After the lunch break, which provided good networking opportunities, we continued to think about “best business practice”. Judy Heminsley, having worked from home both as en employee and running her own businesses, was ideally placed to talk to us about work-life balance. Judy had some valuable suggestions in store for us, such as how to deal with interruptions. Having two separate phone lines for example, one for business and one for private purposes, is something which I certainly find very useful myself. Judy also advised us to set ourselves time boundaries and find out how long our concentration spell is. Consequently, breaks can be planned in advance more easily. I already consider myself an experienced home worker, but I could definitely see some areas for improvement in my case.
The importance of not only selling yourself as a translator, but also as a person was highlighted in the session run by Andrew Mann, employed as a project manager by Syntacta Translation & Interpreting until very recently. You can build your marketing activities on the principle that, despite all the automation in the translation industry nowadays, people still buy from people. In the end, the cornerstone of your business, apart from how you approach customer service, are the relationships that you have made. Andrew's blog for Ways with Words, where he now works, is also very worth a read.
Time was flying, but before we all went away from this informative, inspiring and well-run event, there was room for general questions and answers. Among the issues raised were technological changes. It was noted that the role of the translator in the future would change drastically due to crowdsourcing and machine translation. Machine translation in particular may be expected to necessitate more post-editing rather than actual translation. Although future translations produced by machines may well be usable to some degree, they will still and always have to be looked at by human translators afterwards. Human translators are therefore unlikely to ever run out of work - a reassuring statement, which concluded the day.
I have written a more detailed report on this event, which will be published in the forthcoming issue of ITI Bulletin in May.