In this episode, I take a look at three ways to not earn enough money as a freelance translator or interpreter:

1. You don’t have enough work, period
2. You have enough work, but it’s low-paying
3. You have well-paying work, but not enough of it 

…and how to handle each of these situations!

Links mentioned in this episode

• The Training for Translators website
• The 2022 American Translators Asociation compensation survey
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ outlook for translators and interpreters
• The MIT Living Wage Calculator 

You can subscribe to Training for Translators in your favorite podcast app, or listen below!

If you’re interested in translating or interpreting for the international development sector, join me and Meghan McCallum on Tuesday, April 15 for a two-hour master class! Registration is $75 and includes the recording. We’ll discuss:

• An overview of the sector and how translators and interpreters fit in
• Marketing your services, particularly in a post-USAID environment
• Topics you may encounter
• Choosing a sub-specialization and doing terminology research

We have a good group signed up and there’s room for you!

Now that the first quarter of 2025 has wrapped up, we all have some data on how things are going in the current, pretty turbulent economic environment. My take: For most people, it’s either the best of times, or the worst of times, with not a whole lot in between. Lately, when I talk to other freelancers (translators, interpreters, or writers), I feel like it’s:

• The best of times: “Had my first $15,000 month,” “New, great client fell from the sky;” or
• The worst of times: “Worst quarter since I started freelancing, giving it one more quarter and then considering switching careers completely or looking for an in-house job.” 

What’s going on here? Of course, no one really knows. I’m not an economist, and people way smarter than I am don’t know what’s going on, but here are a few observations. 

Sometimes, it’s mostly luck

For what it’s worth, first quarter went really well for me. I made over $10,000 more than in the first quarter of 2024 without working more hours. I can identify a few things I did: mostly working with a business coach who helped me with both mindset (self-sabotaging patterns in my business) and strategy (identifying parts of my business that I do and do not want to expand). I’m expecting that these things will continue to yield results over time, but in the short-term (this quarter), the bulk of the extra cash came from “out of nowhere” translation projects: three different direct clients who I hadn’t heard from in a while, and who sent big projects that were also really enjoyable. 

If you had the opposite kind of quarter, it honestly may just be luck, or a blip. I know that’s not super-comforting if you had a terrible quarter, but it’s true. Things may pick up, just because sometimes work volume goes in waves. 

Sometimes, it’s larger factors 

I also feel like the ChatGPT-induced dust is starting to settle, with problematic results for a lot of freelancers:

• Many agencies perceiving that, at least for high-volume, low/medium-visibility projects (by which I mean large amounts of text that aren’t particularly critical to the company’s operations but that have to be translated), their clients are pretty happy with machine translation plus a human editor. 
• Many agencies offering editing rates that are around half of what their translators made when they were paid by the word (i.e. a translator who used to make 12 cents a word and translate 500 words an hour is now being offered $25 or $30 an hour to edit machine translation). 
• Meaning that it’s hard to make a living on those rates, leaving a lot of freelancers a) living precariously off very little money/dipping into savings, or b) working an unrelated job on the side, or c) trying to find higher-paying clients, or some combination of the three. 

Sometimes, it’s the best of times 

When I posted on LinkedIn about my strong first quarter, I wondered if it was just me. It’s not; a number of people chimed in with similar results, and even greater income increases than I reported (one “best quarter since I started freelancing,” and one “up 26,000 euros”). Anecdotally, the same is true in a six-figure freelancer group I’m in. We did a first quarter debrief session, and there were a couple of people whose work has been so slow that they’re dipping into savings and looking at in-house jobs, and a couple of people racking up personal-best months. It’s a weird time. 

I’ve given a bunch of keynote speeches at translation conferences this year, and I’ve tried to beat a familiar drum. Right now, you need:

• A diverse business
• Working for clients who care 

You need at least some diversity in your client base or in the services you provide. In the current economic environment, even seemingly stable options (like the entire U.S. Federal government) have proven unstable. And you need clients who care, because the clients who don’t care have an increasing array of fast and cheap options to choose from. And (here’s the important part) there’s still tons of good language work out there, working for clients who either want you to avoid AI, or they really don’t care how the work is done, as long as it’s done well. The clincher: it takes a lot of work to find those clients, but I promise they’re out there. 

Have a great week! And if you want to leave a comment and tell me how your first quarter went, I’d love to hear.

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Translation: hot right now? 

