Establishing the freelance translation work you do not want to do, and standing by your decision

I was reading The Entrepreneurial Linguist, by Judy and Dagmar Jenner, a couple of days ago. And they mention one step in freelance translation that I had not consciously thought of before: defining the work you do not want to do.

When I started freelancing, I pretty much tried everything that came my way. I worked for peanuts, for agencies where I knew I would not have a long- or even medium-term future, I took jobs that I did not like, jobs where I could not possibly be competitive and jobs where it took me forever to deliver a translation just to the best of my ability, and I generally made a point of never saying no to a potential client.

The good thing about such things, of course, is that it does not take you long to realize where you have gone wrong and redress course. It is all part of the learning curve, and I think I learned a lot relatively fast. However, I like the Jenners' approach: I wish I had done things the other way around and actually sat down to define in advance a few things I did not want to get involved in.

When they are starting out, freelance translators often do not even know the going rate for their business. Even when they find out, they don't have a clue of where to find clients willing to pay them that much, how large or small the market (their market) may be, where they stand in this new world they did not even know existed, and even where their relative strengths and weaknesses may lay. And the natural thing is to try things out, gradually (though hopefully fast) learn what works for you and stick to that as a platform for growth.

However, now that I am a stretch further along that path, I wish I had devoted a couple of hours of my life to establishing what I did not want to do and developing a series of bottom-line policies.

Setting a rate below which one will not work is very hard to do right at the start of your freelance career: you usually do not have all the data necessary to make an informed decision. However, it does not take more than a couple of months, and may take much less, to find out at least a few of the things you need to know. It is important for you to have the courage to act accordingly.

No one is saying that you should not retain some flexibility, but it would be foolish not to make the most of the opportunities that are out there for you if only you look for them. No one will hire you for 15 cents a word  if you will work for 3. And it is probably even true that no one worthwhile will hire you at all if the rates you set for yourself are ridiculously low. I still accept relatively low per-word rates occasionally, but only when I am certain that the job will be fast and painless and I can draw a decent hourly rate from it, and when I know the agency in question guarantees a healthy workflow, in terms both of work load and deadlines.

After about two months in the profession, I systematically turned down technical (cars, chemicals, and the like) and medical texts. They simply took me too long to research and left me seriously wondering whether I had actually done a good job rather than just a job. And, above all, I found I had no interest in pursuing them further so I might overcome my limitations and turn them into an area of specialization. It was never going to happen, and such translations and I were both better off without each other.

The Jenners talk about this as "non-specialization," and I find that, while freelance translators talk a lot about specialization, they do not give much attention to the opposite concept. For beginning freelance translators, non-specialization is in fact probably more important: specialization takes a long time, many years, but realizing what areas are out of bounds can probably be established within a few hours and save you many headaches.

By the way... the Jenners' book (for a taste, here is their blog, Translation Times) is explicitly written for people wishing to attract direct clients, which I am hoping to do. However, I would recommend portions of it for freelancers who work with agencies too: it provides some good insights on how to approach the business aspects of translation, particularly the assets that many of us hopefully have but are not consciously aware of.

Two borrowed posts on rates that you probably should not miss

Rates do not just happen, as we all know (but may need reminding): you need to set them, set them well and keep pushing them up as you grow professionally. Translation agencies are surely not the best you can do when it comes to charity, so you should charge them as much as you can.

From the Patenttranslator's Blog, 10 Signs That Your Rate Per Translated Word May Be Too Low

From Thoughts On Translation, What is "the right rate" for your translation services?

And, while I am at it, here is another post I should have passed on weeks ago and did not. I thought and wrote about this at some length a few months ago, but the Patenttranslator's Blog clearly knows best: Is 50 Thousand Dollars Money Well Spent on a Translation Degree?

Enjoy!

When is the right time to become a full-time freelance translator, and how do you know it is?

Experts say that having a job to pay the bills is a great asset for a beginning freelance translator, and it is easy enough to know why they would be right. And yet you surely need to take the leap at some point, to set aside the certainty a paycheck provides and seek growth in the freelance world, where apparently there is such growth to be found.

Many questions emerge. Do you really need to take that leap? Can you not be a part-time freelance translator forever? Of course you can. I, however, do not want to: I like translating enough to want to make it my official career, and I think I am good enough at it to make it work out as my official career. I am not there yet, but if the ATA says the average freelance translator makes more than 40,000 dollars per year, I feel I should be able to make that kind of money, and thus pay the bills, just translating.

I am 37, but I approached my start in the freelancing world as humbly as I did the beginning of my career in journalism almost 20 years ago. I know that few things happen overnight, and I am happy to let things flow and find their course. Experience in other walks of life tells me that things generally do find their course, and I am sure that translation is no exception. I also know enough about the real world by now not to expect any miracles, however, and I am convinced that whatever I reap as a translator will be largely the result of my own efforts. 

If I want to grow as a freelance translator, I need to put in a lot of effort into improving both my ability to translate and my presence and availability as a freelancer. I am working hard, translating quite a bit and taking both NYU's Certificate in Translation and the DipTrans exam to convince anyone who needs it that I am qualified, so they give me the chance to prove that I am also good. 

And yet I feel that my formal job, the one that pays my bills (and currently allows me to keep my translation money for bigger and better things!), is more and more of a burden for my freelancing career.

