The ATA Chronicle - May/June 2017 - 22

KEY COMPONENTS OF SUCCESSFUL TRANSLATOR RECRUITMENT continued
professional associations are excellent
resources for recruitment efforts. For
example, visiting the member directories
of ATA chapters and affiliates (including
my local group, the Midwest Association
of Translators and Interpreters) is a great
solution for recruiting U.S.-based linguists
for any projects with location or citizenship
requirements.9 Vendor managers can
also carry out simple online searches to
identify professional associations and their
directories for specific target countries,
such as the Swedish Association of
Professional Translators10 for Swedish
translators, the Brazilian Association of
Translators and Interpreters11 for Brazilian
Portuguese linguists, and the Association
of Translators and Interpreters of Ontario12
for Canadian French. Beyond these
online resources, there's no substitute
for meeting new candidates in person at
local and national translation events and
conferences. For vendor managers and all
other translation professionals, it pays to
get involved.

Communication between vendor managers and translators during
recruitment sets the tone for the entire working relationship between a
translator and a firm.

up for the greatest chance of success.7
First, for recruiters, membership in a
professional association such as ATA
demonstrates translators' understanding
of the business investments necessary
to operate as professionals within
the language services industry, and
presumably, their commitment to the
field. Second, membership also represents
a greater potential for participating
in legitimate ongoing professional
development through webinars, articles
in The ATA Chronicle, or the ATA's Annual
Conference. Members of professional
associations are also more likely to have
strong networks of other members of
professional associations to whom they
can turn with language-, process-, or
technology-related questions-and who
they can recommend to vendor managers!
Other well-known translator directories
include Proz.com and Translators Café
(TC).8 These directories are good resources
22

The ATA Chronicle | May/June 2017

for languages of lesser diffusion, in
particular. However, when recruiting
through these directories, vendor managers
should be aware that the free profiles
available on these sites are more likely
to attract scammers and new translators
who are more likely to misrepresent
their translation and subject-matter
qualifications. That's not to say that
professionals can't be found on directories
such as Proz and TC, only that added
efforts are recommended to verify that
individuals' actual training, background,
tools, etc., correspond to any claims they've
made in their directory profiles-advice
that holds true no matter the directory
through which one recruits. (Recruiters
can also limit their searches on Proz to
display only vendors who have had their
credentials verified by Proz, which is a
worthwhile parameter to put in place.)
While the ATA, Proz, and TC directories
are perhaps the best known, regional

BASIC CRITERIA FOR IDENTIFYING
SUITABLE VENDORS
An often-quoted statistic within the
language services industry is that
recruiters decide whether to pursue a
candidate after spending just one minute
scanning that candidate's résumé, CV, or
profile. This is absolutely the case, and the
speed with which this decision-making
is carried out is based on the reality
of recruitment. To illustrate, my own
vendor management experience includes
recruiting talent in over 50 languages. To
carry out that recruitment, I contacted
1,000 candidates in 2016 alone, and of
these 1,000 initial contacts, approximately
40% of candidates responded to my
request. Of the approximately 40% who
responded, around 20% met the criteria
established by my firm for experience,
education, translation technology,
payment capabilities, etc. That is to say,
for every one translator who met the
organizational requirements to be passed
on to linguistic testing, 12.5 translators
were contacted. That does not include the
countless profiles, résumés, and CVs that
were first screened to even establish a list
of candidates to contact. Therefore, no
matter the directory being used to identify
www.atanet.org
http://www.Proz.com http://www.atanet.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - May/June 2017
