The first six months of this year: how business is going

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! As it’s now mid-July, I did a review of the first six months of 2023 and how things are going in my business; I’d encourage you to do the same, because you still have half the year left to make some changes if you’re not where you want to be.

I recognize that I’m a bit of an outlier among translators and interpreters for sharing my income statistics. If you find this weird or off-putting, feel free to just skip it. Such topics seem to be more common among freelance writers (examples here,  here, and here, and here, and some of those include much more detail about the writer’s sources of income than I typically provide, which I found interesting!). My goal here is not to brag about how much I’m earning, but to say that I started from zero (twice: once as a translator and once as an interpreter), and if can do it, you can do it!

Income and where it came from

At the beginning of 2023, I set an income goal of US $125,000, an increase of $15,000 over my 2022 income. When I say “income,” I mean gross income minus subcontracting: I don’t include money that I took in and immediately paid out to someone else (typically online course instructors), but I include everything else. My 2022 income was almost equally divided between translation, interpreting, and teaching (31-35K from each of those).

At $110K, I definitely was not worried about how to keep the lights on, but I was frustrated with the stagnation. My income had stayed stable at around that level for four years, and I wanted to bump it up a bit. Specifically, I wanted to move more toward the equivalent of a six-figure salaried job, which I feel that I (and anyone else with two Master’s degrees and 20 years’ experience) would merit.

So far, I’m ahead of this goal; minus subcontracting, I earned about $86K in the first six months of 2023, for an average monthly income of slightly over $14K. Where did the 86K come from, and what are the trends?

• My translation income was slightly behind last year, at 14K for six months (my total translation income in 2022 was 31K)
• Interestingly (since I haven’t published a new book in a number of years, but hopefully that’s changing soon!), book royalty income, while not a huge portion of my overall income, was way up, at $3,500 for six months as compared to around 4K for all of 2022
• The remaining 69K was divided between two line items that are up: interpreting, and teaching. Teaching is up about 25% (I offered some new Training for Translators courses that did well, and I did some training for other entities that also did well), and interpreting is way, way up: my total interpreting income for 2022 was 35K, and I earned 34K from interpreting in the first six months of this year

What went well:

• I honestly really enjoyed all of the work I did, even when I was working a little too much. I got my conference interpreting degree exactly two years ago, and I’m seeing that conference interpreting clients are starting to trust me with larger, more important, and multi-session assignments, rather than occasional or one-off things
• I did a lot of remote court interpreting work for entities outside Colorado, which brought in some additional income and proved to be interesting (and who knew there were so many francophone defendants in court cases in the US; there really are!)
• Court and conference interpreting are starting to balance out. In 2022, I did a bit over 110 court assignments and around 50 conference assignments, and so far this year, I did 47 court days and 52 conference days, which is more like what I’m aiming for
• Even when I was working a little too much, I made my own health and happiness a priority, and mostly kept going to yoga at least 10 times a month (sometimes 15-20 times), meditating pretty much every day, and doing the daily stretch/strengthen routine that I really enjoy, and that keeps my body feeling good when I’m sitting a lot. I was able to go on a week-long trip to the Navajo Nation with our animal rescue group, I took a really great trip to Iceland, we took a very fun family trip to Bryce Canyon National Park, and we fostered some really great cats who have now moved on to their forever homes. It felt really good to do all of this during a time when I also made a good amount of money.

What went less well (or failed completely!):

• For various reasons, I decided to scrap an upgrade to the Training for Translators website that I had already paid for a lot of web programming on; it was the right decision, but I should have thought this through before I went ahead with it.
• As expected (but it never seems real until it actually happens!) one of my largest direct clients completely discontinued working with me because their six-year contract with USAID ended. I knew this was going to happen, but it really sunk in after the usual start of their translation cycle went by and I didn’t work for them.
• My conference interpreting work from clients in the US is still sporadic, with the bulk of my conference interpreting work coming from Canada and Europe. This doesn’t necessarily bother me (I love Canada and am spending the whole month of July in Canada, and I went to a Canadian interpreting school), it’s more that I feel like haven’t really “cracked” the US conference interpreting market. I have clients who say they’re sending me all the French conference interpreting work they have (maybe one to two assignments a month), and there are many clients that won’t pay the rates that Canadian and European clients offer.
• I switched accountants, which took a lot of time and was a major hassle. I hate accounting, and I just want to pay someone to deal with it for me. My longtime accounting firm made some errors (that I caught…not good), took too long to fix mistakes that they made, and had a bunch of billing hassles, so I decided to switch to a new firm. However the first person I tried turned out to be even more disorganized and unresponsive, and on attempt #3 I think I’ve found a winner, but this still involved switching all of my payroll accounts and previous tax documentation over to their online portal, which was time-consuming. Hopefully this is now resolved (stay tuned!).

Other observations

• I’m still getting used to the seasonal nature of interpreting, and along with that, what it feels like to earn a big chunk of money at once, and very little money at other times. For example, QuickBooks tells me that I earned $1,100 in January (!), followed by three months in a row where I earned more than 15K per month. Experienced conference interpreters tell me that they expect and even look forward to this, and that they expect little to no work from mid-July to early September. I’m filling these gaps in by doing more translation and court interpreting, but it’s a big change to get used to, even when I’m happy with my overall income.
• Don’t give up on translation agencies. I haven’t worked with any new agencies in a long time, but earlier this year, an agency found me in the ATA directory, and sent a 30,000 word project paying 14 cents per word. They were easy to work with, the project was interesting, and they paid on time. Never say never!
• It takes time to build up a new line of business. Not an earth-shaking observation, but worth noting. When I finished my conference interpreting degree in July 2021, my only interpreting client was the Colorado state court system, essentially a “captive audience” client because Colorado has a lot of court work for French, and only a handful of certified French interpreters. I started from complete ground zero with conference interpreting work, and it’s only in about the last six months that my client base feels solid. Interestingly enough, this aligns with the 18 months it took me to replace my previous full-time income when I started my freelance business in 2002.

What’s ahead
At this point, things for the second half of the year look good. I’m currently working on a large translation project for an agency (there we go, another good agency!), I have inquiries or confirmations for at least 30 days of conference and court interpreting in September-November, and I’ve finally made some decent progress on the interpreting version of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator that I’m determined to finish before the end of the year. As always, freelancing involves a lot of uncertainty, but I’m feeling good about how things are going right now.

I hope these observations are helpful to you, as you assess your own first half of the year!