As I said earlier, I am a 37-year-old mother-of-two: I can hardly afford to experiment as I did in my early twenties. However, I still wonder whether a fair dose of "hunger" might actually be good to grow professionally. I understand that not being able to make ends meet would get me far more stress than I want at this stage in my life. However, I also ask myself, quite often in fact, whether needing to support myself as a freelance translator might actually drive my career as a freelancer far beyond anywhere where the mere wish to translate in my spare time can ever take it, and make things happen a lot faster.

I do not work at McDonald's: I actually like my job as a journalist quite a bit, particularly when it is busy and I have lots of work to do. I spent three weeks in Brazil to cover the Confederations Cup in June and I loved the assignment... but it meant that I did virtually no translation work for three weeks. If I make it to the World Cup in June, the same will happen again, and last about a month-and-a-half. 

I do not want to whine about pleasant things, of course: I could say no to these assignments but would not want to say no in my current circumstances. If I am a journalist at all, it is clearly for things like these. The point is, however, that I feel such events, and having a full-time job more generally, affect my commitment and my results as a freelance translator.

I monitor ProZ.com and TranslatorsCafé.com for jobs quite closely and regularly bid on the ones that I think might suit me, I take almost any translation jobs that come my way from agencies I have worked for in the past and I feel I can do well, and I always push myself a bit beyond what might be reasonable: if you look at my translation figures, I am almost a full-time translator despite having a full-time job as a journalist and a family. 

Marketing to direct clients is what I never find time to do, and I feel that that would be essential for me to take things a step further: can you become a full-time freelance translator, with no jobs on the side, and earn a decent living without devoting 2-3 hours per day to looking for new, better-paying clients, for a few months at least?

The truth is that it is a mouthful to handle a full-time job, freelance translation on the side and the marketing tasks that are essential to any freelance effort, along with the family life and other daily tasks that make life really special and enjoyable for some of us. 

When I started out as a freelancer, I thought the move away from moonlighting would be natural enough: a day would come when I could make more money from the translation jobs I actually do and those I have to turn down because... well, because I have a job that pays the bills. At that point, I would be better off without a day job and could walk away from it comfortably enough. Now, I am not so sure that that day will come on its own. 

A friend once told me that moonlighting is in fact addictive. According to her, one gets hooked on the rush, and the money, that come from working two jobs, and it is hard to go back to having just one. I definitely see my friend's point and to some extent I am enjoying that position at the moment.

However, I am also quite certain that the major leap in my freelancing career will come only when I finally dare to drop my regular job. 

At the risk of sounding too much like a teenager wondering what love is and how can you ever know when you have found it, I hope the day will come when I muster the courage, or the will, or the drive, or whatever combination of factors it takes, to take the leap and become "just" a freelance translator. I am not there yet. But I hope to be sometime, sooner rather than later.

Doing vs. blogging: a translator with writer's block in the Internet age

It's been a very long time, and there is an explanation for that: I may be a journalist, but I do occasionally get stung by writer's block, particularly when I'm not working to a deadline!

At one point in recent weeks, I even felt somewhat guilty about not posting anything in my blog. I wanted to write, could not come up with anything mildly interesting to say... and before I knew it my mind had twisted all that into, "Oh, I'm not doing anything!"

I once heard or read somewhere that people who keep a diary occasionally get so caught up in writing about their lives and analyzing them that they forget to actually live them to the full. And I think I experienced a reverse case of that! I took "I can't think of anything to write that my readers might be interested in" to mean that I wasn't doing anything of interest to myself. That, of course, triggered a couple of alarms, fortunately enough to prove that it simply was not true.

I sat back and counted. Over the past two-odd months, the period over which I have not written a proper blog post, I have actually done quite a few things to advance my translation career.

I have for one thing completed my Introduction to Translation course at NYU, the first of what I hope will become my online Certificate in Translation. I did well at it, and I have signed up for a second course in the fall.

I have also registered to sit the DipTrans exam in late January, which I hope will be a crucial milestone in my budding second career.

Further, I have finally made the decision to drop French from my CV! I am now formally a bilingual translator with English and Spanish as my target languages and with those two plus German as my source languages. This may look easy, but the decision has taken me many months, and I am quite proud of it. I started freelancing a year ago with eight language pairs and a broad background. Based on my experience over this year, on lots of reading and research and on the helpful comments of several veteran colleagues, I am now down to four language pairs, with a clear focus on financial translation. The whole process feels somewhat like growing up professionally, and despite the inevitable growing pains it is something I am very happy about.

Also, largely as a consequence of my first NYU course, I finally got my act together with glossary-building. I have been translating forever, but I never developed a consistent habit of actually writing down for future reference and use the words I had to look up as I worked. Now it is finally happening. That is probably yet another aspect of growing up professionally, and it is definitely something else to be very happy about.

In recent weeks I have read 1.5 books on translation (nothing good enough to recommend it here, I'm afraid, but interesting reading nonetheless). I have updated my website and drafted a classy brochure (about to go to print as we speak!) to hand out to potential clients. I have built the foundations of a couple of very interesting working relationships with colleagues that I hope to work with again in the future.

And I even took a great holiday... and did a few translations!

Being a freelance professional in the Internet age is quite a handful. It is exciting and fun but... wait... you have to blog, tweet and post about it! That is usually also exciting and fun, but sometimes it is just too much. Please bear with me when that happens!

An interesting, borrowed discussion on rates...

A very good article from The Translation Journal: Rosetta Stone and Translation Rates, by Danilo Nogueira and Kelli Semolini. Enjoy, think, and work out where you stand!