With the economy not really knowing what it’s doing this year, it’s a good time to look at your income stream: what’s up, what’s down, and how can you do more of the work that’s up? In my case, my work from U.S.-based agencies is markedly down, work from European clients (both direct clients and agencies) is holding steady and work related to translator training (such as my book and course) is way, way up.
Happily, most successful translators are good candidates for branching out beyond translation. If you’re running a successful freelance business, chances are that in addition to being fluent in at least two languages, you’re a good or excellent writer in your target language and you’re reasonably tech-savvy. All of these are good starting points for a sideline venture.
There’s a plethora of information on the web about how to create a spinoff business and make money from it. Many of these sites have useful tips on things that translators could potentially do, such as writing articles online and getting paid for it. The barometer that I always use is whether the site’s author gives actual data about their earnings so that you can judge whether the sideline business in question is a good possibility for you. For example, I enjoy reading The Smart Passive Income Blog, because the author gives monthly reports about his income and what he did to earn it. For example, I deduced from reading this blog that writing articles on eHow, a possibility that I once considered as a remarketing tool for translation-related articles I’ve already written, is actually not a great option. In addition, although the author of Smart Passive Income makes a lot of money from Google AdSense, I personally find ads on blogs to be pretty off-putting. By contrast, Smart Passive Income has a lot of great information about how to write and market an e-book, which I think could be useful to many translators.
Following are some ideas about diverse revenue streams for translators, feel free to contribute your own!
- Write. This is probably the most obvious fit for many translators who are already good writers. Subject-specific glossaries and application-specific software guides offer fairly endless possibilities for writing. Also, I’ve seen from personal experience that niche business guides (how about something on marketing to direct clients?) can do very well. You can either create a simple PDF of your document and sell it on your website or use a self-publishing service such as Lulu (I use and enjoy Lulu but I don’t have any sort of affiliate deal with them) to create an e-book or traditional book.
- Teach. You could teach classes at an established institution, maybe a course on how to run a successful freelance business via your local adult education program? Or you could offer courses on your own; how about something related to a translation-related tool that you use? With modern web-based tools, it’s not hard to set up a webinar, e-course, conference call, etc.
- Do tech work for other translators. Think of a tech task that you’re proficient at and which is either labor-intensive/highly annoying or requires expensive software that most people don’t have. Alignment and PDF conversion are two tasks that spring to mind. I get a lot of PDFs to translate, but I’ve so far resisted purchasing a good conversion tool such as Abbyy FineReader because of the cost; I would definitely be willing to hire someone to do this task for me when it involves non-confidential documents.
In addition, why not expand these ideas to projects that aren’t translation-related? In the course of reading books with my elementary school-aged daughter, I’ve gotten interested in writing some historical fiction for young people and using the same publishing and marketing tools that I currently use for my book about how to become a translator. Any other ideas out there?
Corinne,
For the intrepid ones out there, there’s simultaneous interpretatation (which, compared to the average translator income, extremely well-paid, but requiring nerves of steel, total concentration, being near-native in your B language and possibly having a C language, quick thinking, improvising, ability of soaking up terms quickly). Along those lines, court interpretation in the US has interesting opportunities beyond Spanish – again, not for the faint of heart :). The Consortium for State Court Interpreter Certification, a 40-state initiative, has now started certifying LOTS (Languages Other Than Spanish), to include about 15 other languages.
For those who still want to express their voice (pun intended!), if you have an interesting voice, range, good diction, access to a good studio and live in the “right place”, where voice-overs, narrations, etc are in demand, foreign voice-over production can be equally fascinating.
I’m also curious about learning from translators who offer DTP as part of the package. And I wouldn’t mind find out a bit more about subtitling in the US.
My $0.02,
Cris
What a novel approach. I love using WinAlign and ABBYY FineReader. I never thought about marketing those skills to other translators… I’ll have to think about that.
A good option to create an e-book is to do it as a Html help file (*.chm).
What one loses in visual appeal with respect to a pdf e-book is gained in usability (if the help file is planned correctly).
I’m not too sanguine about the possibility of selling services to translators… unless you can do it extremely cheap.
We had tried to do it way back then (the translation branch of our company was supposed to be a side-show to our language engineering/service one – long since gone), but we found very little interest for our services – at least at the prices we could afford to provide them.
Corinne,
I’ll take a bit of a contrarian view here 🙂
Rather than spreading yourself out more, I think that this is the time to do a better job at your core business. Translators who can figure out ways to streamline their work (e.g., use technology more efficiently), add value to their work (e.g., proactively adding an extra QC step, such as running an automated numbers checker), provide solutions to client’s problems (e.g., share experiences from other work with clients who might benefit from this – without breaking the terms of an NDA, of course) will get more work now, face fewer demands to cut their prices, and will be in a much, much stronger position when the economy rebounds.
I would argue that it’s exactly >because< most translators will be looking to do things outside of their core business that this is the time to improve your core business.
Thanks for a good post!
