Last weekend, I had the pleasure of giving a seminar on “Beyond the Basics of Freelancing” for the Northern California Translators Association. At the end of the seminar, I did a short overview of ways to diversify your freelance income stream. All of us are familiar with the basics such as editing, proofreading, voiceover, copywriting, but I wanted to generate a few new ideas. I’ll write more about these in the coming weeks, but one sideline business that really jumped out at me is personal software training for other freelance translators (i.e. going to people’s houses and helping them learn a new piece of software or improve their computer skills).
This idea first came to me when a fellow freelancer in Colorado told me that she had recently hired a bookkeeper to come to her house and set up QuickBooks. This freelancer was an instant convert to the personal software trainer model; in just a few hours, she had her entire accounting system set up and was also able to ask exactly the questions that she wanted to ask. In my own case, I recently battled with setting up Wordfast Pro on my Linux computer; in that case I couldn’t get the software to work properly for other reasons, but I also looked at Wordfast’s new standalone model and thought “Can’t I just pay someone to come to my house and teach me how to use this?”
Partially, I think that there is a big and untapped market for this type of service because as freelancers become more successful, our time is more valuable. Personally, I would rather pay someone $200 to come to my house for a couple of hours and teach me exactly what I want to know (and not repeat what I already know) than sit through an all-day seminar that covers some topics I want to hear about and some that I don’t. Likewise, I’d prefer one-on-one attention to a webinar where I can’t really ask questions until a defined time if at all.
It seems to me that there are a lot of pieces of software that would lend themselves to the personal training approach. Obviously any of the big translation environment tools, Dragon Naturally Speaking, accounting software, etc. In addition, I think that this approach could win more freelancers over to some of the less well-known translation environment tools; whenever I evangelize about OmegaT, the free (as in doesn’t cost anything) and open source translation tool that I use and love, people seem excited by the idea but intimidated by the idea of installing it and learning how to use it.
An additional benefit of a personal software trainer who comes to your house (or works over the phone and uses a VNC system to see your desktop) is that you’re seeing how the software works and looks on your computer and how it interacts with your file system. It seems to me that this system could be a win-win deal; good extra income for tech-savvy translators and a great service for busy freelancers who want to learn new applications or polish their skills.
Finally, not to send everyone rushing to the domain name registrars, but my random sample research shows that the domain name “personalxyztrainer.com” is available for all of the translation-specific software that I searched, where “xyz” is the name of the software (yes, including the market leader!). If you decide to start this type of business, let Thoughts on Translation know how it goes!
Hi Corinne,
Very interesting post, as usual.
To anybody interested in becoming a personal software trainer, I would suggest to first take the time to learn precisely how much time each specific task will likely take.
This could be done, perhaps, by training some friends and acquaintances for free: the future trainer gets the benefit of learning how to teach and how long it probably will take, the friends the benefit of learning from the future trainer’s expertise.
I consider myself a Trados power user, and a couple of years ago volunteered to teach the basics of the program to a fellow translator. Based on my experience, I estimated it would not take more than a couple of hours.
However, I ended up spending more than eight hours teaching the software: things that I had thought would be easy were difficult for this colleague, and the more difficult concepts harder still.
Once the future trainer has sufficient gained experience to be confident of his or her estimates, I would suggest to estimate high – people are going to be happier if a six-hours estimate becomes five actual hours of training than if the estimate had been for three hours only but the training then took four.
Some caution is advised here and consideration that one should never underestimate human ignorance. I once watched a well-planned Trados training seminar be completely derailed when it was found that many of the participants didn’t even know the basics of a computer’s file system and were baffled by words like “directory”. You can’t even blame the user-unfriendliness of Trados for that one.
In general, however, I think it’s an excellent idea, but I would not commit to any time estimates until a clear assessment has been made of a user’s basic knowledge and organization skills. For example, I have a very strict system of organizing files for projects, which is intended to aid in finding information in the archive later. Many people opt for more “natural” systems or quickly diverge from the structure I propose, only to find that files are not easily located later. Where possible the software training should include recommendations for organizing information created/processed with the software so that the learners can derive maximum benefit.
Nice idea, Corinne. Though I’ve got some experience as an instructor at a ‘PC for beginners’ course, I’ve never thought of applying this skill to translation software.
How would you market this service? Our marketing workflow is generally oriented towards customers, not colleagues. For instance, offering this through one’s profile on Proz.com seems useless, as freelance translators generally don’t visit other freelancers’ profiles.
Good idea, and excellent points from Kevin and Riccardo. In general, I think it’s a great idea. My twin is trying to teach me Translation Office 3000, and even though I am definitely a software power user, it’s super frustrating (her fault, not mine). I bet there is a a market out there for these kinds of services, but as others have set, you’d have to put a lot of thought into the details to eliminate as many variables as possible. @Kevin: I am speechless about some folks not knowing what a directory is. That makes the training job almost impossible, doesn’t it?
Great post. With so many tools available to coaches/consultants nowadays, you don’t even have to travel to their home and could very well do many of these tasks remotely. Remote apps such as TeamViewer, video or web conferencing systems that are very affordable and the power of fast internet connections means you could be a personal XYZ coach to someone in Florida while never leaving your house in Chicago, making your income stream even larger.
Hi Corinne,
Your post is very interesting. It can help telecommuters looking for new ideas.
I’d like to publish it at my site about remote access software and telecommuting. Is it possible?
Regards,
Ted
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With so many applications and softwares to even connect to machines from remote locations, the world definitely has become a smaller place.