Flirting with a Fiverr & more

If you always want to get paid...

Payment practices are a perpetual pain in Trashlation World. What professional translator or interpreter has not, at some point, faced difficulty getting paid for work delivered. Or in my case, consultant, independent solution developer and instructor, since I retired from translation three months ago and no longer accept such tasks in the increasingly thankless environment where they are requested.

Net never has become the modus operandi of too many wankers in the NMT-AI-MOUSE Fanboy and -gurl Klub, and when B of A, Barclays, Santander of some other clan of thieves fails to provide the desired credit for the Incredible Journey to Ruin, there will always be those AI Artists Formerly Known as Trashlators who understand that in matter of money, all that really matters is mindset.

Fuck you. Pay me. Well, imagine getting paid! Isn't that exciting? Fuck you. Pay me. I'm more excited by the structure of your fucking kneecaps and how fragile it is... SET YOUR MIND TO PAY ME.

But wait, Paulie, there may be a better way!

A perpetually solvent friend who owns a couple of German service companies once shared his secret: when in doubt, demand payment in advance. When there is no doubt, demand double. But what if the prospect just walks away? Offer them a peck on the check and hold the door for them in gratitude for the grief they are about to save you.

Times are hard. But payment practices are, alas, too often limp. Like a little mushroom past its sell-by date and full of mold and other things best not named.

I'm personally fortunate not to deal with many deadbeats; avoiding business with Italian and American companies certainly helps. Well, I have a soft spot for the Portuguese, but let's not go there.

I have another problem. I had administrative work even more than I hate not getting paid, and since I acquired a retired surgeon as a billing assistant and, at about the same time, took on a new role as a trainer for incoherent billing software like SAGE, not getting paid has been a source of surprising pleasure. But our five dogs still demand food, and if it does come in bags and come on time, well... there is that extra weight I'm carrying, the Portuguese pit bull is fond of reminding me.

And I am sure that many clients and friends and friends with the misfortune to be clients keep a special dartboard with my face on it for those times I get around to writing the bill after a year of so.

Fuck you. Pay me. Well fuck you. Write the fucking bill. Yeah, right, you tell me again how all that works here in Portugal where the tax laws are so screwy that almost none of the invoicing tools typically used by translators, companies involved with language services (regardless of whether they actually provide any) in other countries are compliant with Portuguese tax law, so I often feel myself well and truly fucked.

Enter the performance platforms such as Fiverr, which I am beginning to consider for certain recurring requests where I have asked Dios for a better intake process in which people tell me exactly what they need, provide the means of doing that, including the money to pay for the electricity to drive the tools I use to reach their goal and, well, just let me get on with it and make something nice and bless them for a change.

I started toying with platformed pre-payment about four years ago, when I started using Teachable as a way to demonstrate to memoQ and others how professional tools instruction could be improved and content could be shaped in more useful ways. I may not have been successful in convincing others to Do the Right Thing, but now that I have more time on my hands and have resigned myself to take a shot at that myself and maybe actually charge for all that knowledge that so many people mint money with, I am really, really glad that the Portuguese tax mysteries are handled in a way that does not involve me at all and is completely correct. No more constant special requests for special invoices for special people in special countries and special claims on my non-existent admin time.

So, that's the news, I guess. Next time you need a training video, a dash of regex for your project soup, a magical mysterious import filter for Formats Unknown or the like, there's a process. And it's not "fuck you". That's between consenting buyers and the platforms from which they draw their services....

memoQ Courses, Resources & Consulting at Translation Tribulations Tech

The new online school offers a variety of resources for new and experienced users of desktop and server editions

For many years now, I have advocated for better professional education for users of translation process support software at every level. I have tested curriculum delivery platforms, better ways of making information more accessible to those who need it, and more. In a limited scope, this has been a successful effort.

My greatest hope in these efforts was to encourage professional associations, technology providers and universities to do better by their clientele. I would judge the success there as mixed, at best. The wind of change discussed, for many of them, could fill one's sails... for a voyage off the edge of their flat Earth. Their reluctance to provide even minimal indexes for navigating copious video content is simply baffling, as an example.

Even with the current pandemic, I have seen little progress, though that may be as much for reasons such as those which kept me largely silent last year. It's hard to think about doing things better when you have to ask honestly which of the people you care for will be lost because of the refusal of so many national governments to do so.

