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This question came from a student in the most recent session of my direct client marketing class. It’s a good topic that I haven’t covered in a while, so I thought it merited its own post.

First, the basics

If you set things up correctly, non-payment shouldn’t be a huge issue for most freelance translators and interpreters. In 20+ years of freelancing, I’ve only been completely stiffed twice: once by an individual (which led to a change in my payment policies that I’ll describe below), and once by an agency that went bankrupt. I’ve had to chase clients for large invoices maybe three times. However, this track record is at least partly due to how I set things up. I would recommend the following basic rules:

• Never, and I mean never work for an agency without checking them out on Payment Practices and/or the ProZ Blue Board. I find it somewhere between heartbreaking and maddening when I (not infrequently) hear from freelancers who’ve been stiffed by agencies, and I can tell them in 30 seconds that this agency is a known non-payer. If you work with agencies, you must have a membership to at least one of these services.
• Always put the payment details in writing. Even if it’s just in an e-mail, and you ask the client to reply and confirm, write down the details: rate, full amount, payment terms, payment method, who pays any banking fees (typically I pay mine and the client pays theirs), etc.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for full payment in advance. Subsequent to being completely stiffed by an individual client for a large project early in my freelance career, I started requiring full payment in advance from individual clients, before I do the translation. Especially with individuals, you have very little recourse if they don’t pay. In my case, the individual stopped responding to my e-mails and phone calls and refused to sign for a certified letter (“There’s no one here by that name”).
• Don’t assume that a contract will force a client to pay. If I have doubts about a client’s solvency or if they’re not an established business, I just require advance payment so that I don’t have to worry about chasing them for money. If a client really doesn’t have the money or is otherwise determined not to pay you, it’s unlikely that having a formal contract will sway them. Likewise, don’t assume that the legal system will do much for you. In many jurisdictions, claims under about $5,000 or $7,500 are handled in small claims court; the non-paying client likely will not show up, resulting in a default judgment in your favor, but you still have to get them to hand over the money. And it’s generally not worth hiring a lawyer (unless you have a personal connection) for a claim of that amount.
• Have an easy way for clients to pay by credit card. This is really important. If a client is trying to weasel out, or is blaming their own cash flow issues, “check must have gotten lost in the mail,” etc., you want to have a way for them to settle the invoice with you ASAP via credit card. I used to use PayPal for this and I now use QuickBooks; you could use Stripe or any other online credit card system, but you definitely need a way to say, “Let’s take care of this right now and I won’t have to contact you again if you can just put it on a credit card.”

When you have to escalate things

About a year and a half ago, a direct client in France delayed and delayed on paying me for a fairly large (~3,000 euros) invoice. As is typical in these kinds of situations, they started out with some normal-sounding excuses (glitch in their payment system, accountant was on vacation, etc.), but it soon became apparent that they were having money issues, and after they outright lied to me (“We sent the wire transfer last week, you didn’t receive it??”) I was done being nice. Here are some strategies to try if you find yourself in this situation.

First, send a polite but firm e-mail with specifics

Remember that if this client is having cash flow issues, you want to get paid before they declare bankruptcy, if that’s where they’re headed. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is a “get in line” kind of situation, and you may be in that line along with a lot of other people to whom the client owes money.

Start with a polite but firm e-mail, reminding them that your invoice(s) are overdue, giving the dates and amounts of the invoices, and asking for a date on which the invoices will be paid. There’s a strong chance that the client won’t respond, or will respond with something vague, like “We’ll pay you as soon as we can,” or “As soon as one of our clients pays us.” Even if you’re fundamentally a kind/generous person, this is the time to remind yourself:

• The client manages their cash flow, and you manage yours. Especially if the client is an agency, non-payment from their end clients isn’t your problem, it’s their problem.
• It would be totally unacceptable for the client to do this to their employees. It always irks me when a client acts as if freelancers who want to be paid on time are being unreasonable. I’ve actually said to clients more than once, “Would you be OK with your employer delaying your paycheck by three weeks?” The client should be treating you in the same way they treat their employees.

