Free CPD opportunities for technical translators

For some time I’ve been promising to provide some more ideas for free CPD. Today I concentrate on technical translators working into English as it is the area I usually work in.  I’d like to highlight the fact that good technical translators into English are in short supply. So if the thought of technical translation is abhorrent to you – think again! The work can vary greatly – anything from press releases, brochures and application stories for the trade press, to instruction manuals, specifications and IT upgrades. It’s not all long lists of boring component parts!

I list below some of the technical journals I try to read regularly. I used to receive them in the post, and a few still keep coming. But nowadays most good journals are available on the web – and very often at no cost. Here are a few:

The first one is  Design Products and Applications. The most recent issue has articles on machine building and automatilon, the pneumatic and hydraulic sector, electrical and electronics, mechanical components, engineering software, and materials and fasteners. I have clients in most of these areas, so this journal is an excellent way of finding out what companies are developing, and simply, to keep up with industry trends. Nuts and bolts may be tiny but their influence on every product in the world is immense.

The second journal I’d to recommend to you is Industrial Technology.

The most recent issue contains a report from the food and drink industry - intriguingly entitled “Oh crumbs, solved at last”. It also has articles on medical technology, machine building, electrical equipment, electronic enclosures, springs and dampers (well someone has to make them!), fasteners, automotive products, as well as drives, motors and controls, among others. If you are only interested in one or two subjects, you can simply download the pages that interest you.

My last recommendation today is Renewable Energy Magazine

This is a journal published in Spanish (click here for the Spansh version) and English and it is available free. You can also follow it on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter. It is packed full of information about solar and wind energy as well as energy-saving news.

  

Virtually every industry has its own journal. If you need help in finding one relevant to your field, do please ask me.

TRADE SHOWS

A really great way of learning how things work AND of meeting potential clients is to visit a trade show. A good way of finding out where and when these are is by checking this website: At the top (in boxes that are much too faint for my eyes) you can refine your search to a particular industry or country. But be aware that, like paid-for Google sites, the first few hits may not be in your country at all, or relevant to you.

Another way of finding out about these exhibitions is from the journals I highlighted above. You can usually obtain free tickets to the show through the magazines. I often go to the Southern Manufacturing Show at Farnborough. Most exhibitions have free seminars that you can attend during your time at the exhibition. The organisers stage the same show in Ireland, the Midlands, the North, the North West and Scotland, so there's something for everyone there.

But beware: busy exhibitors do not appreciate a hard sell. They have paid a lot of money for exhibition space in order to sell their products, not buy yours. In fact it’s a breach of etiquette to try to sell your services at an exhibition. So only approach exhibitors on a stand if they appear not to be busy with customers. Otherwise, attend the seminars, pick up brochures (great for terminology), watch the demonstrations, inspect the products, and only engage in general conversation rather than hard sell. An exchange of business cards can lead to an excellent business relationship after the trade show is over.

FACTORY VISIT

If you have a family member or a friend who works in a local factory, do not be shy about asking to visit one day. I’ve been shown round a circuit-board manufacturing facility, a company that makes seat belts, a refrigerator company, and another that makes car parts. Even if you don't know anyone, why not just ask if they ever have an open day?

Lastly, to gain technical experience, you could consider working as an intern or temporary employee at a factory. Years ago I worked for several months in the offices of a firm that made special refrigerated chambers to carry out endurance tests. I may not have realised it at the time, but that experience counted towards my knowledge of matters technical.

I hope that some of these ideas are useful to you. My aim is to find some ideas that cost little or nothing, yet are highly valuable and motivating sources of learning.

Don’t forget my poll. The poll link is in the first paragraph of my last post. I’m trying to find out just how many of you are like me: living in a mono-lingual household with little opportunity to practice speaking our source language(s). So far, the results are showing that most respondents live in a mono-lingual environment. I’ll keep the poll open for another week and share the results next week.

Multi-lingual living

Before I proceed with further ideas for obtaining high quality but low-cost CPD I thought I’d run a very short survey.

I make no bones about the fact that it’s difficult for me to keep up my source language skills. I live in a mono-lingual household – my fault, despite living in various countries in my youth, I opted for an Englishman whose only word in Spanish is “naranja” and that is unrecognisable when he pronounces it.

Also, because of my husband’s sight impairment, I find it very difficult to travel to events that require an overnight stay. It means that, sadly, events such as the ATA conference in San Diego are out for me.  

If you have a moment, please answer the 3 simple questions: it really won’t take long). Click the link in the first paragraph or just above. I shall report on the results in a few weeks.

