Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Marketing to Direct Clients starts Monday-FULL

This session is now full; I’ll announce the 2017 sessions soon.

 

If you’re hoping to make 2016 your year to break into the direct client market, the next session of my online course Marketing to Direct Clients can help you get there, and it starts on Monday. The session runs for four weeks, and you’ll learn how to find, market to and successfully work with direct clients. A past participant commented, “Corinne’s course arrived just at the right moment in my freelance translation career, at this crossroads where you know you have to move up in terms of client base, rates and overall income, but you just don’t know where to start or what to do.”

Registration is $355 ($340 for ATA members) and includes 12 video lessons, eight live Q&A sessions (two per week; recordings provided if you can’t attend), individual feedback on four homework assignments, and a private online discussion group. With three months left in 2016, it’s a good time to make one final push on your business goals, and I’d love to help you get there! Here’s a preview of one of the course videos (you can use the ideas even if you don’t take the class!).


Corinne McKay

Six figures as a translator: how to get there?

Earning six figures (meaning over $100,000 US dollars per year) is a significant goal for lots of freelancers. It’s an ambitious but achievable goal for most translators and interpreters who are good at their work, are ambitious, have good business skills, and are willing to work hard. One confusing thing in our industry is that there are lots of paths to six figures; if it were as simple as “raise your rates,” or “work longer hours,” the goal wouldn’t be so daunting. Let’s look at three ways you might hit the six-figure mark in the next year. If you’d like a first-person account of the six-figure journey, read this excellent post by Spanish translator Paula Arturo.

Work for agencies, and work a lot
I’m not saying this is the preferred path, but it’s a path. I know several translators who work exclusively for agencies and make six figures, because they aim for the high end of the agency market and they work a lot. To do this, you have to have a high tolerance for being in the translation trenches; you have to be willing to crank out 3,000+ words a day, every single day, and you can’t take a ton of vacation. But if you prefer working for agencies, your administrative overhead is a lot lower than someone who works with direct clients. You might only issue a few invoices a month, and you might spend little to no time marketing.

The risk here is burnout: just make sure that in your six-figure quest, you’re not sacrificing your enthusiasm for the job, the quality of your work, or your future sustainability. You also want to pay attention to your vulnerability to client vicissitudes. If you’re working for four agencies and earning 25% of your revenue from each one, think about what you’d do if a client lowered their maximum rate for your language pair, or lost the end client that you primarily work for, or stopped sending you work all together.

Work for at least some direct clients
If there’s one major downside to the “work for agencies, and work a lot” model, it’s that your options, if you choose that route, are fairly narrow. Translate, translate, and translate some more, until you reach your target income. By working for higher-paying clients, you open up various options: you can work the same amount and earn more money, or work less and earn the same amount of money, or use the higher-paying clients to “subsidize” lower-paying work that you take on just because you enjoy it.

Realistically, hitting six figures gets a lot easier if you work with at least some direct clients. Make sure to account for the fact that direct client work is often more time-consuming than agency work. You may be doing a lot more than just translating. When I entered the direct client market, I also found that I worked a lot more slowly, because more of my direct clients used my translations for publication or distribution (grant applications, program reports, etc.) rather than for in-house, informational purposes. Remember that direct clients come in many forms; for example I do a lot of work for individual clients, and I really enjoy it. Direct clients don’t have to be Fortune 500 companies, and many freelancers fail in the direct client market by aiming too high, targeting clients that need more (volume, availability, languages) than a freelancer can realistically deliver.

Another caveat here: working with direct clients isn’t an all or nothing proposition. I work with both agencies and direct clients, and I enjoy them for different reasons. But if you want to hit six figures, you’re going to have an easier time if you filter at least some direct clients into your mix.

Have multiple revenue streams
As Walt Kania says, “A few prongs is good. With twelve prongs, you have a manure fork,” and you definitely don’t want that. But multiple revenue streams can be a big boost to your six-figure goals. For example, I work for agencies and direct clients, I earn royalties from my books, and I teach classes and do consulting for other translators. Personally, I enjoy the mix. Sometimes, when one thing is down, another is up. Or when I don’t feel like sending out warm e-mails to prospective direct clients, I do feel like marketing my classes, or the other way around. Some weeks it feels great to dive into a meaty translation project, and other weeks I really enjoy making a new set of videos for one of my classes.

The key here is to find revenue streams that complement each other and don’t make you feel pulled in a million directions. It also helps to have a relatively easy time shifting gears (translate in the morning, edit in the afternoon, teach at night, or whatever your revenue streams are), and you also need to pick the right niches when you look at these multiple streams. Another aspect I enjoy is that I don’t have to worry too much if I want to take on a lower-paying or pro bono project just because I enjoy it; it’s nearly always balanced out by some higher-paying work.

