The run-up, the big leap and new priorities

January has been a dream month, a time I had been looking forward to for about three years: I finally quit my day job and became a 'just' a freelance translator, after more than 15 years as a journalist.

As is the case with so many important decisions, the move towards an exclusively freelancing lifestyle was the sum of lots of little steps and the culmination of a plan I had developed a long time ago.

I had met my desired annual income target and my savings target. A control freak like me would not jump without some form of a safety net! I felt I was qualified enough and well-positioned professionally, with good clients to keep my project pipeline moving including my former employer. And I had solid evidence that there was room for greater growth without a job that kept me busy for many hours every day. I was ready.

Over the past two years, I had somewhat customised the concept of full-time work. I was using early mornings, evenings and weekends in such a way that I was virtually working full-time as a freelance translator anyway. However, while translation almost had a monopoly on my proactivity and my enthusiasm, it received only as much attention as I could muster in my off-hours, and that felt like a burden.

I was increasingly having to turn down translation projects for lack of time, my marketing was down to virtually zero (to say nothing of this blog!) and, while I am one of those people who can generally tackle a packed to-do list calmly, just one thing at a time, I was beginning to feel my stress levels rise. I never missed a deadline, but over the past year I did for example skip two parent-teacher meetings that were simply blanked out of my mind on the day. I knew that some things were getting out of hand.

When I attended the ATA's annual conference in Miami in November, the single thing that struck me the most was a slide in a presentation from former ATA president Dorothee Racette (@takebackmyday): 'Are you running a sweatshop?' I knew that I was exploiting myself precisely like that.

In contrast, the past few weeks have been blissful. I had got used to working two jobs to a point where I almost did not notice exactly how hard I was pushing myself, but I really enjoy having a more relaxed schedule and just one professional activity on my mind.

My new off-hours (those left over after sorting out new medical insurance and other administrative issues, at any rate) have inevitably led to the resurrection of old plans to revamp my website, come up with a consistent marketing strategy and develop a sustainable work routine now that a lot of the pressure I had been under in recent years is gone.

Life without a day job has reminded me that there is a lot to say in favour of work-life balance. In the years to come, I would very much like to be a little less busy than I have been of late, and coming up with a plan to make sure I stick to that is my top priority right now. I am doing very well and enjoying myself too, so I should think of a way to keep that up.

A good jump takes a run-up, and I would definitely not change the past two years. I always had clear objectives, I mostly knew what I was doing and I am very proud of the hard work I did. In fact, I achieved virtually every goal on my list in my first attempt and wasted almost no time. To me, the whole experience was a necessary stepping stone on the way to get where I am now.

And yet I am glad I did not let my run-up turn into an attempt to run a marathon in run-up strides. I have taken my leap, and it is only natural that things should be different from now on. Run-ups and jumps take a particular set of skills, which I suspect is quite unlike the set required for walking the ground where I now stand.

The learning process continues, as it should, and I still feel well-placed, excited and eager to grow and build on the career I have crafted so far. In the coming months, I hope to acquire or hone some tools and techniques that will be of use at this second stage in my life as a freelance translator. I am sure hard work will remain part of the bundle, but, as I tackle a different kind of race and a different set of goals, it is no wonder that pacing and sustainability have taken centre stage.

Translation and the "asset that is worth owning"

I have been listening to many podcasts and online courses over the past few weeks. In that process, generally geared towards polishing my own definition of myself as a professional, I have gleaned a lot of useful information, and I would like to share some of it here.

One of the stars of my recent research was a course from Seth Godin on Udemy which turned out to be enlightening in many ways.

"Build what you need. It's not just there to be taken. These are assets, assets that we acquire over time, assets that we earn, because we seek them out and we invest in them," Godin says. "The leap you need to take is not the leap of quitting your job. The leap you need to take is to be the professional who invests in building an asset that is worth owning."

This struck many chords all at once, not least because I tend to dwell on the need to quit my day job. Godin reminded me that there is a lot more to building a career than just that.

Ever since I started to think of myself as a freelance translator, I became convinced that the decision to change careers needed to come coupled with a growth strategy and with as much investment as I could muster to make things happen, first, and then to make them happen better and faster.

