Since the use of social media has become more and more important for my business (and many of yours as well), I thought it would be a good idea to write about what I do on "my" social media platform as well as to ask some colleagues how they are faring on other platforms (more on that below).

In preparation for this, I read an interesting book by Renée Desjardins, a professor from the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg, called Translation and Social Media. It was published in 2017 so it's a little outdated, but it was helpful to read anyway because she analyzes the function and role of social media for the translation profession and highlights some very interesting facts (that most of us may know but have never heard articulated).

Here are some examples:

I found it exciting to look at this and realize (again) that our participation in social media not only fulfills our own agendas (to find jobs, to make friends, to be entertained) but that of our profession as well.

As mentioned above, I asked some colleagues to share their experience on different platforms. Clearly there are more platforms than those mentioned here, but Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter seemed the most obvious, at least from a US-based perspective. (Interestingly, you'll notice we have two colleagues talking about Instagram. It was really hard to find translators or interpreters who were using Instagram in a (business-) productive manner, and then surprisingly two of them agreed almost simultaneously!)

It is often overlooked that Facebook is not just a social media platform; it is also a search engine that helps people discover local businesses. I have learned that firsthand, seeing that at least three to five clients a week approach me and say that they found me through Facebook. Some of them find me through my Facebook business page, others through word-of-mouth referrals from their Facebook friends, and others find me in several local Facebook groups where I am a member. That last strategy has been particularly helpful, as group members who have already used my services are often the first ones to respond when someone is looking for a translator. Free advertising? Yes, please!

I don't use my personal Facebook page much, but I keep my business page on Facebook updated, respond to inquiries through Facebook Messenger, and regularly check if there are any translation-related questions in any local groups where I am a member. If there are any, I respond to them and offer advice. With a time investment of about 30 minutes, I usually get two to three well-paid translation jobs a week from clients who found me through Facebook. So, despite having beef with Facebook's "content personalization" and targeted advertising, I think it has been a great supplement to my marketing strategy.

I have a lot more to say about finding translation clients through Facebook. Are all the clients there looking for fast and cheap? (No.) Do they all need official document translations? (No.) What groups should I join to find clients? What do I need to have on my business page? How can I get more word-of-mouth referrals? I will be sharing more details during the Smart Habits for Translators' webinar on January 22.

Veronika Demichelis is an ATA-certified English to Russian translator based in Katy, TX. She serves as Director on the Board of Directors of American Translators Association (ATA) and as Chair of ATA's Professional Development Committee. She is an adjunct professor of the Translation and Interpretation program at Houston Community College and a co-host of the Smart Habits for Translators podcast. You can find her professional Facebook listing right here.

LinkedIn has been one of the most powerful tools in my marketing toolbox, especially in the past few years. Like many people, I used to simply let my profile collect dust, connecting to new people every now and then, but not really using it on a regular basis. Now it is one of the main ways I build relationships with potential clients and build my client base over time. I use the free version of LinkedIn, but I take advantage of all the ways it can work for me: optimizing and opening my profile so potential clients can find me more easily, reaching out to potential clients who are likely to need my services and who I know I can serve well for years to come, and using the direct messaging feature to connect directly with those who hire and make decisions in their business. Just last month a new client reached out to me, we set up a Zoom call to talk about her needs for a freelancer, and I'm now working on several projects for her through the first quarter of 2021.

I could go on and on about the power of LinkedIn, a social media platform that is meant for those who are there to do business. Not only is it a robust search engine, but Google recognizes it as a trusted source of information, which means that most people's LinkedIn profiles rank quite high in search results (often on the first page) when clients are looking for them by name or using other specific keywords. Spending a few minutes every day on this platform is a very small investment for the return I have seen, which equates to thousands of dollars in freelance income. I would recommend that every freelancer get comfortable using LinkedIn regularly and connecting with their potential clients through using Groups, messaging, and creating an optimized profile.

For more information on doable, proven LinkedIn strategies, visit my blog and enter "LinkedIn" in the search bar.

Madalena Sánchez Zampaulo, CT is ATA president-elect and chairs the Governance and Communications Committee. She is the owner of Accessible Translation Solutions and a Spanish>English and ATA-certified Portuguese>English translator. She has recently written about social media for the ATA Chronicle and her LinkedIn profile is right here.

