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Off to Providence for NAJIT!

I was flattered to be invited to present the keynote speech and a preconference workshop at the conference of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT), held in Providence, Rhode Island, from May 17-19. My fabulous friend and colleague Judy Jenner is on the conference planning committee and had actually invited me last year, but I was in Iceland, so we finally made it happen this year! NAJIT was held from May 17-19 at the Omni hotel in Providence, Rhode Island.

Executive Summary: I loved the conference, and I was impressed with the sessions and the overall organization. It was also interesting to attend a small(er) T&I conference, since most of my language profession conference experience is at ATA, which is probably 4-6x the size of the NAJIT conference. Details below!

Hotel and venue

We lived in Boston for a long time before we moved to Colorado, and at that time, Providence was Boston’s, uhhhh, “gritty?!” southern neighbor. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Providence, at least the section near Providence Place and the riverwalk, is now very, very nice! The Omni hotel is quite stylish, the neighborhood is walkable and felt very safe, and there were excellent food options in the vicinity. Judy and I are both vegetarian, and we went twice to the Plant City food hall, a pleasant 15-20 minute walk along the river from the hotel. The hotel restaurant was tasty and stylish, and my room was large and very comfortable. I give the Omni and Providence two thumbs up! It was also very cool to see the public transportation connections in the area. The Amtrak station (from where one can take the commuter rail to Boston in an hour!) was just a couple of blocks from the hotel.

Overall vibe

One of the most interesting things about the experience was, as a former ATA conference organizer, observing the general vibe: who was there, the sessions, the social experiences, etc. NAJIT is open to anyone in the judiciary translation or interpreting professions, but trends heavily Spanish and court interpreter. I did meet a number of other French speakers, and there were tons of languages represented.

NAJIT’s attendees seem to trend younger than ATA. I’m 52, and if I’m at a random table of six to eight people at the ATA conference, I tend to be, no kidding, on the younger side of the group. And at ATA, if you meet someone under 30, that person tends to stand out. Not true at NAJIT: for the sit-down lunch (more on this below), I was one of the older people at my table, and there were lots of attendees in their 20s and 30s, which I really enjoyed.

Again, from the perspective of a former ATA Board member, it was also interesting to hear that NAJIT is growing. Don’t quote me on this, but I think their statistic was a membership increase of around 10% in the past year or so. NAJIT is a much smaller association than ATA with a very specific focus, but I still thought this was interesting, given that ATA membership has declined in recent years. My sense here (based only on my own, admittedly limited, knowledge of the professional association environment): NAJIT is perhaps an easier “sell,” because it has more members who have salaried jobs, and it has a more targeted membership base (mostly court interpreters, rather than anyone and everyone interested in T&I).

At this smaller conference, I also found that I was able to at least have a conversation with everyone I wanted to see. I love the big-group energy of the ATA conference, and it’s always frustrating to get home and hear from someone who was there, and who I never even saw! I really liked the size of the NAJIT conference!

Sessions

The NAJIT conference is a lot shorter than ATA. Preconference workshops on Friday (I taught one on preparing for an interpreting exam), main conference all day Saturday, plus Sunday morning. Personally, I liked this shorter format. Presumably, part of the motivation is to align with the schedules of interpreters, whose jobs are less portable than translators’, and who tend to work more of a 9-5 schedule. But honestly, it was good. It was long enough to have a good variety of sessions, but short enough that I didn’t feel like I’d been run over by an 18-wheeler by the end of the thing. Personally, if I were still on the ATA Board (which I’m not, and I avoid giving them my opinion so that the current members can do things their way!), this is something I’d consider: have the whole conference be just three days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Here again, NAJIT has a leg up, because they’re offering sessions for people who work in only one specialization. However I did find the sessions, especially the preconference workshops, more engaging and pertinent than a lot of the sessions at the ATA conference (yes, including the ATA conferences that I organized!). It’s a hard call: part of the reason that people attend a large conference is that there’s something for everyone, whether you do Japanese literary translation or Spanish court interpreting. But/and, that also means that a lot of the sessions are not going to be interesting to a lot of the attendees, and you need a lot of presenters to fill all of those slots. At a smaller conference with a more targeted base of attendees, you can cover a narrower range of topics, and you can choose presenters who you know are going to be really good. Specifically, NAJIT’s preconference workshops are primarily/exclusively skills-based, where you learn an immediately applicable skill: how to interpret for fast speakers, how to interpret for depositions, how to take better notes, how to interpret in immigration court.

In addition to sessions

NAJIT does a nice job with the non-session part of the conference. In particular, registration ($475 for the early bird member rate) includes a sit-down lunch during the NAJIT annual meeting on Saturday. This leads to my only constructive criticism of the conference: the sit-down lunch is a great idea, and the NAJIT Chair’s address (a sort of “state of the association”) is also a great idea, but combining the two is something I would recommend changing. At most networking and fundraising events I attend that involve a sit-down meal plus speeches, the speeches start at the very end of the meal (dessert/coffee time), so people have had most of their substantive conversations and are ready to listen. NAJIT has the Chair start the “state of the association” address as soon as the lunch is served, while asking attendees to keep the conversation down and listen to the speaker. This is a nice idea, but doesn’t really work, when a lot of the people in the room want to network and haven’t seen each other in a year, so they’re talking loudly, and you have servers circulating with the food, asking, “Who had the vegetarian dish?” etc. I felt terrible for the Chair: I was sitting pretty close to the podium and it was still almost impossible to hear her, and at one point a member even got up to the mic and asked people to quiet down. Personally, I think this would be easy to solve: keep the speeches short, and have them during dessert, when it’s also less awkward for people to leave if they’re not interested in the annual meeting portion.

