 Hi. Well, first of all, I'm in a new place. Before I was in my office with the books behind me, which I kind of like, but it wasn't very well lit. Here I get a lot of natural light. So let me know what you think about this new location. Unfortunately behind me, there's absolutely nothing because it's just a wall. But at least it seems better lit. And so I'm trying out as I am trying out this shirt for some reason. Anyway, today I want to talk about something a bit more technical, let's say, and it's something that I've sort of touched on in the past, but not really. And this is what to do when you're not sure about a translation. This is mostly for people who feel a bit insecure, especially when you're beginning. You'll you might see requests for translations or you people might want you to work on a translation or you think there might be a chance for a job or something, but you're not very secure. Like, I don't know if I could translate. I haven't translated things exactly like that before. They might have new terminology. I'm not ready for that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I just wanted to address what to do when this happens. When you're unsure about your translation about certain terminology, about a certain term or anything like that, because this doesn't change. It doesn't go away. Even the most experienced translators have it happen to them. I can have jobs coming from my regular clients, maybe just the regular quarterly financial statement. They send me all the time to translate. It's just an update, but there might be some term there that I've never seen before. Now, I've already gone through more or less what I do specifically, but I, as I mentioned before, am an Italian to English translator specializing mostly in financial translations. So this means I use very specific websites that help me out with what I'm doing, but many of you deal with different types of translations and different types of specialties, and so that might not be very helpful. If you want to check out that video, I'll leave a link down below and say you can. But in this one, I'm hoping that I can give information that's a bit more general, so then it can help all of you. So what do you do? Say you accept the translation and they give you stuff to translate, and there are some terms there that you have no idea what they mean. What does that term sesquipedeliac mean? I have no idea what it means. So what do you do at that point? If you have an online dictionary or a bilingual dictionary especially, but even just a dictionary that's in one language, it can give you synonyms for whatever that term is, and it can help out. If you can find it there, that's great. If you can find other websites that deal with certain types of terms, like maybe it's a specific term for a certain type of industry, or a type of sector, a segment, or whatever, and if you can find dictionaries that deal with that specific industry or sector or segment, then by all means go there. And by the way, bookmark whatever websites you find that are useful, because you're definitely going to need them in the future. But maybe none of that helps. So where else can you go? This is usually the point, at least for me, when I started where I started panicking because I'm like, I can't find it on any dictionaries and so I don't know what to do. One thing you can do is, if it is a term, say it's a couple of words together, or even if it isn't, try taking the couple words in this context, put it in quotes, and then just googling it. See if it turns up anywhere else, because you never know. Often what happens is that you're translating something for a company, and they've already translated the same term before, and you'll find that term on their website, and that can be translated again. Usually, if this is the case, the company should have sent you a glossary of their past translations, but if not, you can always, if you find something like that online from their website, absolutely, you can feel free to ask them if they have past translations, a glossary, or anything along those lines. So the first thing to do is, yeah, put it in quotes, whatever the term is, or the word, or a set of words, and search for it, and see if it pops up anywhere. And, you know, see if through that you can get a translation and see what you can do with that. The next step, if you say you still can't find anything for your translation, you still have no idea how to translate this specific term, then you go to forums, there's translatorscafe.com and pros.com. I've mentioned these websites a million and a half times purely because they're the most helpful websites for translators. And go to these forums and, or a lot of them have just a glossary, have an online dictionary, et cetera. Search for it there. First of all, search to make sure it doesn't exist there somewhere already. And if it still doesn't, ask. You can always ask a term there and people are so helpful, you can just ask, hey, I came across this term, I have no idea what it means, or I have no idea how to translate it, does anyone know? And you'll pretty much always get quite a few answers, a good number of answers within 24 hours. And then you can go through those, sometimes it's back and forth, you can speak with them and try to figure out which one you like best and which answer works best in your specific situation. Don't be scared to do that. Every time that I've done it, it's been super helpful. Of course, it can take a bit of time because you usually need at least those 24 hours to look it over. So bear that in mind and don't wait until the last minute to do it, but know that that avenue is always open. Now, maybe once you do this, and once you get your responses, you're still not 100% sure. So what you can do at that point, and you can do this with any terminology, any term you translate, you can always send it to the client and tell them, look, if you have any questions, or if you're not sure about any terms, please feel free to get back to me. Always mention that you're available for any questions or any issues because if they find an issue, they should be able to reach you and then you work with them and then they'll be happy. So don't panic also if they say, hey, I don't get why you use this term to translate it. Do you think that's right? Don't be scared about stuff like that because