But, of course, the more or less abstract ideas I have come up with over the past couple of years are infinitely more powerful when someone as good as Godin puts them into deliberate sentences. The idea that I am "building an asset that is worth owning" puts my own actions into perspective by adding an external market angle, while keeping in the forefront the fact that I need to be the agent, the driving force in that process. 

According to Investopedia, an asset is "a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide future benefit."

So far, I had thought mostly of my own professional development and my own growth. When I chose Word Assets as the name of my translation business, I was thinking of the importance of corporate communications as a major asset for potential clients, which I could help preserve and even grow through my translation services. The idea that I too owned an asset that I could hone and develop as such, not only to improve my position in the market but actually to increase its value as an asset, was a revelation.

Thinking of myself as the owner of "an asset that is worth owning" puts me, as a translator, in a different category. And it gives new meaning to trying to find clients: I have an asset that would be of great value for them. In this context, it becomes transparent why my marketing efforts should be as much about my clients as they are about me. I would welcome the new business, of course, but potential clients would do well to gain access to the asset I have to offer.

Godin also has interesting things to say about the nature of that asset.

"Is there something about my interaction (as the client) with you that is bigger than the work itself? If you are a wedding photographer, is it the prints that someone is buying, or is it the interactions the bride had with you the entire time that they are actually paying for? Because those interactions are far easier to build in a discernible way than merely saying, 'I can prove my photographs are better than their photographs'," he says.

Indeed, the word assets that I was thinking about when I came up with my business name are only part of the picture. I have long been convinced that, when you offer a service, that service is as much a part of your deliverables as the translated files you send back to the client. What I had not incorporated into that argument until now was the reasoning behind that.

The "asset that is worth owning" is far bigger than a translated text. It brings together linguistic skills in my source and target languages, but it also incorporates a series of worthwhile interactions that add value to the whole process. I believe I am a good translator, but I am also convinced that the asset I am building and investing in, to put it in Godin's wise words, is bigger than translation itself.

Needless to say, the Godin course held many more pearls, and it was worth every penny. I highly recommend it!

Putting a name and a real-world profile on your ideal client

The best news of the year so far, for me as a freelance translator, has been the realisation that my client portfolio includes two 'ideal clients.' In fact, one of them deserves super-ideal status, because it not only is fantastic but also points the way to finding other similarly great business partners.

I entered 2015 convinced that marketing would be a crucial element of my year, the one thing that would make or break my translation business in the medium term. I realised that, until now, most of my clients, and certainly the good ones, have found me on their own. I have made sure that my name is out there and that people around me know that I am a professional freelance translator, but so far I have not really managed to attract clients 'on purpose.' Directories and word of mouth have indeed worked, but I am sure I can do more than simply sit and wait for people to knock on my door. 

There was one little problem, of course: I did not really know what 'doing more' meant in more concrete terms. So I had some homework to do. In October, I attended a one-day seminar with Marta Stelmaszak in Buenos Aires, I have avidly listened to every episode in Tess Whitty's podcast, read Tess's book as well as Andrew Morris's and even explored online materials on marketing beyond the world of translation. All of that has delivered very valuable awareness of what I like to do and can do particularly well, along with a sense of how to go about increasing my portfolio of people who hire me to do precisely such things.

First of all, I had a good look at my existing client base. I realised that I have one fantastic client, a firm that requires a lot of translation on topics I love, pays a great rate and has brilliant in-house project managers, so I get all the good things of working with a direct client without any of the hassle. I love them.

Then, I realised that that client, my star client, is probably not my most valuable client. My most valuable client is also great. They pay a lower rate but also send me lot of very interesting work and are easy to handle. What makes them really special at the particular spot in my career where I currently find myself is the fact that they are hardly unique: There are plenty of potential clients out there with very similar characteristics and, at the moment, it has become almost my life's mission to find a few of those near-clones and convince them that I can work well with them too.

