Lots o’classes coming up!

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! It’s high season for professional development, and we’ve got a variety of options on tap for you:

• Direct client research lab: Get personalized direct client marketing recommendations, tailored to the kinds of clients you want to work with. I know, I said I wasn’t going to offer another session until April, but with a pretty full waitlist, I decided to go for it in February. Registration is $190, currently 11 spots left, registration closes when those spots sell out or on February 10.
• Free webinar: What now??: Free! The live session is on February 12, and everyone who registers will receive the recording. Everyone is welcome in this one-hour session, but it’s particularly targeted at mid-career translators trying to regroup and move forward in the world beyond “three agencies and a Gmail address.”
• March Marketing Madness challenge group: Back for an eighth year, MMM serves up the motivation that you need to get that marketing done! Twenty daily challenges, 20 motivational videos, an optional but fun Slack group, and new for this year, three live sessions (recordings provided). Registration is $95 until February 15, $99 thereafter.

This week’s topic: Some thoughts on relational marketing

When it comes down to it, there are two basic types of marketing: pitching, and relational marketing. Note! My business coach Treasa Edmond uses the term “relational marketing;” I’m not sure if she coined it, or if it’s a common thing!

For most of us, pitching means sending “warm” e-mails to people we don’t know, pointing out an intersection between their needs and our skills. In my opinion, the resource for that is Ed Gandia’s e-book, Warm Email Prospecting: How to use short and simple emails to land better freelance writing clients. That’s not an affiliate deal but I’m definitely biased, because after I took Ed’s e-mail prospecting class, I tried it for myself and immediately landed two book contracts.

Pitching has a lot of advantages: it’s fast, it’s cost-free other than your time, it’s low commitment (a student recently said to me, “I remind myself that no one is going to come after me with a pitchfork for sending an e-mail”), and according to entities that study such things, it still works, even though it’s kind of a “dated” marketing method. Here’s an article from Hunter.io on how to write more targeted e-mails that people are more likely to respond to.

Then there are the icky parts of pitching: lots of people think it feels spammy (TBH I don’t have this issue, I honestly feel like lots of companies out there need my help, but they can’t get my help if they don’t know that they exist), it can be kind of soul-sucking to send out 100 e-mails that 95 people never respond to, and you have to find a steady stream of prospects to keep it going.

In our profession, you also have to consider the cultural factors: in many European countries, direct e-mail marketing to people you don’t know is a) frowned upon/seen as tacky and desperate, b) illegal or close to illegal because of e-mail privacy laws, or a combination of the two. So what’s an eager freelancer to do?

The other option: relational marketing

If you don’t want to pitch, your other option is relational marketing: building a connection and establishing a relationship of trust and authority with the potential client before you directly ask them if they want to work together.

Hands-down, the most effective form of relational marketing is in-person client-side events where you can rub shoulders with the people who need you. For example, the American Bar Association’s international law section recently held a three-day conference in Mexico, and it was open to non-members. Topics included mergers and acquisitions, international arbitration and litigation, international trade, and legal technology. Just as an example, translating and interpreting for international arbitration cases has been the subject of a couple of great presentations at recent American Translators Association conferences. At this type of event, you could a) learn a lot about the sector and its needs, and b) connect with people at the top of the pyramid.

Whenever I meet a freelancer who says, “I went all in on direct client marketing and doubled my income in a year,” they’ve almost always focused on client-side events. And, you can probably envision some of the challenges:

• Client-side conferences can be costly and time-consuming to attend. The non-member rate for the ABA conference was $1,200+ (but let’s also say that even a medium-sized translation job would have paid for this).
• You may need to be comfortable speaking your source language(s), which a lot of translators aren’t.
• You need to be comfortable interacting with high-level people in person, which a lot of human beings (not just translators) are not.

I often suggest: if you’d like to dip your toe in the client-side event waters but you’re intimidated, start with something online. Go to a one-hour webinar or an online conference. Tons of specialized professional associations offer this type of thing. Again, random example, the Museums Association is having a one-day online conference in May, Championing accessible museums, it’s 69 UK pounds (around $94) and is on a hot topic in the museums sector, an area that a lot of translators and interpreters are interested in.

