An easy explainer
Sometimes explaining what services I offer can get complicated.
Here’s a quick visual explainer 👇
London Book Fair 2024
This March I attended my first London Book Fair and it was HUGE. I’d been to events at London Olympia before, but the scale of LBF was incredible by comparison.
As an introvert who works from home, I find myself making excuses not to get out to events in person. The result? I end up falling out of practice with talking to people in professional contexts and I need to give myself a lot of pep talks to get through them.
In some ways, the huge scale of LBF makes it easier to fade into the background. The background is my natural comfort zone, but comfort zones can be too… comfortable. A few of my lovely translator colleagues were there too and this meant I couldn’t just wander around anonymously. Which is A Good Thing.
Honestly, if you’ve never attended the LBF, I recommend going just to marvel at the beautifully colourful sight of London Olympia being given over entirely to the book industry. Wall to wall books in all their glory, and in a huge range of languages. Bliss for book lovers.
To get started, I attended the opening keynote by Jonathan Karp, President and CEO of Simon & Schuster to hear his perspective on publishing industry trends and developments. I heard that there is increasingly an international focus in book publishing – great news for anyone wanting to read books written in a language other than English.
Other key points I heard mentioned (these are very much my own quite subjective takeaways):
In a fast-changing industry, where publishers and authors have to embrace social media and new technologies, there is now often more reference to ‘decks’ than to manuscripts.
Authors are often doing their own marketing and achieving greater reach through social media (think BookTok).
AI was discussed, of course. You can’t go anywhere without it being mentioned these days. Karp said that at Simon & Schuster they were ‘daring to be cautious’ about the benefits of AI as a tool. One example is how it could be used for older books, and they are experimenting with AI narration for books that would not otherwise be published.
Particular highlights for me were hearing about Strasbourg as 2024 World Book Capital, and hearing distinguished literary translators talk about the translation of non-fiction works, something that can sometimes be overlooked as a genre of literary/narrative translation. I also went along to the CIEP’s stand to say hello and had a lovely chat with its new CEO, Christine Yeates.
I’d love to go to LBF again. Even though I only attended one out of the three days, I got a lot out of it.
Have you been to LBF? Share your tips in the comments!
If you’re planning to go, pop your questions in the comments below.
16 years in business
What has changed in my 16 years as a solopreneur?
Today marks my 16th year in business. Time flies when you’re freelance!
Time has certainly flown, but a lot has changed since I first sat down in my home office desk on a grey February morning in 2008, having left my secure(ish) in-house translation job.
I’m sure that version of me would have felt proud to have made it to 16 years. The translation industry itself has changed enormously since 2008, but that’s a story for another day.
Things that have not changed:
❌ I’m still deliberate in my approach to my business planning.
❌ I still love what I do.
❌ I still love languages and fervently believe in the power of words.
❌ It’s still just me – I wear all the hats (except for accountancy).
Things that have changed:
✅ Most of my work is no longer in legal translation. I decided a few years ago that life was too short, and I should move into doing more of the work I enjoy most.
✅ I’ve discovered my niche. Within international development translation, food security, food policy and food systems are the sub-specialisms that interest me most.
✅ I have two children who are growing up far too fast and challenge me every day (in good and bad ways).
✅I’m more sociable. I’ve joined accountability and marketing groups, plus revision clubs with colleagues, and I’m much more proactive about getting out to events. This is great progress for a committed introvert.
✅ I’m more knowledgeable – I’ve done more CPD in the past 5 years than ever before. Most of that CPD has focused on deepening my knowledge of my specialist fields.
✅ I have started doing actual marketing. It sounds ridiculous, but back in 2008 my unstructured marketing strategy can be best described as ‘wishful’.
✅ I’m now also a copy-editor. I have taken multiple training courses through the CIEP to get formal accreditation in this service, and editing now makes up around 40-50% of my workload.
✅ I now also offer plain English services. Having done editing work for a few years, I’ve branched out into plain English editing and writing (and translation!) services.
What has changed in your business since you first started?
______________________________
Hi, I’m Philippa and I’m a translator and copy-editor.
I take Spanish, French and Portuguese (and English!) content and transform it into snappy and 100% engaging English.
I love to bring clarity to other people's writing and helping to share it with the world.
I love to work with people who are making the world a better place.
Why not book a call with me to see how I can help you.
Solidarity in four different languages: tricky terms to translate.
In December each year, the BBC runs a series of lectures by leading figures. These are called the Reith Lectures, after Lord Reith, the BBC’s first director-general.
