Conferences and marketing

 

For whatever personal growth and pleasure attending a professional conference may bring, it is not entirely clear to what degree they justify investing time and money in them. In terms of professional education, conferences provide the most efficient way to learn and renew. On the other hand, it is often quite difficult to ascertain how much actual business, either in terms of volume or client numbers, they create. My experience of more than 10 years of conference hopping is that it is possible to maximize the economic benefit of participation and justify the expense.

To begin, the term conference refers to any industry event bringing together professionals whether it is for those in your field or those of your target customer. It is also necessary to define participation in today’s hybrid environment. At minimum, it means paying a small fee and watching the lectures through Teams, Zoom or any other Internet streaming tool. Physically attending involves a larger investment of time and effort in traveling to a city and possibly staying there for several days. Once there, participating in a panel raises a person’s status with relatively little preparation time while making a presentation generally involves a significant time investment, far greater than the discount or fee that conferences compensate their speakers. The cost of attending a conference can vary from minimal to highly significant, especially to freelancers with low income.

In compensation, conferences provide a fast track to knowledge and an opportunity to frame a business vision. Especially for newcomers but also for experienced practitioners, the speakers and workshops provide practical advice for solving common as well as not-so-common issues in the profession. In translator conferences, these matters generally include marketing, pricing, software and, especially in the last few years, AI. There is no need to find time to watch videos as the lectures occur in real time. Moreover, experts make these presentations and are available for questions. Beyond immediate needs, conferences provide a wider perspective of industry trends and trigger contemplation on how any given freelancer can leverage them in the future. Daily life leaves little time for longer term planning while conferences encourage it by providing a wide-angle view of the industry and its practitioners. Thus, the educational value of conferences is without question, even for the most experienced.

Yet, many freelancers question its direct business justification. To understand this issue, it is vital to understand the difference between advertising and marketing. The former involves providing an immediate incentive to buy, generally some level of discount. Its results are measured by comparing short terms sales as compared to the previous month or the same month last year as is relevant. By contrast, the purpose of marketing is to create a brand, a name that customers will remember when they need that product. To give an example, Huggies advertises to all customers, even those that do not have any children yet, knowing that a day may come when the person has to buy diapers for the first time and has to decide which is the “best” product. For service businesses, a business may not need to outsource it on a weekly or even monthly basis. However, decision makers or colleagues may remember someone that they had met at a conference and impressed them. In marketing, the economic return is not generally immediate and difficult to identify among other factors. Therefore, it is far from simple to calculate whether attending a conference was worth the cost in terms of new customers.

I have attended many conferences and directly benefited from the contacts I made. In one case, a fellow participant on a panel asked for my services as she remembered that I specialized in financial translation. On many occasions, colleagues I met at conferences recommended me to translation buyers, having heard that I translate from Hebrew to English. Just recently, a translator with whom I had spoken in the hallway at some conference several years ago gave my name to a potential customer. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only worse than being remembered is not being remembered. Without being able to quantify the number of new customers or resulting business volume, conferences have increased my visibility especially in places where I have no direct presence.

Five ways to increase this exposure and, consequently, the economic benefit of attending a conference, are to attend physically, mingle with others, focus on one niche, raise your status by speaking and follow up. First, while virtual events are far less expensive and more convenient, they do not allow proper face-to-face communication, severely limiting the ability to create a memory. In simple terms, on-line conversations do not create the same level of human impact as actually sitting with someone. To attain this benefit to the maximum, spend as much time as possible, aside from quiet breaks and possibly a short nap to charge the battery midday, reaching out to people, whether in before and after lectures or in the halls when none of the lecture offerings are attractive. Conventions are work and hard work at that. Marketing requires effort but the rewards come to those that make that effort. Since most conversations are short and conference participants may engage in hundreds of conversations over the conference, it is vital to focus on your best and most unique niche, some area that the person will remember after the conference. Since conference chats tend to be short, use words efficiently and effectively. Furthermore, investing time in proposing, preparing and making presentations creates value by raising your status and getting people to approach you either directly after your lecture or years afterwards. The speaker stands out above the others, making it the best marketing position. Finally, upon return to reality, i.e., going home, professional follow-up by contacting serious contacts in writing reinforces the connection. By going, mingling, concentrating, speaking and following up, conference participants maximize their marketing efforts.

