Adding New Services and Admitting I Was Wrong

From the Next Level team: At some point in their professional lives, many linguists consider adding a new service to their portfolio. A major change like adding an entirely new line of work can seem daunting and potentially disastrous, but what if it’s successful? In this week’s post, Anne Connor discusses how she took up a former service and made it her own again.

Planning a career using languages came to me as a sixteen-year-old studying Spanish, typing, and shorthand in high school. Seven years earlier, the foreign language seed had been planted in me when my older sister Mary Ellen started learning Spanish in high school and taught me a few phrases. While taking my own Spanish classes, I sensed that conversational fluency would require paying close attention to and mimicking the accents of my heritage-speaker classmates, who graciously invited me into their homes to hear and practice my Spanish with them and their families. At Temple University—where I studied Business and Legal Spanish translation and interpreting—I took a part-time student worker position as an exchange program assistant at the University’s Center for International Services, which gave me real-life translation and interpreting opportunities as I kept up my shorthand and typing skills. In college I also took courses in Italian, which I continued to study after graduation at the America-Italy Society of Philadelphia in the evening after work.

Fast-forwarding to 1991 when my husband Bill and I were the proud-but-nervous parents of boy/girl twins who had been born prematurely a year earlier, I realized that my dream of translating from a home office might actually come true, thanks to the relatively recent advent of home computers, fax machines, and modems. A college friend and former coworker of mine, Linda Pollack-Johnson, had already been freelancing as a French and Italian translator from home for a year and told me that the first thing I needed to do was join the ATA and its local affiliated group (now an ATA Chapter), the Delaware Valley Translators Association (DVTA). I then attended a meeting about income taxes as a freelancer and immediately started to market my services to local translation agencies, making up the $2,900 it cost back then for my equipment within a matter of a few months.

I was ecstatic that I could help supplement our household income while being a stay-at-home mom. It took a few years for the “peaks” to far outnumber the “valleys” in work requests, but for over twenty-five years I continued to devote my work life to translation, editing, and spoken-word transcription. Many ATA and DVTA interpreter colleagues, my sister, and even Bill continued to encourage me to go back to interpreting after the children were grown. However, I was afraid to take that leap and return to what I had done in-house in the export and medical fields ages ago because I thought, “How will I ever remember specialized terminology when I go out to interpret?” They’d all reply, “But you’d get training and really love it! You have the personality of an interpreter!” Stubbornly, I kept refusing their promptings because I was so used to my routine of working with the written word and having my hardcopy and online references and glossaries always at my fingertips.

Then something occurred that led me to change my mind and finally admit to those people in my life that they were actually right and I was wrong: the COVID-19 pandemic. By the late spring of 2020, both my Italian>English and Spanish>English translation work requests had all but dried up, since I had specialized in clinical-trial translation and subspecialized in handwritten medical reports and serious-adverse-event documents. By the end of that same year, Bill accepted a package from his aircraft-company employer, which needed to lay off more than 25,000 employees. Bill loathed working from our home office (which I rarely used then). Luckily, he met the minimum company seniority and age requirements for the layoff, and he became a huge help on the days when I babysat our one-year-old granddaughter.

Spurred on by my DVTA colleague Eileen Haag, in April of 2021 I took and passed the virtual Bridging-the-Gap Medical Interpreter Training program through the Lehigh Valley Health Network; Eileen had taken it in person several years earlier. Soon after completing the course and listing it on my ATA Directory profile, I started accepting (and enjoying) in-person medical, educational, and community interpreting jobs. Although I was really nervous before each gig at first, once I got used to how things worked and how to research vocabulary prior to the assignments, I started to relax and found that my English>Spanish interpreting speeds were increasing. During the summer of 2021, I also began receiving several translation requests from local direct clients, as a result of using my slow work period to take Madalena Sánchez Zampaulo’s and Veronika Demichelis’ virtual courses on increasing T&I online presence and refining my Google and LinkedIn listings, my website, etc. Since then, I’ve been able to accept as many interpreting jobs as I want, while also serving clients who find me (usually on Google) and ask me for translations of their Italian or Spanish demographic documents into English for the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission (with a branch office within 5 minutes of my house), USCIS, and other purposes. Still other clients who find me online ask me to manage translation projects going from English to other languages, which I have come to enjoy.

The direct interaction and feedback that I experience in the various interpreting settings and during translation encounters with grateful individuals whom I’ve helped complete the processing of their vital statistics documentation is extremely rewarding and is something that I didn’t realize I was missing while doing only LSP-sourced translation and editing for so long. Though I’m truly grateful for all those years I was able to translate or edit from wherever I was (at home, while traveling, etc.), I really enjoy getting out of the house and not having as many deadlines over my head as I used to have during my translation-only heyday. Once a day of interpreting is over, I can forget about it and relax!

In conclusion, during these times of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that are changing the landscape of various professions, I’m extremely grateful that in-person Spanish interpreters are still in great demand in the Delaware Valley and that I finally heeded the sage advice of my peers and family. So, to all of my translator and interpreter colleagues looking to change things up, my advice is: Don’t hesitate to take additional training or refresher courses in a specific area that you love or always wanted to learn about. That way, you can add more offerings to your ATA profile, online listings, and website so that both LSP and direct clients can find you easily and so that you can increase your business income.

About the Author

Anne Connor is a professional Spanish and Italian-to-English medical and legal translator, as well as a Spanish Community, Educational and Healthcare Interpreter. She has been an ATA and DVTA member since January of 1991 and is now a Life/Active ATA member and a Lifetime DVTA member. She holds a B.B.A. in Business Law with a minor in Spanish from Temple University in Philadelphia. She is a past President and Secretary of the Delaware Valley Translators Association (serving on the DVTA Board from 1994 to 2016) and serves on the following ATA Committees: Business Practices (Mentoring Subcommittee), Professional Development, and Public Relations (School Outreach Subcommittee).