That sounds like an odd way to put it, but…my translation work has been stable (not up, not down) for the past two years or so, until this past quarter (Q1 of 2025) when, all of a sudden, I made $10,000 more from translation than in the first quarter of 2024. This was thanks to a couple of large projects from my good direct clients. When I posted this on LinkedIn, a couple of people chimed in to say that they’ve had similar results in the past few months (and a couple of people reported even more dramatic increases). I’m not sure if this is trend, but it’s an interesting data point: my interpreting work is stable, teaching/writing/consulting is stable, and translation is, for the moment at least, way up. 

Improving our translation quality 

If you want the TLDR version, here are my top strategies for improving the quality of your translations:

• Read a lot of well-written documents in your target language, and try to find things that are as similar as possible to what you translate. Pay attention to the sentence structure, paragraph structure, tone, register, terminology, everything! 
• Decide whether file conversion and translation memory are time-savers or time-wasters 
• Know what makes a translation sound like a translation, particularly between your specific source and target languages 
• If you translate into Microsoft Word, learn its features that can help you translate faster and better 
• Have a robust process for when you have to proofread your own work (even if it then goes to a secondary editor)

Let’s look at little deeper!

Technology: time-saver, or time-waster?

Whenever you’re going to use a technology tool, whether it’s a relatively low-tech thing like converting from PDF to Word, or something higher-tech like TM or MT, you want to make sure that it’s saving you time, improving the quality of your work, or both. 

• A PDF to Word conversion (I use iLovePDF for this) can save you a lot of time if you end up with a “clean” Word document, but it can be worse than starting from scratch, if you end up with a Word document that’s full of weird text boxes and nonsense characters (stop me if this sounds familiar).
• Personally, I hate editing bad translations; I’d rather start from scratch. For this reason, I don’t edit fuzzy matches when I use translation memory, and I never use a machine translation/AI-generated translation as a starting point. I also have confidentiality concerns about online tools; I have the paid version of ChatGPT, I have the “do not use my data to improve the model for other people” option checked, and I still never put anything confidential (even a client’s name) into it, because I’m not convinced that it’s actually not storing or sharing my data. This may be a personal paranoia, but I’m sticking with it. 
• And yet, these tools can be huge time-savers. I use Trados, and I find that it saves a lot of time if I have a good-quality PDF with complicated formatting, because it reproduces that formatting in the translation. I can generally translate about 10% faster in a TM tool even if the document isn’t repetitive, but the TM tool makes it a lot harder to rearrange text and avoid the “chunky” feeling of translate one segment at a time. 

A translation that sounds like a translation 

Lots of things make a translation sound like a translation. Some are amorphous (it’s just not the way a native speaker would write), and some can be identified. For example, I translate from French to English, and it’s obvious that:

• French-language writers love their passive voice. Your English translation should almost always be in active voice. 
• They also love a reallllly long sentence. U.S. English prefers shorter, snappier sentences. 
• And the fact that French uses “of the” rather than a simpler possessive construction, leads to the temptation to say “the profits of the company” rather than “the company’s profits.” This stands out as “non-native-sounding” when you read an entire document full of, “of the.” 

As translators, I think we’re also often reluctant to deviate too much from the source text. For example, I recently used the expression “on the flip side” in a translation (it fit the register of the document!), and the editor commented that they’d never seen that expression used in a translation: everyone says “on the other hand,” or “on the contrary.” It’s OK to live a little, as long as your translation mirrors the tone and register of the original. 

This can be a good use of an AI tool; I use ChatGPT a lot for rewriting: “Make this at least 10% shorter while maintaining the core message and tone.” 

Learn some Microsoft Word advanced features

Actually, I’m not sure if these are advanced features or not; maybe you know them already! But here are my favorites: 

• Add your own autocompletes. For example, I recently translated a document that repeated the name of the French town “Le Coudray-Montceaux” about 20 times. Rather than retyping this and checking the spelling every time, I created an autocomplete so that I could type “LCM” and Word would expand it into the full name of the town. Find this under File>Options>Proofing>AutoCorrect Options>Replace. Type your shortcut in the Replace box, and the full text in the With box. 
• Shift+F3 to toggle the case of your highlighted text, from all lowercase to Initial Caps to ALL CAPS 
• Control+Backspace to delete the previous word (rather than tapping Backspace 10 times to delete one letter at a time) 
• Tab leaders: Thank you to my friend and colleague Andie Ho for this! If you’ve ever tried to fill a line with dots or dashes (this happens a lot in official documents), don’t do it manually! Set a tab leader (Paragraph menu>Tabs) so that you set a tab stop in the appropriate location (for example six inches for the right-hand margin), then set the “fill with” character (dots, dashes, or a solid line), and when you press Tab, it will automatically fill the line, and automatically adjust the fill if you later change the text that precedes it. 
• Dictation: The Dictate feature in Microsoft Word is helpful, even if you don’t generally dictate your translations. I use it for things that are tedious to type, like long lists of numbers in official document translations. 