I started my business account on Instagram in June 2019. My goal was to network and meet colleagues.

Recently I reached a little over 1,600 followers. For over a year I posted daily, but starting this year I changed that to three posts per week. So far, the change has not affected my statistics. I probably spend about three to five hours per week planning the content I'll publish the following week. In the platform itself, I try to spend at least an hour per day, mainly engaging with other users, and answering DMs and comments.

I believe Instagram has helped establish my brand and I am proud to belong to an amazing community of translators, interpreters, linguists, and freelancers in general. I've made great contacts there. Every day I learn something new or refresh my knowledge!

Thanks to my Instagram account, I am a member of an affiliate and a brand ambassador. I have also promoted other accounts, so these are extra incomes that I had no idea I could get.

Ilduara Escobedo is a freelance translator for English and Spanish from Guatemala City, Guatemala. You can find her Instagram account right here.

I first set up my "professional" Instagram account in 2019 to share my experience of working as a translation trainee at the Council of the European Union. When I decided to go full-time freelance in May last year, I began using the account to document my journey as a freelance translator and subtitler and to share tips about freelancing and languages in general.

The time I put into Instagram really does vary from week to week. I try to post on my account a few times a week to keep my followers engaged, but there are some weeks where I'm too busy to plan out posts or feel as though I don't have anything interesting to say. I try to spend a little time every day scrolling through my feed and engaging with other people's posts and also dedicate some time creating or planning out my own posts. Sometimes I have a good idea of what I want to say and what image I want to use, other times I spend more time researching, planning, and taking photographs.

I also use Instagram's story function to share inspirational posts that I have seen. I'm also trying to use this function more to share things about myself, my business, and the "bigger picture." For example, just last week I hosted my first Q and A session on my stories where my followers could ask me anything they wanted to know about translation, freelancing, or my professional journey. It got really good feedback, so it's definitely something I'll do again.

Most of my current followers are fellow freelance translators or language professionals. I also like to follow accounts that give marketing tips and that support freelancers. In future, I'd really like to transition my account to attract more potential clients, especially since I specialise in marketing and digital services. At the moment, however, I enjoy connecting with other freelancers and sharing experiences. Whilst my Instagram account hasn't yet directly attracted clients in the same way that my LinkedIn page has, it has led to referrals from other freelancers who have seen what I do and allowed me to make meaningful connections with other people in the translation industry.

Chloe Stout is a French and Italian into English translator and subtitler in Scotland. You can find her on Instagram right here.

I (Jost) use only LinkedIn and Twitter. I'm happy with that limitation because it allows me a much more focused use of my efforts, particularly on Twitter. I use LinkedIn more passively, primarily to announce new books and projects -- wait to be surprised in a few weeks!

Most of what I tweet is links to articles or resources. If I really like them, I tend to spend quite a bit of time preparing those tweets, including researching the Twitter handles of the authors or other people who might be mentioned in the article or resource in question. My hope is to start conversations with journalists or other stakeholders, which happens rather frequently (and one of the reasons for that is that I have a reasonably high number of followers which I think helps to get noticed when you reach out to others). I see my function as a cheerleader to communicate a better way of thinking and writing about translation than how it is typically perceived by the outside world.

I actively shy away from discussions that get too heated -- usually their outcome is in my opinion not very productive. The jobs I get through my Twitter presence are based on potential clients' perception of me as someone with industry knowledge. While some of those offers have been translation jobs, more are in the area of consulting, speaking engagements, and collaboration.

I would guess that I spend about 30 to 40 minutes per day on Twitter, which includes perusing news items that I might or might not tweet about.

Oh, and while we're talking about Twitter: Alex Drechsel and I have passed our administrative duties for the TranslationTalk Twitter account into the enthusiastic and capable hands of Andie Ho, Deepti Limaye, and Nadine Edwards. On the off-chance that you don't know about that Twitter account, you should definitely click right here and start following -- regardless of whether you yourself have a Twitter account. (Hint: it's hands-down the best Twitter account for translators and interpreters out there!)

One very popular tool for this is Grammarly. But there's one big caveat: It only speaks English. If you're a Grammarly user who wished it could also help you with, say, Spanish or German, you may have been excited to learn about Microsoft's "Editor." It supports 20 languages and works in all Office apps and major web browsers (except Safari), but to get the good stuff, you need a Microsoft 365 subscription. So today, we'd like to tell you about another option: LanguageTool.

