Few people doubt that I exist. My clients see my work and don’t question whether it was prepared by chance or by an intelligent mind. When I show up at university, I never have to interrupt debates on my existence. At home, I have not once had my wife doubt that when she is talking to me, she is talking to a real person.

Yet thing aren’t quite as simple for God. You see, despite his constant reminders in the Bible that He is with us (Genesis 26: 3; Joshua 1:5; Matthew 28: 20; Hebrews 13: 5 etc etc), even good, church-going Christians find it hard to believe sometimes. Where is God when money is tight? The answer: He is there with us. Where is God when our children are sick? The answer is: He is right there with you. Where is God when someone hurts you or cheats you or betrays you? Guess what: He is there with you.

This doesn’t guarantee that the entirety of life will be a bed of roses. The book of John opens with a declaration that Jesus is God in human form, God with us, the Word made flesh (John 1: 14), yet at the end of the book, we find this same Word Made Flesh forgiving someone who had betrayed Him in His hour of need. Even He was betrayed.

On the other hand, there is no doubting that knowing that God is with us does make a spectacular difference. Who else could have fed five thousand men and their wives and children from five loaves and two fish and make sure that the leftovers were greater than the amount He started with (see Matthew 14: 15-21)? Who else could heal someone without even going near them (see Luke 7: 1-9)?

Yep, life with God nearby takes on an entirely different quality. Suddenly, there is power to heal, faith to calm fear and more than we could ever need. Suddenly, jugs of water to wash your hands become vessels of the finest wine ever tasted (John 2:1-11). Suddenly, a stay in a dank prison becomes an opportunity for hope (Acts 16: 22-40).

With God, it isn’t that the storms don’t come; it’s that you go into them with the Great Storm Calmer in your boat. Since God is with you, you can be sure that what He said about you will come true. You know that His Word is not only an account of a wonderful history but a picture of a promise-filled present.

Isn’t it time you met this God?

Work on the use of corpora (think translation memories and parallel texts) is improving our understanding on how translators can and do use existing texts to improve their work. Work on expertise is teaching us more on how translators and interpreters can improve their skills. Work on ethics is helping us to gradually look for routes through the minefield of translation and interpreting decisions. Work on client expectations is giving us new insight into what clients want and how that relates to the brief they give you and the job you take on. The list goes on.

On the other hand, it’s not as if those outside the ivory tower are failing to think carefully about their work either. Debates rage about the effects of globalisation, technology and marketing strategies on our work. Professional journals and magazines show that there is a growing interest in understanding our work above and beyond the level of typing a sentence into a TM and hitting enter.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the problem doesn’t actually seem to be that there isn’t academic work out there that might be of interest to translators and interpreters but that it is not always accessible to them. How many of those who chip away at the wordface each day would ever consider subscribing to an academic journal? How many academics purposefully ensure that they present at least some of their work to practising professionals?

If the ivory tower is going to affect the wordface (and what good is research if noone ever uses it?) then perhaps some subtle shifts are needed. On a purely pragmatic level, the world of academia and the professional world need to learn to speak the same language. Outside of a few journals, noone calls their clients “commissioners.” Similarly, I have yet to read an academic paper on payment practices.

For academics, the challenge then is to “sell” their work to the profession in a way that aligns nicely with professionals’ everyday concerns. For freelancers and agencies, there is the arguably tougher challenge of making some kind of headway into existing research to ensure that all their hard work isn’t simply a reinvention of the wheel. Believe it or not, many of the issues the freelancers face, from status to ethics to CPD, have already been the subject of academic enquiry. It will surely pay to find out what has been achieved so far.

There are, of course, a growing number of academics who continue to translate and interpret – a position which leaves them ideally placed to build bridges between the two worlds. With one foot in either camp, these “practisearchers” (to borrow a term from Daniel Gile) can and do serve as mediators, or even interpreters. They instinctively know both “languages” and understand the concerns of both worlds.

Perhaps then the ivory tower isn’t a tower at all. Research isn’t and needn’t be entirely separate from the cut and thrust of professional life. Now, if only everyone understood that…

The church isn’t just a community in name. When we had no money for food, CVCC supported us. When we needed prayer the people of CVCC were there. When we needed to be inspired or encouraged or even corrected, Fraser and the teaching team offered enough Scriptural truths to set the whole church on the right track.

