Smart Habits for Translators

Smart Habits for Caring for Growing Your Online Network

We all hear about the importance of having a strong network for our business. And in some of our previous episodes, we've talked about ways to network at in-person events. Today, we thought it would be great to chat about growing your network online and some dos and don’ts that we personally subscribe to.

Networking can be equally daunting whether you’re just getting started in the profession or you’re already an established translator or interpreter. You can feel uncertain about meeting clients on their turf, attending online events, or using email or social media platforms to connect with clients and colleagues. And of course, if you sometimes struggle with imposter syndrome or consider yourself an introvert, you may dread the very idea of networking.

And then there are all kinds of other things to consider: where to find networking opportunities online, whether to network with clients only or to also think about networking with colleagues, what you can bring to the table and how you can utilize your network efficiently, etc.

So, today we're sharing our thoughts and tips on this topic with the hope of helping you grow your online network as well.

Tune in to hear our conversation on:

Why it’s important to have an online network and what some benefits are for your freelance business

Where to go to establish or grow an online network

What platforms or ways of connecting with people you should be thinking about

Our thoughts on limiting your online network to clients vs having colleagues in your online network as well

How to grow your network in a consistent and strategic way

Good strategies for connecting with new people online and creating new professional relationships

What are some dos and don’ts in maintaining your existing network and leveraging it

Our tips for those who feel nervous about connecting with new people for various reasons: maybe you find it difficult to step out of your comfort zone or maybe you feel that you don’t have much to bring to the table

Resources we mentioned in this episode:

• Registration for our Virtual Business Retreat on March 17, 2022

• Madalena’s master class on Google Ads for Training for Translators

• ATA webinars related to building your online network:

o Building a Network

o The Power of Social Media: Key Strategies for Marketing Your Interpreting and Translation Services

• One Line a Day journal

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/58

Smart Habits for Caring for Managing Your Inbox

Having a freelance translation or interpreting business means that you depend quite a bit on your email inbox. At least, we know we do!

You probably correspond with most of your clients via email, as well as colleagues and others who need to reach you or send you important information.

But it’s really easy to let your inbox take over your work-life (and perhaps your home-life, too!). We know that we have felt this way on and off through the years, especially as email quickly took over as the main form of communication.

So, today we want to share our thoughts and tips on managing your inbox so it doesn’t manage you!

Tune in to hear our conversation on:

- Why it’s healthier for your business and work/life clarity to set yourself up for success with your inbox

- Why it’s important to do a quick audit of what you receive and send on a regular basis and determine if it’s all truly necessary

What filing systems we use in our inboxes

- How we handle incoming emails that we haven’t yet seen or replied to

- What we do with emails that seem to have a lot of back-and-forth

- Our thoughts on when and how often to check your email

- How to set boundaries around emails on evenings and weekends

Resources we mentioned in this episode:

- SEO Translation course by Teresa Sousa

- Boomerang for Gmail

- Streak for Gmail

- Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant

- Money Mindset by Canna Campbell

- Enhanced Productivity with Text Expansion by Nora Diaz for ATA’s Next Level blog

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/57

Smart Habits for Caring for Your Mental Health with Dr. Elizabeth Miller

There is a lot of responsibility and uncertainty that comes with being a freelancer and a small business owner. Many of us often struggle with feelings of overwhelm and anxiety, and the pandemic has certainly exacerbated this to such an extent that some people could barely function due to constantly feeling worried and not knowing what to expect. Our worlds have been turned upside down, and many people have been feeling guilty that they don’t seem to be able to function the same way they did before.

We’ve been talking about discussing the topic of caring for your mental health on the podcast for a long time, but let’s be honest, we’re not experts on this topic. So, we decided to find someone who is, and we’re thrilled to welcome today’s guest, Dr. Elizabeth Miller, who will help us normalize this topic and offer some helpful advice.

Elizabeth is a psychotherapist, researcher, speaker, and mom of two, who specializes in women’s mental health, chronic illness, and compassion-focused trauma recovery. She opened her private clinical practice, Elizabeth Miller Therapy, after identifying a need for an integrative and holistic approach to healing. She provides support for women, teenagers, couples, and families, who are looking for a mind-body approach to mental health. Elizabeth merges modern neuroscience with research-based mind-body techniques to help her clients obtain optimal health. Please visit www.ElizabethMillerTherapy.com for more information. Elizabeth also founded a company called Well Mind Body to provide educational resources to help people live their lives to the fullest by helping connect mind body and spirit.