In a way, it is because of my personal circumstances that I took such joy in starting up eCPDWebinars in April 2010. I feel that there must be many translators like me who find it hard to attend courses, lectures and seminars, perhaps because they live a long way from metropolitan areas, or have relatives to care for. Webinars are ideal for busy people too. No travel, no hassle. Just an hour or so at your PC.


In England (the south at least) we are experiencing a heat-wave. This is a bit of a shock because last week it was cold, wet and windy. In the UK we have to enjoy such weather while we can!

How early should you start Continuing Professional Development (CPD, PD, CE)?

My young friend Fraser, aged 11, has just won his STRIPE award. On investigation I found that this is an award given by his school to the pupil in the class who has demonstrated the highest level of personal, learning and thinking skills.

The acronym STRIPE stands for Self-management, Teamworker, Reflective learner, Innovative thinker, Participator, Enquiring learner.

At age 11, Fraser is already well on the road to maintaining his continuing professional development, whatever his career may be in the future – at present  he wants to be an inventor.

Many of the points in the STRIPE programme apply equally well to us in the translation business.

Self-management

As freelancers it is essential that we manage our time effectively: negotiating with clients, marketing ourselves, carrying out administrative work. And then there’s the little matter of actually doing the translating that earns our fees. Those who manage their time well will emerge the winners.

At eCPD Webinars we have worked with several well-known speakers on these topics. See eCPD Webinars Shop for details.

Teamwork

Translating can be quite lonely. Certainly when I first started I felt very isolated and unsure of myself. Gradually over the years, and as the Internet developed, I was able to join groups of translators in my particular languages and specialist areas. We discuss terminology and cultural issues and the groups are an excellent source of peer support. If you do not already belong to a professional institute (in the UK these would principally be CIoL and ITI) do consider doing so. Not only does it add to your credibility as a translator, but the benefits of membership are endless – including the above-mentioned egroups.

Reflective Learning

Learning should be a lot more than just looking something up for the translation of the moment, or watching a TV documentary out of mild interest.  Last year Janet Fraser gave a wonderful talk on the importance of reflecting on the learning we undertake. From it I developed a new way of presenting my CPD activities.  Rather than simply list what I’ve done, I now categorise the activities, and add a short paragraph about what I gained from them and how they fit in with my plan for the year.

Innovative Thinker

I sometimes find it difficult to move away from my known method of working. I have a way of doing things and I tend to stick to certain areas of knowledge.  But it’s never a bad thing to look at things a little bit differently. Perhaps you might consider introducing a new technique such as post-editing machine translation to your quiver of skills, or entering a new area in which to translate. At eCPD Webinars we have run several “Specialising in …” webinars, including financial and medical.

Participator

My young friend Fraser joins in many school and group activities. The pupils raise money for charity, bake cakes, dig the garden. Fraser is often charged with organising many of the activities.  Translators can participate too by volunteering to do something for their professional organisation. It may be as simple as contributing to a discussion on an egroup, or as altruistic as offering to act as a mentor to new translators, standing for election onto the governing body of your professional association, serving on a committee, or organising events, however informal these might be. I currently am organising a lunch for translators in Sussex and in the past have served on the CIoL Translating Division Committee. There are plans afoot for me to become a mentor with ITI.

Enquiring learner

Translators by definition have enquiring minds. We need to know how the machine for which we are translating an application story for the press actually works. We need to know about the latest business news from the multi-national whose reports have just landed on our desk to translate.

To help with Internet searching, eCPD is running a webinar on 29 May 2012 giving plenty of tips as to how to improve your Internetsearching. (Link will expire after 30 May).

And lastly …..

I have just returned from a wonderful holiday in the United States and Canada. It was a very busy, yet relaxing, three weeks. I forgot all about translating, invoices, accounts, keeping up my CPD. I was not called upon to interpret for lost or confused tourists and my Tlingit (the language spoken by the native people of SE Alaska) is not too good. Moreover, the part of Canada I visited (Vancouver) pays only lip-service to French as an official language. I might have said “merci” just once.

Now I am back I find I am less impatient and am moving around more slowly (an improvement on my usual jumpy behaviour). This indicates to me just how important it is to take a real break away from thinking about work – and CPD. To those whose summer holidays are still to come, I wish you every bit of a successful break as mine was.

My next post will continue the theme of ideas for low-cost CPD.

