I just updated the Speaking of Translation recordings page with a new recording: French to English orthopedics translator Joanne Archambault’s interview on finding direct clients through translation industry conferences. It’s the same recording that I ran in this post on my blog, just in a different location. But while you’re over there, you can also check out the Speaking of Translation archives, chock full of recordings on freelance sabbaticals abroad, all of your translation technology problems solved, insider tips for a thriving freelance business, and more!
A couple of freelance tips
Every now and again, I feel inspired to post a random freelance tip on my Twitter feed. I could say that these are Zen master-esque pearls of wisdom that distill in my mind over the course of a few years, but they’re more like out-of-left-field thoughts that come to me while I’m washing the dishes or folding laundry. Here are two for today; feel free to add a comment with your thoughts on them!
The freelance startup phase: give it time, or pick another business.
One of the most common laments I hear from beginning freelancers is that it’s taking so long to develop a solid client base. “So long” could be defined as anywhere from a month to the better part of a year, depending on the person’s situation. First, I tell the discouraged beginners that for the first year and a half that I was freelancing–a time during which I had planned to work very part-time or not at all, since I had just had a baby–I wondered almost every day if I would be better off getting a full-time job. After about 18 months, I still wasn’t earning a ton of money, but it was enough that I felt encouraged to stay the course. It took about three years of freelancing until I got to the point where I no longer considered the option of returning to full-time work for someone else. Looking back, that was a long three years. But here’s the thing: now, after almost 11 years of freelancing, there is no way that I could replace my freelance income if I worked at an in-house job, especially if I looked for something with similar hours and flexibility. Partially this has to do with location: if I lived in a major East Coast city, there might be in-house jobs that pay more than what I make freelancing and offer generous vacation. But in groovy college towns in the foothills of the Rockies: no way.
If you need quick money–and there’s nothing wrong with that…haven’t we all been there?–pick another business. Another mom from my daughter’s school recently told me that she was in that situation, and although she’s bilingual, in a marketable language, she started a housecleaning business. Within three months, she was bringing in a full-time income. Is the work intellectually stimulating, or creative, or self-directed? Probably not so much. But if you need a source of income ASAP, cleaning houses or walking dogs is a much better option than starting a freelance language business. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, since my fantasy sideline career is to become a service dog trainer!
Well-paying work is out there if you look for it. But most people don’t look for it; they wait for it to find them, and meanwhile they complain.
I’m not sure how much explaining this one needs: it’s all right there. Yes, our industry has its share of low-paying work and bottom-feeding clients. In addition, as freelancers we often take that aspect of the industry very personally, as if it’s a reflection of our personal worth. For more on that, see Walt Kania’s insightful post Charge what you’re worth? Please, no on The Freelancery.
But here’s the thing. There is so much well-paying work out there; even clients who are looking to pay high rates to someone who does a really good job. But those clients are too busy with their own work to comb the web looking for you. Maybe they don’t even know that you exist. Seriously: when I interviewed Joanne Archambault about how to find direct clients at industry conferences, she commented that a lot of her clients said that they never knew that someone like her existed, although they desperately needed her. You can go find those high-paying clients at their industry conferences; you can send them postcards; you can give webinars for them; you can write articles for their industry newsletters. But you cannot wait for them to find you, and meanwhile complain about the bottom-feeders and non-payers. It’s tough love, but there you go.
Some thoughts on file-sharing sites and copyright violations
I’m a big believer in sharing information: for example, over the last five years I’ve written 400+ posts that are available on this site for free. I’ve found countless solutions to my own questions on other people’s blogs, also for free. However, I think that there’s a place for copyrighted work too; when applied correctly, copyrights allow authors and content creators to earn a living, and to keep on writing and creating because of the income that their copyrighted work generates.
File-sharing sites like Scribd and Slideshare (and others; I’m just using these as examples because I’ve found my copyrighted work on them…) have a complicated relationship with copyright law. In one sense, these types of sites are a great way to get your own work out there: put up an interesting presentation, and tons of people might find it. It might go viral, and you might get a book deal out of it. But, at least in my experience, these sites do essentially nothing to prevent people from posting other people’s copyrighted work.
Case in point: this morning I got an e-mail from a kind colleague who let me know that someone had posted one of my books on Slideshare. Yep, there it was, including my copyright notice, which appears on the first page of the book. To Slideshare’s credit, they immediately removed the book when I notified them, but presumably they’re not planning to reimburse me for the 1,333 times that the book had already been viewed. A few years ago, someone posted one of my books on Scribd with similar results: it was taken down after someone alerted me, but it had already been viewed over a thousand times.
A few thoughts here:
- I see that these types of sites have legitimate uses. But it disturbs me that they cannot take the minimal amount of time it would require to prevent these very flagrant copyright violations. Posting someone else’s entire book isn’t a grey area: my copyright notice was on the first page of the file on Slideshare.
- It disturbs me that translators would do this to each other: I know the username of the person who posted my book, and it’s a translator.