In my opinion, the choice to attend conferences, whether those focusing on the service provider's profession or in the potential customer’s field, is sound both in terms of the opportunity to learn and update knowledge as well as create strategic vision. Furthermore, when participants maximize their personal investment and effort, they also can receive their money back with interest. When I return from a conference. I am exhausted but invigorated, a seeming contradiction in terms. I am tired from the effort but more focused on bettering my business bolstered with additional knowledge on how to. I know that I will harvest the fruits of my labor sometime in the future if not immediately. Thus, attending conferences is a solid investment in the future.

Devised device names – a tri-lingual look at appliances

Innovative products require descriptive names. In practice, languages use completely different roots to describe the same technology. As an example, French and Hebrew apply different approaches to describe a vacuum cleaner, iron and car as compared to English.

In the case of the vacuum cleaner, each language emphasizes a different aspect. The English term for the vacuum cleaner, developed in the first decade of the 20^th century, focuses on the physics of the device, i.e., by creating a vacuum, pressure differences cause the air to rise up into the bag, taking with any trapped dust with it. The French aspirateur is derived from the root to breathe upon, which is strange because the appliance actually inhales, not exhales. The Hebrew שואב אבק [shoev avak] literally means “sucks dust”, which is exactly what a hoover does. Different strokes for different folks.

An iron is a far more ancient device, used by the Greeks in 400 BCE and developed gradually until the invention of the electric iron in the 1880’s. The English term identifies it by its standard material, iron. The Hebrew term מַגְהֵץ [maghetz] notes its function, smoothing out clothes. The French equivalent takes no chances, specifying both – un fer à repasser, literally an iron for ironing. Ironically, the French term is the clearest.

Cars have been part of modern life since the end of the 19^th century. The modern English term for a motorized vehicle is an automobile, having long laid to rest its predecessor the horseless carriage. The meaning of the English term is a vehicle that moves itself, i.e., without the need for horses. The French voiture refers to a carriage, something that carries objects, which a car does resemble to an outside viewer. The Hebrew term מְכוֹנִית [mechonit] merely states that it is a machine with a possible implication of being small or feminine. This lack of precision apparently has not prevented people from easily attaching the Hebrew word to the object. Humans are clearly quite adept at abstract thinking.

These examples demonstrate the multiplicity of approaches to devising words for new devices. The powers that make these decisions can focus on the shape, material, process or purpose, among other elements. Regardless of the case, through repetition, language users learn to equate a word and object and even stop thinking about the reasons for the name. Yet, understanding the logic provides a peak into human thinking. 

Eighty (well – ten) ways to leave your class behind – proven methods of losing your class’s attention

 

I do know something about teaching. With more than 30 years of experience teaching mainly in college but also at junior and senior high school, I can sense when the lesson was successful and when it was not. I would like to say that all my lessons were diamonds but the truth is that quite a few, admittedly less in recent years, had a closer resemblance to mud. I would like to share with you ten proven, personally tested, ways of how to lose the attention of your students.

1.   Put hard text in front of the students and proceed to read it out loud. Why should they listen to you?

2.   Talk too long (45 minutes or more) without giving the students a chance to practice the skill. You try keeping alert for that long without doing anything.

3.   For that matter, try to teach too much in a given lesson. Beyond the saturation point, students retain absolutely nothing regarding anything you said during the entire lecture.

4.   Talk to the front row or two and avoid eye contact with the back rows. For those distant students, it is now time to dream, text or pass messages.

5.   Lecture from behind a podium. it is as about engaging as listening to a radio lecture on an irrelevant subject. Get up and engage!

6.   Sit down –A proven Soviet torture technique, teachers that sit and lecture are far less effective than those that move around. No dynamics is somnabulent.

7.   Read your notes. Parents put their children to sleep by reading them a story. It has the same effect in class.

8.  Maintain a monotone speech – no ups or downs in tone. Anything is boring without some variation. For inspiration on voice modulation, listen to Christian preachers.

9.  Fail to relate to current student knowledge. Understanding the abstract demands close attention, a capacity most students lack. Practical, relevant, especially amusing, stories can make the irrational rational.

10. Fail to confirm understanding by not actually checking it in real-time. The fact that the teacher explained something has no correlation with the result of a student understanding it at any level. A teacher physically going around the room while the students do a short class exercise will identify which percentage of the material, if any, actually made it to their brains.