Keeping up with source language (if you don’t live there)

Years ago I started a job in local government as the Clerk (read Chief Executive Officer) of a local council in West Sussex, in the UK. It was quite a big and busy Council (6,000 inhabitants) and the job was quite complicated. I had no training for it all and was flung in at the deep end. But with the help of the retiring clerk, the clerk’s handbook by Charles Arnold-Baker , and a truly inspirational and helpful Chairman, I got along very well and, by the end of twelve years in the job, had turned my Council into one of the busiest and most proactive in the county.

Every year the Local branch of the National Association of Local Council Clerks (NALCC) organised a Clerks’ Day. We didn’t call it CPD then. It was a wonderful day – usually in a lovely countryside setting - at which we met colleagues from other Councils and listened to talks from the experienced ones on various aspects of local Council policy and law. In my early years it was very gratifying to find that I was actually doing things right. Later, my Council paid for me to do the first stage of a degree course in Local Government policy. It still wasn’t known as CPD, but it was part of the growing movement in every profession to ensure that professional jobs were held by professional people. Although I didn’t know it, I was constantly undergoing continuing professional development.

Ok! So what about translators?

Most translators and interpreters already do CPD in one way or another but, since most are freelancers, it is less likely that they are keeping formal records, including 

•        Goal-setting

•        Record-keeping

•        Reflection

So, to address at last the title of this piece.  In my last post I promised to put forward some ideas.

If, like me, you do not live in your source language country (and I have 3 source languages so for me it wouldn’t be possible anyway) you probably need ways to keep your source language up to date – the first of my five areas of CPD mentioned in the last post. Here I'm assuming that you know and understand the structure of the language and have studied it to degree level at least.

All the suggestions I make are great for keeping up with the latest turns of phrase, the buzz words and so on. They are also essential for knowing what's going on in your source language country. If you don't know - to take an obvious example - that France is in election fever in the run-up to yesterday's (22 April 2012) first round presidential election, you won't easily be able to translate an article about the political situation there. None of my suggestions costs much, if anything, to do. Just your time and a bit of thought.

The Internet is a boon here. You can listen to radio programmes in your source language, or read newspapers, or source language journals in your specialist subject. It’s also great to follow native speakers of your source language on Twitter or through blogs.

Another idea: next time you install some software, do it in your source language (if you can, not all software is capable of this). This is really useful for seeing how the familiar messages appear in another language.

Get hold of a style guide in your source language. I am assuming that you already have a style guide for your target language, but reading about style in your source language gives a great insight into language structure and usage. Here’s one published by the World Bank for English-speakers who use French. Another one I found recently is a guideline document on writing scientific articles in German. And for Spanish, here is just one guide published by El País. You will find many more by Googling.

Then, you could try to get a conversation partner: a Skype contact perhaps, or a “penfriend”. Here is a useful site to help you get in touch with someone who has similar interests and outlooks to you.

Look around locally for a social group for your source language. I joined a German literary circle for several years, run by a native German teacher of German. It gave an opportunity to listen, read, and speak in German - opportunities that I rarely have in my own personal life, living as I do in a mono-lingual household.

And whenever I can, I read novels in my source languages. Currently I have on my bookshelf La Voz Dormida by Dulce Chacón set in the times of the Spanish Civil War, a gift from my sister and I look forward to getting to grips with it soon.

Records

For your CPD - however formal or informal - to count torwards professional development, you need to keep a record of what you are doing, and ensure that you are structuring your CPD, rather than just pottering around it - however tempting it might be.

As a translator, I started keeping records of my CPD activities in 2004. I stopped using the card supplied by my professional Institute a long time ago and developed a formatted Word document, which I organise into the five headings I mentioned in an earlier post, namely:

·        Language learning and assimilation (source languages)

·        Language learning and assimilation (target language)

·        Business and Technical Skills

·        Translation Skills

·        Personal Development, contribution to the profession, and publications

The document contains a section on my aims for the year, and a review of the activities actually undertaken.

How do you keep your CPD records?

Note: I will be offline for a few weeks in May, so won’t be able to moderate any comments after the end of April. I’ll get to it as soon as I can.
For information about cost-effective CPD delivered by webinar to your home/office, visit eCPD Webinars - webinars for translators and interpreters.

Learning never stops

I was listening to the Today programme this week (a serious news and interviews programme on Radio 4 in the UK) and heard an interview with Nigel Adkins, manager of Southampton Football Club.

Southampton is poised for promotion back into the Premier Division and no small thanks are due to the Manager. Nigel was never a high-level player of football but made the most of the opportunities he came across in life. One comment he made during the interview struck me. “You have to be like a sponge and absorb everything you can so you have it ready for when you need it in the future.” I didn’t write it down so I have paraphrased.

