Operation Holiday Business. Gameplan: Questionable

So many different bloggers, from the T&I industry or elsewhere, talk about client loyalty around the holidays:

• A nice one from Thoughts on Translation
• Another good one from Thoughts on Translation, because of the comments
• And one from Les recettes du traducteur (in French, of course) sharing observations of what she received

It's easy: you send nice cards to your clients, thanking them for working with you and wishing them well for the new year.  At the same time, you're reminding them you exist and putting a smile on their face that links back to you.  If you do it right.  You can even send thoughtful little gifts to your favorites.  It's a nice thing to do, and it's on the fun end of marketing.

But what do you do when the holidays come around and there are agencies who you want to work for, but aren't yet?  When there are clients you've presented yourself to, but nothing's happened?  Is it a good idea, or even appropriate, to send a card to them?

I think it might be, so long as you've had two-way contact with an actual person there.  If you just submitted your resume to a company and didn't hear diddlysquat from them, who are you going to send the card to?  "Dear Hiring Manager"?  What would you do if you got a holiday card from someone you didn't recognize?

But if you have communicated directly with someone at the company and they haven't completely written you off, sure!  Send a card.  It can put you back on their radar, remind them that you exist, and prime them to think of your name when their next project in your language pair pops up.

"Dear so-and-so: Best wishes to you and your loved ones this holiday season.  I look forward to developing our working relationship together in the coming year. "

Why not?  It seems like a good idea...right?

Now, to find cards at the beginning of December.

My First ATA Conference

Like a baby's first word, or the first day of school: such is the importance of attending one's first major industry conference. It provides a huge (and needed) boost in the attempt to form a full-time career out of a part-time passion.

For three days at the end of October, I went to Boston to see what I could learn, who I could meet, what connections I could forge. And I have to say, it was a rousing success. I've been so busy taking action based on what happened at the conference that I've only now been able to put my thoughts down in the ether ("on paper" being a bit of a misnomer...).

So, here follows, in tidbit/interview form, a general conference review, from the highly biased opinion of a starry-eyed first-timer:

Scariest/best decision: skipping the first-time-attendee orientation session in favor of a seminar on "Translating for Quebec," given by Grant Hamilton. He knows his stuff. I know Québecois is a bit different (so is Canadian English), but he pointed out so many things you must know. Geography. Politics. News. "La fleuve" is not "the river," but the St. Lawrence River. Obviously...

Worst decision: not bringing a winter hat, gloves, and snowboots.  Oh, Nor'easters, how you make life more interesting!

Proudest moment: reading poetry I had translated while living in France, from a dear friend of mine's collection.  And having people give genuine compliments on both the translation and my stage presence.  Thank you, choir/theatre training.

Strangest connection: meeting a French>English translator who lives just across the river in New Jersey, and finding out we had the same professor at NYU -- eccentric Anne-Marie.  She had her in New York, but by the time I came along, Anne-Marie had been politely shuttled to the Paris campus, to finish her dissertation.  25 years in the making.

Best celebrity sighting: Chris Durban. No, no, this isn't your normal star, but a very highly respected French>English translator who is renowned and revered among most in this profession. She is smart, sharp as a whip, and takes no nonsense from whiners. I want to be like her when I grow up.

Most interesting audience member moment: watching the discussion go way off its rails at the Arabic session on theory and framework.  I think it's a cultural thing that makes people who have grown up in Arabic-speaking countries less tactful when butting into a presentation intended to give them useful information.  The presenter, a native-English-speaking professor of Islamic Studies who learned Arabic along the way, was trying to give the by-necessity-generally-amateur Arabic translators a bit of theoretical framework, and they pushed back the whole while.  Not because they didn't think his ideas were useful, but because it just seems to be in their nature.  And at the end, most of them congratulated the presenter on surviving his trial by fire and said they would be taking some of the techniques into account while translating.  Interesting.