If any teachers take this personally and believe that I am mocking them in any manner, rest assured that I still fall into a few of these traps from time to time. As I wrote, I have personally committed each of these pedagogical sins. Live and learn.

Question anyone? – What translators should ask and translation buyers should provide

 

It can be said that wisdom is a certain lack of certainty. One of the characteristics of truly professional translators is that they ask questions before they start a project. Depending on the situation, these queries can relate to audience, purpose, names and legacy translations. The failure to ask these questions can lead to frustration and disappointment.

One essential element of every successful translation is the match of the style to the intended audience. For example, in medical translation, the target population is the patients, who may have no knowledge of medical terms, as compared to the medical staff, who are quite familiar with them. Even more common, linguists must carefully choose the vocabulary in books and material intended for children. In the entertainment business, subtitlists need to keep in mind that the consumers of their translation come from all ages and adjust the vocabulary level accordingly. Thus, translators need to find out for whom the text is intended.

Likewise, the purpose of the document will affect the translation. Linguists working on marketing or sales texts have wide freedom to render their message into the target language, especially as compared to technical specifications documents. Subtitlists face serious challenges as they must avoid exceeding a specific number of characters due to screen space limitations. In legal translation, incorrect language is a serious error when translating briefs and court documents while they may need to be reflected when translating depositions for court if they appear in the original. One translation trash is another translation treasure.

It is impossible to assume how names are spelled, meaning that translators should confirm the spelling if possible. Sometimes, the name spelling reflects another language. Just recently, I discovered (in time), that the common English name Felix was spelled Feliks in Polish. In other cases, immigration officials or immigrants adjusted the spelling, especially of the last name. An example in my family is Bronstein as compared to Bronstejn. Most often, a country simply has several spelling variations, e.g., Steven vs Stephen. As there are no rules, translators must exercise diligence.

An interesting issue, which many translators often ignore, is legacy, i.e., previous completed translations that include terminology decisions of previous translators. For example, in the Hebrew translation of the Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, there have been four translators. Curiously, they have not always translated a concept or spelled a name or concept in the same way, which can be confusing to the reader. In product information material, especially over a series of similar products, it is vital to maintain consistency when referring to specific parts or processes. In general, in marketing, unless the company has decided to change the style, translators need to be aware of the material previously released to the public to render the introduction of new text seamless. The customer may insist that the translator follow previous translations, mistakes and all. Thus, it is important to know that such material exists and ascertain the level of consistency demanded by the customer.

Therefore, as in most services, professionals not only listen but ask questions. To provide a proper translation and meet expectations, translators must attain all the information they require to produce the required document. The failure to do so leads to wasted time, frustration and lost customers. The answer to the query in the title is “yes”.

I’ve got that (May 1) feeling

 

May 1 was a fine day for barbequing. This year, while some workers of the world celebrated International Workers’ Day, Israeli marked its 77^th Independence Day. With the long weekend, Thursday to Sunday, one would think that joy dominated both occasions but many felt the exact opposite. As in most impressions, each person viewed the event through personal lenses, pessimistic, fatalistic or even optimistic.

The negative thinkers among us noted that beyond the Potemkin village celebrations and fronts of joy , the situation is rather depressing. At this moment, Trump is doing his best imitation of Atilla the Hun and ruining the US economy and wiping the savings, not to mention the financial and  job security, of workers in the United States. Of course, when the United States sneezes, the whole world economy, including its workers, gets a cold and starts to worry. Israeli’s celebration was physically darkened by a serious fire in the Jerusalem area as well as other areas, which required a callup of all firefighters, meaning that all local events were cancelled due to lack of fire protection. Symbolically, many Israelis  feel that that the national situation is just as dark with the continued war with Hamas and never-ending captivity of the hostages. For many anti-Bibi voters, the political situation does not provide much hope. Thus for many, neither event was “an ode to joy”, as Beethoven would say.

Those fatalists that view local events as mere parts of larger systems shrugged off the holidays and the circumstances. A holiday is an arbitrary date determined by pollical organizations. Thus, there is no correlation with the date and any events that occur before, during or after it. The world seems in a mood for certain extreme solutions, back to the future if you will. Trump is merely an oversized example of this type of populism. Employment levels ebb and flow to one degree or another over time. Wars usually end long after they have lose any reason to continue just because of personal and national pride but they do eventually run out of gas. Unfortunately, this superfluous period merely creates more tragedy. As is written in Book of Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun and, therefore, no reason to get overly emotional.