Sadly for us, we didn’t jump into the church wholeheartedly from the beginning. We stood back just in case we moved to Edinburgh too early on. I can’t speak for Helen but I know that my own decision was based partly on what seemed like logic (“why build relationships that will be lost so soon?”) and partly on my own pride. Truthfully, I got a bit too concerned with if and how the church might want to use “my gifts” and not concerned enough with how God might want me to serve His church.

Thankfully, once we made the decision to settle in, it wasn’t that hard. People really did welcome us into their hearts and into their home groups. From Marsella’s gentle wisdom to Raymond’s cheeky humour to the way that Kirsty always stayed down to earth, life would never be boring. The CVCC music team kept on demonstrating what excellence looks like and Michelle helped me see how inspiring drama could be.

If my time in Victory in Life/COC Wishaw/Gateway was all about growing up and learning that God had put potential in my life, CVCC was all about learning God’s faithfulness and understanding the nature of servanthood. In fact, you could sum up what God taught me in today’s sermon from Fraser: – God is faithful and He asks us to trust Him with what He gives us.

This is a lesson I am glad to have learned, even if it does seem to have come by getting it wrong a lot first! God has never let us down and has always provided for us. Some of that provision has come through the gifts and time and hugs we received from the people in CVCC and for that we are both very grateful.

I came to CVCC so hurt in some areas that I didn’t even know I was hurt. Throughout my time there, I feel like I have been in receiving mode. Thank you to everyone in CVCC for sticking with us and supporting us in a multitude of ways. May God bless you for your giving. The seeds you have sown will reap a harvest.

Jesus said that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Truly, if you are a member of CVCC, you are very blessed. If you are on the edges of CVCC wondering whether to join a house group or offer your time, don’t make our mistake. Jump in now and watch God to miracles.

While it can be enjoyable to complain and blame it doesn’t really do anything constructive. We can grump all we like about reverse bidding, we can protest and write and even sing if we like, but those sites will not go away; neither will those who use them.

So what is the solution? For me it is incredibly simple: just say “no.” If a client asks you to work for less than you are comfortable with, say “no.” If a project proposal seems to lean towards getting the most work for the least money, say “no.”

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realise that the rates issue is not really about online portals at all. It’s actually all about the decisions translators make. We can complain about cheap providers and unrealistic clients all we like but if we choose not to work with them, it doesn’t really matter anyway. There is no way that we will ever prevent people offering and getting translators for ridiculous rates; what we can do is ensure that we don’t work for those rates.

For as long as translators will accept silly rates, there will be clients who will try to get them. On the other hand, there are still plenty of clients who realise that when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It is those clients we need to care about and it is that market that we need to be concentrating our attention on. After all, who is worth more to us, the client offering rock-bottom rates or those who actually care about the quality of the work they get?

Let the low payers find low chargers. Just make sure you are not one of them.

Those two areas bring me onto some upcoming changes. As Matthew Bennett kindly pointed out in response to one of my earlier posts on passion, it is clear from the entirety of my site that I have a real passion for preaching. I also get unusually excited about conference interpreting and interpreting research. This makes me a bit of a nerd but at least I am comfortable with my nerdishness.

For me to keep being inspired enough to write fresh, interesting articles on a regular basis, I really have to keep pushing my areas of passion. So, from the week after next, you will notice some (much longer) posts on Bible Study topics. This doesn’t mean that there will be no translation or interpreting posts (but I don’t have any in the queue right now). This does mean, however, that you are likely to see less posts on everyday translation business and more on topics like: how to know what our clients really want, survey design, the role of interpreters in society and perhaps some leadership ideas.

I am currently looking at posting one or two Bible study articles per fortnight (they take longer to write) and one or more interpreting/research posts in the same period. To make it easier to tell between them, I will be making better use of twitter hashtags. I will also be making clearer use of category tags here on the blog. So, if you are only really interested in interpreting posts, keep an eye out for me #interpreting tag. If, on the other hand, you are more interested in the Bible study posts, keep an eye out for the #Bible hashtag.

Thank you so much for reading this blog and I look forward to hearing from you in future.

Jonathan

Anyone else recognise that feeling? It normally happens at parties or when you meet someone for the first time. It’s that nervous feeling when someone says that immortal line “so, what do you do?”

You see, compared to out 9 to 5 compatriots, we freelancers can have a bit of a rough time when it comes to describing what we do all day. Sure, we can always go for the old chestnut of “I run my own business” but the follow-up question is always “what kind of business?” and it all careens downhill from there.