How about LinkedIn?

For many of us, LinkedIn is going to be our most basic form of relational marketing, especially for clients that we can’t meet in person. We can do things like:

• Comment on our target clients’ posts and tag them in conversations that they might be interested in
• Post things that speak to our clients’ pain points, and post things that are helpful, regardless of whether a client ends up working with us
• Find natural reasons to reach out to potential clients: “Congratulations on the new office in Munich!”
• Collaborate: Co-write posts or articles on LinkedIn; feature other people in our posts

The goal here is to create a human connection without the hard sell, and to “organically” grow our reputation among potential clients, who will (hopefully) then think of us when they need a translator or interpreter.

My take

I think that relational marketing can work well for specific types of freelancers:

• People with the time, money, and social skills to attend client-side conferences
• People with the patience and persistence to create relationships with potential clients online (on LinkedIn and similar platforms), without an intense focus on “the payoff” of getting work from them

The positive side of relational marketing? To a lot of freelancers, relational marketing is more palatable than pitching, because it feels less salesy. The negative side? It’s generally a longer-term, slower-burning strategy than pitching, and a lot of people don’t stick with it for long enough to see results.

The point of this comparison is mostly to show you various options and help you find a marketing method that you can at least tolerate (you don’t have to love it!). Remember our guiding principle for this year: Marketing: Do Something. Relational marketing is another “something” to have in your marketing arsenal!

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• Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! Don’t forget that February 1 (that’s this Sunday!) is the last day to secure last year’s price ($90) for this year’s edition of March Marketing Madness. After Sunday, the price goes up to $95. Back for an eighth year, the MMM challenge group is Training for Translators’ largest program of the year, giving you 20 business days of marketing challenges, motivational videos, an optional but fun Slack group, and this year, three live sessions!
• If you’re a podcast person, are you listening to the Training for Translators podcast? I’m excited that it’s reached almost 10,000 downloads, and the latest episode is an audio version of my 2025 year in review. Listen directly on the T4T website, or subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the Training for Translators YouTube channel.

Things to try, if you’re paralyzed by marketing anxiety

Lately, I’m hearing from a lot of freelancers who are struggling with some hard realizations:

• It’s difficult to impossible to have a thriving freelance business in 2026 without actively marketing your services
• Lots of people know this (translators and interpreters, after all, being very smart people) but still can’t make themselves do it

First, it’s important to remember that the freelance landscape changes all the time. When I started freelancing in 2002, I applied to over 400 translation companies during my first year in business. Marketing to that many potential clients never seemed odd to me, because I didn’t know anything different. And yet, the generation of freelancers ahead of me, people who started in the 80s and 90s, said, “That’s crazy!! When I started freelancing in 1993, I had a phone number and an AOL address, I did only a tiny bit of marketing, and through word of mouth and referrals, within six months I was so busy that I had to hire another translator to work with me.”

Moral of the story: things change. The other day, I overheard a discussion at my coworking office; two middle-aged guys, one lamenting the changes in the freelance landscape. “I wish I could still make good money making simple websites, now everyone uses WordPress or Squarespace!” To which the other guy responded, “Yeah, and I wish I were still 25 and not bald. But the world doesn’t work that way.”

If you’re really stuck

Two truths about me, as context: I’m not a fundamentally anxious person, and selling doesn’t bother me. I don’t love selling, otherwise I’d work in sales, but I don’t dread it. People respond, people don’t respond, I don’t really see it as a reflection on me as a human. And, I realize that a) we all have “outreach anxiety” from time to time, and b) some of us have debilitating outreach anxiety, as in we just can’t do it.