The joy of the accidental discovery
In December 2023, it was Professor Ben Ansell of Oxford University giving these lectures. This year I came across the lectures by chance, tuning into Radio 4 in the car while taking my dog to her grooming appointment. The glamorous life I lead!
This chance discovery reminded that, when we carefully curate and filter the content we consume through podcasts and streaming services we sometimes miss out on this joy of discovering something by chance.
What is the true mean of ‘solidarity’ in languages other than English?
This year’s lectures were entitled ‘Our Democratic Future’, and the episode I tuned into was ‘The Future of Solidarity’ – the third in the series. I quickly reached to turn up the volume, because when I heard ‘solidarity’ it got me thinking about the word itself and what it really means.
‘Solidarity’ is not a term I hear much among English speakers, except when someone is expressing their backing or sympathies for someone or something. To me, the word ‘solidarity’ also has quite strongly political connotations.
There are terms that look very similar to ‘solidarity’ in other languages, for example ‘solidarité/solidaire’ (French), ‘solidariedade/solidário’ (Portuguese) and ‘solidaridad/solidario’ (Spanish). In my experience, these are used more often in those languages than in English, where a different word is usually more appropriate. Especially in the international development field.
For translators, these terms are notoriously tricky to translate and, when it comes to deciding on the English word that fits best, that decision is guided by the context. So what we English speakers think of as ‘solidarity’ is not necessarily what French speakers think of when they say ‘solidarité’. Or is it?
Narrow definitions need to be ‘unpacked’ to fit their context
What I found so interesting about Professor Ansell’s lecture was that he seemed to me to be proposing a definition of solidarity. One that gets closer to the meaning of the equivalent term in French, Spanish and Portuguese. Or am I wrong about that? Let’s see what my trusty bilingual and monolingual dictionaries say.
Compared and contrasted definitions
The table below compares the meanings of roughly equivalent terms in French, Spanish, Portuguese and English. It’s worth noting that a dictionary definition is just a starting point for a professional translator – the definition can rarely just be inserted into a text as is; context is everything.
Translators do their research
What do you notice about the English definitions and examples, compared with those in the other languages? Some sources provide quite a few different examples from specific contexts and sectors. One glaringly obvious thing is that we don’t often use the word ‘solidary’ in English. Well I don’t!
Perhaps you also notice subtle differences in nuance, or perhaps you don’t think they differ much at all. What I notice is that it’s those examples in context that really tell you what the term might actually mean.
You’ll also notice that not all of the examples I’ve quoted are from conventional dictionaries. One is a corpus, and another is Wikipedia. This shows how, though the dictionary is often a translator’s starting point, things get REALLY interesting when you dig deeper than that.
I find it intriguing that the Wikipedia articles in French and English, and the parallel language corpus, offer the most context (I use Sketch Engine on most days for that reason). Perhaps because language is always evolving.
More real-life translation examples
Whichever the source language, it’s generally true that English prefers more concrete language. Over the years, this has often required me to ‘unpack’ the intended meaning behind a French, Spanish or Portuguese term to pinpoint the right English word for the context.
Depending on context and register, I’ve used some of the following words and phases to express the concept of ‘Solidaire/solidario/solidário’:
Community/community outreach
Supporting good causes
Pulling together
Inclusive
Close-knit (if talking about a team)
Socially responsible (referring to funds)
Standing shoulder to shoulder
(Re)connecting with others (when talking about people)
Charitable initiatives
For the common good
Caring (education)
As a translator, my task is to successfully communicate across cultures in a way that someone who simply ‘speaks the language’ cannot. Intercultural communication is about more than simply replacing words with other words; it recognises that our understanding of words is forever shaped by our (changing) social and cultural contexts as humans.
Over to you
Going back to the Reith Lectures, what I believe Professor Ansell was proposing was a revival and almost a repurposing of the term ‘solidarity’ that I think fits more closely with the French, Spanish and Portuguese concepts. He talks about solidarity as the ‘social glue’ that binds us together in our polarised societies.
The lecture distinguishes solidarity – a shared feeling of ‘us’ – from charity, which is more an act of a fortunate ‘us’ giving to an unfortunate ‘them’. And Ansell argues against seeing ourselves through a binary lens – us and them.
What do you think about the various meanings of the term ‘solidarity’?
Would you agree it has subtle nuances and differences between languages?
Have you found any other definitions, or have you used any other translations of these terms in your work?