What now? Six options if your freelance business is struggling

Last week, I taught a free webinar called “What now?” directed primarily at mid-career translators whose freelance businesses are struggling.

Why mid-career people? Because, in my experience, mid-career people are having the hardest time adapting to “the new world order” of freelancing.

• For early-career freelancers, “it is what it is,” as we say in U.S. English. There’s nothing to adapt to, because they never knew a world in which translation agencies paid by the word for you to translate 10,000-word PDFs into Word documents using whatever technology you felt like using, or none at all. In my experience, early-career freelancers accept the things that mid-career freelancers are struggling with: they’re more likely to have a diverse business from the get-go; they’re more likely to aim for direct clients; they’re more likely to accept that they need to always be marketing.
• For people who were already established in the direct client marketing when ChatGPT hit, not much has changed. In my case, my translation clients never cared about technology and still don’t, because they’re not paying me for French word = English word, they’re paying me to solve a problem (translation) that they don’t want to deal with. Additionally, when a client comes to someone with 20+ years experience, most of it in the direct client market, they know that it’s not going to be cheap, and they either need/want that level of experience, or price is not a huge concern.

It’s not the service, it’s the type of client

One point I tried to make the webinar: if your business is struggling, you really want to focus on what kinds of clients you’re working for, less than the services you’re offering. My concern here is that people are looking for a magic bullet, like “Translation is dead, but if I can only offer the right service that clients want, then I’ll be fine.” For example, I mentioned on the webinar that content strategy and content marketing writing are one of the fastest-growing areas of my business right now; and a couple of people on the webinar mentioned that when they see copywriting and content writing jobs posted on LinkedIn, they often have hundreds of applications within a couple of hours.

My reaction: That doesn’t surprise me at all, and I would definitely not depend on LinkedIn (or any other online job board) as a source of well-paying work. Personally, I think that nearly any “word work” job posted online these days is going to get hundreds of applications, simply because a lot of people are struggling to find work. The key is finding clients who want your unique expertise, and who want an ongoing relationship with a freelancer they trust and who understands their needs. If you can hit that sweet spot, then you’re going to have a lot more success with charging rates at or above $100/euros an hour rather than the $25/euros an hour that you’re probably seeing on LinkedIn. Editing for translation agencies may not pay much, but editing for C-level corporate executives who have to write in their non-native language could pay really well.

The six ideas

If your freelance business is struggling, there are way more than six things to try, but I identified six that I think are worth considering for mid-career translators. If you’d rather listen to these six ideas as a podcast, you can do that by finding Training for Translators on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or using this direct link.

A number of people have recently asked me, what would I do right now if my business were really struggling? I’m happy to tell you, but the problem is that I’m not you. If you’re the main wage earner in a family with small kids, a big mortgage, and a spouse who’s home full time, that’s a lot different than being single, unattached, and having the option to store your stuff in your parents’ basement while you go digital nomad-ing and decide what to do with your life. I hope that these six options will at least give you some food for thought, particularly if you had a difficult 2025 and are trying to move forward.

1. Keep doing what you’re doing, and hope that things improve. Could we see the AI-fueled pendulum swing back toward human translators? Possibly! A couple of people on the webinar mentioned that they’re seeing this happen in some sectors, specifically gaming. And I think that clients are realizing that good translations cost money either way: you need IT and QA people to maintain your large language model, or you need translators to do the translations. I’d put this in the category of stranger things have happened, but I wouldn’t count on it and I definitely wouldn’t make this your Plan A unless you have another job or enough savings to wait this situation out.
2. Offer the same services, but to different clients. This, in my opinion, is the best option for most people, but also the most challenging. “Just keep being a translator, but for clients who appreciate you more and pay better” is a great idea, but if it were that simple, you would have done it already. Working for direct clients involves a lot of selling, at least at the outset, and the truth is that most freelancers have a hard time making themselves do that, with enough consistency, to establish a solid base of direct clients. But if you’ve been “thinking about thinking about” marketing to direct clients, it’s never too late to go for it, and I’ll take the liberty of mentioning that March Marketing Madness could help you get started!
3. Branch out into work that agencies still pay well for. There’s a reason people enjoy working with agencies: they find the clients, and then you just do the language work, which is what most of us are here for. And agencies still pay well for certain types of work: two that spring to mind for me are conference interpreting and medical/scientific linguistic validation (where you’re checking the actual scientific content of the document, not just the translation). Here, the issue is how long it takes to develop these skills if you don’t have them already. For example, I decided to branch out into interpreting in 2018, passed the court interpreter exam in 2019, did a conference interpreting Master’s in 2020-2021, and 2022 was the first year that I had a significant amount of conference interpreting work, so three to four years between the idea stage and the income stage.
4. Branch out into other “word work.” Again, this is going to require selling to the right kinds of clients, but I’d personally look at a) fact-checking, and b) writing and editing for companies or corporate executives who don’t have the writing skills or the headspace to do it themselves. I recently attended a presentation by a journalist turned fact-checker who started an agency in 2024 and already has 40 (not a typo) fact-checkers working for her! Caveat: if one of your struggles is that you can’t make yourself market to direct clients, this could be more of the same.
5. Look at salaried jobs that you could do with your current skills. Three options I’d consider: language teaching (we may see people streaming from translation into teaching, the reverse of the usual pattern), working in-house for a translation company as a salesperson or project manager, or working in-house in the localization department of a non-translation company, for example a software company or medical device company. I honestly think these are good options. If your freelance business is struggling, the income volatility can get pretty terrifying, and this is something you could start doing right away.
6. Finally, you could change careers completely. In the spirit of putting all the options on the table, let’s include this one. My advice: just make sure that you’re moving toward something better. As someone on the webinar commented, don’t become an entry-level coder and have that be eaten by AI too. Here in the U.S., there’s a huge demand for people to do education and healthcare jobs where you cannot work remotely. The “Careers” page for my local school district (not even an enormous city), includes no fewer than 10 pages of job listings, many of which don’t require a teaching license. I think I’d also look at IT jobs where you could study for some type of credential on your own, then apply for a salaried job. This occurred to me after I talked to someone with no IT background, who studied on her own for the Salesforce Platform Administrator certification (using Salesforce’s free training site) and subsequently found a salaried job paying $88K a year.

If your freelance business is struggling, you’re 100% not alone, and I hope these ideas are helpful! Just leave a comment if there’s anything you want to add.

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!