Then, bump it up

If the client still doesn’t pay, you may have to escalate things further. Here’s what I would suggest, depending on the specifics of your situation. Write the client an e-mail, giving various “possible further actions” that you may take if they don’t pay by a certain date. State that in the e-mail. “If I have not received your payment by X date, possible further actions on my part may include…”

• Never threaten legal action unless you’re actually going to follow through. Because if you don’t follow through, you’ve lost all credibility. It just doesn’t work to say, “I’m going to take you to court if you don’t pay me. Just kidding! I’m actually going to write a negative Google review!”
• If the client is an agency, and if you know or can identify the end client for the translation, you can threaten to contact them. “Further actions on my part may include contacting the end client, to let them know that I was never paid for this translation.”
• You can point out that this may be a copyright violation. Under U.S. law, the client’s use of the translation may be a copyright violation if they never paid you.
• If the client is an agency, you can threaten to report them to any professional associations that they belong to, especially if the non-payment is a pattern. Many professional associations don’t get involved in individual payment disputes, but you may be able to report the non-payment as an ethics violation if it’s a pattern, or if the client has engaged in deceptive behavior around the non-payment.
• You can threaten to send a collection agency after them. This should be a last resort, because most collections agencies will try to get the client to immediately settle for less than the full amount, and then you’ll get only a percentage of that. Specifics will vary, but when I contacted a collections agency years ago, they told me that on a $2,500 unpaid invoice, they would probably offer the client to settle it for $1,900, and I would get two-thirds of that amount. It’s better than nothing, but it’s worth trying to settle it yourself first.
• You can threaten to “post a report of this transaction” in various places. Negative Payment Practices/ProZ Blue Board review, negative Google review, report to the Better Business Bureau, report to any other professional associations they belong to, really any place you can find to tell other people about this and warn them not to work with this client.
• You can copy the highest-ranking people you can find. This is how I eventually got paid for my 3,000 euro overdue invoice. I combed through my old e-mails and found the e-mail address for a C-level person who had been copied in on an e-mail that I was on. Don’t be afraid to give details in this type of e-mail, particularly if the client has lied to you. It felt icky (for lack of a better word) to do this, but it got me paid! I e-mailed the C-level person and said, this invoice was due four months ago; first I got this excuse from this person, then I got this excuse from this person, then this person told me the invoice had been paid by wire transfer but that wasn’t true, and now the whole department has stopped responding to me, is there any way we could get this settled this week?

Of the clients I’ve chased down using these methods, all have eventually paid. If you’re in a payment struggle, I hope they can help you as well!

Greetings, Training for Translators readers, and happy July! Here’s what’s up at the T4T world headquarters (my office!).

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Fall four-week classes

Our live classes are on summer break, but you can pre-register now for the September session of Getting Started as a Freelance Translator or Interpreter (in the age of AI), or the November session of Direct Client Marketing Launch Pad. These are self-paced, four-week classes with weekly question and answer sessions, registration is $195 and American Translators Association members can use coupon code ATA for $30 off.

A recent participant in my direct client class commented, “[I really enjoyed] the down to earth and honest recommendations and comments. The fact that we can talk about absolutely everything and the instructor knows how to deal with each and every topic in a kind way.”

This week’s topic: 2024 is halfway done! How are things going for you?

Crazily enough, 2024 is halfway out the door, and those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are rolling into summer. Whether things are going well or poorly for you, it’s a good time to re-evaluate. Here are a few suggestions for a mid-year review of your freelance business!

Primary factors to consider

I think it’s important to give equal weight to two primary factors in your freelance business:

• How are things going financially? Are you hitting your financial goals?
• How happy/satisfied are you with the work you’re doing? Are you enjoying the job?

As I say a lot, you are a non-renewable resource. Financial insecurity is not fun, and I think it’s equally unpleasant to be financially secure and miserable in your work. So, ask yourself those two questions first. Did I earn enough money in the last six months, and am I happy with the work I’m doing.

My assessment: Yes, and yes, although I had a couple of work-related fails, and I need to refocus on a few things in the second half of the year. More on this below.

