The 2010 conference of the American Translators Association will be held this coming October in Denver, Colorado (and the venue, the Hyatt Regency Denver, is really, really beautiful!). The form to propose a session for the conference is now available on the ATA website and the deadline is March 8, so get those ideas flowing! I was also interested to note that this year, the main presenter for each session that is accepted receives a $100 discount on registration for the conference.
Theories about direct clients
Recently, a reader posted this comment on my Wrapping up 2009 post: “I just wonder how one goes about getting direct clients. It seems ideal, but it also seems like a hurdle to get over, that many of us have not learned how to do.” I think that a lot of translators feel this way: they’d love to work with more direct clients but they struggle to find them. So, here are a few of my theories about working with direct clients, feel free to add your own:
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- You’re not going to find direct clients all in one place. Or as I heard someone else put it, “You need to think of ten ways to find one direct client, not one way to find ten direct clients.” I think that many of us who started out working with agencies did so by applying to many, many agencies that we found all in one place. For example, during my first year in business I applied to over 400 potential clients and I found the bulk of them by using just a few sources, such as association directories. See this post for more information about applying to agencies. So, first of all, I think it’s important to restrain yourself from looking for that gold mine of direct clients and accept that you are probably going to find them one at a time.
- Many direct clients will find you, rather than the other way around. Think of it this way; when you receive marketing materials from professional service providers (accountants, web designers, etc.), do you most often save them because you might need them in the future? Do you click on the links in most of the marketing e-mails you receive? I don’t either. So, you have to make sure that you’re easily findable when clients need you. I would say that 90% of the initial contacts I get from direct clients are in a moment of crisis; they have the opportunity to bid on a big contract but the RFP response has to be in English and it’s due next week, they’re exhibiting at a trade fair and just realized that they need their handouts in English, etc. So, make sure that you’re easy to find. Have an engaging and updated profile in the online directory of any associations you belong to; write articles for translation industry websites; get on LinkedIn and similar websites for your non-US countries; write a blog; have a good-looking professional website; join associations related to your specializations. I receive a lot of cold contacts from direct clients because if you Google “freelance French to English translator,” I’m on the first page: this really helps when direct clients are panicking and need a translator.
- You need to be the kind of person colleagues refer clients to. Quite a number of my direct clients have come to me through colleagues. One colleague closed her business to take an in-house job and gifted me a couple of clients; one colleague who works in English>French refers her clients to me when they need the opposite direction, and I receive a lot of referrals through people I meet at conferences and seminars. I know, this involves talking to people and potentially even putting on nice clothes and leaving your house, but it really works.
- Consider putting up a website that is only in your source language. Personally, I think that potential clients are attracted to a website that is exclusively in their language, because it makes you seem more approachable to them. For example, my colleague Eve Bodeux and I invested a very modest amount of money into putting up an exclusively French website. We picked a French domain name and the content is in French only (translated by our trusted colleague Marianne Reiner) and we have gotten excellent feedback on it from potential clients. Just for reference, this site cost us just a few hundred dollars to put up.
I don’t think that direct marketing to direct clients is worthless; personally I like postcard ad campaigns because they’re inexpensive and if you put a nice image on the card, clients may keep it just because they like it. However I do think that for most direct clients, “pull” marketing (where the client comes to you) is much more effective than “push” marketing where you go to the client.
Web 2.0 presentation in Paris in March
If you attended the ATA conference in New York this past October, you may have seen Eve Bodeux, Michael Wahlster and I present “Web 2.0 for translation industry professionals,” in which we talked about how to use LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, podcasts and Twitter for business purposes.
Eve and I (both French to English translators) are very excited that the Société Française des Traducteurs has offered us the opportunity to present a similar workshop (but this time it will be a day long!) entitled Web 2.0 pour traducteurs : optimiser votre utilisation des médias sociaux… which will take place in Paris on March 13. We’ll be presenting in French and covering social networking sites and strategies for Europe-based translators too. Hope to see some Thoughts on Translation readers there!
