Lightning round: Questions from students and readers

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Following are answers to some questions I’ve recently received from blog readers and students; I hope they’re helpful!

Q: If you live in the U.S., what’s the best way to be paid by international clients?
A: I’ve ranted about this a bunch of times on my blog. Because the U.S. banking system is stuck in the 1950s (and that may be a generous estimate), there is no commonly accepted, inexpensive way to get paid by clients outside the U.S., unlike SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area. The vast majority of U.S. bank accounts don’t even have IBAN numbers, the system that the rest of the world uses to identify bank accounts. Thus, you’re stuck with picking the least-bad option for you. For me, this is usually an international wire transfer into my business bank account, for which I pay a flat fee of $15 (this is at Chase). Typically, I pay my banking fees and the client pays theirs, but for international clients for whom I do a lot of work, I have them deduct their wire transfer costs from my payment, so that they’re not penalized for working with me. My accountant feels that the Wise borderless account would be classified as a “foreign account” under FATCA, (this is a grey area and your accountant may have a different opinion) so I don’t use that, and several of my clients will not use Wise to transfer money to me (which I would prefer, because it comes in as a domestic ACH transfer, for free) because Wise isn’t a bank and thus lacks some banking legal protections. I do accept credit card payments from international clients and I just eat the fee for that. Basically, it’s a mess, but typically I accept wire transfers or credit cards.

Q: How much do publishers usually pay for book translations?
A: I’ve translated six non-fiction books: four for traditional publishers, one for a private business press, and one for a self-published author. All of the traditional publishers have framed the payment as a lump sum that worked out to about 10 US cents per word. The nice thing about a traditional publisher is that they typically have their own editor (in-house or on contract), which can be a big factor when you work with a self-published author. In my experience, editing costs are often where book translation projects involving self-published authors break down: not many editors want to work for a discounted rate just because the project is interesting, and not many self-published authors want to, or can add roughly 30% to the cost of the translation to hire an editor.

Q: Is it a good idea to use a tracking tool like Streak to determine if people open your marketing e-mails?
A: Objectively, sure. Especially if you’re using different e-mail scripts or targeting different types of clients, it’s great to have some data on who’s reading what. But you also have to consider the emotional impact of all of this data, as described in this article by a freelancer who used Streak. If you’re at all insecure about your marketing efforts (which means, basically, 99.9% of freelancers), you want to think about a tool like Streak before you use it: someone opens your e-mail multiple times and never responds; a direct referral from a friend never opens your e-mail; you can’t stop checking whether your dream client has opened it yet. In some cases, more data isn’t better, it’s purely a nexus of anxiety that serves no purpose.

Q: Is interpreting more future-proof than translation? Should we all become interpreters if we want to work in the language professions for another 20 years?
A: It’s complicated! Hopefully you were expecting that answer. I do think that, overall, we’re a long way away from, “Put on this magic headset and listen to the judge in Spanish.” I think that day will come, but probably not in the working lifetimes of those of us who are active in the language professions today. However, there are a lot of other factors to consider. We’re already seeing clients using workarounds for interpreting. I lost an interpreting client like that, last year: I had been recording an English voice track for their French corporate training videos, and they decided to go to an automated captioning tool for the French version, with machine-translated captions for the English. A bad idea, in my opinion, but they went ahead with it. Interpreting definitely isn’t immune to AI incursion, and you also have to consider that interpreting is still at least somewhat location-dependent even when you work remotely, because you still have the time zone factor. I get offered a fair bit of remote interpreting work for Europe, but I’m eight hours behind Central European Time and I don’t want to work the graveyard shift. All this with the caveat that I love interpreting and I really enjoy the translation/interpreting combo; just some things to think about!

Q: How can we fire an annoying client in a polite way? Is it OK to raise our rates until either the client drops us, or at least we feel fairly compensated for how aggravating they are to work for?
A: Absolutely! A former agency project manager in my online course alumni group always says, “The higher the annoyance fee, the greater the chance that the client will pay it.” And this has proven true in my own business! Most importantly, you never owe a client an explanation of why you don’t want to work with them anymore, unless you have some sort of ongoing contract with them. Just tell them you’re “not available” until they stop asking. But I fully support the option of simply raising your rates until the client stops contacting you, or you think, “This is an amount of money that fully compensates me for my irritation.”

Q: Is LinkedIn Premium worth paying for?
A: Erk. Maybe? The issue here is that LinkedIn, like many social media platforms, keeps limiting various features on the free account. Some of these limits aren’t that big of a deal; I personally can live without seeing who’s been viewing my profile (see above, in reference to data that may cause you anxiety with no benefit). But to me, personalized LinkedIn connection requests are key to any outreach campaign on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn recently limited most users to only five personalized connection requests per month. So, you have a few choices: first, I would do the free month of LinkedIn Premium (it’s easy to sign up for and easy to cancel) and see where that gets you. Second, I would do the math and figure out the return on investment for Premium. All of these subscription fees do add up, but in most countries, a year of LinkedIn Premium Career (the basic Premium level) is going to run you less than US $250 if you pay for the whole year, and even if you found one client on LinkedIn, you’d already be ahead of the game.