Blog | AQText Translation Services

The Expat Guide to Stress-free Translation for an IRS Audit

IRS targeting expats

With the IRS targeting American expats throughout the world, especially in the UK, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Hong Kong, Australia, Israel and Switzerland, many former Americans have been subjected to tax audits. This often entails submitting certified English translations of personal and financial information, including pay stubs, financial reports, and birth certificates.

The audit is stressful enough, and you don’t want to make it worse by getting a poor translation or having your documents rejected by the IRS.

Here are 5 tips for getting stress-free, accurate, and admissible translations:

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How to Get Rid of Targeted Ads

How to Opt-out of Interest-based Advertising

Starting March 1, Google will be implementing a new “Privacy” policy (which essentially boils down to storing information from all its different services in one database), so that it could track us better and make even more money off advertising. Read the rest of this entry »

13 Useful Android Apps for Translators

Unless you never budge from your computer (and I’ve known some translators who have remained perfectly stationary for years), a smartphone is a terrific way to stay organized and carry your information no matter where you go. If you own an Android phone, here are some useful applications for retaining productivity and taking your translation office with you, no matter where you are.

Security

Before you begin downloading applications to your shiny new phone, take a minute to install a security app.

Lookout – comes in two versions free and premium. The free version scans applications to ensure they are safe and backs up your data to a cloud. Should you phone get lost or stolen, you can locate the application to locate it on a map and make it scream (pretty loudly). The premium upgrade ($2.99/month or $29.99 a year) also enables a Privacy Advisor, which analyzes how apps access your information, and Safe Browsing to scan URLs and prevent phishing and malware on the web. Finally, the premium version allows you to lock the device and wipe off the data remotely in case it is lost or stolen.

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Getting Your Clients to Love You

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been translating a steady stream of resumes for American expats moving to Israel. Most of them have experience in both countries and the original English resumes denote the location of Israeli institutions with city and country names (for example: Jerusalem, Israel). This makes perfect sense if you don’t want a potential US employer to wonder if the applicant spent a year, say, in Jerusalem, Ohio or Jerusalem, New Zealand. On the other hand, American cities are never qualified with a country name (they’ve heard of Philadelphia back home).

My pet peeve is to receive a translation in which everything is left just as it was in the original. The translator duly notes where Jerusalem (and other Israeli cities) is located, as if an Israeli employer might have a shred of a doubt exactly which Jerusalem is being discussed. At the same time, the location of places such as Baltimore, Cleveland, or New Brunswick is not identified, although few Israelis have heard of these places.

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Ask Not What Your Clients Can Do for You — Ask What You Can Do For Your Clients

In my last post on creating a mindset conductive to better pay, I promised to show how to use this attitude in doing the actual translation. However, several comments on one of LinkedIn groups (sorry about the malfunctioning comment function here – it has been fixed) made it clear that the message did not go down very well with some of the colleagues.

As one reader wrote:

We provide services, and then often have to run after people to pay us, or accept terms like “current month + 60.” That in itself may make us feel bitter and unappreciated, especially if we are financially tight.

Another aspect of our work is that much of it is creative work in which we invest a lot of research and effort, and yet not only do we not get credit, often **someone else** gets the credit — if we translate articles, academic papers and the like, or if we work through agencies, where the end clients never know our names.

That’s a bit more than just “invisible.” We have to accept it as the nature of the job, of course, but if we get paid poorly, late or not at all, it’s much harder.

Financial hardship is painful, especially when you are skilled and hardworking. Get this. Many translation agencies feel the same way as freelancers about the low price of translation. At one of Doug Lawrence’s seminars, several agency owners expressed concern that the industry is being driven exclusively by price considerations.

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Making Results Transparent

Transparent?

In my last post, I explained why paying too much attention to non-paying customers or demanding a “living wage” is counterproductive to achieving professional success. Translators sometimes argue that their services are undervalued, because they are meant to be transparent. In other words, since the ultimate translation is the one that reads as if it had been written in the target language, the translator needs to make herself as inconspicuous as possible.

In reality, the same is true of many other services. The best doctors should make us feel as if we had never been sick, computer technicians would do well to help us forget there was ever a problem, and successful products leave us wondering how we ever managed without them. The real culprit is the sense of entitlement exhibited by many translators. After dedicating decades to the subtleties of syntax, the magic of morphology, and the glamor of grammar, they are often dismayed at customers’ utter lack of appreciating. Needless to say, the attitude is completely unfounded.

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Don’t Let Bad Clients Hijack Your Mindset or Why No Peanuts! Will Not Get You Better Rates

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

Don’t we all hate Scrooges among our clients? As true as this may be in most other professions (a former boss of mine who used to own a tombstone company told me he had never received a bad check in 20 years in business), among translators the pain runs so deeply that recently someone launched the No Peanuts! Movement to decry low rates offered to translators and demand a “living wage.” Despite the overwhelming popularity of No Peanuts! among my colleagues, I am convinced that it is not only counterproductive, but outright dangerous to the professional success of each translator and the strength of the industry as a whole.

At a recent seminar, a noted life coach Dr. Leah Gniwesch puzzled her audience by turning a laptop computer away from herself and pretending to type. “You wouldn’t let others control the information that goes into your computer,” she explained. “So why would you allow someone else to influence your emotions and mindset? Why would you allow them to ‘push your buttons?’”

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The Case for the Non-disclosure Agreement

In an insightful blog post about the NDAs in the translation industry, Grace Bosworth shares some personal experiences litigating with a former employer over a non-compete agreement. She is correct in arguing that litigation is the only way to enforce any type of agreement. The financial and emotional cost of litigation often makes it counterproductive. In fact, I firmly believe that all disputes are best settled through negotiations and out of courts.

Having said that, I do require all translators working with our agency to sign an agreement, which covers non-disclosure, non-compete, and rectifications for sub-par work. At first, it was more of a precaution, but after several negative experiences, today we do not do business unless the translator signs an agreement. Here’s why:

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5 Steps to Using Translation Technology – Beginner’s Guide

moz screenshot 5 Steps to Using Translation Technology Beginners Guide During last week’s annual conference of the Israel Translators Association , Doug Lawrence presented the Common Sense Advisory’s statistics about the translation industry in general and its Israeli segment in particular. Unbelievably, despite the Israelis’ affinity to technology, only about 18% of local translation companies are open to using advanced translation tools.

There is nothing like a good laugh to shake us out of our preconceived notions. Here’s an adorable Norwegian skit that drives the point home.

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Professional Translation Resources – From Proz.com to Multitran

Last week, I spoke about translator websites at the Israel Translators Association’s annual conference. The presentation covered sites, offering operations, marketing, and business resources for professional translators (no, this does NOT include free online machine translation).

Translation Resources – From Proz to Multitran

While most sites provide similar information and services, each one has distinct advantages of its own. Proz presents the most complete set of tools for a freelance translator and enjoys the highest traffic ranking of all translator sites. Moreover, the site constantly adds new features, so if you are considering a premium subscription, this would be the site to choose.

Translatorscafe offers some of the same features as Proz.com, but the quality and diversity of available information does not compare. Furthermore, this veteran site has been stagnating for quite a while. Still, although your money would be better spent elsewhere, it is worthwhile signing up for the free subscription.

While Translatorsbase is not a very popular site, technology neophytes might want to consider its web hosting solution, offering translators the ability to set up a professional looking website, with extensive back office features.

Finally, although Odesk is not exactly a translation site, it does offer many project opportunities for linguists, including translation, content writing, and editing, with one major advantage – guaranteed payment.

Do you have a favorite translation site not covered here? Please share it with us.

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