However, it must be noted that many people, possibly the silent near majority, do count their blessings on these holidays. Marx would have been shocked if not entirely overjoyed that so many workers in the West actually own shares of those capitalist companies. In the West, the vast majority of the populations enjoys some kind of safety net when facing unemployment and even profits from two days off a week. Quite a few can even send their children to college so they can have better jobs. In Israel, despite the challenges of the last two years, and more importantly the last 77 years, Israel stands strong in terms of having an army, a democracy and a strong identity. Admittedly, the war and the period before it have challenged those elements but they have stood up to the test. The world may not be pink but it is not black either and will improve, hopefully soon. Optimists follow Kate’s (of Kiss Me Kate) advice and “accentuate the positive”.

So, as I was cooking my steak on the barbecue in the garden of my house talking to my friend and drinking a beer, I thought to myself, or at least choose to, “life isn’t bad at all”. In Hebrew, the expression is  יהיה בסדר [yehiye besder], everything will work out. May 1 can be a happy day.

Bonne route – Process, pleasure and AI

 

[Painting by Dina Levin]

In one of La Fontaine’s fables, a pig, sheep and goat are on a wagon on their way to the market. The pig squeals in fear (justified in the case) but the sheep and goat prefer to enjoy the view. I cannot say who is more correct or whether this fable applies to AI. However, after listening to my engineering students make oral presentations about processes pre- and post-AI, I definitely understand that there is a certain pleasure in the actual process independent of the result as I will demonstrate with three examples provided by my very talented engineering students.

Among the many lectures were presentations on the revolution in  travel planning, translation and image creation. Specifically, before AI, travel planning necessarily involved either consulting a travel agent or spending hours finding appropriate flights, assessing hotels and investigating potential tourist sights. With AI, a series of prompts with follow up questions can theoretically create a complete vacation plan in minutes. Likewise, as I know too well, human translation involves a significant investment of time and effort to reproduce a given text into another language. With AI, this same process can take less than a minute and involves almost no effort at all, leaving plenty of time and energy to edit and improve the created text. Even more extreme, AI makes it possible for the artistically-limited to create any image, real or imagery, without any skill  in graphic arts or software. AI can take over the process of creation, benefiting people by saving time and effort.

Granted, at least at this point, AI often produces a flawed product, sometimes to the point of non-relevancy. For example, the AI engines I tried for finding flights failed to identify the most convenient flight of a given route (Tel Aviv, Israel to Portland, Oregon) , which I was able to find. It may be a matter of the nature of the prompts or the type of AI but the results do not seem sufficiently exhaustive. In language, AI translations of specialized texts exhibit far too many serious terminology and syntax issues. This tendency means that a skilled human translator must invest time and energy in reviewing the text before the text is relevant. AI images quite often look artificial, which can be a detrimental feature in many of their uses, especially commercial. Furthermore, humans creates images that are much more individual and unique. Thus, AI is not yet capable of  fully replacing the process of human creation.

For me, the greatest issue is that I enjoy the challenge of creation both despite and because of its challenges and investment. It is strange but one of the greatest pleasures of traveling is planning it, including finding the “best” flight. My father took great pleasure in that art as do I. It is my trip as I have invested in it. Similarly, translation is an act of writing and creation just as much as writing the original version. The transformation of a text from one language to another can be challenging but that aspect is precisely what I seek, at least up to a certain degree. It is the pleasure of learning and testing oneself. As for pictures, I find an artist’s rendition of a scene in pencil, oil, watercolor or even using a digital photograph is far more impressive than any AI image. The reasons may be that I have no talent in that direction and find the process magic or that I seek the privilege of seeing the scene exactly how the artists viewed it. Human creation has a far greater impact on me regardless of whether the creator is someone else or myself.

It is clear that there are solid economic reasons for adopting AI processes whether on an industrial or smaller scale. However, as a matter of personal taste, I tend to focus on the experience of the process more the result. In fact, I wish myself and others what Serge Reggiani sang in “Ma fille” (admittedly in another context): “Bonne route” – a good journey.