The view from here

Overall, things for me are going well. I earned $67,000 total in the first half of the year, putting me ahead of my income goal for the year (here’s my 2023 wrap-up post, in which I talk about my goals for 2024). I’m not sure this will translate (haha!) into double that amount for the year, because conference interpreting work slows down a lot in July and August. But it’s a number I’m happy with, and I’m happy with the balance between conference interpreting, court interpreting, translation, and teaching/writing/consulting. If things keep going the way they’re going for the rest of the year, I’m happy with that, and that’s a good feeling.

On the positive side

I really enjoy the work that I’m doing right now; a good mix of conference interpreting for a couple of anchor clients, court interpreting primarily in Colorado but in other states as well (more on this below), translating for my usual NGO and law firm clients, and doing all things Training for Translators.

Over and over, I have to learn the lesson (even as someone who teaches classes about this stuff!) that marketing works if you do it. Last year, I had a somewhat anxiety-provoking drop in interpreting work over the summer. More experienced interpreters told me that it’s just a seasonal thing and that things would pick up in September (which turned out to be true), but it was more of an income drop than I felt comfortable with. This year, I jumped into action in June (as conference interpreting work was winding down) and nudged some of my non-conference interpreting clients, plus applied to a few new clients. Shockingly (insert a sarcastic eye roll here) this produced some good results (who would have guessed that marketing actually works???), and converted a dormant client into what looks like an anchor client for the second half of the year. I also found that a surprising number of U.S. states outsource their court interpreting work to private-sector agencies, so I ended up registering with a few of them.

Ireally enjoy the translation work I’m doing right now. AI fever is real (more on this below), and I really have no interest in editing machine translation. I’d honestly rather do a different kind of work than do MTPE; I don’t mind editing, but I find that AI writing all sounds the same, and after a while, I can’t even tell if a human would write the way AI writes. Thus, I am working only for clients who are not on the AI wagon, which is going well so far.

On the less positive side

Of course, things in freelance-land are never entirely positive. Dealing with AI fever is honestly pretty exhausting sometimes, even though it’s not directly affecting my business, so far at least. Since the beginning of the current AI wave (let’s date that to approximately the release of ChatGPT in late 2022), I’ve felt that we’re going to lose a lot of translators from the middle of the market: people who were cruising along, making decent money translating for mid-market agencies. Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of this kind of thing:

“For the past 10+ years, I’ve been earning 12-15 cents per word, translating almost exclusively for agencies, and having as much work as I wanted, almost all the time. Now, all of my main agency clients have moved to MTPE, and they’re offering rates around $25 an hour, meaning that even if I wanted to edit 40 hours a week, which I don’t, my income would drop by more than half. I’m not that interested in working with direct clients, so I’m currently contemplating another career.”

Just in the past few weeks, I’ve started to hear from more people in this category: people who only translate (they don’t interpret, edit, subtitle, copywrite, etc.), who only work for agencies, and who are really struggling. And I feel like this has gone on for long enough that some of them are starting to find other jobs or think about retiring. Although this doesn’t affect me directly, it makes me sad, because I feel like we’re going through a massive shift in the translation profession (not so much in interpreting, at least for now) that no one on the freelancer side is really happy about.

Unrelated to AI, I did have a couple of my own business fails! Most notably, I decided to put a couple of book-writing projects on pause in order to create a series of recorded webinars for beginning freelancers. Bad idea! I totally misjudged the demand for these, and they’ve sold a total of…wait for it…one recording of one webinar! It’s not a disaster and they were fun to record, but I’m not doing any more recorded webinars! Now I’m putting my extra time into the delayed book-writing projects, and into starting a podcast version of my newsletter/blog, which will hopefully be ready in September.

What’s the status of your goals?

No matter how your business is doing, the worst option is to avoid the data. At least look over, or think back on, the goals you had for 2024 and how you’re doing. I put my goals in this blog post, and here’s how it’s going:

• Maintain income above 125K: So far, so good, and I have a bunch of work on the calendar for September through November.
• Take a subtitling class: No! I decided I don’t want to do this; too much audio work with the amount of interpreting work I’m currently doing.
• Finish at least one new book: Not done yet, but making progress, which is more than I can say for 2023!
• Keep up my current volume of translation work: So far, so good.
• Prioritize my wellness and happiness: Check! I’m happy, and my body feels good.
• Go to cello camp or join a community orchestra: Cello camp didn’t happen due to time and money constraints (no complaints, I ended up taking an impromptu trip to Switzerland instead), but I did the Spring session of Denver Adult Strings Camp and it was a lot of fun!

