The holidays are a good time to…

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! December’s master class, Breaking into the subtitling market, is open for registration! On December 11, guest instructor Molly Yurick will teach a two-hour master class for beginning and aspiring subtitlers and audiovisual translators, based on her own experience re-training as a subtitler during the COVID pandemic. This class always gets rave reviews! Registration ($75) includes the recording. We hope to see you there!

This week, let’s talk about handling the holiday season as a freelancer, depending on where you’re at in your career.

• If you’re an experienced freelancer and you’ve reached your income goals for the year, December and January are a great time to take time off, because work is often slow anyway. Particularly if you work with direct clients, make sure to give your regular clients a referral to another translator. Don’t just send them to a directory where they can find someone else; find a trusted colleague who will be working when you’re on vacation, and either send that person’s contact information to your regular clients, or put their contact information in your e-mail auto-responder. This rule isn’t absolutely iron-clad: if you’re taking off the week between Christmas and New Year’s, your clients are probably on vacation as well. But you definitely don’t want to leave clients hanging if they really need someone; better to set them up with someone else ahead of time. If your workflow is solid, give yourself some time to recharge. This is what I’m doing: planning on some pajama time, some ski time, and some beach time.
• It’s also a great time to remind clients that you exist, by sending them your holiday availability. I had sort of forgotten about this holiday nudging technique, until someone else mentioned it in a comment on my LinkedIn post about nudging dormant clients. Tamar Arenas Pastor commented that she followed up with a client who had said they might need her services in the future, letting them know her availability over Christmas, in case the project was going forward (the client replied, to discuss a project!). Sending out your holiday availability is a great excuse to contact pretty much any client.
• If you’re a beginner, it’s also a great time to look for work. Why? Because everyone else is taking time off. Over the years, I’ve talked to several translators who either launched or expanded their businesses by being available during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Particularly if you work with agencies, it’s a great idea to let them know that you’ll be working over the holidays, and it’s a good time to look for work in places where you might not ordinarily look (i.e. job boards). Clients are often more amenable to taking a chance on a new person when all of their regular freelancers are busy!