In any case, I've always been one to advocate more personal involvement. If a person says they're hungry, give them food and listen to their stories. Cash may not be the answer. The courses, consulting and resources offered through my license of the Teachable platform will cover much of issues and assistance for which I have been an advocate in the translation sector for two decades. I also hope to involve other language service educators to offer their unique and valuable approaches in this venue. This is not to compete with any existing associations or companies, but rather to continue to show them how we can all work together to help users develop the competence and confidence so often needed and not found.

This, like all of us, is a work in progress. Check out Translation Tribulations Tech (here, or by clicking the school graphic at the top) and see if anything there provides missing elements for your professional toolkit.

Some of the initial offerings include:

• re-released help guides I've written for learning memoQ, including some material in Portuguese. The link provided here is for a bundle which includes books and courses.
• a course with quick tips for maximizing terminology leverage in memoQ
• consulting which provides quick, affordable glossary building support for projects
• a special memoQ ergonomics course to improve user experience and efficiency 

Additional courses, consulting and tools for

• regular expressions as an aid for translation of patterned information like currency expressions, dates, legal citations, coded information, etc.
• better source document segmentation in projects
• memoQ server basics for collaborating groups and small companies
• memoQ and other technology for legal translation

will be available soon.

This platform provides a long-needed mechanism for providing more detailed learning assistance than I have enjoyed with this blog and my YouTube channel, and future publication habits on my part will reflect that. I'm excited about many ideas for moving ahead in quick and quicker steps with memoQ and so many other resources that many of us depend on for professional relief and productivity.

Tweeting away....

Got up this morning to not altogether unexpected good news that the Empire of MAGATs has fallen:

 

Sometimes you wake up in the morning, and sometimes... it seems that a country wakes up with you. From nightmares.#fuckthenazis#fucktrump#MAGA2020 #EatThisMAGAts pic.twitter.com/JsKskALOdP

— Kevin Lossner (@GermanENTrans) January 6, 2021

Yeah. Life is starting to feel normal again despite the usual continued death and destruction. But what does one do with babies if not put them in cages? 

A course announcement for terminology users in memoQ (i.e. any sensible user):

Course re-opened for enrollment:#memoQuickies: On Better Terms with #memoQ

The real deal for better #terminology leverage in #translation#xl8 #translate #l10n #Localization #LocalEyeshttps://t.co/bxpu6FhT1U pic.twitter.com/KtmmqW3OFU

— Kevin Lossner (@GermanENTrans) January 6, 2021

... which leads one to ask: How do I get there? Well, try this:

Check out the CAT skills courses and consulting services at #Translation Tribulations Tech. #1 in #memoQ productivity on desktops and servers.#l10n #xl8 #translate https://t.co/76kcL1UAgK pic.twitter.com/xMa3iBuGNK

— Kevin Lossner (@GermanENTrans) January 6, 2021

10 Tips to Term Base Mastery in memoQ! (online course)

Note: the pilot phase for this training course has passed, free enrollment has been closed, and the content is being revised and expanded for re-release soon... available courses can be seen at my online teaching site: https://transtrib-tech.teachable.com/

In the past few years I have done a number of long webinars in English and German to help translators and those involved in translation processes using the memoQ environment work more effectively with terminology. These are available on my YouTube channel (subscribe!), and I think all of them have extensive hotlinked indexes to enable viewers to skip to exactly the parts that are relevant to them. A playlist of the terminology tutorial videos in English is available here.

I've also written quite a few blog posts - big and small - teaching various aspects of terminology handling for translation with or without memoQ. These can be found with the search function on the left side of this blog or using the rather sumptuous keyword list.

But sometimes just a few little things can get you rather far, rather quickly toward the goal of using terminology more effectively in memoQ, and it isn't always easy to find those tidbits in the hours of video or the mass of blog posts (now approaching 1000). So I'm trying a new teaching format, inspired in part by my old memoQuickie blog posts and past tutorial books. I have created a free course using the Teachable platform, which I find easier to use than Moodle (I have a server on my domain that I use for mentoring projects), Udemy and other tools I've looked at over the years.

