Musings from an overworked translator

What would happen if you passed away? August 31, 2009

I know this is a morbid topic, but there was a brief discussion on Zahlungspraxis this morning about an agency owner who owed a translator money – and had for the past 3 years (which I hope would never happen to me. I would be sending reminders 14 days after the bill was overdue…). It seems this person was a 1-woman show, which happens a lot in the translation industry. Someone wrote in and stated that the person in question had passed away in September 2008 and chances were slim that any creditors would receive payment from the estate.

This got me to thinking about death – and specifically about estate planning and managing your online profiles. Have you given any thought to what might happen if you were to suddenly pass away? I have given this some thought recently. It has nothing to do with the fact that I turned 40 over weekend. I started last year when my grandmother passed away and my immediate family members started talking about their wishes for their funerals, burial plans, etc. I now have a notarized Living Will and Medical Power of Attorney for my personal side of things, but what about my business and online contacts? Would your family and/or executor know where to find the bills that need to be paid?

Right now I have two outstanding invoices for work I subcontracted in the last month. If something were to happen to me I would hope my executor would find the bills and pay them, but I realized I haven’t shown her how my system works. I need to have her over and show her where to find the information she will need (and how to use my money management software). Do you have an executor? Do they know where to find your legal documents and access your financial accounts? Also, something that is never discussed by estate planners but is very important in our field: do they know who to inform if you pass away unexpectedly? Do they know how to access your e-mail and notify the various forums in which you are active?

You might want to consider asking a colleague you trust to be your “online executor.” That person should have the password to your e-mail accounts so they can set up an autoresponder to notify your colleagues and clients of your untimely death. If you have a blog and/or website, it isn’t a bad idea to give the password(s) to that person as well so that they can log on and post the bad news – and eventually shut the sites down.

Just a little food for thought. Take a few minutes this week and jot down who might need to be notified if you were in a car accident or something. Your friends and family will be very grateful you took the time to do this. It is a very stressful time and careful preparation makes things a lot easier for your loved ones.

Paypal is not a good solution for translators August 19, 2009

According to a recent blog post, Paypal adds new fees with no notice, Paypal quietly started charging new fees last month to its customers with personal accounts without notifying them of the change.  As the blog post states, “The new fees apply to payments marked as “Goods” or “Services.”  Such payments were previously free but will now be charged a fee of about 2.9% plus 30 cents.” This obviously applies to translators, since we provide services (and if you provide hard copies or files to clients one could conceivably argue we also provide goods). I have a personal Paypal account that I only use for eBay purchases and am the contact person for my translator association’s business account. I never received any notification of these changes for either account. According to a follow-up post published a week later in which Paypal tried to explain themselves and did not do a very good job, Paypal allegedly sent out an email “trumpeting how those with Premium or Business accounts no longer had to pay fees for personal transfers.” I can’t say I received this notice either…

The moral of this story is that nothing in life is free – and in light of our economic climate anything that used to be free will soon not be. When asked about banking and international business dealings, I never suggest using Paypal, because the fees can be so horrendous. For smaller amounts it isn’t that bad, but for large amounts it is a better idea to maintain a bank account in an alternate country and initiate occasional wire transfers. In my case, I maintain a bank account in Germany – but I am shopping around for a new alternative as well, because my German bank just started charging me a monthly fee of almost $10. Whatever I do decide to use, it certainly won’t be Paypal!

The Perfect Storm August 7, 2009

The term ‘”the perfect storm” has come to mean how circumstances and bad judgments come together to create havoc and death. In my case there was definite havoc – and most likely the death of any chance of ever working with this agency again. Let me tell you the story of my Perfect Storm this week. Heed my warnings, my friends, and make sure that this does not happen to you.

I took Monday off to recover from walking 60 miles in 3 days over the weekend in the Cleveland Breast Cancer 3-Day. It was an absolutely amazing experience. I ended up walking 55 miles out of 60, but then again no one said we had to walk all 60 miles. We had already done the hard work of fundraising (I raised $3,215) and raising awareness. It was a good decision on my part to take it easy on Day Two, and that and all the training I did over the last 24 weeks resulted in the fact that, apart from some blisters on the balls of my feet Sunday night, the blisters had subsided and I was feeling good on Monday. I had my auto-responder on for my e-mail accounts, but I did not think anything of it when the phone rang at around 5:30 p.m.

It was a project manager from an agency that I have long admired and never worked with before asking if I could translate a little over 7,000 words of real estate/business by Thursday. I told her no and explained that I was out of the office that day. She then somehow talked me into accepting it for delivery on Friday. I gave her my backup e-mail to view the file, because I did not have my work computer on, which also complicated things. I knew things were going to be tight, but she assured me there were plenty of reference materials and glossaries so I accepted.

I already had two smaller jobs lined up for Tuesday and Wednesday from the week before for two of my favorite agencies, one medical report and some legal documents. I figured I could start working on the job on Wednesday and would be in good shape by Friday.

My first inkling that things were about to go south was when I tried to OCR the large PDF files so that I could import them into a TM and leverage them for the translation. I don’t know why, but ABBYY FineReader had problems with the 80-page files. The consistent capital letters in the headers came out a garbled mess of capital and lower case letters. Worst of all, the program was dropping “i” and “l” in the middle of some words (like financial) for absolutely no reason while duplicating them perfectly in others. I spent an exorbitant amount of time fighting with the OCR and then gave up and saved them without spellchecking. Then I tried to align them in WinAlign… and soon gave up.

I also copied out my portion of the 175-page document and discovered there was a discrepancy, so I wrote the project manager to ask why the word count was 3,000 words off and specified exactly where I understood I was to start and end. It turns out the page numbers she was referring to were in the FOOTERS of the document and not the page numbers in Word itself, but that is just indicative of the communication problems we had from start to finish.

At that point the project manager called me to ask how things were going. When I asked how much of the reference material was repeated in my file she told me “none.” Oh crap. I felt the bottom of my stomach drop and started getting a panicked feeling. I expressed my panic to her at that point, because it was now Thursday morning and I was just getting started on the file. I asked her to find someone else for the remaining 3,000 words, but she never told me that she had. She asked me to deliver what I had finished in the morning and let her know if I could do more. I ended up translating 4,500 words yesterday (Thursday) and delivered them this morning. I then got back to work and translated 700 words this morning when she called to confirm delivery and told me to stop.

I realize that this was not my finest moment and tried to apologize and explain that the job was characterized by lots of miscommunication on both sides. I understand my actions put her in a bind, and I do not fault her for the fact that I kept translating. I do, however, wish she had told me she had indeed found someone else to take a portion of it instead of saying “stick to the original plan,” which indicated to me that I had to translate the entire 7,000 words. I probably would have slept a lot better last night, for instance.

So, kids, if your gut tells you to say no to a project, by all means say NO and do not let the agency talk you into accepting it. You will only be hurting yourself and the agency. And if you truly screw up like this, accept any accommodations the client suggests without complaining, in this case billing for a lower word count than you submitted. I screwed up and have to pay the consequences. It happens to the best of us.