AI and I – an attempt at perspective

 

I admit to feeling somewhat hostile about the idea of using AI in my work as a professional translator.Thus, I felt (and still feel) a need to ascertain whether my internal resistance is stubbornness or intuition, two similar but not identical impulses. Consequently, I invested the time to listen to Doron’s Tzur excellent 2-hour presentation to the Israel Translators Association on March 26, 2025 on the subject of AI for translators. He gave an excellent introduction to the approach of AI as well as its practical use in translation, providing examples using several different AI applications. Granted, this presenting does not make an expert on the subject but the lecture did provide me with some updated data. I thus feel more at ease discussing my perspective. I now understand that an AI-based translation method does not fit me in terms of task/time allocation, the resulting standard and the produced style. Yet, while I do not see AI as a practical tool in the initial translation phase, I definitely can see its value in the editing stage, when it is possible.  In short, my personal answer is: “No, but”.

One of the Doron’s first points is that AI can and does change the time relationship between translation and QA, which include both finding errors and improving style. Specifically, he noted that the initial translation process, what he called the white paper stage, using AI takes minutes, if not less, allowing translators to focus their energy and skill and improving the text, rendering it both accurate and human. It should be noted that many translators, including myself, actually prefer the creative stage, the writing of the first draft, over the editing stage. An important passion in translation is the joy of playing with words, preferably in at least two languages. Thus, as demanding and time-consuming as translation can be, the work is fascinating and satisfying. By contrast, editing is a technical skill requiring great attention to detail and great discipline. Consequently, as I have no great desire to specialize in editing, I prefer the traditional method of translation, i.e., without AI.

Another point made by Doron is that AI is becoming or has become the new standard. He noted that it is possible to produce a workable translation of even long texts in hours, not days. I certainly do not dispute his assessment of time requirements or creation of a standard. However, I do challenge the worthiness of the standard. Written communication, especially in English, necessarily involves polishing and repolishing. Each QA session reveals more underlying issues, theoretically infinite but in practice limited by delivery deadlines. Clearly, any translation produced and edited in three hours lacks that polish if even it suffers from no concrete language error. Thus, it is possible to produced rushed translation but the issue is to what standard.  I am aware that, historically, people have come to accept lower quality standards, e.g. cars and clothes, but I find that disturbing.

Finally, AI, because it is based on statistics, not intelligence (Doron’s words), produces a clear but somehow flawed text based. To paraphrase Doron, average is never good as the 50% of the other texts are better.  The actual level of finishing depends on the skill and knowledge of the editor, many of whom are not even native speakers. Consequently, the AI-produced and human-edited translation often is correct but off, like a fluent but non-native speaker telling a story. Everything is clear but a real person would not write that. For many purposes, this artificialness is not an issue, in particular when a person only requires the translation to ascertain the main idea or find a detail. However, if the writer wishes to move the reader to buy, be inspired or any other action, this dissonance ruins the effect. People believe writers and speakers because they are authentic even if their facts are not quite accurate. Effective written communication must reflect the writer’s voice, not the statistical average. Therefore, I feel that using an AI-produced translation does not serve the needs of most if not all my customers’ needs.

One of the most attractive features of AI was its editing capacity. The ability of AI to identify errors of all types, including context-based spelling errors on some applications, is highly useful and a significant improvement on Word’s Spellcheck and even Grammarly, to name a few non-AI applications. However, to use these AI-tools efficiently requires consistent effort and time investment in attaining the computer skills and keep up with the weekly changes and newest versions. Moreover, translators cannot upload many legal, commercial and medical documents  due to confidentiality issues. I would love to upload the first draft 18,000 words I am working onto AI but will not do so because of the fear of it entering the public realm. Finally, it should be noted that most older people and quite a few younger people are not native to technology.  Yet, for many translators, using AI for editing makes sense both in terms of effectiveness and economics.

If I view the translation economic equation as time/effort as compared to income, at this moment at least, I feel that it is correct decision for me is to ignore AI but to keep an eye on it. AI is not the end of translation just as Computer Aided Translation and Google translations did not destroy the profession. Clearly, AI will change the industry but in what manner and which degree, nobody can say. It remains for each translator, or any other professional for that matter, to examine and decide, as Kirstie and Phil would say, to love it or leave it. I am leaving it for the moment.