you can always explain your logic. Well, I thought because this and this and that, they say, oh, no, no, no, usually we deal with that and that and this, and then you say, okay, then in that case, you should use this term. Something along those lines. Don't be scared to do that. Don't think, oh, no, I made a mistake. They're going to hate me. They're going to hate me. No, you know, you're working with them and frankly, they might be blaming themselves as much as you because it may be something they feel like they should have explained to you. Obviously, don't start blaming them or don't start saying it's not my fault, not my fault, but work with them to try to come up with something. So you do have all these avenues and so, you know, you can look it up and if you can't find it anywhere on any dictionary, you can feel free to ask and people always help on all these forums because there are quite a few people and so, you know, you can usually find some help and then you can always ask the client. And many times what I've done is explained. I'll be like, look, I use this terminology here because of this and this and, you know, and how it's been used in the past and so I think it works well or, you know, what also happens is sometimes one word gets translated in two different ways depending on the context. Anyway, things can get very complicated once you get into it. And if it's something that I think will confuse the client or that they might not like, I try to preemptively explain what I did. Otherwise, I just send it and then, but I'm ready in case they ask me any questions or have any issues, I know what to reply. So hopefully all of this can help you and so you can feel less insecure and more secure when you're dealing with potential translations. So you can actually accept your first translation or, you know, a new client and work on their translation knowing you can get through it. But you'll notice something here. You definitely need to make sure that you leave enough time. You need enough time to work on this. Like I said, it can take 24 hours for someone to reply and then you need to look all this stuff up and you can use this to your advantage. Say you're talking to a client and the client, you know, they need something translated. You're like, okay, I can do it for 50 bucks and they're like, no, 50 bucks is too high. Then you can try to negotiate with time. You can say, okay, look, I can do it for 30 bucks. But how about I do it for 30 bucks, but you give me an extra day or two extra days. What this does is it actually gives you more time because especially if you're charging 50 bucks and you can't translate something, they're going to be quite mad. But if you're charging less, but you give a very good translation, they're going to be very happy. What this does is it gives you more time to then go on these forums and ask people if need be or do your search and try to find stuff. Try to try to find the right solution. So try to negotiate with time whenever you can. Now, obviously the bad part there is that you get paid 30 bucks rather than 50 bucks. But especially when you're starting out, and I've mentioned this so many times before, when you're starting out, ratings and referrals should always be very important to you probably more important than the money you make because you can use those ratings and referrals to make more money in the future. So it's an investment. So I wouldn't worry so much about not making those extra amount of money at the beginning, but instead concentrate on doing a good job and getting those good ratings and referrals because you can use that later to make a lot more money. So just learn how to use this to your advantage and know that you can translate any term out there as long as you have the time to do it. And I'm not saying to go accept some ultra, ultra technical translation, even though you've never touched those things before, because that will take you forever to translate, trust me, and or medical stuff or stuff like that. Those are very specialized. I mean, if you can try to look up every single thing, but it will take you forever and chances are even then you might make some mistakes. But if it is something that you're more or less used to, and you're just afraid of certain terminology here and there, then go for it because there's always a way to find the right terminology. And by the way, in case I didn't mention this before, if you do find a term that you're happy with or you find a way to translate some term you didn't know before, always write it down. Keep a glossary. I've done videos before. If you search for under my videos under glossary, you'll see the glossary that I keep. It's very rudimentary. You can do something on Excel. It's very easy, but you need to keep the term you translate somewhere. If it's something you had to look up, then absolutely jot it down and keep it for the future because it's going to come up in the future and six months from now, you're not going to remember what it was. You're not going to remember where you found it and you don't want to have to go through that same huge search once again to search for it. So anytime you find a term, keep it in your glossary so you have it for the future. Really, you really need to. So I hope you found this helpful and again, I hope it helps you in accepting those translations early on where you might feel a bit insecure just to know that there is going to be a way to deal with it. If you know of other ways of dealing with it, then please feel free to let me know. I'm always happy to know of other ways to find good translations. That's pretty much the process I go through. And now, like I've mentioned in other videos, I have my go-to websites that I check and usually I'm able to handle 90, 95% of all my issues with those. And over time, you'll find your go-to websites as well, which will help a lot. But in the meantime, just know that help is out there and you always have those forms you can go to and people are very super, super helpful there. And so don't be afraid to do that. That's about it for now. I hope you found this useful. If you did, please click like because that always helps. And don't forget to subscribe so you can get more videos like this that help you with your freelancing, with your freelance translation. And I'll see you in the next video. Okay, thanks. Bye.