ATA SLD

Slavic Languages Division (American Translators Association)

American Translators Association: The Voice of Interpreters and Translators

Reminder: Messenger Marketing for Freelance Translators

One week left! On January 23, 2024, at 12:00 PM Eastern, SLD member Dmitry Beschetny will be presenting an ATA-hosted webinar titled “Messenger Marketing for Freelance Translators: How to Leverage It Effectively.”
In today’s digital age, conventional marketing approaches are evolving, and mobile messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, and more are becoming indispensable tools for freelance translators. In this webinar, Dmitry will explore inbound and outbound strategies and practical techniques tailored for freelance translators to effectively use these apps, ensuring that even your one-off clients of yesteryear keep thinking of you and prospects keep coming in.
This webinar is designed for freelance translators who work in geographical locations without access to major marketing platforms and for those looking to augment their marketing efforts with messaging platforms to boost their translation business. It will be primarily conducted in English, supplemented with illustrative examples in Russian.

 

ATA Webinar: Messenger Marketing for Freelance Translators

Mark your calendars! On January 23, 2024, at 12:00 PM Eastern, SLD member Dmitry Beschetny will be presenting an ATA-hosted webinar titled “Messenger Marketing for Freelance Translators: How to Leverage It Effectively.”
In today’s digital age, conventional marketing approaches are evolving, and mobile messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, and more are becoming indispensable tools for freelance translators. In this webinar, Dmitry will explore inbound and outbound strategies and practical techniques tailored for freelance translators to effectively use these apps, ensuring that even your one-off clients of yesteryear keep thinking of you and prospects keep coming in.
This webinar is designed for freelance translators who work in geographical locations without access to major marketing platforms and for those looking to augment their marketing efforts with messaging platforms to boost their translation business. It will be primarily conducted in English, supplemented with illustrative examples in Russian.

 

Upcoming ATA webinars this week

We have two fun and interactive ATA webinars coming up this week!

November 2 at 6 pm EDT: Ethics in Conference Interpreting with Katty Kauffman

https://www.atanet.org/event/ethics-in-conference-interpreting/


Duration: 120 minutes
ATA CEPs: 2.0

What will you learn?

  1. Working definition of ethics in interpreting
  2. Core concepts and values of conference interpreters
  3. Best practices for onsite events
  4. Best practices for remote events
  5. Where ethics in onsite and remote events converge and diverge

Registration Closes: November 2, 4:00 pm EDT

November 4 at 7 pm EDT: The Power of Social Media: Key Strategies for Marketing Your Interpreting and Translation Services (free for ATA members!) with Mireya Pérez, MS

https://www.atanet.org/event/the-power-of-social-media-key-strategies-for-marketing-your-interpreting-and-translation-services/

What will you learn?

  1. What types of social media posts you can use as a marketing tool
  2. What is visual storytelling and how you can use it on social media
  3. How to identify your target audience
  4. How to create identity on social media
  5. What social media resources are available

Registration Closes: November 4, 10:00 am EDT

Upcoming ATA webinars in April: Branding Basics and Doing Business with Law Firms

Several ATA webinars are coming up in April, and we thought that these two would be of interest to SLD members!

“Personal Branding Basics”: a Back to Business Basics webinar with Ben Karl on April 6 at 12:00 pm Eastern time. This webinar is free to ATA members but registration is required. All registered participants will get a handout and a link to the recording.
Register at https://www.atanet.org/event/personal-branding-basics/

Developing a personal brand is a classic “work smarter, not harder” technique. When done well, it will showcase your specific expertise and skill set, bringing focus to your marketing and targeting your ideal clients. Far more than a logo or a slogan, your personal brand will tell your story, from who you are and what you do to why you are the right person for the job.

“Doing Business with Law Firms”: a webinar with Paula Arturo on April 14 at 12:00 pm Eastern time. Registration is $45 for ATA members and $60 for non-members (including 1 ATA CEP and a link to the recording)
Register at https://www.atanet.org/event/doing-business-with-law-firms/

Legal translators are expected to master both law and language in a market with its own unique, and often rigid, set of rules. This is not a field you jump into unprepared.

So how do you know if this field is right for you? How do you prepare to cater to this demanding market? Should you sub-specialize? If so, in what? How do you get your foot through the door with top law firms? And, once inside, how do you keep them happy and coming back?

Presenter Paula Arturo will draw on her 20+ years of experience and current role at a top law firm to help get you on track for doing business with law firms.

ATA58 Review: Working with Direct Clients. For Real. (IC-8)

Image showing graffiti of a sunflower captioned "always room to grow"

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:

  • Good writing and/or good quality are a given, not a differentiator, as are native-level quality and consistent terminology.
  • Instead of generic statements that do not add up to anything distinctive, you have to provide specific examples of value that you bring to the table.
  • Quality may be (and frequently is) affected by any or all of the following factors:
    • Time pressure
    • Blind spots
    • Cynicism
    • Overselling (and under delivering).

To start working with direct clients:

  • The factors that go into producing a product that is not likely to be MT-replicated or replaceable are: Time + Brain + Talent. Plan accordingly
  • Understand priorities of direct clients in your segment (likely not price-driven). Know what is mission-critical or sensitive
  • Find a partner (reviser)
  • Create a client-friendly system: be generous, be efficient, do not make clients jump through multiple hoops to work with you
  • Be friendly and enthusiastic. Do not snark. Do not blabber
  • Be honest on your experience and on whether or not you subcontract. Specialization goes deep, not wide (to eliminate blind spots)
  • Research and stalk (professionally, of course) potential clients
  • Be mindful of scalability vs quality restraints
  • Sign your work
  • Offer solutions instead of words on a page.

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.

ATA58 Review: Selling Your Translation and Interpreting Services (IC-4)

People shaking hands

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.

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