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6 Steps to Writing An Easy-to-Read Blog

Attracting more traffic is high on the priority list of any blogger. However, have you ever asked yourself what happens once your readers actually land on your homepage? Does your writing effectively communicate your message, or do readers have to reread things to understand? Most blog readers don’t have that kind of attention span and just move on.

Here are six ways to make your site easier to read and help your visitors stick around.

1. Is your blog easy to read? – A great way to answer this (and many other blog quality) questions is to get your site inspected by Websitegrader. The service measures the level of education necessary to understand the content.

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Translating in a Niche

Yesterday, McDonald’s Israel launched a new product – McFalafel. For those unfamiliar with falafel, it is the Middle Eastern equivalent of an American hot dog, a fast food to be grabbed on the go. In Israel, these deep-fried balls of chickpea paste are served in pita bread with humus, tahini, and vegetable salad, together with whatever other condiments the store owner might whip up to upgrade the otherwise standard offering.

Falafel is sold almost on every corner in Israel, so I can’t imagine what would push the McDonald’s management to roll out a product that strays so far away from its line. Although falafel is a fast food, an average Israeli will choose his falafel joint based on a perception of authenticity. McDonald’s customers have the option of eating falafel at any of the dozen mom-and-pop stores peppering practically every city, so it must be something else that brings people into the McD’s.

Rather than concentrating on what attracts customers to its store, McDonald’s is now venturing out of its niche into an already crowded market, where it has little chance of competing. This basic marketing mistake plagues many business owners, translators among them. Fearing to miss a customer, most translators position themselves as jacks of all trades. What they do not realize is that concentrating on a specific niche will make their business more profitable in the long run.

For freelance translators, there are four main components to a niche: language pairs, services, areas of specialization, and client types.

1. Choose your language pairs
I often receive resumes from translators claiming to work in a dozen different language pairs. They never make it into my database. Despite knowing some wonderfully talented polyglots, my rule of thumb is to work with linguists translating into their native language from one or two other languages.

2. Pick a service (or two)
Whether you offer translation or copywriting, editing or DTP, marcom or graphics, concentrate on just two or three services and excel at them. Build your brand as the go-to marketing writer or the foremost expert of file format conversions. This will allow you to stand out from the crowd of run-of-the-mill translators that handle “everything.”

3. What’s your specialization
The same idea applies to areas of specialization. Resumes from translators offering both technical and literary translations raise concerns in my mind, because these fields involve opposite brain hemispheres. Beyond that, a translator with extensive background in a specific field would do well to showcase just that experience to relevant clients, instead of burying it in a list of half a dozen unrelated specializations.

4. Client types
Unfortunately, most translators do woefully little marketing, so it is imperative to make every marketing move count. The first step to effective marketing is identifying your perfect client. Do you mostly work with students or agencies, with small business owners or individuals? By answering this question you will be able to figure out the best avenue for reaching your potential clientele.

By way of an example, a couple of years ago, I realized that close to 40% of my clients came from the non-profit industry. This realization allowed me to identify the needs of these clients, find the channels for communicating with them, and offer relevant service packages. That in turn has led to more work in the same industry.

So, have you ever given any thought to your translation niche? How did that impact the profitability of your translation services business?

Ripping off the Cloak of Privacy

In the beginning of the summer, I posted an item discussing potential privacy breaches and legal violations associated with the use of Google Apps in general and Google Translate in particular. At the time, some of the readers thought the risks seemed too hypothetical.

Now, a landmark New York lawsuit has taken these concerns out of the realm of potential and made them very real. In August, a New York court ordered Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger accused of libel, in what is sure to become the groundbreaking case for all issues of Internet privacy. The ramifications are clear; any veneer of privacy and anonymity for web users is just that, a veneer. Obviously Google was required by law to comply with the court order, yet the immediate implications of the ruling are that user privacy is not an underlying value and can be violated whenever the grounds are deemed to be substantial enough.

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4 Reasons NOT to Translate into English

A couple of weeks ago, I installed the Hebrew version of Microsoft Office 2010 on my computer. After an hour or so of fruitless attempts to configure the user interface to English, I was shocked to discover that the software bundle came without the English language pack. There I was, stuck with the Hebrew ribbons until the new disk arrived in the mail.

Despite my near-native Hebrew skills, almost two decades of Office use, and the similarity between the 2007 and 2010 interfaces, the “unusual” screen setup left me completely disoriented. The wrong (or actually right) directionality together with different menu and command names felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

I am sharing this as a lesson for all translation buyers satisfied with procuring a set of documentation in the seeming lingua franca of business dealings – English. Some time ago, a non-profit client called me before going on a fund-raising trip to France with a request to translate their brochures into English. Why English? The client reasoned that translating into several languages was just too expensive and besides, they speak English in France, don’t they. Even more surprising was a bid from a corporate client to translate documents into English for negotiations with potential South American distributors. Read the rest of this entry »

Do Israelis speak Hebrew?

