How to work with colleagues and (hopefully!) stay friends

It’s February, which means that my March Marketing Madness challenge group is open for registration! Back for year seven (!!), MMM has become a Training for Translators tradition. This year’s theme is Show up and do something. Whether you’d like to find your first direct clients, pursue a new service or specialization, or get a fledgling freelance business off the ground, MMM can help you get there with 20 daily challenges, an optional but fun Slack group, and some new features for this year! But the price ($90) is the same! Here’s the full description. 

New on the podcast 

Training for Translators episode 11, My Chat GPT use cases, is live. Listen on the T4T website or in your favorite podcast app. 

This week’s topic: How to work with colleagues and (hopefully!) stay friends

Collaborating with colleagues on translation or interpreting projects can be a great way to take on larger projects, work with people you like, and offer clients a one-stop shop. On both the freelancer and the client end, a “collective” of translators or interpreters can tick a lot of boxes: you get to choose the team, while the client gets many of the benefits of *both* the agency and freelancer models. 

Or, it can be a total nightmare, where you barely make it through the project and never speak to your (former) friends again. How can you set these collaborations up for success? I’m so interested in this topic that my friend and colleague Eve Bodeux and I gave an American Translators Association conference presentation on it, and I talked about it on an episode of the Smart Habits for Translators podcast.  Based on my own experiences, and the interviews that Eve and I did for that presentation, here are some recommendations! 

Here’s how these things fail

I’m a die-hard optimist, but let’s start with the negatives. I know at least two pairs of freelancers who started out as best friends, then started working together, and ended up never speaking to each other again. Freelance relationships fall apart for a few reasons:

• Role confusion: Differing expectations (often unspoken or assumed) over who’s going to do what, who’s responsible for what, who “owns” certain aspects of the work, who gets to do the juicy stuff, who has to do the work that no one wants to do. 
• Money: Disagreements over what to charge, what to charge for (samples, edits, project management), billing terms, payment methods (are you going to accept credit cards, who pays the fee, etc.). 
• Scope of work. Handling clients who add to a project you’ve already quoted on, or who ask for multiple rounds of edits after you think a translation is finalized, or who want you to record an interpreting assignment without paying extra. 
• Unequal commitment or availability. Feelings of imbalance and frustration when one person has less time to devote to the business, is perceived as not responding quickly enough or as not prioritizing the partnership or group. 
• Personal issues spilling over. Having colleagues who know all about your personal life can be a curse/blessing situation. Colleagues who are also your friends can be more understanding, but it can also be frustrating to be on the other end of that, with a colleague who repeatedly invokes family issues and doesn’t hold up their end of the deal. 

Ahead of Eve’s and my ATA conference presentation, we interviewed four or five sets of translation partners, and one key trend emerged. To have a successful partnership, it doesn’t really matter what your expectations are, it matters that your expectations are aligned with your work partner’s/partners’ expectations. For example, one set of translation partners (two very high-earning men!) told me, “We’re both in this primarily for the money. We want to do a good job on the work, as efficiently as possible, then have time to do other things.” These two people were not really friends outside of work, and collaborated on high-paying translation projects. That’s very different from, “I love the partnership because I get to work with my best friend,” but the important thing is that it worked for them. 

Recommendations for a good partnership or collective

Freelance partnerships and collectives can be incredibly enriching experiences. To set things up for success, I would recommend:

• DO NOT form a joint business entity unless you have a compelling reason to do so. It’s generally best to keep your own freelance entity; when you work with colleagues, have one person serve as the “head contractor.” The client pays that person, and they pay everyone else. 
• Start small. Before you decide that you’re going to share a significant amount of work with someone else or with a group of colleagues, do a few low-stakes projects together and see how you get along. 
• Be willing to have the difficult conversations at the outset. Definitely talk about money: what rates you envision charging clients, and how those will be divided between the team members. Also, talk about who “owns” what. Go through a few scenarios. Let’s say one member of the team meets a prospective client at a networking event; do they automatically “own” that client, and they get to decide what parts of that client’s work they take on? What if another team member feels that they are better suited for that work? 
• Decide how you’re going to handle project management. Are you going to charge clients a project management fee? Is a project management fee going to be built into your quotes? If you’re handling projects large enough that they need multiple translators and editors, project management can quickly balloon: dividing up the files, maintaining the translation memories, tracking what’s been submitted and what hasn’t. Consider that the person handling this may want/need to be compensated for it. 
• If you’re focusing on translation, talk about who’s going to translate, who’s going to edit, and how you’re going to divide up the money and workflow. It can work really well to work in a translator/editor pair, and it can also cause conflict if the editor feels like they’re doing the (generally) lower-paid work. 
• Also, think about your marketing presence and whether you’re willing to invest any money up front. Do you want to make a joint website that represents all of the team members? Just use LinkedIn? What kind of joint marketing presence do you want, versus being a group of freelancers who occasionally work together? Are you going to have a joint e-mail address, or just be a informal team that you can all call on if you need help with a specific project? 

I feel generally positive about freelance partnerships and collectives; they can give us the opportunity to work with people we really like, while giving clients an option other than a solo freelancer or an agency. The key is to identify what you want to get out of the arrangement (the ability to take on larger projects, offer translation and editing, offer an interpreting team, provide clients with a wider range of services, or something else), while anticipating some of the ways in which things can go wrong. 

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