This new course - "memoQuickies: On Better Terms with memoQ! 10 Tips toward Term Base Mastery" - is currently designed to give you one tip on using memoQ term bases or related functions each day for 10 days. Much of the content is currently shared as an e-mail message, but all the released content can be viewed in the online course at any time, and some tips may have additional information or resources, such as videos or relevant links, practice files, quality assurance profiles or custom keyboard settings you can import to your memoQ installation.

These are the tips (in sequence) that are part of this first course version:

1. Setting Default Term Bases for New Terms
2. Importing and Exporting Terms in Microsoft Excel Files
3. Getting a Grip on Term Entry Properties in memoQ
4. "Fixing" Term Base Default Properties
5. Changing the Properties of Many Term Entries in a Term Base
6. Sharing and Updating Term Bases with Google Sheets
7. Sending New Terms to Only a Specific Ranked Term Base
8. Succeeding with Term QA
9. Fixing Terminology in a Translation Memory
10. Mining Words with memoQ

There is also a summary webinar recorded to go over the 10 tips and provide additional information.

I have a number of courses which have been developed (and may or may not be publicly visible depending on when you read this) and others under development in which I try to tie together the many learning resources available for various professional translation technology subjects, because I think this approach may offer the most flexibility and likelihood of success in communicating necessary skills and knowledge to an audience wider than I can serve with the hours available for consulting and training in my often too busy days.

I would also like to thank the professional colleagues and clients who have provided so much (often unsolicited) support to enable me to focus more on helping translators, other translation project participants and translation consumers work more effectively and reduce the frustrations too often experienced with technology.

Adding time codes to YouTube videos

For years now, I have advocated the use of tables of contents for long instructional videos, recorded webinars and suchlike. I saw these in a few instances, but it was never clear how the indices were produced, so I suggested merely writing a list of relevant points and their play times and scrolling manually. Understandably, not many adopted this suggestion.

Then I discovered that my video editor (Camtasia) could create tables of contents for a video automatically when creating a local file, an upload to YouTube or other exports if timeline markers were added at relevant points. The only disadvantage for me with this approach was the limit on the length of the descriptive text attached to the markers. Worse than Twitter in the old days.

But when I accidentally added a marker I didn't want and removed it from the YouTube video description (which is where a TOC resides on YouTube), I saw that things were much simpler than I imagined. And a little research with tutorials made by others confirmed that any time code written at the beginning of a line in the video's description will become a clickable link to that time in the video.

So I've begun to go through some of my old videos with a text editor opened along side. When the recording gets to a point that I want to include in the table of contents, I simply pass the cursor over the video, take note of the time, and then write that time code into the text file along with a description of any length.

Afterward, I simply paste the contents of that text file into the description field in YouTube's editor. When the Save button at the top right is clicked, the new description for the video will be active, and viewers can use the index to jump to the points they want to see. Because only a few lines of the description text are visible by default, I include a hint at the beginning of the text to let people know that the live table of contents is available if they click the SEE MORE link.

If Kilgray, SDL, Wordfast and others involved with the language services sector would adopt techniques like this for their copious recorded content on the Web, the value and accessibility of this content would increase enormously. It would also be very simple then to create hot links to important points in other environments (PowerPoint slides, PDF files, etc.) to help people get to the information they need to learn better.

Not to do this would truly be a great waste and a shame in many cases.

Spanish/English language service education online: Q&A with Judy Jenner

When I heard a few years ago that colleague Judy Jenner, who lives in Nevada (USA) had begun teaching courses at a California university, I pitied her for the commute. Then I heard that it was all done online, and while I remember some good programming courses I took that way ages ago, I was curious how this would apply to translation and interpreting. Since then I have met other professionals bringing their experience to university education this way and seen excellent online education in the Portuguese university system, so when Judy a few days ago that she would be offering two courses again this spring, I asked to see her syllabus to get a better understanding of her approach to education. That led to more questions... and answers.

(KSL) Judy, thank you for sharing the syllabi for your two courses offered this term through UC San Diego Extension. I have a great personal interest in how effective distance education is conducted, and the syllabus organization makes it clear that these are structured courses with clear objectives for those interested in Spanish/English language service careers. Could you tell me how you became involved with the UCSD Extension program?

