Origins of The New Leaf Marketing Program for Translators Only

Background of Founder

Course founder Susan Remkus is a guest contributor to MultiLingual magazine. Susan is not a language services provider. While she was working on her master’s in linguistics (her first master’s is in English, specialization text linguistics), she worked at a translation agency as project and office manager. Over the years, she became very familiar with the viewpoints from the client side. You know them…

• Translation is a commodity.

“What’s the per-word cost to me?”

• Translation means pouring words into another language.

“Can’t you get this done by tomorrow?”

• L2 is no different than L1; language is language.

“You shouldn’t have any questions, so no need to call us until you’ve got the job completed.”

• No creativity or finesse needed.

“It won’t be much work for you. We already did the hard part of writing it.”

Over and over, Susan saw the gap between the provider side and the client side:

The translator side consisted of artisans dedicated to their craft, professionals possessing an inherent need to find just the right word and phrase.

The client side consisted of well-meaning but uninformed business people who wanted high quality (but couldn’t define it), great prices (but didn’t know what that meant), and fast turnaround (but didn’t understand the potential impact on quality).

How this translator training program came about

After she struck out on her own as a messaging strategist, Susan had the pleasure of helping small translation companies and freelancers with their marketing.

That got her thinking that she should contact other translation companies and freelance translators to see if she could help them promote their services.

What she realized, however, was that most independent translators and smaller companies didn’t have the budget for their own personal outsourced marketing help.

But from the sample print pieces and web pages a number of LSPs sent for critique work, Susan realized something these translators held in common.

Although they were clearly experts at their work as language service providers, they could use a hand promoting their services. Plus, they could benefit from objective guidance concerning changes in marketing tactics that could result in significant changes to their bottom line.

So, Susan spent the next few years developing this course – for translators only. The program works because there are aspects of marketing that apply to everyone in the LSP profession.

What Susan wants for you as a student of The New Leaf Marketing Program for Translators Only is to give you an edge in marketing: translator tools to improve your productivity skills and get more work from direct clients.

The marketing course is designed to help you get the translation work you want as you fine-tune your business skills and showcase client-focused value. You’ll learn easy-to-implement ideas in a step-by-step fashion.