Two things are true about becoming a six-figure translator: it’s doable (if anyone tells you otherwise, seek a second opinion), and it takes a lot of work and some creativity. And you need a motivation; earning more for the sake of earning more isn’t going to carry you through a whole year of hard work. My motivations are that I love to take chunks of time off to travel with my family, and that I hate worrying about money. Together, those things motivate me to keep working at all of my revenue streams so that they add up to what I want to earn.

Readers, over to you: thoughts on breaking the six-figure mark?


Corinne McKay

Analog words in the digital age

Here’s a random linguistic observation… Earlier this week, I was translating away on some public health materials, and came to the expression “composer notre numéro sans frais.” Knee-jerk translation: call our toll-free number (to get information about this public health initiative). And then it occurred to me, is it still correct to call something a “toll-free number,” now that toll calls are not much of a thing anymore, having been replaced by unlimited minutes.

I bumped this to Twitter, and various translators weighed in with other examples of analog terms that we still use in the digital age. Robert Sette pointed out that musicians still call new albums “records,” although vinyl is all but obsolete; that made me realize that radio hosts still say “on tape,” although now it’s “on a digital recorder.” Karen Tkaczyk noted that we still “dial” the phone (using digital buttons?); Lloyd Bingham concurred that although he’s never actually dialed a phone, he still says “dial.” A friend of mine pointed to the expression, “hang up on,” although it’s decidedly less satisfying to “hang up” on someone by emphatically pressing the touch-screen than by slamming the phone back onto the hanging cradle.

There’s no deep takeaway here, just something interesting about linguistic evolution (or lack thereof). Readers, any other thoughts on this, or any other analog expressions that we cling to in the digital age?


Corinne McKay

Non-billable work: learn to live with it!

Thanks to reader Lisa Rodriguez for suggesting this post! Lisa (correctly) points out that “even with well-oiled procedures, it is *normal* to spend hours” on tasks like record-keeping, cleaning up bills and outstanding invoices, etc. As Lisa comments, “It’s part of the job…no point in getting bent out of shape about it.”

Yes. Amen. I feel as if many translators have the goal of having zero non-billable time: they just want to translate and get paid for it every minute of every working day. And there’s one way to do that; it’s called a salaried job. As someone who doesn’t have a salaried job, your situation is going to be different. What I mean by non-billable work is what Jonathan Hine would call overhead: work that you cannot bill to any one project or client. Things like:

  • Invoicing
  • Recording payments
  • Professional development
  • Computer maintenance
  • Cleaning the office
  • Following up with late-paying clients
  • Issuing quotes for projects that don’t pan out
  • Marketing
  • Managing your online presence

As a freelancer, your non-billable time is going to vary by the types of clients you work with. If you work only for agencies, especially agencies that do everything through an online management system (so that you don’t even really issue invoices), your non-billable time may be fairly low. If you work with direct clients, or have other lines of revenue like writing books, teaching, or consulting, your non-billable time might be closer to 50% of your working hours. But I completely agree with Lisa’s point: this stuff takes time.

An additional factor: without non-billable time, your business is going to wither. On a very tangible level, you can’t work efficiently in a cluttered office that you never make the time to clean or organize. On a big-picture level, you can’t keep your skills current without doing professional development. One major area that lots of freelancers neglect is consistent marketing, which leads to peaks and valleys in your business (“I can’t do any marketing because I’m already translating 70 hours a week…Oh #*$%, that project is over and now I have no work, so I’ll market like crazy…Here comes another 70 hour a week project.”) The way to smooth those peaks and valleys out is by embracing the idea that you can’t, and indeed shouldn’t be doing billable work every minute of every day. Non-billable work is the undercurrent of a stable, successful business, so embrace it! Or at least clean the coffee rings off your desk…

Readers, any thoughts on non-billable time, or how much of your time is not billable?


Corinne McKay

ProZ community choice awards & upcoming book translation class

Thank you to everyone who voted for Thoughts on Translation in the recent ProZ.com community choice awards. I’m excited to have won in the best translation blog category, and I promise to keep writing the kinds of articles that inspired you to nominate and vote for this blog! Congratulations to all of the other winners as well!

In other news, the inaugural session of my online course Breaking Into the Book Translation Market starts on Monday (September 12). There’s a good turnout for the course so far, and registration is still open. If you’ve thought of translating books (in general, or a specific book), but are wondering:

  • what translation rights are and how they affect you as a translator
  • how to query prospective publishers for your translation
  • what types of contract terms are important for a book translation
  • how to decide how much to charge for a book translation
  • how to work successfully with authors and publishers

…then this class will help you get there! Like all of my online courses, the class is open to translators in any language combination, runs for four weeks, includes lots of individual attention and feedback (plus self-paced components), and costs $355, or $340 for ATA members. I’m excited about this new course, and hope to see some of you there!