techforword’s round up of Black Friday deals for translators, interpreters and language professionals, including 30% off all our courses and an incredible deal on techforword insiders!

Online events offer unparalleled opportunities to bring together colleagues from across the globe.

Yet we’ve all attended plenty that were unsatisfying, draining and felt like a waste of time.

This post takes you behind the scenes of two dynamic online summits with thousands of happy participants.

The secret to success: Don’t replicate in-person events. Innovate.

Read on to discover how we designed the summits, why we picked our tools, and how we used that toolbox to create two powerhouse online summits.

In the last year, the number of online meetings, webinars and networking sessions for translators and interpreters has shot through the roof.

By now, you’ve probably picked up a solid webcam and figured out how to tweak your lighting and framing to look good on camera. You may have even splurged on a green screen to hide all the chaos behind your desk - or created a professional branded background for your online meetings.

If so, you’ve likely stumbled across a common problem. High-quality webcams tend to have wide-angle lenses, which means they tend to pick up way more than that tiny clean patch you’ve carefully curated behind you.

Wish you could crop stuff in the background out of the shot for online meetings? Looking to crop your webcam so it only captures your green screen?

You can.

In this month’s column, we’ll show you how to zoom and crop your webcam for online events using a nifty tool called OBS Studio - and even add in that branded background.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve seen your fair share of virtual backgrounds. Most of them aren’t especially professional or convincing, with blurry edges around people’s faces and backgrounds that bleed through.

The secret behind a good look isn’t the background image, it’s using a green screen.

Once you’ve picked up your green screen, you could just use one of the backgrounds that come with your meeting platform. But why would you want to use the same background as everyone else?

In this month’s column, we’ll show you how to create a professional, branded background image that’ll make you stand out at your next online meeting.

Without a doubt, the easiest path to solid audio during remote meetings is to invest in a USB headset.

But questions abound. Where should you place the microphone to avoid popping sounds? What makes a headset high quality? Do you need a noise-cancelling microphone? Do built-in limiters really work?

In this column, we’ll answer these questions and share our suggestions for finding your perfect interpreting headset.

As more and more interpreting work has gone online, the quest for the perfect headphones has begun in earnest.

Yet unpacking the jargon and discovering your ideal pair of headphones is quite the challenge! 

After all, headphones come in all shapes and sizes. And the terminology used to describe all these shapes and sizes can be overwhelming.

Never fear - we’re here to help! 

We've been huge proponents of tablets for interpreting for over a decade. And when the first tablets came out, we wondered how this new technology could be used for interpreting -- we're curious about everything, like all interpreters!

So we started poking around and discovered countless reasons why tablets make great interpreting companions.

In this article, we share some of our favorite ways to use tablets for preparation, consecutive interpreting and in the booth.

Over the last two months, we’ve been hard at work on our second e-book: The Interpreter's Guide to Audio and Video.

For this book, Josh teamed up with renowned interpreting expert Naomi Bowman to help you take the stress out of audio and video.

The end is in sight, and we're excited to announce that we’ll be releasing our brand new e-book on Monday, June 7th! 🎉

But first, we thought we’d kick things off in style - with a giveaway!

As more and more interpreting has gone virtual, we've all been searching for ways to teach and practice online.

Today, we share our thoughts on GoReact, a web-based platform that makes it easy to record the original and simultaneous interpretation, adjust the volume while listening back to both tracks and provide feedback using text, audio or video. Plus, since GoReact supports dual video tracks, it's perfect for both signed and spoken language interpreting practice.

If you’re an interpreter adding a new language or exploring a new subject, speech repositories can be real gold mines.

But what if you’re looking for thousands of hours of authentic high-level speeches and recordings of the interpretation as delivered? Look no further than the UN Digital Repository, a little-known treasure trove.

In this month‘s column, we‘re focusing on an interpreting mode that is often seen as decidedly low-tech or even no-tech: consecutive.

And chances are that, due to the pandemic, you find yourself doing more consec than usual, and on online video platforms to boot!

So if you want to brush up or enhance your note-taking skills, here are some tech-infused tips to get you started.

Think auto-correct and grammar-checking tools are old hat? Think again! Today, we’d like to tell you about your multilingual writing assistant: LanguageTool.

2020 has been a year of upheaval and changes, but also a year of incredible growth for techforword and our profession overall.

Read our reflections on how we've grown over the last year and for a sneak preview of what lies ahead - plus a list of our most popular webinars, videos, blog posts and free resources of 2020.

There’s an app for pretty much everything, or so they say. And it’s true that smartphones and tablets have brought us millions and millions of apps to solve nearly every problem under the sun.

But surely you use a handful of sites that don’t have an app or simply work better online. How do you make sure your go-to websites don’t get lost among all those browser tabs? How do you get them to behave more like real apps? SSBs to the rescue!

We don’t know about you, but we’ve been in a heck of a lot of online meetings recently.

And if you’re anything like us, your home office doesn’t look great on camera. So how do we set up our home office to win over clients?

In this month’s column, we’ll share tips for looking and sounding great on video calls. We’ll also let you in on a little secret: a portable green screen so you can look like a pro in no time.

It's Black Friday!

Read on to discover our two special offers and round-up of some of the best tech deals we've found.

At a time when online learning is more important than ever, Nathaniel Elcock talks to Alexander Drechsel and Josh Goldsmith from techforword.

Technology is improving due to big data and new approaches to machine translation, but translators and interpreters: Don’t give up your day job.

In last month’s Tech-savvy interpreter 2.0 column, we shared the first part of our discussion with Barry S. Olsen on the history of interpreting technology.

This month, read on to hear Barry’s take on the present and future of technology in interpreting.

Do you often take handwritten notes during meetings? Nothing quite matches the experience of writing by hand, right?

There’s one problem, though: Going back through your notes and digitizing them is such a hassle!

Today, we’ll share why we think Nebo is the go-to app for handwriting conversion and show you five of our favorite features.