Age you went on your first international trip: I went to elementary school in western New York and we went to Canada frequently, but I left North America for the first time when I was 13, on a trip to France with my mom.

Best foreign beer you’ve had and where: Pass. I hate the taste of beer!

Cuisine (favorite): Tie. Anything Asian and vegetarian or anything French and pastry.

Destinations-favorite, least favorite and why: Favorite destination is a tie between Nepal and Paris, because in their own ways they are utterly unlike anyplace else in the world. Least favorite: the border crossing town between Nepal and India, which is not only “small, congested, dusty and dirty” but where you can also lie awake all night listening to the various calls to prayer blasted from the various temples and mosques on both sides of the border.

Event you experienced abroad that made you say “wow”: The Hungry Ghost Festival in Singapore. My husband and I backpacked across Asia for a year after we got married (an experience that also made me say “wow”!) and this festival was on the first night of our trip; the whole city was lit up with candles, lanterns and incense. It was my first time in Asia and a truly breathtaking experience.

Favorite mode of transportation: If I’m on a road, a bike. If not, my feet. Any place is within walking distance if you have the time! And I love how these modes of transportation bring everything down to a human scale.

Greatest feeling while traveling: Losing track of what day of the week it is. Now that’s vacation!

Hottest place you’ve ever been: Anywhere in Southeast Asia is pretty intensely hot and humid, mitigated by the fact that there’s lots of air conditioning. Honorable mention to the Arun Valley in Nepal, where it was 104 degrees and I was carrying a 60 pound backpack full of winter clothes for the higher elevations.

Incredible service you’ve experienced and where: The Gite du Mont Albert in Quebec, which we could afford only because the US dollar was worth almost 2 Canadian dollars at the time. It was the dead of winter, in the middle of the mountains and although there was only 1 vegetarian item on the menu, the chef cooked a different, totally amazing, vegetarian item for me and my husband every night.

Journey that took the longest: In actual terms, probably flying from Boston to Singapore. In terms of how long it felt, riding in the unheated baggage car of a night train between Grenoble, France and Salzburg, Austria (holiday weekend: all seats were taken and the conductor took pity on us!).

Keepsake from your travels: Sugar cubes and sugar packets. A little weird, I know, but I’m really not a knick-knack collector, so I bring the sugar home and add it to my coffee and think of the place I got it from. I also like interesting plastic shopping bags (ditto on the weird, maybe this is just me!).

Let-down sight-why and where: Not the Taj Mahal itself, but its surroundings. Before we went there, I never realized that it’s smack in the middle of a huge,  gritty, industrial city. Somehow I envisioned it in the middle of a wildflower meadow or something!

Moment when you fell in love with travel: On my first trip to France at age 13, my mom and I went to Mont Saint-Michel which is still one of my favorite places on earth. I had read a story about it in my 7th grade French textbook, entitled “Le beau paysage sauvage de Mont Saint-Michel” (The wild and beautiful landscape of Mont Saint-Michel) and I think it was one of my first experiences of seeing a place I had learned about in school coming to life.

Obsession-what are you obsessed with taking pictures of while traveling?: Animals? Mountains? My daughter? I’m not a very fanatical photographer, but I guess those are it.

Passport stamps- how many and from where?: Lots; I don’t really keep track but I do like passport stamps!

Quirkiest attraction you’ve visited and where: The ancient erotic temples in Khajuraho, India (you asked, OK!). The duty-free store in the Dubai airport, which sells Mercedes automobiles. The world’s northernmost Turkish minaret (in Eger, Hungary).

Recommended sight, event or experience: Two things I could watch all day: the astronomical clock in Bern, Switzerland and the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas.

Splurge-something you have no problem forking over money for while traveling: A truly unique experience. I’m really not a “stuff” person and I don’t do a lot of shopping on vacation, but give me a really cool boat ride or animal-watching tour or a zipline and I’m there.

Touristy thing you’ve done: I admit it, I love cheesy tourist stuff. I’m going to side with Jill here and say that the Sound of Music bus tour in Austria (where you drive around to the places the movie was filmed, and the movie plays in the tour bus) is high on the list. Dracula’s castle in Romania definitely deserves a mention.