That is precisely the good thing about coming up with an ideal client, in marketing terms. An ideal client is a key factor when it comes to building a sustainable, long-term business, because it should be the person or firm you are in business for. You can work for anyone else who is looking for your services and willing to pay what they are worth, of course, but growth prospects should be based on identifying and convincing ideal clients that your services are just right for them.

In an ideal world, I would like to have at least two more such ideal clients, and I am working on that. However, the very realisation that my ideal client does exist, that they are not just a random illusion but rather people who can indeed benefit from my services and do value them has been a massive boost to my confidence and my will to find further outlets for my services.

Now it is up to me to work hard to bridge the gap between an ideal client and an actual client, to identify and win over more of those clients for whom the translation work I do best and most happily is an asset they need on a daily basis. That is clearly no easy task, but then neither was actually identifying what to look for in an originally big, broad and impersonal market. The exercise of breaking down 'the market' into pieces with an easily recognisable name who are clearly connected with who I am as a professional feels like a major leap forward.

I feel like I have achieved that first goal of the year and I am delighted about that, although there are many months still ahead and many tasks left to do. I will keep you posted about any further developments!

Why the ATA Mentoring Programme is worth exploring (before applications close)

This time last year I was feeling a bit stuck. My freelance translation business had reached a plateau of sorts, after a start that had exceeded all my expectations, and I had the impression that I had run out of ideas on how to push it forward.

At the time, the only thing I knew for sure was I wanted to keep trying, and the ATA Mentoring Programme emerged as a welcome tool, one of only a few things I had not yet tested, a way to step outside my own head and bring in some outside help.

Applications are now open for the 2015 class, until 7 March, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Whether, like me, you are somewhat stuck, or whether you can simply benefit from someone else's vision, experience and external assessment, which we arguably all can, at any stage in our careers, it definitely is worth applying!

The programme asks you to set yourself goals and will pair you with someone who can help you achieve them. Your mentor will most likely work in a different language pair and be located far away from you, but they will probably have lots of positive contributions to make. They will not do the work for you, but they can point you in the right direction, or at least in a direction that is worth exploring.

As I applied for the programme, I tried to pinpoint the problems I was facing. That was already good, insofar as I had to sit down, think what the problem might be and explain it in writing to someone who did not know me at all. It helped me define exactly where I felt I had reached a dead end.

A few weeks later, by the time I had actually been assigned a mentor, things had picked up on their own, and I am pretty sure that the exercise of trying to make sense of it all helped. My mentor became someone who would answer my questions and provide me with real-life benchmarks, which was very, very welcome. I had done lots of reading, followed many online debates and engaged in generous introspection, but the chance to ask an actual person concrete questions was quite refreshing.

My mentor made suggestions that have helped me define in greater detail the translator I want to be, gave me answers that allowed me to feel more confident on my chances of getting there and - as his single most important contribution - persuaded me to spend a small fortune to go to the ATA Conference in Chicago. That event changed the way I feel about the profession, so it was clearly great advice! And, of course, my mentor was around to make the whole thing less daunting.

The Mentoring Programme is free for ATA members, and I am pretty sure it will be worth every effort you put into it. You do not need to be a newbie, just someone with things to learn and explore, and it will help you from the moment you start to write down why you want to sign up for it. The programme will probably leave you with a much clearer idea of where you want to go in the field of translation a few years into the future.

By the way, in case you are wondering, I need to put in a few years' work first, but yes, I will hopefully return to the programme sooner rather than later, as a mentor!

Reinventing your professional self: a career change as a conscious, creative, exciting process

Changing careers is a privilege. You get to work out what you want to do and more generally who you want to be, insofar as work is a major portion of most people's lives these days. And you get to build on aspects of your personality and the wider world that you never knew about at university.

The decision to embark on a different career, as a freelance translator in my case, comes coupled with the opportunity to rethink yourself as a professional.

You need to work out your strengths and your weaknesses in an altogether different setting, and to consider your skills and aspirations both in the short term and far into the future. You need to establish whether there is a market for the services you would like to provide, and find that market in the form of potential and actual clients, one at a time. And you need to make sure your dream plan supports both your personal and professional ambitions and the living standards you want for yourself and your family.

