The first half of 2024: How did it go?

Greetings, Training for Translators readers, and happy July! Here’s what’s up at the T4T world headquarters (my office!).

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Fall four-week classes

Our live classes are on summer break, but you can pre-register now for the September session of Getting Started as a Freelance Translator or Interpreter (in the age of AI), or the November session of Direct Client Marketing Launch Pad. These are self-paced, four-week classes with weekly question and answer sessions, registration is $195 and American Translators Association members can use coupon code ATA for $30 off.

A recent participant in my direct client class commented, “[I really enjoyed] the down to earth and honest recommendations and comments. The fact that we can talk about absolutely everything and the instructor knows how to deal with each and every topic in a kind way.”

This week’s topic: 2024 is halfway done! How are things going for you?

Crazily enough, 2024 is halfway out the door, and those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are rolling into summer. Whether things are going well or poorly for you, it’s a good time to re-evaluate. Here are a few suggestions for a mid-year review of your freelance business!

Primary factors to consider

I think it’s important to give equal weight to two primary factors in your freelance business:

• How are things going financially? Are you hitting your financial goals?
• How happy/satisfied are you with the work you’re doing? Are you enjoying the job?

As I say a lot, you are a non-renewable resource. Financial insecurity is not fun, and I think it’s equally unpleasant to be financially secure and miserable in your work. So, ask yourself those two questions first. Did I earn enough money in the last six months, and am I happy with the work I’m doing.

My assessment: Yes, and yes, although I had a couple of work-related fails, and I need to refocus on a few things in the second half of the year. More on this below.

The view from here

Overall, things for me are going well. I earned $67,000 total in the first half of the year, putting me ahead of my income goal for the year (here’s my 2023 wrap-up post, in which I talk about my goals for 2024). I’m not sure this will translate (haha!) into double that amount for the year, because conference interpreting work slows down a lot in July and August. But it’s a number I’m happy with, and I’m happy with the balance between conference interpreting, court interpreting, translation, and teaching/writing/consulting. If things keep going the way they’re going for the rest of the year, I’m happy with that, and that’s a good feeling.

On the positive side

I really enjoy the work that I’m doing right now; a good mix of conference interpreting for a couple of anchor clients, court interpreting primarily in Colorado but in other states as well (more on this below), translating for my usual NGO and law firm clients, and doing all things Training for Translators.

Over and over, I have to learn the lesson (even as someone who teaches classes about this stuff!) that marketing works if you do it. Last year, I had a somewhat anxiety-provoking drop in interpreting work over the summer. More experienced interpreters told me that it’s just a seasonal thing and that things would pick up in September (which turned out to be true), but it was more of an income drop than I felt comfortable with. This year, I jumped into action in June (as conference interpreting work was winding down) and nudged some of my non-conference interpreting clients, plus applied to a few new clients. Shockingly (insert a sarcastic eye roll here) this produced some good results (who would have guessed that marketing actually works???), and converted a dormant client into what looks like an anchor client for the second half of the year. I also found that a surprising number of U.S. states outsource their court interpreting work to private-sector agencies, so I ended up registering with a few of them.

Ireally enjoy the translation work I’m doing right now. AI fever is real (more on this below), and I really have no interest in editing machine translation. I’d honestly rather do a different kind of work than do MTPE; I don’t mind editing, but I find that AI writing all sounds the same, and after a while, I can’t even tell if a human would write the way AI writes. Thus, I am working only for clients who are not on the AI wagon, which is going well so far.

On the less positive side

Of course, things in freelance-land are never entirely positive. Dealing with AI fever is honestly pretty exhausting sometimes, even though it’s not directly affecting my business, so far at least. Since the beginning of the current AI wave (let’s date that to approximately the release of ChatGPT in late 2022), I’ve felt that we’re going to lose a lot of translators from the middle of the market: people who were cruising along, making decent money translating for mid-market agencies. Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of this kind of thing:

“For the past 10+ years, I’ve been earning 12-15 cents per word, translating almost exclusively for agencies, and having as much work as I wanted, almost all the time. Now, all of my main agency clients have moved to MTPE, and they’re offering rates around $25 an hour, meaning that even if I wanted to edit 40 hours a week, which I don’t, my income would drop by more than half. I’m not that interested in working with direct clients, so I’m currently contemplating another career.”

Just in the past few weeks, I’ve started to hear from more people in this category: people who only translate (they don’t interpret, edit, subtitle, copywrite, etc.), who only work for agencies, and who are really struggling. And I feel like this has gone on for long enough that some of them are starting to find other jobs or think about retiring. Although this doesn’t affect me directly, it makes me sad, because I feel like we’re going through a massive shift in the translation profession (not so much in interpreting, at least for now) that no one on the freelancer side is really happy about.

Unrelated to AI, I did have a couple of my own business fails! Most notably, I decided to put a couple of book-writing projects on pause in order to create a series of recorded webinars for beginning freelancers. Bad idea! I totally misjudged the demand for these, and they’ve sold a total of…wait for it…one recording of one webinar! It’s not a disaster and they were fun to record, but I’m not doing any more recorded webinars! Now I’m putting my extra time into the delayed book-writing projects, and into starting a podcast version of my newsletter/blog, which will hopefully be ready in September.

What’s the status of your goals?

No matter how your business is doing, the worst option is to avoid the data. At least look over, or think back on, the goals you had for 2024 and how you’re doing. I put my goals in this blog post, and here’s how it’s going:

• Maintain income above 125K: So far, so good, and I have a bunch of work on the calendar for September through November.
• Take a subtitling class: No! I decided I don’t want to do this; too much audio work with the amount of interpreting work I’m currently doing.
• Finish at least one new book: Not done yet, but making progress, which is more than I can say for 2023!
• Keep up my current volume of translation work: So far, so good.
• Prioritize my wellness and happiness: Check! I’m happy, and my body feels good.
• Go to cello camp or join a community orchestra: Cello camp didn’t happen due to time and money constraints (no complaints, I ended up taking an impromptu trip to Switzerland instead), but I did the Spring session of Denver Adult Strings Camp and it was a lot of fun!

Over to you! Now it’s time for your own analysis of how things are going in your business. Post a comment below if you’d like!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!