Unforgettable travel memory: Spending my 29th and my husband’s 35th birthday camping in a stone hut at 15,000 feet in Nepal, watching the sunset over Langtang Lirung and the moonrise over Fluted Peak. Seeing wild tapirs grazing on the beach in Costa Rica. Traveling through Eastern Europe in 1991-1992 during the first wave of tourism after the Iron Curtain came down. Partying under the Eiffel tower on New Year’s Eve!

Visas-how many and for where?: French residence visa, tourist visas to India, Brazil and Laos (got the visa but never went there!).

Wine-best glass of wine while traveling and where?: I spent a summer in the Bordeaux region; pretty much anything there would qualify.

eXcellent view and from where?: Man-made: the Paris panorama from the Pont Neuf. Natural: Mt. Everest; kind of cliché but it is really amazing in person!

Years spent traveling: A year living in France, a year trekking across Asia, summers in France and Denmark, probably at least one trip a year outside the US since I was 13 and I’m 40 now!

Zealous sports fans and where: Cricket fans in Australia. Our Australian friends even took us to have drinks at a luxury hotel in Melbourne where (no kidding) the bathrooms have a particularly good view of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

This week’s essay, by violinist Joshua Bell, particularly grabbed my attention. Although I’m not a rabid fan of Bell’s music, he’s the subject of one of my favorite newspaper articles ever, Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pearls Before Breakfast, in which Weingarten chronicles Bell’s incognito performance in the Washington DC subway at rush hour. Bell’s “My Favorite Mistake” column tells the story of his first international violin competition performance, in which he flubbed the opening of his piece and decided to stop, apologize to the audience and start over rather than soldiering on through the performance. This got me thinking that we translators and interpreters, who by nature thrive on being right about everything, could also benefit from hauling our favorite mistakes out of the archives. Here’s mine. I told this story during the “Smart Business” panel at the Boston ATA conference so it’s not totally fresh, but this is its first time in writing!

I started freelancing in 2002, right after my daughter was born. I had a Master’s in French and had done a translation internship, but I really had no clue about the conventions of the translation industry. Plus, I was very, very hungry for work because I knew that my goal of working from home to be with my daughter was completely dependent on my success as a freelancer: if I didn’t make it, it was off to full-time daycare for her and off to a cubicle for me.

One of the first assignments that I received was from an agency, a very simple birth certificate translation, maybe 100 words total. I think that my minimum charge at the time was $30, and the agency didn’t give me any special instructions, just asked me to “translate the birth certificate.” So there I am at my computer, thinking that this is the easiest $30 I’ve ever made. I mean, for 100 words, why even put the translation in a Word document? Why not just type it into an e-mail to save the client some time dealing with the attachment. Obviously the missing link here is my lack of knowledge of the conventions of translating an official document: the big time investment isn’t translating the 50 or 100 words, it’s re-formatting the translation to look as much as possible like the original. So off I go, typing the translation into an e-mail and firing it off to the client, feeling really proud of myself (aren’t I efficient?!).

I have to say that the client was fairly understanding; probably more understanding than I would have been had I been on the receiving end of that e-mail. In any case I think they paid me the $30 we had agreed on, which was more than generous on their part since they ended up hiring another translator to do the job. But when I think back on this Favorite Mistake, I think that it really helped me. Obviously I learned something about official document translation, but I also learned a few larger lessons:

• Knowing how to translate and knowing how to run a freelance business are completely different things; to succeed as a freelancer, you need to know both.
• Try as we might to forget it, we were all new, inexperienced freelancers once. Maybe someone else’s stupid mistake wasn’t quite as stupid as mine, but we’ve all made them.
• When translation newbies ask uninformed questions (Why doesn’t my TM tool spit out a translation after I type something into it? How much do I have to pay to get work from an agency? I charge 2 cents a word, is that about the industry standard? I’m looking for a business that’s easy to run in my spare time, would conference interpreting be good?), it’s hard not to be condescending, but it’s important to at least try. Whenever I answer a question like these, I think back to my “this is the easiest $30 I ever made!!” moment and try to give a thorough and non-condescending answer. Although these questions (and my birth certificate mistake) are completely off the mark, I also think it’s fair to ask how someone who’s never worked as a translator would know that TM and MT are two different things, or that agencies don’t charge up-front fees, or that the highest-paid freelancers make 40 or 50 cents a word, or that conference interpreters go to school for years  just to learn the basics of the job.

