What if you had a horrible year? Is it time to quit?

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I’m an inherently positive person, and, as I wrote last week, 2025 was my most successful year in 23 years of freelancing. And yet, lots of freelancers in the language professions are really struggling. Evidence: I’ve talked to more than a handful of freelancers lately, who’ve said:

• Things in my business are going really poorly
• To the extent that I’m having to dip into savings to pay my basic expenses, or I’m having to cut way back on my spending, or I’m depending on a spouse/partner’s income which I haven’t had to do before
• I’ve tried marketing for more/better work, but either I can’t make myself do enough marketing to make a difference, the marketing I’m doing doesn’t seem to be successful, or both
• And now I’m wondering, how do I know when it’s time to quit and do something else?

Step 1: Questions to ask yourself

First, let’s slow it down and do some analysis, by asking yourself a few questions:

• How bad is the situation? Is work slow-ish? Or reallllly slow? And for how long have things been this bad?

Example: I’m a big proponent of green, yellow, and red rate zones, and you can do the same thing with income levels: what’s your ideal monthly income, your not great/not horrible monthly income, and the monthly income that is the absolute bare minimum you can live off?

In my case, I think (always hard to know until it happens, but I’d surmise) that if I earned below my “red zone” monthly income for six consecutive months, I’d start asking some hard questions.

What are the hard questions to ask?

If your business is really struggling, I’d recommend asking yourself the following questions, which all depend on your specific situation:

1. What are your other options? To me, this is the most important question. If you quit what you’re doing now, what then? Maybe you’ve already thought about this and you’re looking at in-house jobs, or at another type of freelancing. You don’t need my permission to do this, but here it is: it’s 100% OK to not want to be a freelancer anymore, or to not want to do what you’re doing. But you need to be going toward something, not just away from what you’re doing right now, unless you have both the desire and the financial resources to stop working.
2. What’s the root of the problem? If the root of the problem is that your agency work has crumbled and you don’t want to work with direct clients, that’s a pretty clear signal. Maybe you can pivot to a type of freelance work where the agency model is still going strong. That exists: I know a number of writers who are making six figures working for content marketing agencies; if you have a legal or medical background, I think linguistic validation for agencies is viable. But if the root of the problem is that you hate or can’t make yourself do what it takes to be a freelancer, that’s a bigger issue, one that I talked about in my recent podcast episode, Do you have a freelance business, or two clients and a Gmail address?
3. Are you trying to get blood from a stone? I’m looking for a less graphic metaphor here, but I mean: are you still thinking that there are tons of translation agencies wanting to pay you good money to translate 10,000 words a week on a regular basis? Because, in my opinion, that way of working barely exists anymore. I know. I miss it too, but things change, and clients want different things. I just don’t think that there’s that much well-paid “pure” translation work for agencies these days, and I think that if you want that kind of work, you have to work with direct clients. For what it’s worth, my direct clients never cared about technology and still don’t. I really have no idea if they assume I use MT/AI, assume I don’t use it, don’t care because mostly they’re paying me so that they deal with translation as little as possible? No idea, but that kind of work is out there if you work with direct clients.
4. How much are you really (really) marketing? Another tough question. The vast majority of people I know who are really turning up their marketing, are finding interesting, well-paid work. But most freelancers aren’t doing enough of any kind of marketing to really make a difference. For example, when I started freelancing in 2002, I applied to more than 400 translation companies in my first year of freelancing, and it still took a year and a half until I had steady work. And well-paid agency work is harder to find now than it was then. In the course of my direct client research lab class, I’m constantly stunned (and I mean this in a factual way, not as a judgment) by the number of people who have no visible contact information anywhere online (clients couldn’t work with them, even if they wanted to), their LinkedIn About section tells their (very interesting) life story and has zero information on the results and benefits of working with them, which is what clients care about. Or the top search result for them is a ProZ.com profile that was last updated in 2012. See my post Online profile mistakes we’re all making for more on this! Expecting too great of a return from too little marketing effort is a huge problem for many of us.

Objective signs

Unless, as mentioned above, you have both the desire and financial resources to stop working, I think it’s important to give yourself an end point, rather than just watching your business wither until you can’t pay your bills. I’d recommend something like:

• Giving yourself three months to do a huge marketing push (every second you don’t have paying work is spent on marketing) and seeing what comes of it. If the answer is “nothing,” or if you literally can’t make yourself do this, it may be time to move on.
• Giving yourself a financial parameter, which is going to depend a lot on your specific situation. Maybe it’s:
  • If you dip into savings for six months in a row just to pay your basic expenses, you’re moving on from this type of freelancing
  • If you earn below X amount for six months in a row
  • If you have three consecutive quarters of decreasing earnings
  • If your 2025 income was way, way down (I’ve talked to freelancers whose income dropped by more than half between 2024 and 2025) and you have zero desire to market for new clients

What about diversifying?

I’m a huge fan of diversification. I do direct language work (and that’s divided into translation, interpreting, and writing), and teaching/writing/consulting, and I enjoy all of those “prongs” for different reasons. If you already have an established freelance business, you could diversify into a different translation specialization, a different language-related skill (interpreting, subtitling, editing for non-native speakers), or a different kind of “word work” entirely (fact-checking, humanizing AI-generated content).

I’d recommend this as the #1 thing to do if you’re struggling; but it doesn’t solve the problem if you simply can’t make yourself do what it takes to run a freelance business. If this is the case, it’s not a personal failing. I’ve heard from so many freelancers who’ve said, “For 15 years, I made decent money working for four agencies; in the past year, two went out of business, one switched entirely to MTPE, and one sends me only minimum charge jobs.” This has to do with forces larger than you, so try to take it easy on yourself, and focus on how to move forward from here.

Post a comment below if there’s anything you want to ask me or tell me!