All this is a major challenge, but it also breeds a massive surge in enthusiasm. I have been known to say, 'I don't even care about whether or not it works out.' I did of course want my career change to be successful in all possible respects, but what I meant was that the positive feeling, the excitement I drew from each step of the way was in itself a great thing. I stand by that: working out the professional you want to be is a fascinating and extremely energising experience.

Of course, I had chosen my first career too, I prepared myself well to become a journalist. It was in tune with many of my skills, suited my aspirations at the time and was great fun for many years, but the process is quite different the second time around.

When I chose to become a reporter, I was young and did not really need to take into account several factors that are crucial more than a decade later. I am a bit of a control freak and was one back then too, but I just did not know enough about the world around me to really be able to think rationally about a lot of the things the decision involved. I thought hard, but I was in many ways doing the wrong kind of thinking. That was of course inevitable: as we age, we do not necessarily become wiser, but we do tend to have more information.

The good thing about a career change is that you get to imagine yourself as a professional all over again, with a broader focus. You should clearly take pride of place in that wider picture too, but having a clearer idea of what to expect from the world around you and what others 'out there' expect from you is a healthy addition.

The difference between a university leaver who becomes a journalist and a journalist in her mid-thirties who becomes a rookie freelance translator can be spelled out in terms of consciousness as well as age.

As a career changer, I was more aware of my own skills and had more confidence in them. I knew I lacked other tools that would be useful, and I had a clearer idea of how I could start to develop those too. And most importantly, in my opinion, I approached the whole process with a more critical eye, constantly assessing how the whole bundle could help me lead the life I want to lead.

As a young graduate, I looked for a job I would enjoy doing. As a career changer, I knew I was looking for one crucial element in a more generally satisfying life and that keeping a balance with all the things that were already going well was important.

A career change is a way to revisit the abstract exercise of choosing your profession in your early twenties, pull it apart and turn it into a more down-to-earth, better-rounded effort with feasibility as a key element.

I want to be a freelance translator for a lot of reasons besides the fact that I like translating. I am good at it, there is a market out there for my services, it allows me to earn the amount of money I want to earn to lead the life I want to lead, and it is consistent with that life more generally.

Of course, well into my thirties the opportunity comes coupled with greater responsibilities, including my share of the family income and a certain obsession with how to transition from my employer's health plan to its still-to-be-determined freelance equivalent. It takes time, many hours of scratching my head and ploughing along with a mix of caution and determination.

However, being able to reinvent yourself so many years into your adult life is a fun way to grow. I am convinced that the experience, creativity, ambition and careful planning one can muster with university as a distant memory would lead anyone to a life that is closer to the one they want to lead. It has certainly worked wonders for me.

Enjoy success, celebrate progress as the year draws to a close

It is that time of the year again, and I am inevitably reflecting on how everything went, looking back on my original plans, recalling the milestones of my very own 2014 and devising ways to hopefully build on it from January.

The first thing I thought about was that, as a freelance translator, I have met and even exceeded the income goal I had set myself for the year. It was an ambitious goal, and it looked almost impossible as recently as July, so it is a major achievement.

However, the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that the real story of a fantastic year for me is not success, but progress: the best thing about 2014 is not that I attained my income goal, but rather that I am a lot closer to my long-term objectives as a freelance translator.

Meeting an income target is great for at least three reasons: the achievement itself feels very nice, it means I have an extra cash injection rather than have to worry about making ends meet, and it will allow for investment that is perhaps a bit more ambitious and even expensive in the year to come.

However, what I will be taking away from 2014 is certainly not an income figure. As I came to realise that, I tried to come up with a list of the things that will hopefully stay with me from 1 January.

One would like to think that effort, skills and perseverance always pay off, but, at 38, I am old enough to know that is not always the case. Still, it is no reason not to go for precisely that mix: it may not be infallible, but it remains the safest bet.

This year, I have worked hard, got my DipTrans, took several MOOCs to improve my knowledge of my areas of specialisation, tried to be helpful and pleasant to deal with, and delivered the best translations I could muster. When I got stuck, I looked harder for possible solutions and I tried to listen to anyone with a different approach. When I was doing well, I tried to build on my achievements.