Andres
I teach my source language (German) at a local university. I love doing it, because translation can be a bit lonely at times, and teaching is the opposite. I also get an office and thus feel better about having an office to go to, etc. I also learn a lot by teaching, and there is a definite “synergy” (if I can use that word) between translating and teaching. Also, many colleges I think like to hire part-time teachers, for the flexibility of it.
Look what appeared just the day after your post: 50 Side Businesses You Can Start On Your Own (and none of them “If you can speak a foreign language, you can translate,” thank goodness!)
Plus there are further suggestions in the comments.
I bet I would be ace at a pet yard cleanup business. I already pick up my dog’s little presents in my own yard, so the learning curve would be shallow.
Seriously, though the best bet would be either something one already does as a hobby or something related to the skills and tools we use in translation; writing, computers, and/or languages.
I see it more like Andres does. Unless the diversification serves in some way to reinforce your core business (teaching languages to corporate clients draws translation business in some cases – that’s how my partner got started 25+ years ago), it’s probably just a distraction. Adding things like OCR services, on the other hand, makes sense as well as money. I wrote an article on this subject early last year, discussing how translators an agencies can use OCR as a means of generating more income as well as simplifying or improving work processes, etc. Although I did have requests from various agency clients to OCR scanned texts, usually refused to do so after a while, because it was clear where that was headed, and I had no desire to operate a conversion service bureau. I use it as an additional paid service for my projects for my core activity: translation.
Here in Europe I know that many agencies are taking a hit in business volume, but that doesn’t seem to affect the main language pairs much, and out of caution they are offering even more business to translators they hope can deliver the quality of results to keep their customers. So some of us have even less time than usual for diversification 🙁
I agree with Corinne: diversification can be, during these times, a good way to improve revenues, but not only. For example, I love teaching so, as suggested by Corinne, I’m thinking about developing courses translation/editing related (I’m not only translator but editor too). I look at these “collateral” jobs not only as a way to improve the income stream, but also as a “wider” way to look at the profession. We have many examples, in Europe and USA, of translators/editors who organize classes about translation, writing etc, and even successfully! If these new jobs don’t turn into distractions which could decrease the quality of the translations/texts produced, I think they are welcome!
Marina
Really cool ideas! ^)
My approach when volume was down in January was to plan extra training, marketing, article-writing and presenting. So not diversification, but focus on outreach/visibility and improving my core strengths. Then volume picked up again and now I have to make time for these extra planned commitments!
My core specialization is rare enough (and I’m well-established enough) that I always think to building it up rather than diversifying.
My advice to others would be to attend training in their specialty (or to get a new one!).
By the way, I’m really surprised you don’t use Abbyy Finereader (or another OCR solution)! I use it almost daily! Saves me sooooo much time.
Karen
Thanks for mentioning the Smart Passive Income blog, Corinne. Pat’s ten-part post on the process he went through for the publication of his e-book is very useful reading. I’ve been planning to publish some advice on the use and integration of translation tools, and there are a lot of very helpful tips here.
Hello,
Thanks for sharing. I’ve had similar thoughts (in Fr) about writing for translators. Why they are able to do it and a few ideas about how to do it.
Feel free to visit my article : http://transtextuel.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/traducteur-redacteur-internet/
Great post, great comments.
Generally, I’d agree with Andreas and Kevin and advocate focusing on one’s core business, expertise, and enhancing outreach.
Diversifying your income stream by leveraging other talents and/or passions (photography is one of mine) can be rewarding, but the possibility of doing so with ease depends on where one lives.
In France, for example, regulations are tight. Depending on the type of work a freelancer does to earn revenue, he or she may well have to sign up with and pay social contributions to several different agencies (“caisses sociales”), keep very precise books to track income and allocate expenses proportionate to each source of income, and file different types of tax returns. Appealing, isn’t it?
Those who work as commercial and literary translators already juggle between two very different sets of agencies and rules (and pull their hair out ’round about March-April). Imagine adding graphic design, web programming, and photography…
When several people thought I should leverage my love of photography, I looked into the details and concluded I did not need the headache! So I make some of my images available to clients and friends as e-cards on an unreferenced part of my website. Makes everyone happy, and that is sometimes payment enough.
Jill — if you put together a WinAlign/Abbye service offer, let me know 🙂
Well, diversification is a good idea. However, in times of recession it is even more pertinent to make sure that you are actually getting the right rates for freelance translation jobs.
But, I liked the idea and have already begun using my Canon to build a portfolio of pictures.
> TheRateIsRight said:
> However, in times of recession it is even
> more pertinent to make sure that you are
> actually getting the right rates for freelance
> translation jobs.
Not sure I follow you there. I suppose this is an indirect advertisement.
The recession has actually made it easier to increase rates up to now. I am somewhat reluctant to do so with older customers (agencies) who are having a hard time for sentimental reasons, but I have found that the new ones inquiring are quite open to substantial increases. End customers seem to be particularly focused on quality now as a means of survival. So the higher-end market is doing well in the major language markets, while others seem to be getting squeezed occasionally.
Kevin,
For ongoing business, it holds true that you can even charge a markup for the quality stuff. For someone starting out, ‘recession’ is more of an abstract terms being used to negotiate lower.
oops!!! sorry me!!! please delete this topic !!!
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