(JJ) My pleasure. The university’s Extension program contacted me a few years ago and asked me to serve on their advisory committee for the certificate in English/Spanish translation and interpretation. I gladly accepted and helped them shape their program a bit. Following that pro bono work, the university asked me to teach a class. I was initially a bit hesitant, as I really enjoy giving one-day workshops for fellow professionals, but wasn’t sure about teaching beginners. However, I immediately fell in love with teaching and have gradually added two more classes. The positive feedback from students has been overwhelming, and I really enjoy helping educate the next generation of translators and interpreters.

(KSL) What is the typical profile of a student in your course? For whom would these courses not be suited? Do you have students outside the US?

(JJ) Anecdotally, I’d say that the vast majority of my students already have a bachelor’s degree and many hold a graduate degree as well. I’ve had many students looking for a career change and others who are young and looking for an education in T&I from a well-known university. I’ve even had a college professor of Spanish take my class, and he really enjoyed it. I also get many heritage Spanish speakers. These students are first-generation Americans with Hispanic parents who grew up in the US and spoke Spanish at home but have no formal education in Spanish. Many students do think that being bilingual means that they are automatically a translator or interpreter, and I go to great lengths to clear up that misconception (and many others). Some students have called my class “reality check,” and I think that describes it well. It’s my job to tell students about the realities of our profession without sugar-coating anything, and if a student finishes my class thinking she’s not yet qualified to sell her language services, then I think that’s also a perfectly good outcome. I think it’s crucial to prepare students for the realities of the marketplace, which T&I programs have traditionally not done. I also do have a lot of students from outside the US, including Spain, Bolivia, Argentina, Italy, Switzerland, etc. I love reading about my students’ lives and their adventures. I have a student who is currently teaching English in Russia.

(KSL) The syllabi mention the "Blackboard" system? What is this exactly? Are you familiar with other course management systems, and if so, how do these compare? Are your lectures live or recorded, and how are assignments handled?

(JJ) Blackboard is a powerful online learning system that’s widely used by leading universities around the world. It’s entirely web-based and houses all the lectures, discussion groups, grades and exams and quizzes. I’ve worked with other online learning systems, and I think Blackboard is probably the best system, as it is quite intuitive and user-friendly. However, just like every piece of software, it has some flaws. The lectures consist of pre-recorded PowerPoint presentations with audio that include exercises, lots of graphics and pictures, etc. Students have weekly deadlines that they must meet, and everything is handled through the Blackboard system.

(KSL) Are these courses part of a degree or certificate program? What other related offerings does UCSD Extension have?

(JJ) Yes, these courses are part of the online certificate in translation/interpretation. There are two certifications: one for translation (http://extension.ucsd.edu/programs/index.cfm?vAction=certDetail&vCertificateID=174) and one for translation and interpretation (http://extension.ucsd.edu/programs/index.cfm?vAction=certDetail&vCertificateID=83) Most of the classes, if not all of them, are offered online. Other classes are held at the La Jolla campus (which is quite gorgeous). However, students can just take individual classes as they wish and don’t necessarily have to work towards the certificate.

(KSL) What are the advantages and disadvantages you find in this type of instruction? Do you feel there are particularly important aspects in organizing such a course successfully?

(JJ) Here in the US, it’s quite a challenge to get a university education in translation and interpreting, which certainly isn’t the case in Europe. However, in recent years, many universities have started online programs, which helps fill a void. While these are not full degree programs, at least these are certificate programs that teach students the basics. The more people we can educate about our industry and its challenges and rewards, the better. However, I’d like to point out that I think it’s essential to look for a good university – preferably a bricks-and-mortar university that has added an online component rather than an online-only program, as the quality of instruction at some of these programs can be sub-par at best. Online instruction removes the geographical barrier and lets students do the work on their schedule. I really don’t think my translation students are missing out on anything they would get in a traditional classroom. I still answer questions in a very timely fashion, interact with students on a daily basis, and grade all their work. For the interpretation class, I think online education might be a bit better because few universities in the US have the simultaneous interpreting labs that are needed to properly practice simultaneous interpretation. Without these labs – and I have been to many workshops and classes where we have had to do this – the instructor just plays an audio file and all students interpret at the same time and record their performances using their iPhone (or similar). This is obviously not ideal as it gets quite noisy. With the online interpreting exercises, I read dozens of prepared speeches every class and students get to interpret them at home with a headset in a quiet environment. They can interpret the same files over and over and get practice that way. Of course they don’t get immediate feedback because I am not there with them, but in my experience, even when I attend week-long training sessions (I went to the highly regarded Monterey Institute of International Studies last year), you also get limited feedback, as class sizes tend to be large. Of course there are drawbacks as well because there’s nothing quite like meeting students in person. Luckily, I have met many of them at conferences, which is lovely. Unfortunately, I usually do not write letters of recommendation – I feel like I really need to spend time with someone before I can recommend them for graduate school, a job, etc.