I started the year with resounding failures, and the effort I made to get over those probably set me up for the successes that were to follow. I looked into the ATA Mentoring Programme, and a suggestion from my mentor took me to the ATA conference in Chicago.

I got several new clients, and they are generally a lot better than the clients I had last year. I even had a few lucky, almost unexpected breakthroughs with very good direct clients, but luck was hardly part of the equation as I tried to gain their trust and, hopefully, repeat business.

A couple of direct-client projects where I felt overstretched became my first project management efforts, as I found translators and proofreaders, negotiated other people's rates rather than my own, and tried to build relationships with fellow freelancers for the future. I found project management hard, stressful, and definitely out of my comfort zone. However, those projects were instances of major personal growth and learning as well as huge business development.

I refloated my blog, which had fallen through the cracks when things were not going so well, for lack of anything positive to say. I also made the leap into Twitter, which I had consciously avoided (as too time-sapping) until them. Surprisingly enough, not only did I find that I enjoy Twitter and can keep it in check, at least for now, but also got a nice translation job from a colleague out of it!

The ATA conference was a major expense. Imagine a trip from Buenos Aires to Chicago! I hesitated a lot, but it was honestly worth every penny. I got a great confidence boost, inspiring exchanges with colleagues and sessions and a bunch of business cards that may or may not deliver actual work. There again, however, I did my homework: I travelled to the conference, tried to enjoy my time there, and did the follow-up. I will be back next year, and it was important for me to make sure that my second experience is different, because it builds on earlier discoveries and earlier efforts.

I can also count some achievements at a more personal level. Spending over a month in Brazil, to cover the World Cup as a reporter, brought home the fact that, inside, I am now a translator rather than a journalist. A dream reporting job was suddenly not quite as perfect as it could have been, just because the heart was not completely in it.

Anyone who has read my blog from the start will know of my conflicted relationship with French. I love it, but I eventually dropped it from my translation CV altogether because it did not seem to convince clients and was effectively just noise in my profile. This year, I received one French-English 8,000-word project and could not believe my luck. I took it on, and got the following reply from the project manager: "I want to congratulate you, because it is really a pleasure to read your translation."

In this post, I want to highlight my own realisation that this year's achievements relative to my income goals are tiny compared to those that will lead to more and better work in the years to come: more and better clients, closer relationships with colleagues, a greater understanding of the profession, in terms of both depth and scope, and above all a clearer idea of my own potential role within it.

On 1 January, both my income target and my professional development goals will be different. However, they will incorporate everything I have learned this year, and they will be all the more solid for it.

Translation as a problem-solving service: a consumer's approach

I am a proud translator, but I do not live in a vacuum: I am also a consumer, and I find that my own experience as such is an essential tool in my dealings with any potential or actual clients.

It is a simple idea. Beyond languages, CAT tools and writing skills, customer service is one thing that can make me stand out from the global translation crowd. I still need to translate well but, all other things being equal, I will be a better translator if I am more customer-oriented.

Being a consumer in other works of life provides me with crucial information about my clients and their needs, and I make a point of keeping in mind that information at all times. What do I need when I need a service? When and how do I want it delivered? Who and why do I appreciate the most for the servicethey provide? Who do I call again, even if they have never actually worked for me?

As a consumer, I have dealt with a zillion unreliable and unfriendly service providers. There is the electrician who says he will show up on Tuesday and does not, and the plumber who says she will turn up at 2 pm and shows up at 3.30 pm, just as I am getting ready to pick up my children from school. There is the Internet company who says the line will be back to normal within two hours, which I can cope with, and again tells me it will take two hours when nothing happens and I call in again to report that things are still not working. And there is the lawyer who does not reply to my e-mails.

We have all been there, probably lots of times. In my case, the unreliability of my own service providers continues to drive me nuts whenever I have to endure it, but I have to admit that it also provides fantastic ongoing training in my effort to become a good translator. It is an always timely reminder of the kind of professional I do not want to be.