Using image searches for translation research
When you’re doing research for a translation, don’t restrict yourself to searching only on text sites. Image searches are really useful as well, and sometimes more so than text searches. Following are a couple of examples I’ve come across lately.
I recently translated a list of advertising keywords for a fashion company. I always find these types of assignments disproportionately hard because you have no context; the source document is just a list of words in a spreadsheet. Doing an image search (I use Google Images but I’m sure there are other good image search engines out there too) really helped, because I wanted to know “what is this thing” more than “what is the meaning of this word.” I also use image searches a lot when I’m translating a document about machinery or manufacturing processes, and I want to see a visual of how the whole apparatus works so that I can translate correctly. In addition, sometimes when I translate non-European French documents (i.e. from West Africa or the Caribbean), certain local terms don’t appear anywhere in my usual text-based term resources but they do appear in image searches.
A colleague in our local translators association clued me in to another great use of image searches: determining someone’s gender based on their name. Obviously if someone has a gender-neutral name, this technique doesn’t help; but when it’s simply a case that you don’t know whether a “foreign” name is typically male or female, it helps a lot. I’ll admit that when I come across many uncommon names, it’s not always obvious to me whether they’re typically male or female and it feels awkward to ask the person to clarify. Often, putting the person’s name into Google Images will immediately give you an entire page of pictures of all men or all women.
Any other translation-related uses for image searches out there?
Wrapping up 2009
Whether you look back on 2009 as an annus horribilis or a welcome change from the status quo, it’s time to take stock of the past year and move on.
The nature of 2009 depends on who you ask; I’ve spoken with freelancers who say they’ve never been busier, freelancers who say that their income is down 25% or more and they’re thinking about another career and freelancers who say that life is pretty much the same as before the economic sky fell. Paula Dieli’s blog Essential Project Management recently featured an interesting interview with the President of LUZ, Inc., who said that although his company’s revenue was up about 10% this year, their busiest and slowest times of the year were the opposite of previous years.
This assessment mirrors my experience in 2009; although I worked about 25% less (by choice, since my husband took an in-house job and I wanted to spend more time with my daughter), I earned about 5% more than in 2008, so obviously something went right. At the same time, my work flow was, for lack of a better term, weird. Some of my regular clients dropped off the map almost entirely or started using cheaper translators, but I gained a fair number of new direct clients who had large and well-paying projects. In addition, July and August were two of my busiest months, whereas Augusts past have been almost completely devoid of major projects.
I’m not really one for predictions, but here are a few of my observations about 2009 and what we might see in 2010:
- Especially for translators who work with direct clients, I think that a combination of the weak dollar and businesses looking for clients overseas is likely to continue feeding demand in our industry. With the euro hovering between 1.4 and 1.5 US dollars, US-based freelancers are an attractive option for European companies, and many US companies are looking abroad for clients in countries where the economic situation is less dire.
- The necessity for translators to opt in or out of the low-margin, volume-driven market is becoming more pressing. It seems (and again, this is just my unscientific observation) that in the world of large agencies, 4,000-5,000 words per day, mass e-mails to multiple potential translators and ever-decreasing rates are becoming the norm. At the same time, I personally have encountered very little downward rate pressure from my direct clients, and they continue to cope with my turtlish 2,000 words per day. In this case I think that you can’t really fight the trend; you just have to choose whether you’re going to try to compete in the volume-driven market or not.
- Along those lines, I think that we may also see some shifts in the CAT tool situation. The various issues surrounding Trados Studio 2009 and just the fact that it’s so different from the older versions of Trados may prompt many freelancers to look at other options. I have never owned Trados (preferring OmegaT and Wordfast), but if I were faced with the possibility of paying 795 euros for Trados Studio and having to essentially learn the program from scratch, I think I would look at some other possibilities. And don’t forget that you can compare a whole bunch of translation tools, without the marketing spiels, at Translators Training (I don’t have an affiliate deal with them, I just think it’s a useful site).
And with that, all the best for a healthy and lucrative 2010! Feel free to add your wrapup comments/predictions/gripes in the comments!