Finally, a few proofreading tips

I struggle with editing because I read too fast. My not-so-secret weapon is text to speech: having the computer read my translation out loud while I visually read the source document.  I find it hugely helpful with:

• Things that are boring or meaningless but that have to be perfect (a series of numbers) 
• Missing words that I would miss if I were reading them (because your brain fills in what’s not there!)
• Words that look visually similar but sound really different (state/slate)
• Opposites that are only one letter different (employer/employee) 

Other proofreading techniques that you might find helpful:

• Print the translation (but then you have to transfer the corrections to the screen version without introducing new errors)
• Change the font to something like hot-pink Comic Sans so that it looks totally different 
• Make the document into a PDF so that it looks different from the original (I sometimes do this when I’m traveling: put a PDF of the document on my iPad and input the changes on my laptop)
• Use Dark Mode to set a dark background with white type

And most importantly, give yourself as much time as possible between the translation and the proofreading!

I hope these tips are helpful; have a great week!

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Greetings, Training for Translators readers! Thanks to this week’s newsletter sponsor, The Creative Language Conference; (early bird rate GBP 110 + VAT **I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you). CLConf targets the intersection of language, culture, and technology, with a focus on creativity and innovation. A past participant calls it the most engaging online conference they’ve ever attended! 

This week’s topic: Progress doesn’t happen in the comfort zone

The comfort zone…as freelancers, the comfort zone is often our happy place. We cruise along, doing the same things, for the same clients, for months/years/decades (and I’m not criticizing you, I do this too!). 

The comfort zone has some advantages:

• Most of us would rather work than market
• Repeat clients tend to decrease our overhead/non-billable time, meaning that we’re spending more time making money (a good thing!)
• There’s nothing wrong with doing work that you feel confident about 

However, we tend to ignore the hidden costs of the comfort zone. I recently heard someone say, “the comfort zone is a nice place, but nothing grows there.” 
Specifically, when we hang out in the comfort zone, we risk:

• Missing opportunities: we don’t know what else is out there, because we never look for it
• Stagnant income: our current, comfort-zone clients are unlikely to offer us significantly more money, particularly if we don’t ask for it
• Burnout from boring work: because we never translate/interpret/write/subtitle/edit anything new or challenging 

How do we push the boundaries of the comfort zone in a responsible way? 

When we exit the comfort zone, we don’t want to be skydiving without a net. I’m very much *not* a fan of “fake it ’till you make it,” or taking on work that you feel unqualified to do. That’s not the challenge zone, it’s the danger zone. But yet, there are two things I think we should all be doing:

1. Reframing discomfort: instead of “Ugh, this is mildly uncomfortable, I shouldn’t be doing it,” what about, “Mild discomfort is a sign that I’m trying something new, which is a recipe for growth.” 
2. Intentionally creating discomfort in a manageable way. Raise your rates with new clients when you’re already busy. Connect with a dream client on LinkedIn (it’s hard to *really* mess up in a 200-character connection note!). Take a class that could lead you toward a new specialization or service offering. 

An additional risk of the comfort zone: nothing in life, not even the comfort zone, lasts forever! In the past year, I’ve heard from a number of translators who surfed the comfort zone, translating for a handful of good agencies for a long time, and doing no marketing. The risk there is that your business muscles atrophy: freelancing becomes like a regular job where you set the hours. This strategy works until it doesn’t: when those clients make a fairly rapid shift to machine translation with a human editor, all of a sudden, the comfort zone train pulls into the station, and you’re left on the platform. Don’t let this be you! Try at least a small step outside the comfort zone (reply to this e-mail if you want to let me know how it goes). 

Sponsorships help me keep producing the T4T newsletter for free! Thanks to this week’s sponsor, The Creative Language Conference.
Have a great week!

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