Tune in to hear our conversation on:

• Elizabeth’s clinical practice and what areas she specializes in

• What solopreneurs and freelancers can do to manage feelings of stress, pressure, and uncertainty in a healthy way

• How to handle feeling isolated and how to manage introvert tendencies and social anxiety

• Elizabeth’s tips on managing perfectionism and overcoming the feeling of not being good enough

• How solopreneurs and small business owners can overcome self-doubt and imposter syndrome and start valuing their own work

• Elizabeth’s advice for parents who, especially after the last couple of years, feel drained and don’t feel like their normal selves

• What resources, tools, and strategies are often overlooked or used inconsistently when it comes to supporting mental health

• What smart habits have been crucial for Elizabeth in her life and career and how she protects the boundaries between her work and personal life

Resources we mentioned in this episode:

Dr. Elizabeth Miller’s website

Follow Elizabeth on Instagram and Facebook

Follow Well Mind Body on Instagram

Look Ma’, No Hands podcast by Laura Max Rose: episodes with Elizabeth on social isolation and the feeling of shame during the pandemic and navigating stress and life transitions with kids

Stress Less, Accomplish More: Meditation for Extraordinary Performance by Emily Fletcher

Harmoni necklace: Use discount code WELLMINDBODY

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, know that there are resources and professionals who can help. Reach out to your physician, your local mental health hotline, or someone you trust and let them know you need help.

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/56

Today’s episode is all about the importance of checking and improving our work as translators. We all know that this is a crucial step in maintaining the high quality of our work. But not all of us enjoy the editing and proofreading step or have a systematic and efficient approach to the process.

So, we invited two of our colleagues, Eve Bodeux and Emily Safrin, to discuss this topic with us. Eve and Emily are both excellent translators and talented editors.

We’re excited to welcome Eve Bodeux and Emily Safrin to the podcast!

Listen in to hear our conversation on:

• When and how Eve and Emily started their freelance careers, what services they offer, and how their businesses have evolved over time

• What smart habits have been crucial in their careers

• Why they decided to present “Proofread Like a Pro and Ship It Express: Effective and Efficient Quality Control for the Time-Strapped Language Professional” at the 2021 ATA Annual Conference

• Why translators usually struggle with checking and improving their own texts as well as editing other people’s work

• How to give objective and constructive feedback as well as receive and respond to the feedback others offer you

• What tools and resources can help translators with quality control of their work

• What they do to maintain work/life clarity and protect the boundaries between work and personal life

RESOURCES WE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Eve Bodeux’s website and Twitter account

• Eve’s book, Maintaining Your Second Language: practical and productive strategies for translators, teachers, interpreters and other language lovers

• Eve’s Global Reads Book Club, a book club for translators

• Emily Safrin’s website

• Emily’s article for the ATA Savvy Newcomer blog on ergonomics for ATA’s certification exam

• American Translators Association

• ACES: The Society for Editing

• PerfectIt: Proofreading software

• Do Pause: You Are Not a To Do List by Robert Poynton

• Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

We'll send our email subscribers a summary of this episode, including links to all the mentioned resources, including Eve’s 10 Tips for an Ergonomic Office and Emily’s guide on how translators can add copyediting to their services.

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/55

In today’s episode, we have a thought-provoking conversation about the importance of treating your translation or interpreting business as a business—in particular, thinking like a business owner.

This sounds like such a simple thing, but many freelance translators and interpreters fail to do this and consider themselves “just freelancers.” This mindset can have a negative impact on your interactions with clients, your pricing, and many other elements of your business.

We have talked about this in many of our previous episodes, but today we’ve invited a special guest to join us in this conversation.

We’re excited to welcome Sarah Townsend to the podcast!

As a freelance copywriter for more than 20 years, Sarah helps purpose-led businesses discover the power of persuasive copy. In 2020, she published Survival Skills for Freelancers to help business owners around the globe tackle the day-to-day challenges of self-employment. Described as “better than a business coach”, the Amazon #1 bestseller busts the myths about being your own boss to help you ace self-employment without burnout. It distills 20 years of experience – plus quotes from over 100 freelancers – into 200 unputdownable pages. Since then, Sarah has combined her copywriting work with delivering mentoring, training, and events to help the self-employed community tackle the ups and downs of freelance life.