First moment I thought "hey, I actually belong here": Friday lunch with some of the French translators I had met the prior evening at the French Language Division dinner.  The dinner had been lovely, fun, and informative, and I had met some great people.  The next day, finding some of those people for lunch, was proof that they weren't just humoring me.  (Some people could have probably realized that during the FLD dinner.  I am, occasionally, harder to convince.)

And now, for the list of awesome things that came from the conference: - personal contacts - an invitation to write a review for the Slavic Language Division's newsletter on a session on translating Rachmaninov's art songs (seems random, but isn't: the request came from the woman who ran the literary readings After Hours Cafe) - the initiative to get involved with my local chapter, the NY Circle of Translators - two possible job offers! - a strong desire to go to next year's conference in San Diego (starting to save money now...) - the knowledge that yes, I can do this

Excellent?  Yes, I would definitely say so.

On the brink...

I feel as though I've climbed a mountain to get here. It is midnight. Eight hours until I wake up for my first day of my first professional conference. I've done more prep work than I imagined possible (and have invariably missed many things). I'm on the brink, waiting to step out into nothingness... Except not quite. I've climbed one mountain, but just a foothill, really. Compare it to the McKinley of the conference, the Everest of a career, all this prep work was really just training. A rock climbing wall.

Here's hoping I remember my not-too-corny elevator pitch by morning!

Passion

When I was a junior at NYU, I took my first translation course.  In it, we had an exercise to translate the children's book Madeline from its original English into French -- a good brain-stretching exercise, but not one I would undertake for professional work, as French is not my native language.  My group finished the translation in class, but one particular couplet bugged me -- the rhyme and rhythm weren't great, and the meter was virtually non-existent.  So I spent my next lecture period working on that one couplet.  I have no idea to this day what that psychology lecture was on.

That's what I love about translation -- the puzzles of language and tone, with infinite ways to solve them, and no one set "right" way.  Literature provides the most opportunities for this, with an author's tone, style, word choice, and countless character voices.  This, above all else, is what appeals to me.

So last night, when a friend brought a particular book on classical music by a French filmmaker to my attention and said he really wanted to read it, my first instinct was, "can I translate that?"  Just a thought really.  But there isn't an existing English translation.  No idea if anyone already owns the English sub rights to it.  So what do I do?  I send an email shooting into the ether in the general direction of a renowned film critic who wrote a blog post on this filmmaker for a prominent magazine last year, who had a few English excerpts from the book in his post.

There's no harm in throwing a few crazy fishing lines out into a frothing ocean, is there?

Here we go again!

New adventure: translation.

I took a course in translation as an undergrad at NYU, and immediately was hooked.  I spent a couple psych lectures that semester working on a particularly finicky translation.  (It's not the lecture's fault that it directly followed my translation class!)  Ever since then, I've been translating something, at least once every week or two.  But it's always been on the side.  And I've never gotten paid for a single word.

Now it's career-building time.  Back in Brooklyn, ready to learn a ton and figure this out.  How does one build a freelance translation career, anyway?  I've hit the blogs, the American Translators Association website, the monthly meetings of the New York Circle of Translators.  I've started talking to people who do this for a living.  I took a job as a proofreader (and occasional project manager) at one of the largest translation agencies in the world, to get experience from the other side.

But the biggest "first" step I'm about to take?  I'll be attending the ATA's Annual Conference at the end of the month.  What a learning experience I will have, if I can overcome the learning curve.

My fears (of course they exist, and they are indeed plentiful) for the moment center on the conference.  What if, what if, what if?  What if nobody talks to me?  What if I don't learn a single thing?  What if this is just too hard?  It's like the first day of school all over again.

But any hurdle demands pogo stick, or a horse, or possibly a helicopter.  My current pogo sticks include:

• creating a modest website
• ordering business cards
• sprucing up my resume
• physically writing out a list of questions to ask people while chatting or networking

And my helicopter?  I'll be staying with a good friend of mine from high school who lives in Boston now.  Lifeline: procured.

(To be fair, I was considering staying in the conference hotel, which would have been a better professional option.  At the moment, though, my income is a bit too modest to warrant such extravagance.)