I’ve got three things for you to try, all very different strategies:

1. 
   If you’re a fundamentally spiritual person, *or* you struggle with the feeling that things in the current world are just stacked against you and you’re constantly swimming upstream, do this. Before you work on marketing, say to yourself, out loud, “The universe is conspiring in my favor. Everything in the universe is pushing me toward success.” This is pretty woo-woo, but it’s actually a take on a quote from Paulo Coelho, and honestly, I think it’s helpful. Why shouldn’t you be destined for great success and even wealth? What if you assumed that that’s what the universe wants for you? Then get after it with your marketing!
2. Less woo-woo. Start your marketing sessions by asking yourself these questions: Who should I be serving? Where can my skills be most useful? Who really needs my help, but they can’t get my help because they don’t yet know that I exist? This is the approach that I find most helpful because it has the advantage of being true. We’ve all had the experience of a client telling us, “You really saved us.” “I’m so glad we found you.” “You’re just what we needed.” So now, go find more people who are waiting to be helped by the skills you have.
3. A tip I gleaned from a freelance writers’ group I’m in. Give yourself a little distance from your direct marketing efforts by scheduling your e-mails and posts rather than sending/posting them as soon as you write them. As mentioned above, I’m neither an anxious person nor super-anxious about marketing, but I was amazed by the number of people who chimed in to say that they do this and find it helpful. Instead of writing a pitch e-mail, sending it, and then sitting there sweating bullets over whether the person is opening it, reading it, are they going to respond, you can avoid all of that by scheduling the e-mail to send the next morning. The person who suggested this tactic said that by that time, she’s probably forgotten about the e-mail anyway, or it seems less terrifyingly immediate. All modern e-mail programs can do this: in Google Workspace/Gmail, click the little arrow on the “Send” button and it will offer you various options, i.e. “8 AM tomorrow morning.” You can do the same thing with LinkedIn posts (click the clock icon on the post interface).

If you’re struggling with marketing paralysis, I hope these tips are helpful! Have a great week!

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In episode 22 of the Training for Translators podcast, I wrap up the highs and lows of 2025. If you’d rather read this episode as a blog post, you can do that here. You can listen to it as a podcast episode right here (using the audio player below), or subscribe to Training for Translators on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

2025 was, financially, my most successful year in 23 years of freelancing. I did a lot of interesting work, published a new book, and took a good amount of time off. And yet, it wouldn’t be a year of being a human without a few fails, which I describe in the episode!

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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!

I did quite a bit of traveling in 2025, and I’m way behind on writing about it, but here we go with an interesting destination: Fiji!! For a bucket-list trip, I told my best friend from high school to pick anywhere (literally, anywhere) in the world, and she picked Fiji, so off we went in May. I’ve never been to the South Pacific or even to Hawaii, so this was a whole new experience for me.

How it all started: Marriott Vacations

Perhaps, a shocker: this trip was actually quite reasonably priced, because my friend found an incredible package deal on Vacations by Marriott Bonvoy. This got us round trip airfare (LAX-Nadi) on Fiji Airways, plus four nights in a very nice room at the Fiji Marriott Momi Bay for $1,500 each (no kidding). So there’s my first tip: if you want to do a resort trip to somewhere that has a Marriott, start on their website!

Off we go to Nadi

I was able to get a points ticket on Southwest from Denver to LAX, so that cost me nothing. My friend and I met at LAX, and then we flew overnight, nonstop 11 hours from Los Angeles to Nadi, the major international airport in Fiji. Here’s another tip: A short-ish trip to Fiji is actually totally doable if you sleep well on planes (I sleep like a rock on planes), but could be really challenging if you don’t.

Because it’s a long flight and you go across the international date line, you lose a day on the way there (we left on Monday night and arrived Wednesday morning), so a one-week trip is really five days, and it’s a looong way to go for that amount of time. However, if you sleep well on planes, this is less of a factor because, at least from LAX to Nadi on Fiji Airways, you fly overnight both ways (leaving around 11 PM). For me, this was fantastic: I fell asleep before we took off, and woke up maybe two hours before we landed. But if you can’t sleep on the plane, you might never recover from the jet lag in that amount of time. Something to consider!

Momi Bay Marriott: Wow!

We landed in Nadi around 6 AM and took a shuttle to the Momi Bay Marriott, a seriously amazing place. It’s about a 45-minute drive from the Nadi airport, and we really loved the remoteness. I’m not that much of a resort-goer, and what I really didn’t want was Cancun, with side-by-side high-rise hotels and no nature. The Momi Bay Marriott isn’t that at all: it’s low-rise buildings (max two stories) in a very quiet environment with lots of jungle. The tradeoff is that there’s literally nothing else there: you could walk to a local convenience store, but that’s about it, meaning that unless you go on a day excursion (which we did, more on that below), you do everything else at the resort, and you eat only at their restaurants.

