It's back-to-school time, so let's start with a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Think of the translators who work in your specialization, your language pair, or even the translation industry as a whole. Then complete this sentence: "Everybody knows . . . ." Who are those people, and how did they get to be so well-known? Most of us would agree that name recognition and reputation-building are major contributors to our success as freelancers, but we rarely quantify the factors that make other translators the go-to people in their language pair or specialization. We know that many translators build their businesses primarily through word of mouth, and that many translators' best clients find them rather than the other way around. Are these people just good at what they do? Are they more assertive than most people about marketing and networking? Can a translator build a high profile in the industry without being active on Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, or is the offline world just so 2010? In this article we'll look at why reputation matters in the translation industry, along with 10 ways that you can immediately start becoming more visible.

First, why should you care? If you're established in the industry and you're reasonably competent at what you do, you probably have as much work as you want. Essentially, a higher profile in the industry gives you more options. A greater demand for your services means that you can choose from a wider range of projects, clients, and revenue streams. A higher profile can also free you from doing outbound marketing, because prospective clients will find you or think of you when they need a translator. For many translators, a higher profile can be the ticket to increased job satisfaction as well as higher income, because it allows you to work with clients who not only pay you more, they value you more as well. Convinced? Now let's look at how you become that translator who everybody knows!

1. Volunteer for an association. When I first moved to Colorado, I volunteered to edit the Colorado Translators Association's newsletter. I filled that role for three years, and by that time I knew almost everyone in the association by face or by name. About 50% of my new clients were either CTA members or referrals from CTA members, most of whom I met through my work for the newsletter.
2. Share information. Sharing information (via e-mail lists, forums, blogs, lectures, websites, books, and yes, even Twitter!) establishes you as an authority and as someone who is helpful and available. Being "the person who knows everything" in your language pair or specialization is probably the best way to get referrals from your colleagues. Tip: why don't more translators put their (non-proprietary) glossaries online? Riccardo Schiaffino (one of the "people who know everything" about translation technology) sent me this link to a tool that creates an HTML glossary with a hyperlinked letter index.
3. Be an organizer. If you live in an area without a local translators' association, start a low-commitment lunch or coffee meetup for translators (or people who speak your non-English language). If you want to take on something bigger, put together a niche conference. Witness the success of Chris Durban's Translate in the Catskills conference for premium-market French translators (other languages welcome, too!) and apply the idea to your language pair or specialization.
4. Become known for your specialization. If you've been translating patents for 20 years, you've probably read as many patents as many patent agents have, but you've done it in two languages. Speak at conferences, seminars, or webinars. Write for your blog or someone else's. Write for industry newsletters and be the only translator those readers know! Teach online or offline courses for beginning translators who want to get started in your specialization.
5. Get to know your potential partners. In order to raise your profile, you have to give up the bunker mentality. Instead of viewing other translators as threats or competitors, get to know people who do what you do and see if you can share ideas. Then the next time a high-paying client needs 20,000 words done in a week (at super-premium rush rates, of course), you can call on your new partner and solve the client's problem.
6. Help newcomers. All of us were there once, but how easily the memory fades once our businesses are thriving. I bet that your local association could use a new member contact person, or someone to hold a new member coffee every few months. I bet that if you wrote an "ask the experienced translator" column for a newsletter, magazine, website, or blog, people would read it.
7. Use social media. I'll give you my honest assessment of Twitter: I hate it, but it works. Be open-minded about social media's potential. If you're a German-to-English translator living in Berlin, your daily world may be filled with potential clients. For those of us who live far from our potential client base, social media gives us the reach that our location doesn't.
8. Make other people look and feel good. When someone helps you out professionally or writes something you admire, or when a client goes above and beyond to make your job easier and more pleasant, spread the love. A handwritten note with some specific praise is great, and so is a compliment directed to the person's superior ("Of all the project managers I work with, Hillary stands out for her positive, professional attitude and her unflinching attention to detail").
9. Get out of the office. I know, you like it there. But one of the most common habits of the highest-earning translators I know is that they spend a lot of time talking to real live people. Go visit your clients and talk about them: what are their challenges, goals, and insights? What are the misconceptions about their industry? Give a presentation for your local chamber of commerce or business association, focusing on how to select and work with a translation provider.
10. Be memorable, or at least be yourself. Don't use your company name if the company is just you . . . be well-known for who you are! And if there's something memorable about you, stick with it. Whether you're Trash Girl (Abigail Dahlberg, a waste management translator) or Twin Translations (Judy and Dagmar Jenner, who even wore matching outfits at last year's ATA conference!) or Ted Wozniak in his ever-present cowboy hat (if I had to pick the best personal brand in the ATA, Ted's hat would be it!), being unique helps you stick in people's minds.

Greater visibility isn't just for extroverts who live in their source language countries and love to speak to large groups. Whether you're a freelancer or an agency owner, whether you want to work with direct clients or with agencies, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, there's a way for you to become better known in the industry. Whether you're interested in earning more money, getting more satisfaction out of your work, or having more time to pursue your non-work interests, profile-raising can help get you there!

Corinne McKay is a French-to-English translator based in Boulder, Colorado. Her book "How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator" has helped nearly 5,000 translators launch or grow their freelance businesses, and her blog, Thoughts on Translation, was selected as one of the top 25 blogs by a language professional in 2011. She is the current president of the Colorado Translators Association and the chair of ATA's Public Relations committee.

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Surprisingly little on Twitter and elsewhere has been said about Google's announcement of the paid version of the Google Translate API last Wednesday. To be sure, some have weighed in (you can also find Common Sense Advisory's take or Applied Languages Services' on their respective blogs), but the point that I find most relevant in Google's announcement is not even mentioned.