Over to you! Now it’s time for your own analysis of how things are going in your business. Post a comment below if you’d like!

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This post is the basis for episode three of the T4T podcast! Listen to it in Apple Podcasts or on Spotify (the podcast is just called Training for Translators), or directly on the T4T blog, here.

This week’s topic: Particularly for experienced translators and interpreters, is it still worth applying to agencies?

This topic came up in my monthly online course alumni question and answer session, and I thought it was worth discussing here.

In the 20+ years that I’ve been a freelancer, rates offered by many translation agencies have dropped by approximately half. There are various reasons for this (Is it them? Is it us? Is it something else?) that I discussed in a recent post about low rates. Many agencies have also leaned heavily into the machine translation + post-editing model, and are now paying by the hour for that, at a much lower rate than their translators were previously making. Typical example from someone I talked to this week: “I was cruising along for more than 10 years, making 12-15 cents a word translating for agencies I really liked, and two of them have now gone almost entirely MTPE and are offering $25 an hour for post-editing, meaning that even if I wanted to edit 40 hours a week, which I don’t, my income would drop by about half.” 

Interestingly, I don’t find this same rate erosion with interpreting agencies. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve even had two interpreting agencies offer to pay me more than what I asked for (no kidding; and I’m the one who teaches classes about this stuff!).

So, if you’re an interpreter, my answer to this is pretty simple: it’s definitely still worth applying to agencies!

Why the difference between translation and interpreting rates?

I have various theories here, which may be on target or totally off-base. In general, I’d say:

• Interpreting has a higher barrier to entry. There are some self-taught translators who are really good, whereas you can’t do interpreting, particularly simultaneous interpreting, without a pretty significant level of training and practice.
• Interpreters, in my experience, exert more rate-related pressure on each other. Whether you want to call it positive energy or collusion, interpreters are, in my experience, much more likely to tell younger/newer interpreters, “Don’t spoil the market for everyone by charging less,” “You need to think of the long term and not start out at low rates,” “It’s better not to work than to work at substandard rates.”
• I think that during COVID, we saw an influx of people into the translation profession, and an exodus of interpreters, particularly in 2020. Another supply/demand factor: at the beginning of COVID, interpreters who didn’t have any remote interpreting clients, another way to support themselves, or a lot of money in savings were in a serious bind, and a lot of them ended up finding other jobs and permanently leaving the profession. Likewise, a not-insignificant number of interpreters hate remote interpreting, which has become a very ingrained part of the interpreting scene. Meanwhile, my sense is that the opposite was happening with translation: we saw a lot of people thinking, “I want/need a permanently remote job, maybe I’ll try translation.”

So, what about translation agencies?

This rate erosion situation is a major bummer, because personally, I really like translating for agencies. I miss the direct contact with the end client, but really, who doesn’t like translating for a client that someone else found, that someone else manages, and that someone else bills? There’s a lot to like about working for agencies. But there’s the rate issue. Here’s what I’d recommend:

• In my opinion, it is 100% worth being open to working with translation agencies, even if you are an experienced person who charges real money. Last year, I got an “out of nowhere” request from an agency that found me in the ATA directory and specifically wanted someone with Swiss experience. They offered 14 cents per word for a 30,000 word project, paired me with a really good editor, and paid promptly. It was a great experience.
• Whether you want to actively apply to agencies depends on the thickness of your skin, to be honest. In a way, what’s the harm? It doesn’t take that long to apply to agencies, although you’ll probably have to contact them three to five times before you get work. Here’s what I mean about “thickness of skin”: you need to be realistic about your tolerance for repeatedly hearing, you’re too expensive, we can’t afford your rates, “all of our other translators” charge X, or, as an agency recently told me, “What you quoted is almost as much as we charge the end client.” If you can let that stuff roll off, go for it. Personally, I find it discouraging and honestly maddening (because I get mad at the professional translators who agree to those rates!) to repeatedly hear, “We only work with experienced/certified translators, we’re quality-driven, etc. etc. and we pay seven cents a word,” when I made 12 cents per word working for mega-agencies in the early 2000s.
• Thus, I no longer actively apply to translation agencies. But if you have a higher tolerance than I do for that kind of thing, go for it!