Readers, any other Favorite Mistakes out there?

The full course information and registration are on my website, and the cost is $250, with a $50 discount for ATA members. I conduct the course entirely online, so it’s open to translators in any country and you don’t have to be online at a specific time. Everyone in the course also receives a copy of the newly released second edition of my book, “How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator.” One participant in the December session commented that “Corinne McKay’s course, “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator,” and book, “How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator,” are invaluable tools for the freelance translator. Her book will be bible for my career pursuit as a translator. I would recommend the class to beginners as well as already-established freelance translators. Excellent!” That was gratifying to read! Hope to see some blog readers in the January session; the December session filled up early!

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

So, this trip was inspired by an American Airlines fare sale that was just too good to pass up. I’m not usually sucked in by such things but at $1,100 for three round-trip tickets from Denver to San Jose, it was just such a tempting deal! We had visited Costa Rica in 2009 (Manuel Antonio and Monteverde) and loved it, so it was time for a return visit.

After a night at the highly-recommended Hotel Buena Vista (spring for a villa!), we flew on Nature Air (circa $150 each, round trip) to the tiny airstrip in Drake Bay, the closest point of entry to Corcovado National Park. I’m not great with small planes, but this outfit seems very professional, and as my husband said “at least you can see that the propellers are still turning.”

So we land, hop out, and the only person in sight is a guy with a pickup truck. Calling my Spanish horrific is giving it a compliment that it doesn’t deserve, but I manage to confirm that he’s somehow associated with the lodge we’re staying at, so we get in. As he’s chatting away in Spanish, the only words I understand are “rio” (river) and “caballo” (horse). Hmmm. Then the pickup truck pulls up by the aforementioned river, and I get it. River very high (lots of rain). Hence the horse. Good thing we brought backpacks!!

We split our first week between Corcovado Adventures Tent Camp and the Sirena ranger station in Corcovado National Park. Both were incredible (if you really want the details, I reviewed all of our accommodations on Tripadvisor); totally wild and amazing. Here’s just a sampling of the wildlife and scenery!

That’s a scarlet macaw, a coatimundi (a little hard to see in the shadows; it’s like a tropical raccoon), a Baird’s tapir (totally incredible!!), a boa constrictor, a tree frog and the beach in front of the tent camp. We also did some nice snorkeling at an offshore island.
Then we were off to the Arenal volcano area, thanks to the excellent services of Coach Costa Rica and their shuttle vans. We rented this cute little house right in La Fortuna:

You can rent it too on VRBO! It was pretty rainy in Arenal; as the locals said, “We have two gorgeous seasons, rainy and extremely rainy!” but we did get to see the top of the volcano. Our favorite experiences were whitewater rafting with Costa Rica Descents, paddleboarding on Lake Arenal with Desafio and zip-lining with EcoGlide. I had never been zip-lining before and I have to say it was very cool; my husband and my daughter also did the infamous Tarzan swing there and loved it. Our two favorite “hidden attractions” were the El Silencio nature preserve (on the left side of the main road immediately before you get to the turnoff for the national park) and the Termales Los Laureles hot springs (on the right side of the main road, past Baldi hot springs). Both of these require a car or taxi to get to and it helps to speak a little Spanish. However we thought that the trails at El Silencio were more impressive than in the national park, and the Los Laureles hot springs were a real deal at $8 for adults and $4 for kids, as opposed to $30-$60 per person at the bigger, tourist-oriented hot springs. Just be warned that it is rainy and cloudy a lot of the time in Arenal. You do a lot of cloud-watching, saying “is there really a volcano in there???”