- Violating someone’s copyright is stealing. That’s all there is to it. Especially when you post an independent author’s book, you are not taking money from a huge corporation, you are taking money from an individual who buys groceries and pays the mortgage with that money. It’s not the new media model: it’s theft.
- If you want free information, there is lots of it out there. Go crazy with it. If you find works that are licensed under terms such as the GNU GPL, you can even sell them, as long as you license them under the original terms. But don’t steal copyrighted stuff and think that you’re doing something noble by posting it online for free. If the author wanted their book to be freely available, they wouldn’t have to look hard for a way to make it happen.
Just for fun (!), let’s put some numbers on this situation. The retail value of 1,333 copies of my book is $26,646; certainly a decent chunk of money by anyone’s standards. But of course I don’t earn the retail value in royalties, nor would all of those 1,333 people have actually bought a legitimate copy of the book. My royalties amount to between $3.50 and $10.00 per copy, depending on where the person buys the book. And let’s say that only 10% of those people would have actually purchased the book, so I would have sold 133 copies. If we take an average royalty of $5.00 per copy, that’s $665. So, dear copyright infringer, if you’re reading this and you want to make things right, I’d say that an appropriate restitution would be approximately that amount. And Slideshare, if you want to make things right, start at least minimally vetting the uploads on your site for copyright violations.
Some blog posts you should read!
It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at the Thoughts on Translation wordface, with the end of school, the start of summer and a couple of very large (and interesting!) projects. Since I’ve been short on time and creative energy, here are some blog posts that I highly recommend:
- Lisa Carter of Intralingo on Advice on how to price a book translation. This is a tricky topic even for experienced translators, and Lisa does a great job of mixing the business mindset (actually needing/wanting to make money from translation) with other factors, such as wanting to get a publication credit, and even the fact that literary translators don’t generally produce 2,000 or 3,000 words per day. Lisa also reports that she discusses compensation issues at length in her online course Next Steps in Literary Translation.
- Judy and Dagmar Jenner of Translation Times on The 50% success rate, or how to make your peace with not winning all the projects you quote on. This post includes some excellent insights on the work that goes into quoting on projects at the high end of the market.
- Walt Kania of The Freelancery on No more self-inflicted discounts, or how to stop negotiating on behalf of your clients, rather than on your own behalf. We’ve all been there: somewhere deep inside, we feel that our rates are too high, so we’re offering discounts, comps and freebies before the client even asks for them. Also make sure to read the comments for more excellent tips, such as bidding high on projects you aren’t very interested in.
- Riccardo Schiaffino of About Translation on Simple regular expressions for Trados Studio filters. Riccardo is a translation technology guru and is great at simplifying seemingly complex topics; in addition, I’m the poster child for “people who just don’t get regular expressions,” so I loved this post. Riccardo includes a great example of a regular expression used to find segments that contain “topcoat” “top-coat” and “top coat” with one search. Great tip!
Happy translating to everyone!
Regaining control of your e-mail: filtering
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m developing a new presentation on time management for translators. I presented the “beta” version at the Colorado Translators Association‘s recent mid-year conference and I think it went well; big thanks to everyone who responded to my time management survey which provided an excellent starting point for the presentation!
Time management is such a huge and subjective topic that I’m not sure I can write just one blog post about it. So I thought I would break the idea down into specific tips that might be easier to digest. Here’s one: take back control of your e-mail by mercilessly unsubscribing and filtering, so that you (try to) limit your inbox to messages that you need to read as soon as you receive them.
All of us receive countless notification e-mails every day: someone added you as a LinkedIn contact; someone mentioned you on Twitter; Groupon has a great offer for you; someone in your neighborhood needs a dog sitter. You may not want to stop receiving these e-mails entirely, but you need to stop them from interrupting your actual work. So, do this: the next time you read an e-mail and delete it without taking any further action, make a change. If you’re no longer interested in receiving that type of e-mail at all, unsubscribe. If you want to keep receiving it but you don’t need to read it right away, create a filter. I use the Gmail interface to read my domain name e-mail, and I make heavy use of the “Bypass the inbox” filtering feature. So let’s say that I signed up for an e-newsletter from a potential client because I want to learn more about their business. The first time I receive an e-mail from them:
-I click on the dropdown arrow on the right side of the message window, next to the Reply arrow
-Then I select “Filter messages like this”
-I enter the aspect that I want to filter on (sender, subject line, etc.), then click “Create filter with this search”
-Then I select or create a folder for those e-mails to go to; for example “Marketing research”
-Then, most importantly, I tick the “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” box. The message will still be marked as unread, but it will go automatically to the designated folder. For example I currently have 497 unread messages from my neighborhood e-mail list in the folder I created for them. Basically that’s 497 messages that didn’t end up in my Inbox, and that I can read when/if I want to.
I’m sure that other e-mail applications have similar features; whatever program you use, make sure that you learn how to use filters so that you can focus on time-sensitive messages in your Inbox.