I think that everyone who is keen to get on does this, probably entirely sub-consciously. But it wasn’t until a decade or so ago that we started calling it CPD (continuing professional development) or CE (continuing education).

Karin Band, FITI, who presented a wonderful webinar recently on medical translation simply calls CPD “Keep up”.

Now most professional associations offer CPD training at every turn. But think about it: if your mind is a sponge, you are doing CPD all the time. The trick to successful CPD for professional purposes is to organise and document what your sponge-like mind is taking in.

I have highly professional friends and colleagues who say “I don’t need to do CPD. My work is my CPD”. Indeed it is. But unless you document the research you have been doing or the background reading you have taken on while working on a project, you cannot say you have done any CPD.

I divide my own CPD record into five sections.

1. · Language learning and assimilation (source languages)
2. · Language learning and assimilation (target language)
3. · Business and technical skills
4. · Translation skills
5. · Personal development, contribution to the profession, and publications

Over the next few weeks I shall be giving some ideas as to how you can soak up knowledge in all these areas without spending a shedload of cash.

By the way, despite no longer having Chartered Linguist status (see previous post), I still intend to keep up my CPD record. It’s a discipline I enjoy and it makes me think about how I can become even more professional in my work.

Visit eCPD Webinars for more ideas on CPD. Free video

Is individual chartered status working for our profession?

Is it time to relax the word count criterion for Individual Chartered Linguist status in the UK? (c) Lucy Brooks, FCIL, MD of eCPDWebinars When the Institute of Linguists was granted Chartered status in 2004 and became the Chartered Institute of Linguists, many of us applauded. In the UK the word ‘chartered’ denotes a person’s accredited and verified professionalism. At last our profession would gain recognition; translators and interpreters would apply to become chartered linguists in droves, and together, we would drive forward the standing of our profession in the minds of business, commerce and the general public. Sadly, this has not happened. At a time when professional translators and interpreters are under intense pressure: rates of payment, unfair conditions created by exploitative agencies, ever-shorter deadlines and a general lack of understanding by end users of what we do, there has been no rush to apply for Chartered Linguist status. When I was last able to check (the register has been off-line for a couple of weeks now) there were only 18 chartered linguists. Only a handful of these were translators. But when the register comes back on line, my name will be missing. When I was granted CL status in 2008 I was very proud - proud to be a pioneer of the scheme, proud to have recognition of my professionalism - and I have applied for renewal each year, since I continue to meet the strict criteria by providing a highly professional translation service, doing a great deal of CPD (continuing professional development) and making a huge contribution to the profession. So why am I no longer a chartered linguist? Have I committed a crime? Has a complaint been made about me? Have I made mistakes that caused the proverbial bridge to collapse? No. I have not been granted chartered status this year merely because I have translated fewer words this year and the rules - which appear to be rigid, despite assurances to the contrary at meetings I have attended on this subject - say that a CL (Translator) must translate 300,000 words in a year. There are two reasons why I have cut down a little on translating work recently. First, I have been running eCPD Webinars for my fellow translators for two years now and, as you can imagine, it takes up quite a lot of my time. The second is that I wish to pick and choose the translating work I do and have “retired” from the kind of stressful job I often used to handle: weekend working, tight deadlines and excel files. I think that the rules are very unfair. If Chartered Accountants or Chartered Marketers (to take a couple of examples) decide to work part-time, they are not made to relinquish their chartered title. Provided they do their 35 hours of CPD a year, they keep their status. Yet Chartered Linguists who decide to work part-time or retire from their professional activity of translating, teaching or interpreting are not allowed to continue to use their designation. For many years I certainly handled 300,000 words and more, so it wasn’t really an issue for me at first, but it was for many of my colleagues who, for various reasons, work part-time and therefore did not meet CL criteria. Many translators have young families to look after, or have second professions, such as interpreting, or teaching. The volume of work can never be predicted or guaranteed. When the Institute was first granted Chartered status it was suggested that every member should automatically become chartered. This was rejected, for some perfectly valid reasons. But the scheme which emerged is too restrictive and there simply are not enough chartered linguists to encourage others to join them. Many people believe that meeting the criteria and requirements for qualified membership of a professional association is quite sufficient. Is it time to reconsider granting all members of the CIoL and ITI chartered status, and setting up a CPD verification system for all members? I believe that our profession needs a boost in the eyes of the outside world. But perhaps the complicated and rigid Chartered Linguist scheme is not the right way to go about it? What do you think? You have a limit of 2000 characters

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