Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

Guest post: marketing translation services to your alumni network

Thoughts on Translation will be running some guest posts over the next few months; to inaugurate the series we’ll hear from Marianne Reiner, an English>French legal translator based in California. I first met Marianne when she was a student in my online course for freelance translators, and with her French and U.S. law degrees, she immediately struck me as someone with a bright future in the industry.

Recently, Marianne has been expanding into the direct client market, and her guest post is on using your university alumni network for direct client marketing. Enjoy!

Marianne says:

I am stating nothing new when I say that I would like to work less and earn more money! While thinking of original marketing strategies to grow my base of direct clients, I received an offer from my Alma Mater to purchase their recently released Alumni Directory.

I attended the University Of Connecticut Law School. I specialize in legal translations from English into French. So I thought, why not market myself to my fellow U-Conn grads! In France (where I come from) there is no such collegial feeling towards the school you attended. (I am still waiting to hear of an Alumni Directory issued by the University of Paris XI Law School!) So the strategy and use of my Alumni network was all new to me!

After an investment of about $90.00, I received a hard cover directory along with a CD-ROM. The task was immense and the font really small! But I strategized and familiarized myself with the different categories used in the directory. The Alumni are organized by geographical region and by area of practice. I started with the regions, and first contacted via email my fellow Alumni in my area (I remembered a great advice from Corinne’s class: the chance for a face-to-face meeting could always go a long way).

I then tackled the list by area of expertise. I selected the area of practice where my experience can be used: contract law, environmental law, European Union law, foreign investments, human rights, immigration law, intellectual property law, international law, mergers and acquisitions, securities.
For each attorney I am contacting, I have researched the firm they work at, any law journal article they may have written or their list of past clients.

The task is daunting but I am confident it will yield the results I am hoping for. Although I have not yet had a new direct client, I am confident that this strategy will eventually pay off. The feedback I have already received is very positive and promising.

And one last note on using your Alma Mater network: do not forget those academics whose classes you enjoyed. They publish articles which may need to be translated to be published in international journals. Or in the case of a law school like mine, the various legal clinics are also a good place to sell your translation services.
Good luck!

Marianne Reiner


Corinne McKay

Using Payment Practices as a marketing tool

Translation client rating services such as Payment Practices are an indispensable way to check out your prospective clients’ creditworthiness before you work for them. Over at About Translation, Riccardo Schiaffino wrote a whole post about client rating services that gives a good overview of the larger lists.

Recently, a colleague and I were discussing the merits of using Payment Practices (which I’m using as an example because I’m familiar with its features, TCR and the Blue Board may have something similar) as a marketing tool, particularly for agencies outside the U.S. whose reputations you may not be familiar with. This technique comes with a few caveats, the main one being that you should never, ever contact the agency’s employees directly by using the contact information that appears on Payment Practices or any other list. Simply go to the agency’s website and follow the application information (look in the “employment,” “freelancers,” “join us” or similar sections) that appears there. Using the agency’s direct contact information (i.e. employee e-mail addresses, basically any information that does not appear on the agency’s public website) is a) highly annoying to the agency and b) a violation of Payment Practice’s terms of service.

That being said, let’s say that you want to start working with agencies in Austria. Log on to Payment Practices (it’s $19.99 a year; I think it’s a bargain and no, I don’t have an affiliate deal with them!) and click Search. Payment Practices gives agencies two ratings, one for Payment Reliability (i.e. does the agency pay on time) and Translator Approval (i.e. do translators who have worked with the agency want to work with them again). The search form allows you to set maximum and minimum values for each of those scores; let’s say you set the PPR and TA scores to be greater than or equal to four (the highest score being five). And look at that; Payment Practices has just displayed 17 potential clients in Austria that are rated 4.0/5.0 or higher.

Again, do not then contact the potential client using the detailed contact information listed on the Payment Practices entry. Go to the potential client’s website, see if they are taking applications from freelancers, and follow the application process that they list. Payment Practices’ form can also sort by city; so if you’re planning to be, say, in Paris, you can sort out the highly-rated agencies in Paris and contact them (again, using the contact information on the agency’s site, not the information on Payment Practices) to ask for an informational interview since you’ll be in the neighborhood.


Corinne McKay

Work less, produce more

Ryan Ginstrom wrote a great comment on my last post about high-earning translators (among other things, informing us that among Japanese translators, the gold standard is now US $200,000!). In his comment, Ryan also observed that “Working long hours only pays off for so long — study after study has shown that when knowledge workers (that’s us!) work long hours (more than 40/week), productivity rapidly drops off, and total output is often lower than those working 40 hours.”

And…he’s right! If you’d like to spend some time learning about the history of the eight-hour work day, take a look at the International Game Developers Association’s fascinating article “Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work,” written by Evan Robinson. The article starts out by informing us, the knowledge workers, that when we work more than 40 hours a week, productivity starts to drop; not just a little, but to the extent that if we work eight 60-hour weeks in a row, we produce about as much as we would have in eight 40-hour weeks. Over the short term, (i.e. a few days), crunch mode can be effective, allowing us to churn out a big job by the deadline. But for those of us who consistently work overtime because we’re convinced that we get more done, crunch mode starts to backfire.