Listen in to hear our conversation on:

• When and how Sarah started her freelance career, what services she offers, and how her business evolved over time

• What some smart habits have been crucial in her career

• Why her book, Survival Skills for Freelancers, is so popular among freelance translators and interpreters

• What top three things freelancers usually struggle with

• How freelancers can educate themselves to maintain a business-owner mindset

• Sarah’s tips for valuing yourself and your expertise and charging appropriately

• Her thoughts on the benefits of having a community as a solo worker and finding the right community for you

• Sarah’s favorite tools or resources that can help freelancers feel more professional, efficient, and productive

• How she tries to protect the boundaries between her work and personal life

RESOURCES WE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• The Smart Habits for Translators Virtual Business Retreat

• Pomodoro technique

• Sarah Townsend’s copywriting website

• Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram

• Sarah’s book Survival Skills for Freelancers

• Free sample of the first chapter of Survival Skills for Freelancers

• Deliberate Freelancer episode: Freelancer Survival Skills + a Pep Talk about Boundaries with Sarah Townsend

• Calendly

• Canva

• Trello

• FocusKeeper

• Text Expander

• Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by

Brené Brown

• On Writing by Stephen King

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/54

Today, we want to share an important discussion that we don’t tend to hear a lot of honest conversations about, at least not in a public forum. Freelancers and business owners know that the feast and famine cycle can really take a toll, especially if you’re unprepared to handle times of famine.

If you’ve ever been in the middle of a famine in your business, you know how unsettling it can be . . . waiting for that next project, wondering how you’re going to make it to the next big check. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

The feast and famine cycle doesn’t have to be on repeat in your translation or interpreting business. There is another way to run a freelance business, and that’s what we want to share with you in this conversation.

We’re excited to welcome our colleague, Yulia Tsybysheva, to join us today!

Yulia is a Russian marketing translator based in the UK. Originally from Russia, she’s lived in the UK for over 10 years and has worked in the translation industry for over 15. She works with clients in the fashion, beauty, jewelry, and travel industries and specializes in web and app localization, as well as transcreation.

Recently, Yulia also started a new role as a Russian Language Lead at Flo Health app.

Listen in to hear our conversation with Yulia on:

• When and how she started her freelance career, what services she offers, and how her translation business evolved over time

• What smart habits have been crucial in her career

• Advice for fellow translators who find themselves in a famine cycle

• How to maintain a level head about your business when you’re in a famine cycle

• Tips for navigating the feast/famine cycle and finding long-term ways to overcome it

• What marketing methods work best for Yulia, and how she finds time to fit them into her schedule

• Smart habit tips to create more times of feast than famine while not falling into a state of burnout

• Yulia’s tips and tricks on enjoying a freelance career and parenthood, and how she protects boundaries between her work and personal life

RESOURCES WE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Our next Virtual Business Retreat

• Yulia’s website

• Connect with Yulia on LinkedIn and Twitter

• Yulia’s blog post for the ATA’s Slavic Languages Division blog: Localizing digital products into Russian: what is it like?

• Yulia’s interview for Slovo, the ATA Slavic Languages Division podcast

• The Freelance Bible: Everything You Need to Go Solo in Any Industry by Alison Grade

• Freelancer Magazine

• Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams and Denny Penman

• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/53

This 52nd episode of Smart Habits for Translators marks the second anniversary of our podcast! It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years since we launched Smart Habits for Translators. More than ever, we are grateful to you all, our listeners and colleagues, and it makes us so happy to hear that you enjoy our episodes!

Last year, we celebrated our first “podcastiversary” by recording an “Ask Us Anything” episode, so we’re making it a tradition by doing the same this year! We’ve been gathering questions from our listeners for a while, and we want to thank those of you who wrote to us by email, through our website, and on social media to submit your questions. There were so many of them that we had to group them into several categories to make sure we could answer as many of them as possible.

Listen in to hear our thoughts on:

• What advice we'd give to a beginner translator starting their online business

• How to pick a name for your business and find your first clients

• How to kickstart your online presence, and how to create a website with little experience under your belt

• What we think a freelance translator should aim to achieve in their first year

• How to prioritize when you feel a bit scattered and overwhelmed with all the things you should be doing as a new freelance translator

• Our advice on being a freelance translator and a parent and how to succeed at both

• How to find your community online and connect with colleagues

• What CAT tools and CRM tools we use and how we suggest choosing which tools to invest in

• What some of our "nerdy moments" are in everyday life

• How we develop new podcast episodes, divide responsibilities, choose topics, and if we ever argue over episode content

Resources we mentioned in this episode:

• Our next Virtual Business Retreat

• Madalena’s interview on the Deliberate Freelancer podcast

• Our Facebook group for translator moms

• Asana

• Streak

• HoneyBook

• Eve Bodeux’s Global Reads Book Club

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/52

Surprise! This is another joint episode of Smart Habits for Translators and Speaking of Translation.