When I call a plumber, an electrician or a lawyer, it is because I need to get something fixed or sorted out. I need the job done sooner rather than later, although I can accept that I am probably not the only person in town with a problem that needs to be solved. In most cases, I can wait at least a bit, but I do need to feel that the service provider in question is taking me seriously, that they acknowledge the problem I am facing, that they will try to fix it as soon as possible.

I need them to be pleasant in their dealings with me - not to buy me lunch or sing my favourite song, just to be civil and helpful. I need them to show up when they said they would, to have with them any tools they might foreseeably have to work with, to acnowledge the fact that I know nothing about their trade without making me feel stupid or cheated.

I assume that potential clients who approach me as a translator want the same things, and I make a point of responding as I wish the electrician, the plumber and the lawyer would. Whether they are agencies or direct clients, people who seek out my translation services come up to me with a need, and it is essential that I respond to that need. I may not always be able to meet it, but I can always try, and I can certainly always aim to remain pleasant and point clients in the direction of a solution.

Responding means acknowledging the need, returning e-mails and calls, perhaps explaining why I cannot translate a document on aircraft engines at all or why I cannot translate a 5,000-word report by tomorrow morning, or noting that I am busy until a certain date. I may be able to provide a referral, or say I cannot do the job by Thursday but can do it by lunchtime on Friday.

It is hardly rocket science. All you need to do is to remember your dealings with your last two computer repair people, the annoying one you dropped and the one who saved your life. Presumably you, like me, know who of those you want to be.

At the end of the day, being nice will not make you translate better, but it will ensure that you provide a better service, and it will help you run a better business. As freelance translators, that is surely part of our job, and a major part of our job at that.

Friendliness is simply business savvy, even without considering its positive personal effects on ourselves and those around us. So... be pleasant, be helpful, be thoughtful, for your own sake as well as your clients'!

Freelance translation as a learning process

It has been a long time since I last posted anything here. The year has been a roller coaster, so it has taken me months to be able to think about it conceptually, and therefore to write about it. However, I have come a very long way over the past few months, and since the purpose of this blog from the start was to help anyone treading a similar path after me, it makes sense to revisit the walk.

January and February were disappointing, with little work and little money from translation, and generally with a massive sense of relief that I still had a day job. Those two months had also been rough a year earlier, so by I now assume that they are just a dry patch in my working year. And, come to think of it, that may be quite convenient since those are the school summer holiday months in Argentina. I have to admit, however, that I was not so enthusiastic about the lull back in February.

Two months with little work made me doubt my strategy: I had raised my rates considerably, but I had not managed to find any new clients for a couple of months, which was not great one year into my freelance career, and I was working so little that I actually earned less than over the same period a year earlier.

I was confused and a bit discouraged. Starting out as a freelance translator had almost seemed easy, and then, all of a sudden, it was tough. I wanted to keep moving, but by then I did not really know where I should be going. So I did what one should probably do in such cases, regroup and take one step at a time.

I signed up for the ATA's Mentoring Programme. I needed directions, and the ATA was offering some, so it looked like a good match. The experience has turned out to be fantastic. I got a very nice mentor, and the opportunity to bounce thoughts and experiences off a veteran translator who has seen everything many times more than I have has proved to be invaluable. I can only recommend it, and I promise to devote a full post to the programme once I have completed it, around March.

As planned, I sat my DipTrans exam in English-Spanish in late January. Several months later, I learned that I had managed to pass all three papers in one go. Now, that was obviously what I had been hoping for, but it was more than I expected based on the exam's pass rates. With hindsight, it has been one of the highlights of the year. It was great for my confidence and, while I am not really certain that it has brought in extra work, I honestly suspect it may have.

Having my EN>ES DipTrans prompted two further moves. I signed up to take the exam in the opposite direction (ES>EN) in January 2015, and since I already had some certification in EN>ES I also switched my NYU Certificate in Translation to ES>EN.

During the first few months of the year, a major project kept me busy. However, I almost dismissed it mentally from my freelancing list: it did not come from a 'real client,' but was actually an assignment from my employer. And then it hit me that, surely, all the fuss about networking and word of mouth should apply to past- or parallel-life employers too!