The story is the same for people who are convinced that they function just fine on a small amount of sleep. Robinson’s article cites a military study that showed that after two weeks, someone sleeping four hours a night is functioning at a cognitive deficit of nearly 60% as compared with someone sleeping seven hours a night.

If you have time to read the article, scroll down to the “What’s It All Mean?” section at the end, in which Robinson makes a strong argument that not only does knowledge worker overtime not produce results, it increases the odds of a massive human error that puts the entire project in jeopardy. So, while a marathon effort once in a while may be inevitable, don’t kid yourself about your stamina… work a maximum of eight hours, five days a week, and then shut that computer off!


Corinne McKay

Secrets of six-figure translators

…with credit to Barbara Stanny, the author of Secrets of Six-Figure Women (which would be a good topic for a post too!)

Lately (and this impression was solidified at the recent ATA conference), I’ve noticed a very positive trend in our industry, that of the freelance translator earning over US $100,000 per year. Right now, I can think of at least five freelance translators I’ve talked to in recent months who have either insinuated or directly said that for 2008 they expect to break the six-figure income mark. Here, we’re talking about a) people who make the bulk of their income directly from translation, not from markups on subcontracting, and b) gross income, not net.

Now, I don’t have a gripe with how much I earn for how much I work; I will earn more than the average for full-time freelancers in the ATA this year, and I work about 35 hours a week during the school year and about 20 hours a week in the summer, with four to six weeks of vacation. However, I think that we can all learn a lot from six-figure translators and their attitudes toward their work. From my unscientific research, here are a few observations on what it takes to earn more than 100K per year as a freelancer.

First, I think that six-figure translators are actually a very diverse bunch. Some charge extremely high rates, some make very efficient use of technology like CAT tools and speech recognition, some work very long hours. So, I think it’s important to realize that there are a number of paths to 100K, it’s not all people working in a certain language or living in a certain place.

Next, I think that in order to reach six figures, there are a couple of non-negotiables: being very, very good at what you do, having a targeted specialization or working in a niche language, charging higher than average rates and being a businessperson/translator, not a translator/businessperson. For example, the average full-time freelancer might translate 400,000-600,000 words per year. If you charge 10 cents a word, you have to translate almost double that amount to reach six figures. But at 20 cents a word, 100K starts to look practically doable. So, although not everyone making six figures is charging very high rates (which I would define as 35-40 cents a word and up, and yes, there are people out there who are commanding those rates!), I would say that if you are not averaging at least 18 cents a word, you would have to work very long hours or very, very efficiently to reach six figures.

Six-figure translators are rarely, if ever, generalists. I think that the exception to this rule is people who work in languages where the pool of translators is small enough that people don’t tend to specialize. Partially, I think that this results from the fact that specialization is the key to attracting direct clients, and very few agencies in the U.S. are willingly going to pay 20+ cents per word for common languages; if you break the 100K mark, you are undoubtedly working either primarily or exclusively for direct clients.

Surprisingly, the six-figure translators I’ve met are not the over-caffeinated stress machines that one might imagine. Rather, they seem to love their work and be happy that they have coincidentally found a way to make what one of them described as “a ton of money” doing it. Six-figure translators also talk about money a lot. While I’m sure that no one is going to attend a translation event and broadcast the fact that they charge five cents a word, I do think that willingness to talk about rates is a good tool for setting/raising your rates; when you meet someone who is as busy as they want to be at double what you’re charging, it is a good incentive to push your own rates up.

Six-figure translators also seem to concentrate on clients who care about the quality of their translations and the level of service they receive, not just about things being on time and on budget (although I’m sure they care about that too!). In her presentation about marketing to direct clients, France-based French to English translator Chris Durban talked a lot about selling “a translation that reflects the quality of the company’s products and services,” which I thought was a great way to distinguish translation as a non-commodity.

So, whether you’re setting your sights on six figures for 2009 or whether you’d just like to earn a little more than you are now, I think that six-figure translators have a lot to teach all of us about the way we run our businesses.


Corinne McKay

New and noteworthy

A few interesting items from the world outside the home office:

  • The pre-release version of Wordfast 6.0 is out. As of this release, Wordfast is splitting into a “classic” version that still works within Microsoft Word, and a standalone version that is platform independent. I saw the standalone version demo in Orlando and I am planning to test it out on my Linux computer this week.
  • Susanne Aldridge has launched the latest addition to the translation blogosphere, In-house translators- a dying breed. Susanne is one of those fantastic people who sits in the front row of your presentation at the ATA conference and mouths the answers to all of the questions that you ( I mean I…) don’t know, so I’m sure that her blog will be fun to read!
  • If you’re looking for a way to keep your LinkedIn profile looking fresh without actually updating it, you can automatically feed your WordPress blog to your LinkedIn profile. Freelance journalist Michelle Rafter tells you how to do this, and it’s just as easy as she makes it sound; less than a minute start to finish.