Corinne McKay and Eve Bodeux, co-hosts of the legendary Speaking of Translation podcast, recently announced, after 13 years they pressed pause on their podcast, but all of their past episodes are still there. We have already recorded two joint episodes (Episodes 29 and 35), and we’re excited that they agreed to join us again and record this special episode!

In this episode, we’ll be discussing a topic that many of us are faced with (yet again!) this fall as many of our favorite conferences are going virtual or hybrid. As much as we look forward to returning to fully in-person events, unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet because of the pandemic and travel restrictions. And hybrid conferences aren’t quite the same thing as an in-person event or a virtual event.

So, how can attendees and speakers prepare for hybrid conferences?

Here’s what we discuss in this episode:

• What we think will be different when attending a hybrid conference vs. a fully in-person one or a virtual one

• What smart habits for attending a regular conference still come in handy when preparing to attend a hybrid one

• What in-person and virtual attendees should keep in mind when attending a hybrid conference

• What speakers should be mindful of when they present in a hybrid format

• What factors do we personally take into consideration when planning which conferences to attend next year

Resources we mentioned in this episode:

• Speaking of Translation podcast

• Training for Translators

• Corinne McKay’s website

• Eve Bodeux’s website and Global Reads Book Club

• Madalena Sánchez Zampaulo’s website and blog

• Veronika Demichelis’ website

• Madalena’s Master class for Training for Translators: LinkedIn for translators and interpreters

• ATA’s 62nd Annual Conference

• Innovation in Translation Summit

• Trados Elevate Conference

• LocWorld conference

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/51

In this episode, we’re piggybacking on the topic of Episode 49 about conducting a business audit.  

Before you start reviewing the different areas of your business and identifying or updating your business goals, it’s important to keep in mind what your vision is for your business.

As we said in Episode 49, we want you to put your CEO hat on and think about what you would like to get out of your business and whether it’s changed from what you originally thought your business would be.

Forming a vision for your business is like creating a roadmap. You’re basically laying out the path you want to take and deciding what you want to get out of your freelance business and what it means to you.

You’ll need to answer some really big questions that may seem daunting at first and may take you a while to figure out.

Not to worry—we’re sharing some advice in this episode about what you might want to consider when you think about the vision for your freelance business.

This is a perfect start to a business retreat that you can do on your own, with a trusted colleague, or with us, at our Smart Habits for Translators virtual business retreat!

Here’s what we discuss in this episode:

- Why it’s important to think about the vision for your freelance business and how often you should do so

- What to consider when you reflect on what you would like to get out of your business

- Why it’s okay to admit that your vision has changed from what you originally thought it would be

- What other questions are worth considering as you reflect on the vision for your business

Resources we mentioned in this episode:

Episode 49: Smart Habits for Conducting a Business Audit

Details and registration for our Virtual Business Retreat

Innovation in Translation Summit

See which T&I events we are attending or speaking at this fall

The ATA Podcast “Inside Specialization” series: an interview with Abigail Dahlberg about translating sustainability

Savvy Diversification Series – Don’t be scared! How to Add Ghostwriting to Your Portfolio of Services

Savvy Diversification Series – From text translator to film subtitler in just a few months

ATA’s The Savvy Newcomer Diversification series

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/50

We often talk about small business owners, in particular freelancers, having to wear many hats: we’re our own boss, bookkeeper, marketing team, tech support person, administrative assistant, and more!

But how often do you really sit down and think about all these areas of your business?

In this episode of Smart Habits for Translators, we are having a conversation about conducting a business audit: why it’s important to check in with your translation or interpreting business regularly, what areas to look at, and, most importantly, how often.

This is an area that is often overlooked by many freelancers: we can get so much into the day-to-day needs of our business that we forget to take a holistic look at the bigger picture. So, we thought that sharing a sort of roadmap today might be helpful.

A business audit is a great starting point that will help you get ready for a business retreat. Spoiler alert: in this episode, we are announcing our very first Virtual Business Retreat! Check the episode for more details.

Here’s what we discuss in this episode:

• Why it is important to review various areas of your translation or interpreting business regularly

• What areas of your business to review during a business audit

• How a business audit can help you set or modify your business goals and create a solid action plan

• Details of the first-ever Smart Habits for Translators virtual business retreat and how you can join

Resources we mentioned in this episode:

• Details and registration for our Virtual Business Retreat

• Episode 8: Setting Goals for the New Year

• Episode 24: Course-Correction for Your Business During Times of Uncertainty

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

See the full list of links and resources for this episode: https://smarthabitsfortranslators.com/podcast-episodes/49