My employer was hiring me to do freelance work. Since I had been working for them for 14 years, it was probably due to the fact that they know I am good. And, from then on, it was just another freelance translation project, one I needed to do, and do well, not just for a certain per-word rate but also for the chance to keep the ball rolling, to make sure people who know me and have worked with me continue to think I am the best translator they can find, and recommend me to their friends!

Beyond all this, the year 2014 gave me the chance to feel like a real, top freelance translator too, but that should be the subject of another post. Let's just keep this one at the start of the roller coaster year, when you are up there on the ride thinking, 'Oh, no! Why did I ever get on this thing?' Suffice it to say for now that I am loving it now and I am determined to hop back on as soon as it is over.

Interesting borrowed post on specialization, with fantastic info in the comments section

Corinne McKay's latest post in Thoughts On Translation, Choosing your translation specializations, derived into a very interesting discussion in the comments section, with input from some great names in the industry (and I certainly don't mean mine!). Lots of things to bear in mind when approaching specialization and more generally when thinking about growing up to be a serious, conscientious professional. Enjoy!

The ultimate translation interview: Chris Durban by Katarzyna Slobodzian-Taylor

If you are planning to read only one translation-related post this month, or even this year, do make sure it is this one: Translators' Wall of Fame: Chris Durban.

I fell upon this post in the Mastermind Translations blog thanks to Catherine Christaki, and I found it hugely inspiring. The interview has a fantastic texture and feel to it. It holds every reason why I want to be a freelance translator and puts forward a sort of ideal picture of what I want to be when I grow up professionally. I can only thank Katarzyna Slobodzian-Taylor, and of course, Chris Durban herself, for reinforcing my urge to work harder, learn more and do things better. I really hope you enjoy it too!

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!

Juggling two jobs: when you are not quite ready to be "just" a freelance translator

I have not written a post for over three weeks, and there is a reason for that: sometimes it is hard to juggle two jobs, or more precisely two jobs, an online course in translation and a life.

In my capacity as a journalist, I get to spend three weeks in Brazil this month to cover the Confederations Cup. I love football, I like reporting and I find such assignments quite good fun. However, I don't quite know what I am supposed to do with my side job as a freelance translator while I am in Brazil. It is probably inevitable that I should set it aside for a few weeks, at least until my day job goes back to normal, but that is actually easier said than done. 

Indeed, I have not been able to do a lot of freelance translation this month, and yet I think of myself more as a translator than as a reporter by now, so I find that quite hard. I have the feeling that I cannot afford to put my budding career on hold just like that, and above all I miss the work of actually sitting down to translate. So the experience has made me think.

It is good to have a job to pay the bills, and most experienced freelancers advise that beginners should have something else until they establish themselves in the world of translation. On the other hand, it is also good to be able to focus full-time on your career of choice, and juggling two jobs often conspires against that.

If I had more time to focus on translation, I would certainly do more marketing. I would also translate more, though there is no way I would be able to fill all my working hours with translation jobs right now: I am simply not there yet. It is tricky to opt between the financial safety of keeping a full-time job on the side and the determination and drive that would inevitably come under the additional pressure of being "just" a freelance translator. 

I sometimes get the feeling that a little uncertainty would be good for my career as a freelancer, and occasionally even that I will never make the leap I need to make next if I keep my regular job. I hope I will know when the time is right to opt out of my job as a journalist in such a way that I take on some additional pressure to fuel professional growth without jeopardising the well-being of my family as well as myself by resigning the extra income.

Focus, focus, focus: keeping one's eyes on the ball as a freelance translator

I am pretty sure I am doing (at least most of) the right things en route to being a successful freelance translator, and yet some things do not quite feel right at the moment. My conclusion is that, while I am doing lots of things that should help my career in the future, I may not be doing enough to push it along right now: focus is definitely the word of the week!

I've got a website and a blog. I'll be starting the NYU Certificate in Translation next week and sitting the DipTrans exam in January. I have joined the ATA and I am in the process of joining my local translators association (which is actually a lot more complicated). And yet... I am clearly not doing enough in terms of short-term client search, good old-fashioned client canvassing.