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re considering your own marketing efforts! If there’s anything you want to ask me or tell me, just leave a comment below!

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After last week’s newsletter about the amount of time it takes to grow and run a successful freelance business, (spending roughly 10% of your time on marketing, and 40% total on activities other than translating or interpreting), a couple of readers replied, saying something along the lines of:

“Yes, yes, I totally get it, but how do I find the motivation to do this? When I don’t have translation or interpreting work, I find myself just doing other things (stuff around my house, etc.) instead of marketing.”

This is a common issue, so I thought it was worth its own article. I’ll address this with a few ideas, in no particular order.

First: I’m not exaggerating

I think a lot of freelancers hear these kinds of statistics (“You should spend four hours a week on marketing”) and dismiss them as extreme; I’d say they’re not. Here’s a LinkedIn article I really love, in which freelance finance writer Carter Kilmann describes his experience taking Ed Gandia‘s prospecting class and then sending pitch e-mails to 100 clients in three months. His results align with what I’ve experienced, and what I often tell other freelancers to expect: he spent 54 hours total on this initiative (I usually say 20-25 hours of marketing to find a new direct client), 88 of the potential clients didn’t respond at all, and two became actual clients. So when I tell people to expect a success rate of 1-2% with direct clients, I’m serious.

Stop worrying about motivation, and worry about consistency

Every year, I tell my March Marketing Madness challenge group that we all focus too much on how to stay motivated when it comes to marketing. To tell you the truth, you don’t have to stay motivated, you just have to stay consistent. Here’s an example: I have high-maintenance teeth (jaw alignment problems, hard teeth that crack easily, etc.) and I kind of hate maintaining them. And yet, I don’t think, “How can I stay motivated here? How can I find an oral hygiene routine that sparks joy?” I just know that if I don’t maintain my teeth, I’m going to end up with implants or dentures. We can apply this thinking to our freelance businesses: you take care of your business, or it withers and dies; it’s that simple! Don’t look for motivation, just find a marketing routine that you can keep up with some level of consistency.

Understand why you do (or don’t do) the things you do (or don’t do)

A friend introduced me to Gretchen Rubin (who I guess you could call a personal growth guru, except that she went to Yale Law School??) and her Four Tendencies framework. Basically, this helps us understand how we (and other people) deal with internal and external demands and expectations. This framework really, really helped me understand myself and other people when it comes to productivity. I’m an Upholder (I find freedom in discipline). Honestly, I work on marketing because I want to tick the box in my Todoist app. But if you’re a Questioner or a Rebel, you may have to find other motivations.

Do you hate marketing, or do you resent it?

Hatred and resentment are two different emotions. Lots of us hate marketing. We want to just translate or interpret…which is understandable…but which is also called an in-house job. Resentment is a different story. Resentment shows up like this: “Clients should be coming to me! Why has it gotten so much harder to find good work? Why don’t clients understand the value of a professional? Why do other freelancers undercut me?” Stuff like that. I don’t have a quick fix for those (complex) emotions, but I think that identifying themis the first step to overcoming them.

Do you have depression, anxiety, ADHD, or another way in which your brain works differently?

I mean this for real, and (as someone who has a lot of people in my life who would say “yes” to this question), with a lot of empathy. If you’re chronically feeling like, I get no enjoyment out of my job, I’m so paralyzed with anxiety that I can’t even try to market because I’m so afraid of failing, I know what to do and I just can’t get anything done, I feel like all marketing is pointless because no client will want to work with me anyway because I have nothing to offer, I keep missing deadlines because I can’t make myself work on the projects I do have…then I think you might want to take a deeper look at what’s going on inside your brain and whether some type of therapy, medication, or both might help you. Again, I say this as someone who considers myself a mental health advocate: feeling like you can’t do what you want to do in life because your brain is holding you back is not fun, and most importantly you deserve to not feel that way.