The answer to this question seems quite obvious, yet in recent years several Hebrew linguists have been arguing the opposite. Thus, a couple of weeks ago Dr. Nurit Dekel created quite a stir at the monthly meeting of the Israel Translators Association by postulating that, while lexically similar, Biblical Hebrew and Modern “Israeli” are so different linguistically that they should be to considered two separate languages.

Since I did not hear Dekel’s presentation first-hand, I can’t comment on its merits, but a similar argument by Professor Gh’ilad Zuckermann left me speechless by its utter lack of scholarship:

WHAT MOST PEOPLE call Modern Hebrew, which I term Israeli, is a fascinating and multifaceted 120 year-old Semito-European hybrid language. It is a mosaic rather than Mosaic. Its grammar is based not only on “sleeping beauty” Hebrew, but also on Yiddish, the revivalists’ mame loshen (mother tongue), as well as on other languages spoken by the founders, e.g. Polish, Russian, German, Ladino and Arabic.

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Marketing Translation Lesson from the Dairy Case

Over the past several years, our family has been spending its summers with my parents in the US. Our kids love staying with the grandparents, but there is one thing they absolutely hate about these visit, the food. (Anyone who has ever been to Israel can vouch for the unbeatable taste and freshness of local food, especially produce and dairy). So naturally, they were extremely excited to discover containers of Israeli-made cream cheese[i] at the neighborhood Costco store.

The solution to my kids’ dietary woes proved to be a valuable lesson in culturally appropriate marketing for me. You don’t have to be a Hebrew speaker to spot the difference between these containers of the same product. Read the rest of this entry »

Business-building Blogs for Small Business Owners

For many small business owners, marketing is a necessary evil, pushed aside by urgent deadlines, everyday tasks, and an occasional crisis. It is one of those important, but not urgent tasks, categorized by Stephen Covey in his now iconic Time Quadrant Matrix.

Time Management Matrix

Let’s face it. Not every business owners is a born salesperson. This is especially true of service providers, who rely on their talent in a core competency to attract clients. The good news is that marketing is an acquired skill and you do not have to go to business school to learn how to do it. There is a wealth of useful marketing information on the internet and in books.

Following several choice business blogs is a simple way to pick up the necessary knowledge over time. While it might be difficult to implement a start-to-finish marketing strategy, you can decide to learn marketing in increments and apply this information consistently. In fact, marketing diva Fabienne Fredrickson says business owners must do something to market themselves every single day to escape the all too familiar feast-or-famine.

Fabienne’s fabulous blog is the first resource on my list of recommended reading. As a marketing consultant, she has developed the Client Attraction system, which covers marketing strategies, management systems, and her think-big mindset philosophy. The blog is chock-full of high-content articles and videos on all aspects of business development.

Debbie Bernstein’s Marketing Morsels presents simple marketing ideas that make people wonder how they did not think of it themselves. Each post provides one bite-size tip you can put to use in your business right away.

Thursday Bram is a professional writer and consultant. Though her blog focuses on market techniques for content creators, some of these ideas are applicable to all small business owners. Thursday has even compiled her advice into an e-book (hint: the original posts comprising the book are available on her site free of charge).

Freelance Folder (as the name implies) is a one-stop resource for freelancers and solo entrepreneurs. The site covers all issues of interest to freelancers from productivity to lifestyle to marketing. Readers can solicit advice on the forum and even advertise their services on the job board.

Finally, no business blog review would be complete without mentioning social media. By now, you must be familiar with its uses for business. Still, signing up for Twitter and posting random Facebook updates is not enough. This is where Social Media Examiner comes in. Every day it provides valuable step-by-step ideas for building a strategy for attaining success one blog post, tweet, and update at a time.

If you don’t want to visit half a dozen blogs each day, I recommend signing up for RSS. Here’s how to do it:

What is your favorite business development blog?

Guest post: Must-know Time-saving Tip for Writers and Translators

I am excited to introduce a guest post by Miryam Blum, a seasoned Hebrew<>English translator, who has been translating articles for the financial pages of Haaretz/TheMarker for over ten years and has a freelance business, translating mainly academic articles and PR films and materials for Jewish education projects. Miryam’s first introduction of the AutoCorrect technique, at the Israel Translators Association 2008 convention, won instant accolades. Miryam can be reached at miryam.blum at gmail.com

AutoCorrect – One of Microsoft Office’s most time-saving features for translators (or anyone who types a lot, for that matter) is AutoCorrect. Initially designed to automatically correct common typing errors, such as teh, instead of the, or feild, instead of field, AutoCorrect allows you to add words that you commonly misspell. In order to increase productivity, you can also add entries that you make up, so that you only need to type 2, 3 or 4 letters in a word or phrase, and the program will do the rest.

