Eve Bodeux and I recently recorded a joint podcast with Tess Whitty, host of the popular Marketing Tips for Translators podcast. The topic is outsourcing for translators: not outsourcing your actual translation work, but outsourcing business, marketing and productivity tasks so that you can focus on the work that you enjoy and do best (while someone else handles the work you dislike or aren’t good at!). We’ve each offered tips on what to outsource, how to find people to outsource to, what newer translators should consider outsourcing, and some of the benefits of outsourcing.
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Outsourcing for translators
Yup, outsourcing non-translation tasks is the smart way of doing business as a solo professional without going insane. I would take it one step further, though, and — like I always do — insist on translators not taking on non-translation tasks as part of translation jobs, which is the clients trying to outsource office tasks to ease the load on their office staff. Translators should resist that, as a rule. As opposed to reaping the benefits of providing ‘full service’ that those translators who embrace that sort of thing are after, they simply end up diluting substantive work (translation) with low-skill low-value office tasks, so the rates go down, not up, along with the perceived value of translation work and corresponding status of the translator (low if you allow formatting, scanning etc. to be part of your standard duties even after 20 years of experience on top of 3-4 field-specific degrees — it really must be a low-value field, or so people are going to think).