(KSL) What is the deadline to sign up for your next courses?

(JJ) Introduction to Translation (five weeks) starts again on April 1, and you can sign up until April 1, although the class does tend to fill up. Introduction to Interpretation starts on May 6, and my brand-new class, Branding and Marketing for Translators and Interpreters, starts April 1 as well.

An indexed, recorded course lecture in the Blackboard environment. A lot easier to follow than typical "webinar" formats.
Click to enlarge.

*********** 

Judy Jenner is a court-certified interpreter (Spanish and German) and legal and business translator in Las Vegas, NV. She runs Twin Translations with her twin sister, Dagmar. They are the authors of the industry book “The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation,” which has sold more than 3,000 copies and is required reading at universities around the world. Judy pens the monthly Entrepreneurial Linguist column for the American Translators Association’s Chronicle and is a regular contributor to the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s Bulletin. Judy was born in Austria, grew up in Mexico City and has lived in the US since she was a teenager. She is the immediate past president of the Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association and a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and workshops in many countries, including Brazil, Ireland, UK, Austria, Germany, etc. In addition to her translation and interpreting work, Judy is an adjunct in the online program of the University of San Diego-Extension’s online certificate in translation and interpretation. She blogs at www.translationtimes.com and she’s on Twitter (@language_news).

Online workshop plans: memoQ for legal & financial translators

As readers of this blog know, I've spent a good part of the last year or more investigating some instructional practices for translators' continuing education and forming my own opinions about what works, what does not, and what might be improved. I've looked at different approaches to blogging, developed e-mail based tutorials for one company, acquired some familiarity with remote coaching options via Skype and TeamViewer, begun the production of short training videos on a YouTube channel, learned to use Moodle and other online courseware platforms, released a PDF e-book with short tutorial modules, supported the localization of some of the preceding things into Portuguese and... probably a few other things I don't remember at the moment. Somewhere in all of that I moved countries and translated a bit to pay bills and buy dog food.

Now I am considering working with a specialist translator to plan a flexible course on the use of memoQ in an optimal way - together with other technologies as required - to achieve better results in processes involved with legal and financial translation. The intent is in no way to teach anything about legal/financial translation as a subject, but rather how to organize the software and work processes to overcome frequent problems, satisfy particular customer requirements or achieve specific improvements in quality management for the translation work.

I have specific topics in mind based on my own work and questions directed to me from specialist colleagues in these areas, but I would like to have suggestions from others, particularly those who might be interested in involvement in such a course in some way. These suggestions can take any form and can be as simple as an observation regarding a difficulty you find in this area which you suspect might have a solution involving technology or working methods.

The delivery media planned are a combination of e-mail, "live" sessions for about an hour each week for small groups or individuals using Skype or TeamViewer, with these recorded and made available for viewing and/or download in a private Moodle course forum on my server. As it makes sense to do so, supplemental material will be provided as web pages, video clips, practice files for testing, memoQ light resources (such as stopword lists or auto-translation rules), PDF "handouts" from my new book edition and other sources.

I've set up an (experimental) mailing list - "Translate Solutions" to discuss this, other topics related to continuing education for translation technology and education/training resources. You are welcome to join the discussion there with a subscription request to translate_solutions-subscribe (at) lossner.net.

The scheduling and detailed subject matter of the course will be announced as specific content requests are received and assessed.

So let the fun begin.

Teach the translators well

My colleague Jayne Fox recently offered a list of various continuing education opportunities of interest under the title "Free webinars for translators and interpreters". It's worth a look.

I find her blog post title unfortunate but astute. Many colleagues caught in the Poverty Cult mentality won't look at anything unless it is "free". Free, software, free training, whatever. Very often a waste of time and money though. Translators and everyone else would do better to set their personal filters to seek the good first, and then apply cost criteria. If I'm flat broke, I'm not going to be paying my bills faster by wasting my time on crap. I need to focus on what will really build my skills and help my marketing. The fact that some of the things that will cost little or nothing is a matter of almost secondary importance no matter how empty the refrigerator and bank account might be.

