The red zone: what is it, and why do you need one?

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Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! Here’s what’s up with T4T this week!

Keep a list of things you say “no” to

We all know that saying no is both difficult and important. Saying no is how we preserve our time and energy for what matters to us, and saying no can be really, really hard. One of my new favorite things is the weekly e-newsletter from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. It’s short, to-the-point, and has tips you can implement right that second. Last week’s issue featured a great one: keep a list of things you say no to. “Turn each no into an achievement.” As a recovering people-pleaser, I love this!

GDPR-compliant e-mail marketing

It’s hard to know how to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if you’re doing e-mail marketing. My friend and colleague Molly Yurick sent me this really helpful article from Hunter.io, titled Is Cold Email Legal? Definitely worth a read if you do e-mail marketing to clients in countries with e-mail privacy laws (not the U.S., for better or for worse!)

This week’s topic: The red zone! What is it, and why do you need one?

Rather than having just one rate (“I charge X cents per word/X dollars per hour”), I’m a big fan of rate zones. The green zone is your ideal rate, where you want to be working most of the time. For me, this is any work that generates an hourly rate of around US $110, whether I’m charging by the word, hour, or day. The yellow zone is a rate that isn’t ideal, but that either works on a limited basis (for me, book translation falls into this category: I can’t afford to work for publishers’ rates all the time, but once a year or so, it works), or that works for more complicated reasons. For me, court interpreting also falls into this category. The Colorado courts pay certified non-Spanish interpreters $65 an hour (well below what I want to be earning), but with a two-hour minimum, and mostly for remote assignments that take 30 minutes or less, and they send me ~100 assignments a year, which works for me.

Then there’s the red zone. The red zone is a rate below which you do not work. No. Just no (see above for James Clear’s advice on this…haha!). The problem is that many freelancers have no red zone, which leads to saying yes to low-paying work, thinking, “It’s just one cent…It’s just five dollars an hour,” and pretty soon, you’re looking at your business finances and wondering why you’re earning so little money when you’re working so much.

The red zone can be freeing

Trust me on this, the red zone can really free you. If you don’t currently have a red zone, it can be very scary to establish a red zone, because turning down work is always scary. But, particularly in the current business environment, and particularly if you translate for agencies, you’re probably seeing a lot of downward rate pressure. There are various problems with this:

• It harms the entire profession. At a certain point, it’s just not true that working is better than not working, when you’re working at rates that don’t reflect the expertise and training that the job requires. I agree that particularly as a beginner, you have to start somewhere, but it’s just a fact that if clients couldn’t find people to work at the rates they’re offering, they would have two choices: pay more, or go out of business.
• It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re working too much for too little pay. You really want to be in a situation where, when a project goes sideways and you think, “Am I getting paid enough to deal with this??” The answer is, “Actually, yes!!”
• It never ends. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but when you’re telling yourself, “It’s just half a cent, I’m not going to make a big deal about it!” the downward slide is likely to continue.

Having a red zone can be very liberating: instead of anguishing about whether you should have turned a job down, you can just tell yourself, “It doesn’t meet my financial goals, so I’m saying no.“

How to establish a red zone

It really doesn’t matter what your red zone is, it only matters that you have one. My red zone is going to be different than yours, and your red zone can involve both specific rates, and “working conditions.” For example I don’t do interpreting jobs that involve getting up before 5 AM; that’s one of my red zone conditions, because I simply can’t fall asleep early enough to do a good job before then. After hearing a presentation by Michael Schubert at an ATA conference, I added a component to my red zone: no two-figure invoices. No invoices for less than US $100; it just doesn’t reflect the time and expertise that I put into even a small project. That idea emboldened me to raise my rate for a one-page official document translation to $100, and it’s worked well for me.

Your red-zone numbers are partly objective, and partly subjective. You’re trying to determine:

• What’s the rate at which I think, “Ugh! This just isn’t worth it!”
• What’s the rate at which I think, “I’d be better off spending this time marketing to better-paying clients”
• What the rate at which I think, “I’d be better off taking a class to improve my skills or pursue a new certification, so that I’m not working for rates like this anymore”

Those types of ideas will guide you to your personal red zone!

Thanks for reading, and I hope these tips are helpful!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. She holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College, is an ATA-certified French to English translator, and is Colorado court-certified for French interpreting. If you enjoy her posts, consider joining the Training for Translators mailing list!