Do you understand your Why?

I know, the whole “Why” thing is kind of a trendy topic. But there’s a reason for that: as a freelancer, your Why is crucial. As a freelancer, you deal with a lot of things that an employer would deal with for you: from paying self-employment tax, to serving as the director of IT, marketing, professional development, and HR, to having no guaranteed income stream, it’s a lot. So, why are you doing this? Getting clear on that is really important. In my own business:

• I really enjoy making my own decisions: whether they’re the right ones or not, the onus is on me, not on someone else telling me to do something that I knew was a bad idea.
• I don’t think any in-house job gives the level of flexibility that I want. I take a lot of vacation (for an American; about six weeks a year), I tend not to work on Friday afternoons unless I have something urgent going on, and I don’t want to have to ask someone else if it’s OK to go to yoga over lunch.
• I hate worrying about money. This sounds basic, but it’s a major reason I set a high income goal. I like having three to six months’ living expenses in the bank. Life has so many problems that you can’t fix with money, so I like to be able to throw money at the ones you can fix with money.

I have other “Why” factors, but those are the three big ones. Knowing yours can be a really good motivator: for a long time, I would look at my daughter (now 21 and thinking about her own career!) playing on the floor in my office, and think, failure as a freelancer is not an option, because if I fail, my other option is an in-house job and she goes to full-time child care, which wasn’t what I wanted for me or for her. I’m not judging anyone who chooses that option, just saying it wasn’t for me.

If you, too, are struggling to find the motivation to work on your business, I hope these tips are helpful!

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First: Spend 10% of your time on marketing

People are always asking…How much time do I need to spend marketing my freelance business? It depends on what situation your business is in:

• If you are just starting out, don’t have enough work, or are branching out into a new niche, market during every second that you don’t have paying work. This sounds extreme, but I really mean it. I did a lot of things wrong during my first couple of years as a freelancer, but this is one thing I did right: if I planned to work 20 hours per week and I had one hour of paying work (the reality of being a beginner), I marketed for 19 hours.
• If your business is at cruising speed, spend 10% of your time on marketing and business development. I’ve always struggled to answer this “How much time…” question, and now I have an objective answer, after reading lots of other people’s thoughts on the subject. Spend 10% of your time working on your business, even if you have enough work most of the time, because that’s how you stay busy.

It’s up to you how to divide this up: 45 minutes per day, four hours per week, it doesn’t really matter. The point is most of us are spending nowhere near 10% of our time on business development.

And then, what do I mean by “marketing”?? I mean, various activities that fall under the umbrella of Always Be Marketing. I wrote a whole blog post about this, because a lot of people asked me, “Are you seriously always applying to new clients??? Don’t you have enough work???” Yes, I have enough work, basically all the time. I’m not in “panicking about how much work I have” mode, because my tolerance for chaos/lack of sleep/work-related stress and drama is (literally) about a negative two out of ten. But I’ve seen too many experienced freelancers whose businesses withered due to complacency and neglect (as one of them put it!). I am not always applying to new clients, but I am Always Marketing.

Next: 60% billable hours

What’s up with 60%? That’s the percentage of billable hours you should be aiming for. Billable hours are hours during which you generate income, generally by typing words or speaking words, in our job! As freelancers, we have, or we should have, a lot of non-billable tasks; things that we have to do, that clients do not directly pay us to do. Here’s an old but still-relevant blog post about the concept of non-billable time.

To keep your business healthy, you need to be spending around 40% of your time doing non-billable tasks: marketing (see above), and also:

• Reading and answering e-mail
• Participating in professional development
• Networking (in person or online)
• Billing
• Following up with clients who don’t pay
• Keeping your tech stuff updated (running software updates, trying out new tools)

Of course, your mileage may vary. If you work mostly for agencies, and your agency clients pay well, you may not need 40% of your time to keep up with non-translation, non-interpreting tasks. But for most of us, spending little to no time on those tasks has one result: your business withers. If you work eight hours a day, I would aim to spend around five hours on billable work, and the rest of the time on non-billables.

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