As you see in these photos, the Momi Bay Marriott is mostly over the water (the building with the barn-style roof is the main restaurant); when my family travels to the tropics we’re mostly tromping through the jungle, so this overwater luxury experience was totally new to me! We had a very nice “standard” hotel room (two queen beds, large bathroom, balcony overlooking the water) and for food, we did the “Momi Meal Deal,” which gets you the breakfast buffet, one item off the lunch menu, and either two items off the dinner menu, or the dinner buffet, depending on the night. I thought the food was excellent, and getting vegetarian food (always a bit of a roll of the dice on an international trip) was no problem. The resort had food packages at various price points; we got the least expensive which was around US $80 each per day for all three meals, and I thought it was totally sufficient! The servers were very helpful and considerate, we didn’t feel rushed, and we had no bad food.

I’ve never been to a five-star resort before so I have zero points of comparison, but this type of trip offers the opportunity for lots of stuff to do, or you can do nothing in a very beautiful place. We did some of each!

Tours and activities

The resort itself has various things to do: it’s a gorgeous place to hang out, and unlike stories I’ve heard of other resorts, it was no problem finding beach chairs or even a cabana (and you don’t pay extra for any of those), particularly if you get to the beach fairly early. There’s a gorgeous infinity pool looking out over the ocean, a nice, large swimming pool (with water aerobics, which I went to), extensive walking paths (but you can also be driven around in a golf cart), a nice gym, a spa (extra cost for that), and other activities like feeding the fish that live in the lagoons on the property.

I also felt like I wanted to see something of Fiji outside the resort, so we did two day trips: a full-day cruise to a small island off the coast of Nadi (Fiji consists of more than 300 islands so it was interesting to see some of them!), and a half-day land trip to the major sights in the Nadi area: the largest Hindu temple in the South Pacific (very cool!), a traditional Fijian village, and, believe it or not, American actor Raymond Burr’s botanical garden, where you can see tons of orchid varieties and also go hiking. Both of these trips were totally worthwhile and not expensive by US standards (around $100 per person including transportation from the resort). The entire Nadi area felt very safe, and the guides for all of these trips were very helpful (essentially everyone in Fiji speaks English).

The Momi Bay Marriott is overall a quiet place (which we enjoyed). There’s not much nightlife other than the on-resort restaurants and bars; there were rumors of a fire show on the beach, but it was raining that night and thus was cancelled.

Who goes to Fiji?

Fiji is not very close to, well, anything, so you might wonder who goes there. We encountered pretty much two categories of travelers: families from Australia and New Zealand (it’s a four-hour flight from the East coast of Australia) and American and Canadian honeymooners. I think the resorts there all have their own flavors: we saw some of the other resorts while picking up and dropping off other people on the tours we took, and I really liked the low-key nature of the Marriott. Some of the other resorts seemed more party-oriented, and the Marriott definitely attracts a lot of families. I like kids and don’t mind being somewhere that has a range of ages, but there also seemed to be adults-only resorts if that’s more of your thing.

Overall impressions

I’m generally more of an adventure travel person than a resort person, but I’ll say that this was a top-tier resort vacation. If you’re a resort person, Fiji is definitely the place to go. For example, one place I would absolutely never choose for a resort vacation is Cancun; I love Mexico, and I would go to Cancun to hang out with people I enjoy spending time with, but the wall-to-wall high-rise luxury hotel scene is 100% not my thing. Fiji, or at least where we went, is very different from that. The resort was all low-rise buildings, and it didn’t feel like they killed every living thing on the land in order to build it.

Resorts have their appeal, in that you don’t have to plan anything “extra” unless you want to. I really enjoyed the day trips we did, and it seemed like most people at the Marriott just stayed there and enjoyed it. I was also somewhat concerned about the “cruise on land” vibe (drunk people at the pool at 9 AM or whatever) and there really was zero unpleasant party action where we were. Thus I give Fiji two thumbs up if you can manage the flight and if you’re looking for somewhere beautiful and relaxing!

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