Otherwise, registration was very smooth, breakfast was good, the a/v was well managed, and I was really impressed with the conference, particularly for a small association with a small but clearly mighty staff! Congrats to NAJIT, and I hope to attend next year in Indianapolis!

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As a freelancer, the feeling (or, the knowledge!) that you urgently need work, is not fun! And yet, it’s a reality of freelancing: nothing is guaranteed! In the 20+ years that I’ve been a freelancer, I’ve experienced:

• An anchor client suddenly hiring a part-time in-house translator; my work for them went from $1,000+ per month to zero, literally overnight
• Clients promising large projects that didn’t end up happening, for various reasons
• Translation projects being cancelled after I had already started work, and I got paid only for what I had translated
• General slowdowns, maybe due to the economy, maybe just the vagaries of the business environment

Lately, business has been very good, but who (no one!) knows what’s out there!/

How to prepare yourself and your business

Before we get to the topic of how to find new work, let’s look at three things I’d recommend setting up in advance:

1. You need a business savings account. The situations I described above are always going to be stressful, and they are often no one’s fault. But if they result in a financial catastrophe, that’s on you, because you should not be working today to earn the money that pays the bills next week. Here’s how that looks in my business: the total cost of running my business is about US $5,000 per month. That includes my salary and my business expenses. I keep $15,000 in a business savings account that I do not touch. It’s purely a rainy-day fund. If I get sick and can’t work, if someone in my family needs me, that’s my insurance policy. Then, I keep around $10,000 in my business checking account, so that I always have more than enough money for one “paycheck” in there. If this sounds extreme, I think it’s not. I would actually like to increase my emergency fund to 30K so that I could take six months off completely, or cut back to half-time for a year, without worrying about money. And if you’re thinking, “Whoa…I could NEVER build up that kind of emergency fund!” then I’d argue that you need to revisit how much you’re charging and who you’re working for, so that you can establish that kind of financial security.
2. Never, and I mean never, project an aura of desperation, even to colleagues, unless they are also your personal friends and you’re talking to them in that capacity. I say this as someone who, not infrequently, gets e-mails and LinkedIn messages from freelancers, saying things like, “I’m about to lose my house, and I really need work, can you send me something?” Don’t get me wrong: this is awful, and I really feel for the people who write these messages. But that’s not the kind of positive, professional message you want to be sending out. More below on how to address this with clients. With colleagues, I think it’s fine to say something like, “Remember that huge project I was telling you about? Well, it just got cancelled, so I have an opening in my schedule, if you’re looking for any overflow help between now and July 1.”
3. Think hard about cancellation fees. Lots of freelance distress is the result of cancelled projects. Again, it’s on you to know what you’re agreeing to, or what you’re enforcing. Particularly if you work with direct clients, you can propose any type of cancellation fee that you want, even, “Payment is due in full once the contract is signed.”

First: It’s nudge o’clock!

If you find yourself in urgent need of work, the first thing I’d recommend is nudging all of your dormant clients. “Hello, I hope you’re doing well! I’m reaching out because I have some availability between now and July 1, and I really enjoyed the [describe the last time you worked with them] project we worked on together in March. Let me know if there’s anything in the pipeline that might be a good fit!”

Nudging is the world’s most boring and the world’s most effective marketing method. Do that first!

Next: Reach out to colleagues

As I said above, I personally think it’s OK to give colleagues at least a big-picture description of what happened. “My main client just let me know that they’re moving to MTPE,” “That two-week interpreting job I told you about was just cancelled,” “The big project I was waiting to hear about hasn’t come through, and I’ve decided to move on.”

Letting colleagues know, in a positive, professional way that you’re available, is a good idea.

Hit the job boards

Lots of freelancers completely ignore job boards, thinking “I’m not looking for an in-house job, and what are the chances they’re hiring a translator or interpreter anyway?” Three comments on this:

1. It’s worth offering your freelance services to clients looking for an in-house translator or interpreter. Tell them that you’re interested in working with them on a contract basis.
2. I know several freelancers who have actually found interesting contract work on job boards.
3. Who knows? You may find a full-time job that’s interesting enough for you to consider! This happened to at least two people in my recent March Marketing Madness challenge group.

By “job boards,” I mean general job search sites like LinkedIn, and specialized ones like Devex (for the international development sector).

Is it time to add a new skill or a new type of client?

Lately, I keep saying that the future of freelance translation and interpreting belongs to people with diverse businesses, working for clients who care. In the current (weird) economic and technology environments, I think that doing one thing, for one type of client, is risky.

One major advantage of a well-fed business savings account: when you unexpectedly don’t have a ton of work, you have a lot of time, and you can use it to nurture the future health of your business:

• Take some classes to add a new specialization
• Take some classes to add a new skill (subtitling, interpreting, editing, etc.)
• Do that big marketing push you’ve been thinking about forever

Would you be happier with at least a part-time job?

There’s no shame in looking for a non-freelance job. I worked as an FBI Contract Linguist during years two to five of my freelance business. The job definitely has its downsides: the application process is really long and invasive, you have to work on-site at an FBI field office, and the pay, at least that time, was not stellar. However, and it’s a big however, I worked with excellent translators, did interesting work, and the steady-ish pay allowed me to continue freelancing until I had a more regular base of private-sector clients. I’ve always thought that if I wanted/needed a full-time salaried job (Contract Linguist, as the title would suggest, is a contract position, not an employee position), I would apply to be an FBI Language Analyst (the full-time equivalent of a Contract Linguist). I honestly really liked the people I worked with, the average salary is around 90K per year, and you get excellent government benefits for your whole family. It’s far from the worst thing in the world to take a non-freelance job!

If you’re actively looking for work, I hope that these tips are helpful!