This year I have been contributing a regular column to Diálogos Online Magazine, a wonderful publication put out by a colleague, Martin Boyd, in Toronto. The latest issue has just gone live, so please do hop on over and check it out. Martin’s editorial addresses the growing influence of Hispanics on Canadian life, the feature article is about the new (and first!) bilingual Hispanic school in Toronto, there is a beautiful piece of classic literature by Alfonsina Storni, and a book review of an anothology of short stories by Hispanic-Canadian authors.
In my column I muse on the concept of “Worth” – how clients view what our services are worth as translators and how we view the services that other people can provide us, from a financial perspective. These are challenging economic times, for sure, and to compound that, our profession in particular has still not got its due. I was talking with Jon (my partner) about this very thing on Sunday, as we were out for a walk. He pointed out that while I may have built up a successful career, translators and interpreters as a whole are notoriously underpaid. The reasons are many, but I tend to attribute this mostly to a lack of knowledge. We need to reach out to clients and the world as a whole to get people to truly understand what our work involves, and therefore why they must pay a decent price for it.
If you have thoughts on this or the issues I raise in the online mag, do post a comment!