This handy app currently supports 30 languages (and language variants) to various degrees. Full support — including spelling, grammar, and style hints — is available for English, German, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Spelling and (limited) grammar checks are currently available for Arabic, Catalan, Danish, Esperanto, Greek, Irish, Italian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, and Ukrainian.

The tool is open-source, which means you can peek behind the scenes if you like. And you can join the community to extend and improve the language coverage.

LanguageTool can be used almost anywhere people get writing done these days: Microsoft Word, its open-source equivalents OpenOffice and LibreOffice as well as Google Docs (requires Premium plan) and major browsers like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera. (Safari is apparently coming soon.) You can also copy and paste your text into the simple web interface.

Any time you're working online, privacy is paramount. Just like Grammarly, LanguageTool will send your text to the cloud; in this case, the LanguageTool server. This happens through an encrypted connection, hiding your data from third parties. And what you write isn't stored. To learn more, check the LanguageTool privacy policy.

So what does it cost? Just like Grammarly, LanguageTool operates on a Freemium model. Basic use is free, and when you want more features, you can purchase a subscription starting at roughly 5 Euros per month.

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When I talked with Samuel Läubli and Nico Herbig in one of the last newsletters (see here) about where translation tools of the next generation need to go, one thing Nico and I talked about specifically was whether his MMPE (Multi-Modal Post-Editing) toolset would be open-sourced. That has now happened. You can find it right here.

Translation environment tool maker Across Systems was purchased by the Volaris Group (itself a part of the Canada-based Constellation Software). Volaris "focuses on acquiring software businesses serving various areas, including agri-business, financial services, and education." This is very fresh news, so I haven't yet had time to speak to Across about it. I hope to have done so by the next edition.

Finally, this morning I spoke to a small group from TAUS. They were not particularly happy about my less-than-enthusiastic description of their Data Marketplace a couple of issues ago and wanted to give me a second (actually third) look. Earlier last year I wrote in fairly great detail about their system that allows for offering translation memories for sale on their marketplace (see here), and most of what I wrote there still holds true. The system is ready for use, though some of the more advanced features (data anonymization, more advanced data cleaning, and an automated system) will not be ready until the late summer. I would encourage you to take a look and see whether it's something that might be helpful for you right now. There is a bit of data available on the site, and while not much has been purchased through the site yet, TAUS expects that to change in the near future.

There was one aspect of Data Marketplace that I was not aware of. In the past, TAUS had translated large corpora in several Indic languages to be used to bolster the available corpora for the various machine translation vendors and developers. This was in the form of microtasks by a large group of native speakers, and these corpora will be made available on the data marketplace as well. Now they are also encouraging users, especially in languages with lesser diffusion, to translate data proactively for the sake of offering and hopefully selling it in Data Marketplace. This admittedly sounds kind of crazy for professional translators, but -- who knows -- it might end up being profitable and at the same time help to build language data for languages for which there simply isn't enough available to build machine translation engines. Here is a story of a Yoruba translator and advocate who is contributing to Data Marketplace, and another for a linguist organizing the translation of Kurdish languages.

The first of now 321 editions of the Tool Box Journal went out 17 years ago -- in January 2004. Its mission was similar to what I described in the introduction to the Translator's Tool Box, my ebook that I had published the previous year:

Although this is still in the introduction of the current 14th edition, I wonder whether this statement holds as much weight today as it did back then. True, many of us are not as good with our computing environment as we ideally should be, but I think that overall (and every time you see "overall," a generalization is sure to follow) most of us have embraced the fact that computer expertise pays off -- quite literally.

Also, in 2004 a substantial number of professional technical translators (and again, I'm using "technical translator" as a term to include all professional translators who translate functional material from all areas, including medical, legal, business, etc.) still argued that translation environment or CAT tools were counterproductive to our understanding and definition of a creative profession. (To the folks who joined our profession only recently: sounds crazy, right?)

Today, the vast majority of technical translators use translation environment tools, often more than one.

So if all of the above is true, what's the value of the Tool Box Journal, an admittedly very technically-oriented journal for translators? Here's where I see value (and you're right if you imagine that this represents my thoughts on the new year and all that is to come):

I'm looking forward to 2021. How about you?

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