It is hard to stay focused on your everyday life as a freelance translator while you also deal with a day job, think about your long-term freelance career and closely follow several LinkedIn groups! In my case, the simpler marketing tasks appear to have fallen through the cracks. I have kept monitoring ProZ.com and bidding on jobs there, but I have not been actively looking for new clients beyond that, either agencies or direct clients. And I should have.

So it is time to go back to basics. I have drawn up a new informal business plan (the old one is more than six months old and has a Stone Age feel to it by now), and I have set myself the goal of writing off to five new agencies per week, just to tell them that I exist. I am starting out with ATA corporate members in Spain and Argentina and hope to take it from there.

More generally, however, I need to consciously devote more effort from now on to just staying focused. There is a good chance that in translation, as in so many other walks of life, things do not just "happen." You need to make them happen, and it is no good putting the cart before the horse: long-term growth is good, but it should not come at the expense of short-term development. Qualifications are great for the future, but I also need to grow my client base now.

Blogs and social networks are fun and they actually teach you a zillion things, but they unfortunately do not increase short-term income. If there was a financial reward for research into translation as an industry, how it works and how I can fit into it, I would be really well off by now. But that is of course not true. What I need to be better off than I currently am is more clients, and the only way to get those is to really focus and to implement a solid marketing strategy.

Priorities to save the day when things get tough

I had been worrying about making everything sound too easy, because it obviously is not. Being a freelance translator is hard work, and it takes a reliance on a long list of factors, many of which are beyond one's control. So it can be quite nerve-wracking at times.

Let my past 10 days serve as a case in point! Yes, it has been one of those weeks: all Murphy's Law, all about how things that are usually good can turn bad, all at the same time.

I am usually a driven, highly motivated and generally quite successful woman who juggles two full-time jobs, a happy family life around a toddler and an eight-year-old and recently also a popular blog. This week, however, I have been a struggling wimp who felt ill and had a zillion things to do no matter what. It was daunting!

Yes, being a freelancer has that sometimes. And by Sunday night I can say I did very well in the circumstances, which is I guess what one should aspire to when things get rough!

I had a flu that kept me in bed with a temperature for two days, I had an 18-month-old with a middle ear infection who made sleep a brief luxury for four nights, I had a meeting with a chamber of commerce to present my services to potential clients, I had a major translation to do for a direct client that I absolutely wanted to impress, I had little jobs to top that off, I had lots of work in my capacity as a journalist, I had the most painful throat infection I can remember.

Being a freelancer can be tough: you don't really get to call in sick, or if you do it is all your loss. However, you do get ill sometimes, just like anyone else, and you have to deal with your share of everyday problems as well as you can.

It has been a long week. At times, I felt like curling up in bed. But of course I didn't. Well, I did while I had a temperature, and I did when I desperately felt I needed some sleep. I postponed the meeting at the chamber of commerce and did not bid on some jobs I would normally have taken. I did most of my regular journalistic work. I went to the doctor's and wound up on antibiotics. I wrote one blog post when I should have written two, and I did not even translate it into Spanish as I normally would have.

However, I certainly delivered what I think is a spotless translation to my direct client - I was so glad to have told him I needed more than double the time I actually did need!

When things go wrong and when your energy is running low, you absolutely need to set yourself priorities. Some things can wait while some cannot, some can get by with less input than you would usually devote to them, and some take all the energy that you can possibly muster.

As a freelancer, it is essential that you learn to set these priorities right, because that can save the day when you get stuck. The crucial thing in such circumstances is to take care of the personal issues that are troubling you, hopefully without losing any translation clients in the process. Other things can probably wait, and you can play catch-up when you are actually fit to do it.

Now the rough patch appears to be over: I am healthy again and so is my daughter, so hopefully I can go back to business as usual, take care of my blog in English and Spanish, meet with the chamber of commerce and bid normally on jobs in the coming days. And hopefully the one translation job that I tried to do as if it had been a regular week will lead to more such jobs in the future.