A How-To Guide

(Not my own.  Sorry.)

There is a lot of advice out there on how to get started as a translator.  Some very nice people have written some very nice blog posts about tidy little steps you can take to break into the world of translation.  I am eternally grateful to all of them for making my life (and, undoubtedly, other newbie translators' lives) that much easier.

The instant you ask about literary translation, though, the mood changes.  People clam up.  They spew spitfire warnings about the dying industry.  Excuses appear: "well, I'm not really a literary translator -- I just do that on the side."

Well, not everyone.  Literary translation is a niche subset of the translation field, so there are considerably fewer blogs and articles written about it.  But resources exist, even online: ALTA's guides are fantastic.  Other people may not have a blog, so you have to -- the horror, the horror! -- search them out in person and actually talk to them.  But they're quite nice.

And then, there's this guy:

Literary Translation in Quebec

He's Peter McCambridge, and he's a newly minted literary translator.  He humbly presents a very frank and open list of rather specific steps and extremely pertinent resources to use.  How cool is that?

I raise my glass to you, good sir.  You do us a great honor.

Just Say No

Drugs are harmful to your body.  Just say "no" when offered them.  It's as simple as that.  Or so all elementary-aged American children were told in the 80s and 90s.  Simple?  Maybe.  Peer pressure builds up, though. Now, we're older.  Some of us are freelancers.  Sometimes, we get offered jobs -- or offered the possibility of jobs -- that we know we shouldn't take.  Why?  We'll have to deal with demeaning project managers.  The work is mindless.  We'd be translating very poorly written copy from the source language.  We'll lose an entire night's sleep to get the job done.  It's harmful to our bodies, and to our sanity, and especially to our happiness.

Even so, when a new agency approached me with the offer of possibly working together, we haggled on rates a bit, I listed my specializations (at their request, which is important for later), and I agreed to do a small test for them.  I stipulated that, since the test would be unpaid, I'd only do a small one, less than 250 words.  A reasonable amount of work for a test.

They then sent me three tests to choose from (nice!).  But wait...all the tests were over 500 words, and none of them fell even remotely within my specializations.

Enter the psychological pressure: "I'd really like the work."  The brain rushes through countless excuses for why I should just buckle down and slog through the test, but they all boil down to "I'd really like the work."

Let's be clear.  I don't know if I'd get any work, or if I'd be at all qualified for the work I'd receive (based on these tests), or if I'd enjoy the work that I was qualified for.  But still, brain goes, "I'd really like the work."

Fortunately, I have an Other Half.  He reminds me that I can, in fact, overrule my worried brain with logic.  What's the point of doing a long, unpaid test that may lead to work that's most likely not in my area that I probably wouldn't enjoy for a lower rate than I normally charge?  None.  There's no point at all.

Just say no.

(Do so respectfully, of course.  But just say no.)

Putting it together

And now, a message from the man who I would choose as my favorite Broadway composer if you put a gun to my head: http://youtu.be/rJFz-ucuTvs?t=5m27s

The last few days and weeks have been accidentally dedicated to making connections and crafting some foundations to build upon as I work towards what I really want to do.  My agenda said benign things like "lunch seminar with CL" or "DN after work" or "NYCT Holiday Brunch".  Benign scribbles become major opportunities, though:

Lunch seminar with CL = Meet the person who does exactly what you want to do; talk as best you can without stumbling over words too many times; she lives six blocks from you? great. get lunch sometime; get contacts; try not to drool

DN after work = Talk for an hour about nothing and everything with colleague of a colleague, then have her ask "What can I do to help you?"...try not to admit that just hearing her talk about the industry was enough, but now she'll reread your cover letter/marketing pitch

NYCT Holiday Brunch = Network, network, network; volunteer for things you didn't know existed or were available; now I'm probably the assistant editor of the association's newsletter? wait, how did that happen? That's...cool.

Putting it all together will take time, marinating, and a dash of luck.  Possibly a whole cup.  Maybe more.  I just have to make the right preparations to be ready for when that perfect opportunity falls into my lap.  There seems to be little other way to do it.

Very few people can make their living doing literary translation.  Even fewer who are not in academia.  But they do exist.  Would that I should be one someday.

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.)

[From the Archives] Le 1er mai

May 1st

May 1st is the only day in the entire year in France where no one works.  Buses don't run, newspapers aren't published, and garbage isn't picked up.  (For some reason, there's still going to be the market in Aubenas on Saturday, but I haven't figured out why.)

I just found out that's there's a tradition in France, for a celebration of spring on May 1st: to give muguet to people.  This is lily of the valley.  Now, there's something important to know about muguet, thanks to our good friend Wikipedia: "All parts, including the berries, of the lily of the valley are highly poisonous."  Thus the conversation between my landlord's wife and I just now, translated for your convenience:

Madame: "Here's some muguet for you, to celebrate May 1st."
Me: "Oh, thank you so much, they're beautiful."
Madame: "Just be careful, because it's toxic."
Me: "Uh...what?"
Madame: "You can put them in water and then maybe dry and press them to remember being here.  Just wash your hands after you touch them."
Me: "...You give toxic flowers to celebrate May 1st?"
Madame: "Yes.  Aren't they pretty?"

Posted without comment.

[From the Archives] Tutoyer

To address someone with the informal "you" One of the most confusing things about conversational French is figuring out whether to address someone with the formal (and/or plural) "vous" or the informal and/or familiar "tu."  Generally speaking, you use "vous" when you don't know someone, or when you're addressing someone older or of higher authority than you, or when you just want to show respect to someone; you use "tu" when you're familiar with someone, or when you're speaking to someone of your age or younger.  Families differ on if kids should tutoient or vouvoient their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, etc.

That being said, my first day at school was made much more comfortable by the mandate that all teachers and staff members addressed each other as "tu," even if you didn't know the other person that well.  It's like a little family, a team; it made me feel very welcome.  On the flip side, I always address my landlords as "vous," even though they've invited me to their house for multiple meals -- what's nice is that they also address me as "vous."  Business arrangement first and foremost, I guess.

The cool thing is when these forms of addressing people start to shift.  A "vous" to "tu" shift (it never happens the other way around) means friendship, or at the very least, familiarity.  I've gotten permission to tutoie Bernard, who runs the bookstore, who I've spent a lot of time with.  Just today, the boulanger (bread man) who comes around to our neighborhood said that I could of course tutoie him.  I'm pretty sure I'm a few weeks away from permission from the sausage man at market and the madame who runs the grocery store to tutoie them.  I may not be able to fit in seamlessly to French life, but I'm becoming accepted by those who live and own that life.

On a side note: incidentally, I'm apparently not only becoming accepted by, but attractive to the French, as well.  At least the males of the species.  My CE2s (3rd graders) made a big deal about two of the boys in the class having crushes on me.  Fortunately, they're 3rd grade crushes.  I think I can handle that.  What I wasn't prepared to handle were the advances of a couple boys my age, maybe a bit younger, maybe a bit older (I can never tell with the French), outside a bar at the edge of town.  They're young, immature, they didn't quite know what they were truly attempting.  I rebuffed their advances not only in French, but like the French do, with a certain aloofness and gentle snide comments (which may not make sense until you hear some native speakers go at it).  My French must be getting pretty good...