Any word that has seven or more letters, and even some four-letter words and two-word phrases with only 6 letters can be made into AutoCorrect entries to save time while typing.

The main principle is to reduce the number of keystrokes and switching back and forth between the right and left hands. Even a city name as simple as Lod can be shortened to ld if it appears many times in a text.

AutoCorrect is really helpful for typing words that use the same fingers on both hands, and which can be misspelled because the message goes to the correct finger, but on the wrong hand. One classic example is also. I have an AutoCorrect entry for this, so that I never have to think about switching back and forth between hands to type the l and the o. I just type aso, and Word fills in the l for me. Another example is future – five out of its six letters are typed with the index finger, and your brain has to send messages alternately to each hand. Why bother, when you can type the whole word with one finger of one hand: ftr. If you are translating a document about furniture, you can change your AutoCorrect entry for ftr to expand to furniture instead of future.

AutoCorrect’s does not limit the length of the entries, making it possible to “type” entire paragraphs with just several keystrokes. This comes especially handy in client communications via Outlook. You can create shortcuts for large blocks of information (payment details, driving instructions, project rules, etc). AutoCorrect entries can be changed as often as you want, to suit your evolving needs.

The more AutoCorrect entries you have, once you develop a system that makes it easy for you to remember your entries, the more you can increase your productivity. The following example, taken at random from a newspaper article I translated, illustrates how maximizing the use of AutoCorrect can increase your translation speed from 600 words per hour to as many as 1,400 words per hour.

What I typed	The sentences that appeared on the screen
The ii fl mkt has psnd itself betw wst, ldn and hkg. The world cmkt igl, and in isr iplr, is exping an upward trend.	The Israeli financial market has positioned itself between Wall Street, London and Hong Kong. The world capital market in general, and in Israel in particular, is experiencing an upward trend.

How AutoCorrect works:

AutoCorrect is activated by the space bar, the Tab key, Enter, and any punctuation mark – comma, period, apostrophe, question or exclamation mark, or mathematical symbol – so you can even use AutoCorrect to help speed up typing formulas.

The fact that AutoCorrect is activated by the space bar and the punctuation marks really speeds up typing, because once you learn the abbreviations that you create, you just type the three or four-letter combinations as you go along, without even thinking about them – the computer does the rest.

Make short words even shorter:

aso	-	also
bf	-	before
bc	-	because
betw	-	between

Type 3 letters for 3-word phrases:

iot	-	In order to
iow	-	In other words
iplr	-	in particular
itp	-	in the past
itf	-	In the future
itm	-	In the meantime

Like any Microsoft feature, you can access and add or change AutoCorrect entries in several ways. Read more about AutoCorrect on Microsoft’s Support site.

Create AutoCorrect entries for:

Common words
Frequently used phrases
Names of people, places, countries, institutions
Acronyms – let AutoCorrect capitalize them for you
Frequently used information chunks

Your goals when creating AutoCorrect entries:

Reduce the number of keystrokes and hand changes.
Any word or phrase with more than 6 letters that is used repeatedly should have an AutoCorrect entry

Keys to creating easy-to-remember AutoCorrect entries:

Find letter combinations that are not real words, but are easy for you to remember.
3-letter combinations work best
Use the main consonants or sounds in a word or phrase

Tips for maximizing your AutoCorrect glossary:

When you create an entry for a noun, create a second entry for its plural
Add suffixes to the 3-letter basic abbreviation eg.: dfr = different; dfrc = difference; dfrly = differently
Change the 3-letter entries as necessary – you can always change them back

Google Translate – What Every User Should Know

Would you believe seeing a clause from Google’s Terms of Service could become a jaw-dropping experience for a group of professionals and business owners? Neither could I, until last week I presented a short resources workshop to a Jerusalem networking group.

When asked whether they use Google Translate in their workflow, almost one half of the participants raised their hands. However, when I showed a slide with the following excerpts from Google’s TOS, hands clapped over mouths all around the room:

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Tools for Wordsmiths – Productivity Programs

Recently, I was asked to teach a resources workshop to aspiring translators as part of WritePoint’s translation course. Countless hours spent collating everything I have learnt during my decade in the industry and researching some things I have managed to miss, produced too much material to squeeze into a four-hour session.

(If you’d like to receive more information about the upcoming Tools for Translators workshop, scheduled to be held in Jerusalem on June 21, please contact me.)

Meanwhile, in the coming weeks, I would like to share some of my favorite solutions with the readers of this blog. While most veteran translators have found their trusty tools and tricks, software companies continue to produce new offerings, not necessarily intended for translators, but useful nonetheless.

Today, we will take a look at some essential productivity programs.

Backup – the standard recommendation is to back up all your data at least once a week. No matter how reasonable that may sound, in the real world of surprise projects and tight deadlines, many language professionals just can’t be bothered. Read the rest of this entry »

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