Here is what the announcement said:

Back in May, we announced the deprecation of the free Translate API v1. Today, we're introducing a paid version of the Google Translate API for businesses and commercial software developers. . . . The paid version of Translate API removes many of the usage restrictions of previous versions and can now be used in commercial products. Translation costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). You can sign up online via the APIs console for usage up to 50 M chars/month.

Developers who created projects in the APIs Console and started using the Translate API v2 prior to today will continue to receive a courtesy limit of 100K chars/day until December 1, 2011 or until they enable billing for their projects.

For academic users, we will continue to offer free access to the Google Translate Research API through our University Research Program for Google Translate. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Website Translator gadget which will continue to be free for use on all web sites. In addition, Google Translate, Translator Toolkit . . . etc. will continue to be available to all users at no charge.

Y'all remember the hoopla when Google originally announced the withdrawal in May, and it's really great to have clarification on what is happening now.

Here is what all this means:

• The Google Translate feature as we know it will be gone from all translation environment tools within no time. Some tools will throw it out completely, and some will replace it with a payment module that allows individual users to pay Google directly. I asked Jeff Chin from Google to confirm this, and he said that it will be possible for individual users to "sign up and purchase usage of the Translate AP via the APIs Console on the Google Code site. So assuming there's a way for the individual user to put their own Translate API key into tool XYZ, it is possible." So the burden will not have to be borne by the tool vendors but by the users directly (and, by the way, the burden will be a lot less for Chinese and Japanese users because the count is character-based).
• Of course, the only exception to the above will be Google's own Google Translator Toolkit, which might give the tool a boost among professional translators. I first thought that open-source tools like OmegaT might get lucky, but it looks like they won't because it's the usage for commercial purposes that counts.
• Tools that have access to other machine translation engines will benefit. This is especially true for the SDL tools with the (former) LanguageWeaver engines, but there will also be more (paid) integrations into tools like Systran and PROMT by other tools.
• Many of the TEnTs that are now using Google Translate will switch to the Microsoft Bing Translator, which will require more resources from Microsoft to run and maintain. When I asked the Bing Translator team at Microsoft back in May about the whole thing, they said:

A large-scale translation service is certainly expensive to run, as Google correctly pointed out. It is also true that simply performing a translation doesn't teach us much besides the fact that we just did a translation. Our goal is to collaborate with our users and partners to continually improve the service that we can deliver to them. This is a model that has been working well for us so far.

The Microsoft Translator API is and remains open for any developer to use. Commercial use requires a commercial license agreement. We welcome localization and translation tool vendors to sign such a commercial license with us. We will provide translations free of charge. Instead of a payment, we are asking the tools authors to make effective use of the collaborative translation functionality provided in the Microsoft Translator API.

So their services will be free for the foreseeable future, but they want to become more a part of the translation process for a more "effective use of the collaborative translation functionality." Some translators might like that (or at best, they don't care), but I know that others will not.

• I would not be surprised to see a number of tools like the GT4T Suite that might find ways around the Google API to pull translations out of Google Translate so that they can be used in translation environment tools.

But the best thing about this? The generic Google Translate might play a smaller role in the lives of professional translators, and if there are any machine translation engines being used, it will more likely be non-generic, trained ones that will give the professional community a better appreciation of what machine translation really is and what its benefits or drawbacks are.

Here is something that I've been marveling about for some time now and that I was reminded of when I read this article on Google Translate in the Office. The article centered around the concept of "gisting," which is the English term used to describe the first pass through a machine translation tool for approximate meaning.

So what exactly is the translation of "gisting" into other languages? 没有, nada, rien, and gibt es nicht! Now, I'm sure that some of you will write to prove otherwise in certain languages, and all languages can explain it, but I happen to find it the ultimate irony that a term so central to the concept of machine translation is, well, untranslatable.

Great song, but not true in the case of this report!

The Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) asked me awhile back to write a report on data standards (such as TMX, TBX, XLIFF, etc.) and what they mean to translators. I finally got my act together (sorry, Rahzeb!) and wrote it, trying to make it as hands-on and easy-to-understand as possible. TAUS distributes it for free, and I think it's worth a read.

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Last week I talked to Ngoc Phuong Trang, the founder of Tatoeba (例えば -- "for example"), a French project that collects sample sentences by users and asks them to translate them in a large variety of languages.

At this point they have collected more than a million sentences and have a total of 92 languages. They have been around for several years, but have certainly escaped my notice -- thanks to Christian Taube for the pointer -- but I gotta tell you, it's an extraordinarily likable project. I asked Trang about the initial and the current goals of the project. Oh, she said, it's mostly language learning. She is aware of machine translation and the potential use it could have there -- but that's not really her focus at this point. For now she likes to see the number of sentences as well as the participants grow. And she is visibly proud of her large multilingual database.

I asked whether there were any professional translators involved. The answer: some, but not too many. There is no way to upload data in the form of TMX files or something similar -- Trang is extremely concerned with copyright violations, and that's also why there is no aligned data from websites. Every sentence is individually entered and then translated if there are volunteers for that language.

Of course, the professional translator in me couldn't help but ask if there is a way to "get" to the data by downloading it, and there is, but not in a particularly easy-to-use fashion. It is possible to download lists of monolingual sentences with enough markup that they can be related to one another and converted to multilingual data, but that would require some real code-writing expertise.

So, for now, it's an adorable project that is fun to peruse and to choose a sentence here and there to translate -- I did -- without any commercial application. But that's partly what makes it so delightful.

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