As you can tell, we love Costa Rica and we’re mulling over ideas for at least three or four more trips. We’ve never been to the Caribbean side (Tortuguero national park and similar) or to the arid Guanacaste region in the West, and now Nature Air also flies to the Bocas del Toro archipelago which is just over the Panama border. So hopefully I’ll have some future off-topic posts about those destinations too!

My verdict on both of these services is: meh. Which, now that it’s been added to the Collins English Dictionary, is a legitimate expression of indifference and mediocrity. So here we go with the details:

For now, I’m sticking with Vonage, but I don’t love them. I have their “US & Canada 300″ plan, which runs $11.99 per month plus taxes and fees. I set it up myself with no problems, Vonage ported my custom ring number with no problems, and the service worked as soon as I connected the Vonage box. Given the overall reputation of telcos and customer service, you have to give them credit for that! However, the sound quality on the Vonage line is far from stellar. It’s definitely not as clear as a land line or even Skype; I haven’t had any dropped calls, but the sound quality just is not smooth: lots of blips and skips and missed half-syllables, which can be irritating on a business call. And it’s worth noting that my DSL connection is fast enough that Skype, YouTube, etc. are no problem. In addition, the outgoing sound (meaning what the person I’m talking to hears) seems to cut out completely for a second or two if I’m talking on the Vonage line and my home land line rings. Still, for $16 a month including taxes, it’s workable. I mainly have the line so that my clients get a nice, professional outgoingl message, and so that I can update the message when I’m out of the office. One Vonage feature I’ve really come to love is the e-mailed .wav files of voicemail messages. When I’m away for a few days, for example at the ATA conference, I can just listen to my voicemails on my netbook and then decide if I need to respond. No more calling the office line a few times a day to check for messages! Executive summary: not a bad value for the cost, but not advisable if you talk on the phone a great deal for business.

On the other hand, WebEx proved to be a fairly crashing disappointment. Speaking of Translation purchased a subscription to Event Center 100 for $99 a month, a fairly large investment for our small venture. However, we were convinced that WebEx was the webinar platform of choice for enterprise-quality events, so we felt that the investment would pay off. It took us a few tries to get the platform working (and we’re not technophobes!) and the user interface has some definite flaws. For example when you schedule an event, the default number of attendees is “99999,” regardless of the number of attendees that your account allows. So, if you forget to change that number, your webinar can be oversubscribed before you realize the error. In addition, the interface allows you to enable both the over-the-phone audioconference option and the VOIP audioconference option, but they are not compatible with each other; and that’s before you find out that the VOIP feature is essentially unusable due to its poor sound quality. On three of the webinars we hosted, the presenter’s audio connection suddenly dropped in the middle of the session (different presenters using different phone providers) and our attendees had many problems configuring WebEx’s viewer widget to view our live webinars and our recordings. WebEx’s tech support reps were always polite and helpful, but in the end it took a huge amount of our time to resolve (or attempt to resolve) these problems and we ended up issuing a lot of complimentary webinar vouchers to make up for them. There are also some features that seem pretty basic that WebEx just does not have: no on-hold or waiting music for attendees, no way to block attendees from hearing what the presenters are saying before the session starts, etc. So, we’re all through with WebEx for now!

On a more positive note, I recently discovered a very neat audioconferencing tool, FreeConferenceCallHD. Like other free audioconference services, this one allows your call attendees to phone a toll number and participate in your conference call while you control things via a web dashboard. The dashboard allows you to mute and unmute people, record the call, etc. The very appealing feature of FreeConferenceCallHD is the option for attendees to connect by Skype, using a Skype-to-Skype contact (free) rather than a Skype-to-phone contact. For example, attendees just add “freeconferencecallhd.XXXXXXXXXX” (where the Xs represent your toll dial-in number) as a Skype contact; the contact request is automatically accepted, then the attendee initiates a call to that number and they’re placed into the audioconference. This is nice because it eliminates international access number problems; no more “I live in the Czech Republic but I have a Slovenian cell phone number, so what number should I call???”  I’ve conducted two very successful tests with this platform; at first I was honestly skeptical that a free service could provide a high-quality product, but the two calls I’ve done have honestly gone better than any of the WebEx sessions that we did. So, this looks like an attractive option for 2012!