Mind you, we might not really have it that hard after all. Who wouldn’t want a rewarding job with no commute (except from the home office to the kitchen), low emissions (except for on curry night) and no annoying managers?

Sometimes, though, we are out own worst critics. In our business, it pays to be a bit self-critical, even slightly obsessive. Sadly, during party conversations, these noble characteristics are frowned on. “I spent all of Tuesday brushing up on my industrial chemical pump terminology” is about on par with “I work as an accountant” as a conversation stopper!

After more than three years of trying to fit what I do all day into the confines of a short, snappy reply, I have pretty much given up. Who cares if my work doesn’t fit the mould of a nice, snappy job title and a single line on a CV? Eventually, I am coming to the place where I am doing what I love and loving what I do and that’s what matters.

So I am writing this post to encourage my fellow freelancers to be proud of what you do. We few, we happy few, we band of undescribables have good reason for cheer. We don’t need to worry about traffic or noisy co-workers. We choose our hours, we choose our clients, we even choose our place of work. Freelancers, we rock!

All of this could seem a bit academic. After all, so long as we get paid we aren’t going to really care about how our clients see our work, or even how we see it for that matter? Or maybe not.

To see why there might be more to this than debates over mere labels, let’s think about the difference between a product and a service. Products, by their nature, are tangible. You can hold a product in your hand. You can count them. You can price them per item or per batch. Products tend to be members of a set of similar items. You can think of a bunch of bananas or a bag of potatoes or batch of mobile phones.

Services, on the other hand, are intangible. Are there units to measure cleaning? Can you measure consultants by the kilo? Does it makes sense to price up accounting per figure or per decimal point?

So, the question becomes: is translation more about the tangible product (the translated document) or about the intangible service (your expertise, your skills, your knowledge)? If it is the former then really our business should be all about bulk. For most products, the more you sell the better, hence why industrial economies have facilities for mass production. The more products you make, the less each costs to make, the cheaper you can sell them for, the more you sell and so on.

See translation as a product and it makes sense to give discounts for recurrent jobs, large projects, repeated words, translation memory use etc. After all, if translation is a product, more is better. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would lead to us all working out what each word costs us to translate and setting our prices according to this number.

But we all know translation doesn’t work like that. Instead of larger translations taking comparatively less time per word, they can sometimes take more. While TMs might reduce the time we spend on some parts of our work, the can extend other parts. You have to buy the TM tool, learn to use it, build your TM, check it, import a TM, manage software crashes, schedule upgrades, attend more classes and the list goes on.

In short, it doesn’t seem like translators can actually benefit that much from economies of scale. Well then, it would seem like translation is a service. If translation is a service, we have an issue. You see, most translators I know, myself included, were indoctrinated into the “price per word” model. If translation was a product, if we were word producers or sentence manufacturers, this would make perfect sense. However, if we are service providers, the logic breaks down a bit. If translation really is more about expertise and knowledge and skills, does it really make sense to charge per word? What do you think?

Can I borrow your brain for a couple of minutes? Let’s see what all this stuff about passion and navel gazing and administration might mean to you. Here are some really simple questions to think about:

1) Are you happy and fulfilled where you are?
If you are, great! If not, why not? Is it just that you expected life to be easier than it is or is it that you feel like your work isn’t amounting to much that will last? Do you recognise that “hollow feeling” I talked about two weeks ago that tells us that something, somewhere is seriously off-beam?

2) What do you focus on the most?
This, I admit, is a nastier question. If you had the time to keep a diary of your recurrent thoughts, what would they be and what would they be about? Do you spend your day concentrating on paying bills, filling forms and adjusting procedures or do you keep your mind focused on a vision, a dream, a goal?

3) What is driving your decision making?
Are you money-focused, God-focused, people-focused, promotion-focused, future-focused? Do you always do what is best for you or what is best for others? If you were to draw a map of the route your decisions were taking you, where would it eventually lead? What is the price of the decisions you are making right now? Is it worth it for what you might gain?

4) When was the last time you were aware of being passionate about something?

5) If you had to sum up your life in one short sentence, what would it say?

These are all good questions but questions that will mean very little unless you really think about them. The truth is that we often spend more time aligning our cars than aligning our lives. We declutter our houses more often than we declutter our lives. Surely that is wrong.

