Marketing For Translators

I’ve come across this rather interesting resource on the Marketing Translation blog by Serena Dorey.

This page, Advice for translation buyers is a perfect example of reaching out to clients and giving them information that is valuable to them.

There, you’ll find the links and description to four articles, “5 things about marketing translation for translation buyers”, “A leap of faith”, “Consistent branding in translation – advice for translation buyers” and “Translation buyers checklist – how to brief your translator”.

I rather enjoyed reading these articles. They are very well written and, most of all, they speak in terms the client will understand. There is no “tech talk” in there, no special industry insider jargon: just concise and valuable information.

Does your website/blog include a similar page? Let me know about it.

There’s a great post over at the Global Watchtower by Rocío Txabarriaga summing up some points from the 10th annual conference of the American Translators Association Translation Company Division (ATA-TCD) held this past weekend in Quebec City, Canada.

I’m going to briefly comment on a couple of points:

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The scenario should be familiar: a social occasion, probably. Someone asks you what you do and you answer, confident and proudly enough: “I’m a translator”. If you’ve had a bad day, maybe you add “Of the freelance variety”, with a little smirk. What follows should also be familiar.

You’ll get asked how to spell that particular word or get thrown a couple of syntactic curveballs. If things do really heat up, you’ll get to hear how some cheap domestic appliance’s user manual ruined their life because some translator didn’t know the difference between “hot” and “cold”. Tragic, I’m quite sure.

Usually, not much credit is given to this kind of situation. It is a common thing and, after all it’s a social occasion; let’s not get too serious here. If you think like this, STOP.

You don’t have to ruin the party, though (actually, never ruin the party, it isn’t good publicity).
What you should do is place the question to yourself: “What is it that I do?”
The answer is different. You know the methods you use, you know the hours of research you put in, and you know all the quality checks you put in. You know what it is to be a translator.
This should hardly be a surprise, but I’ll just put it put, bold letters and all:

Your clients don’t have the slightest idea of any of the things you do.

They give you some PDF file with screenshots pasted inside and then, after a couple of hours, they get a PDF file with the text translated. To your client that’s what you did: you translated.

The importance of perceived value

The problem here is the perceived value of the service.
Translators have been trying to educate clients for years. I know that there are a lot of happy endings on that story and that strong relationships have been created that way. However, most clients don’t want to be educated on something that is an afterthought most of the times.

So take a look at your marketing materials, especially your website/blog and try to answer these questions:

1. What perceived value is there to what you do? Remember that saying “I’m a professional translator” probably isn’t enough.
2. Who are you talking to? How familiar does someone need to be with the translation world to understand that working with you is the right choice?

So, what is it that you do again?

Kevin Lossner over at the excelent Translation Tribulations blog, posted the news that Proz has branched out into a online agency.

Following up on the news, I searched Proz for some more information:

Turn-key translation is a ProZ.com service that helps reduce the overhead costs for short, quick-turnaround translation jobs. Just submit the text and payment, and then receive the translation. The system automatically handles routing the work to the most suitable translators, delivering the completed work back to you, and paying the service providers.

With the current state of affairs in the market and the resources at hand, I think it was bound to happen.

What’s your take on this?

Thanks for reading,

Pedro

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Thanks for reading,

Pedro