a client that is uncooperative in providing the info needed to conduct their business.
For this writer, Di Rico’s approach seemed reasonable and well worth considering. Although not all his recommendations may have been new to session attendees, it was beneficial to closely examine the techniques sellers utilize when they interact with prospective buyers. Perhaps the most salient takeaway was Di Rico’s emphasis on making sure that the seller understands the buyer’s needs and that they work with them to reach a solution. Even with the focus on direct clients, translators and interpreters can nonetheless incorporate Di Rico’s recommendations into their relationship with agencies, as they could also benefit from a heightened sensitivity to a project manager’s needs. Furthermore, customer-centric selling enables the seller to rethink the value of their services and may provide for a renewed sense of purpose in their professional goals. In other words, what does it mean to translate or interpret, for the sellers themselves, the buyers, and perhaps also the greater social good.
Tyler Langendorfer (tyler@aegistranslations.com) is a translator of German and Spanish specializing in marketing, social sciences, and humanities translation. He is a participant in the ATA Mentoring Program and has been studying Russian independently since 2014.