For what is left of this week, why don’t you spend a little time each day thinking, even praying about where your life is headed and where it should be heading. Next week, we will look at making the tough decisions that you might need to make.

See this man hanging here naked? That’s what it looks like to break the rules of Rome. Unless you want to be here next time, play by the rules.

Faced with such an unmistakable message, the group did what many do when faced with loss. They went underground. Now they pray in a locked room while the rest of their fellow Jews are enjoying the festival.

Then, in a flash of fire and a noise like a hurricane, all that changes. Suddenly the group, the church, goes from meeting behind a locked door and sorting out internal issues to bringing change to the world around them. In an Empire where learning one language, Greek, was seen as the way to ensure your place in society, the church is different. Instead of preaching only in Greek, the church preaches in Aramaic and Cushite and Cappadocian and Arabic and Cyprian and Cretan and other languages besides. Rather than forcing everyone into a box, the church reaches people where they are, in the language they speak, in a way they can understand. The church is one family, expressing one truth in thousands of different ways.

Only God could do this. In fact, it would seem that only God could even understand it. Not long later, Peter, a leader of the early church, would find himself in hot water for spending time in the house of a Roman soldier. Jews did not spend time with gentiles and especially not the Romans who had been oppressing them and killing them for years.

It’s as if God was showing people that it was acceptable, no, essential, to love and care about our enemies, those whose behaviour we detest, those whose culture we do not understand. Even though God showed up so powerfully in that soldier’s house, it would be a lesson that would be tough to learn. Years later, there would still be a need for the leaders of the church to remind people that following Jesus did not mean that you got stuck in a box but that you were free to be the real you.

It’s this vision to break the barriers of language, class and race that grabbed me as a teenager and then again in my early twenties. The idea that God could change attitudes and hearts and create a church that honoured and loved diversity was awe-inspiring. What would it look like to have a church that encouraged and enabled people to truly be the unique, inspiring, radical agent of change God had called them to be? What would it sound like to have a group of believers for whom language, class and colour weren’t barriers to be feared but markers of the sheer creativity of God to be celebrated?

I have seen a church like that twice before. Once in Acts and once in Germany. One day, I will see it again, here in Scotland. Until that day, I’ll wait for it, work for it and do the research needed to make it a possibility.

It always starts so well. There’s normally a product or a vision or an idea of how the world could be different. Early on, it seems that the vision is all that is needed. Things move, change is made, people grow personally, financially and spiritually and it feels like nothing could go wrong.

But something always goes wrong. Perhaps a big opportunity is missed or a wrong decision is made or a flaw is discovered. Suddenly, that fire of vision that drove everything along is dampened by the soiled water of fear, territorialism, self-centredness and confusion.

Most of us recognise that feeling all too well. It’s the nagging emptiness that tells you that the passion you had isn’t quite the same any more. It’s the discomfort of knowing that you just spent days working on something that you have no interest in but seems annoyingly necessary. It’s the hollowness of realising that your life is no longer consumed by passion but is spent in meetings about meetings.

So what do we do? Some, the few, the brave, the wise, realise that all of this has happened because the original vision and passion has been lost. They recentre their lives, rediscover their old dreams and, to use the words found in the book of Revelation, “come back to [their] first love.” It might be hard at first. It might mean saying “no” where previously you have said “yes.” It might mean uncomfortable change but they know it is worth it.

Some, however, go in the opposite direction. They replace a passion to bring change for a passion for spreadsheets, figures, procedures and administrative minutiae. There is nothing inherently wrong with spreadsheets and figures. In fact, used correctly they can actually be tools to help us check how close to our vision we are. On the other hand, noone ever had a vision for a company that had excellent procedures or perfectly aligned spreadsheets. The danger in focussing on these things is that they can become all-consuming.

Any time the focus is on tools above the original vision something valuable is lost. Passion for service and love gets exchanged for passion for position and power. A desire for change becomes a desire for promotion and a seat on a committee. And then, with the real vision lying dismembered across a thousand cross-disciplinary sub-committees, it’s all gone.

The truth is, we always have a choice. There is always another opportunity to rediscover what we were made for and live in that reality again. This is why, for the next few weeks, I will be unapologetically talking about the things that brought me into the world of language services in the first place. These posts are inspired by the journey of ex-Deliriou5? front man, Martin Smith, as he recounts it in his autobiography: Delirious. For the next few weeks, you will hear the real me. Hopefully, it will inspire you to be the real you too.