In the same way, fat and happy translators billing €40 per word will not benefit from the fastest, most expensive computer hardware and software available. Anyone can benefit from good tools and some very good ones, such as OmegaT, can be had for no investment but your time. Whether OmegaT is better than SDL Trados Studio, Fluency or memoQ would depend on the task to be accomplished. That's one of the reasons why interoperability is such an important topic for me in translation technology: for thirteen years I have tried to use the best combination of tools to optimize the ergonomics of my work and get the best results.

Most of the web presentations Jayne listed are very good. She gave us an excellent overview which can help a great many people. One of my favorites in the list is the translators training site which Jost Zetzsche has been involved with for so many years: it has pay-for-few recordings that show specific, important and profitable tasks which should interest many translators, but it also offers free short video tutorials for every CAT tool I can think of (about 20 of them), comparing how each performs the same simple translation job, records terminology, etc. Often these little tutorials would be all someone needs to make a good start with their chosen CAT tool, and the videos are a good way to get a simple overview of the different "feel" of the various environments.

But we can do better.
How? I don't have all the answers. I have a few notions, and for some time now I have been researching past and current practice, pestering people with questions, wasting time and mining ideas. Along the way I've stumbled into a few interesting business opportunities as a provider of language services, I've learned a lot and had fun. Some have seen my experiment and been motivated to start their own. I hope that they and others will continue to question the models of online and offline instruction which currently dominate our practice and question whether there is something more to be had.

Let's take the webinar as an example. These are very popular, and rightly so. I have learned a lot from them and probably could have learned a lot more. But to date I have resisted all attempts to draw me into teaching one myself, despite the fact that I have been committed to teaching in various forms for over 30 years. This is because many webinars are a waste of time. Even the best webinars waste time I think. Maybe not. But I think it's fair to say that someone watching the best 30 to 60 minute webinar I could offer would have a lot of their time wasted, and they would have a harder time making use of the lessons later than if these were presented differently.

Many times I have wanted to go back and review some useful technical point in a Gábor Ugray webinar on memoQ, and I just can't find it in the hour presentation, the dog ate my notes, and by the time I do find it, said dog needs to go for a walk and I forget the whole matter.

There is no indexing for most webinars. If you must leave that long talk in one big chunk, why not put an index under it which notes important points and the time at which they are discussed. There is probably some clever way to make this a clickable hyperindex which immediately skips to that point, but I don't mind being low tech and dragging a slide bar to get to the part of the video that interests me.

One hour is too f-ing long most of the time. I swear if I ever do an hour-long webinar, I will edit down to the twenty minutes that really matter and then slice that up into the three to five individual topics of interest. And I'll add a little text and perhaps some graphics to a web page in which the individual clips are embedded if this can reinforce or supplement the message in some useful way.

If the visuals don't matter I might even just extract the audio from the video and offer an MP3 "podcast" you might listen to in the car on a long drive or on a jog through the neighborhood (though I refuse all liability if you get killed at an intersection while not paying attention to your route).

If I'm trying to teach you about software and how to use it for a task like handling particular file formats or types of information, I might think about providing a demonstration file with which you can practice. How many people do this now? Doh. It's all very well to talk about how much a particular translation environment tool can do, but if people can't apply that and gain confidence before they are asked to quote on a big job, they might well be too afraid of failure and leave their refrigerators and bank accounts understocked.

The same applies to skills that have less or nothing to do with translation and multilingual matters. Current teaching paradigms are underdeveloped, and improving them is not usually a matter of better editing, flashier effects and easy listening soundtracks. Real value can often be simpler, faster, cheaper and cruder than that. Integrated instruction is more a matter of imagination than technology and budget.


My current "research" is being performed in most cases with production tools which are free and usually Open Source and which, most of the time, are definitely inferior to the premium Adobe software I used for similar tasks in the 1990s. This is my concession to the Poverty Cult and my own sometimes involuntary priorities, and I fear that if I download the latest copy of Camtasia, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Captivate and other fine tools someone with something useful to teach might confuse the medium with the message and not make a valuable tutorial they could create quite adequately using free and easy tools. There is always time to upgrade after the point has been driven into the ground and the stake is there for all to see.