Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

When marketing feels overwhelming, slow down and simplify

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What’s up with freelancing these days?

Freelancing is in kind of an odd state right now. We’re hearing about mass layoffs at tech and media companies, we’re wondering how AI/MT is going to affect us, there’s a total solar eclipse coming, and the other day, I found myself wondering, “Does any of this matter, given what’s going on with climate change??” It’s an odd time all around.

We know…”always be marketing”

Harder yet, we know that the way to avoid the feast/famine cycle/being overly dependent on one client/making fear-based business decisions because we’re afraid of not having enough work, is to market consistently. Does this mean that we’re applying to 36 new clients a day? Definitely not. Here’s a post I wrote back in November about what “Always be marketing” means to me. But yet, the majority of freelance translators and interpreters do little to no active marketing (believe me, people tell me the truth about their businesses, so I see this first-hand).

Avoiding analysis paralysis

We avoid marketing for lots of reasons. We’d rather translate or interpret (fair enough). We suffer from “be careful what you wish for” syndrome, where we think, yikes, what if my dream clients respond and then I have to be good enough to do their work?? We feel like we shouldn’t have to market; shouldn’t the juicy work be coming to us??? But an additional factor is analysis paralysis: we can’t decide whether to:

  • Apply to agencies
  • Market to direct clients, and if so, how? E-mail them? Connect on LinkedIn? Send them a postcard? Call them?
  • Try some inbound marketing: improve our website SEO, beef up our LinkedIn profile
  • Attend a client-side conference
  • Forget all of that because our website is horrible and our profile photo is from the 90s

In the face of this, we often get overwhelmed and do nothing. But there’s a better way: Pare it down, and simplify. Do the simplest thing you can think of, and do it consistently. Examples include:

  • Nudge a dormant client every Wednesday. This sounds so simple as to be not worth doing, but let’s say you did this even half the time. Did anyone you know nudge 26 dormant clients last year? Probably not; most of us don’t even have 26 dormant clients!
  • Apply to one new agency or contact one new client on the first work day of every month. Here again, is once a month even worth it? Yes, absolutely! That would be 12 clients this year! Twelve more than you contacted in 2023!
  • Work on marketing for 30 minutes, twice a week. You spend more time than that talking yourself out of marketing (“because it won’t work anyway,” which you don’t know, because you never try it). Challenge yourself to see how much you can get done in 30 minutes and motor away. For what it’s worth, this is what I do. I have a Todoist reminder that says, “Marketing: do something,” every Monday through Thursday.

Questions to ask when you’re overwhelmed

Another pro tip: When you’re feeling overwhelmed, start from the questions:

  • Who should I be serving?
  • Where can my skills be most useful?
  • Who really needs me, and can’t work with me because they don’t know me yet?
  • What kinds of work am I so passionate about, that I can honestly say to clients, “I love doing the projects that you need”?

Marketing enough to have a thriving business is a lot of work, but I hope that these suggestions can make it a little less painful.

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

Low rates: A personal decision, or a group issue?

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! My April master class, Aiming for six figures as a freelancer, is next Wednesday (April 10). Registration ($75) includes the recording, and we’ll talk about how to analyze your current workflow, use rate zones (green, yellow, red, gold) to decide what work to accept and decline, and how to create a plan for earning US $100,000 or more (or the part-time equivalent) without working crazy hours.

On to this week’s topic: Are low rates for freelance translation or interpreting work a personal decision, or a group issue?

I don’t have the answer here, and this is something that I think about a fair bit. It happens to me with some regularity (and thus, I assume other people have this experience as well): I’m contacted by a potential client, typically a translation agency (this seems less common with interpreting, more on that later), in this type of way:

  • 9:00 AM: Hello! We have a project of X words, due on X date; this requires an ATA-certified translator and we can offer X cents per word. Can you let us know if you’re available?

In this situation, X is typically something outside what I would consider to be professional working conditions: a huge project on an incredibly tight deadline, at an incredibly low rate. But while I’m contemplating how, or if, to respond, I get another e-mail from the agency:

  • 9:03 AM: Please disregard our previous e-mail! This project has been placed. We’ll contact you in the future if anything else comes up.

Meaning that someone (in this case, an ATA-certified translator), snapped this project up before anyone else could even respond. Here’s my dilemma:

  • It’s a free market, working is better than not working, and you have to keep the lights on. Really, who am I to tell someone else what to charge?
  • And at the same time, if agencies couldn’t get translators to work at these rates, they would only have two choices: 1) Pay more, or 2) Go out of business.

Interestingly enough, I find that interpreters tend to exert more rate-related pressure on each other than translators do. There’s a lot more talk in the interpreting world about, “Not spoiling the market for everyone else,” “It’s better not to work than to accept a low rate,” “If one person says yes, then clients expect everyone else to work at that rate.” It’s also easier to find reference points for interpreting rates: most state court systems, and the Federal court systems, publish the rates that they pay their interpreters. Entities like the UN publish the rates that they pay contract conference interpreters. Perhaps this also has some sort of “elevating effect” on the interpreting market?

Which brings me to my next question: is this a personal decision (live and let live/to each their own), or is this a problem that affects us as a group? Yet another issue is the US’s very strict antitrust/anti-price-fixing laws, wherein it is legal to give objective pricing information (here’s what I charge), but illegal to give anything that sounds like a pricing recommendation or collusion (here’s how much you should charge/here’s how much I think this client would pay).

I’m honestly not sure, and that’s my answer!

  • There are times that I feel like telling other translators, if 2 cents per word meets your financial goals, go for it. It doesn’t meet my financial goals, but you’re welcome to that work if you want it.
  • And there are other times that I feel like saying, “Hey, I’ve got a great business idea. I’m going to become like the H&R Block of legal services. I’m going to have a chain of law offices that charges a flat rate of $50 an hour, where the lawyers get paid $25 an hour and I get $25 an hour for running the business!” If that strikes you as crazy, as if I’d have to either pay my lawyers more, or go out of business, then why can’t we apply that logic to our own profession?

In my observations, this is a phenomenon that primarily (although not exclusively) affects work from translation agencies. In the 21 years that I’ve been a freelancer, translation agency rates have dropped by about half, largely due to the phenomena I describe above: agencies seem to be finding enough people, who do a good-enough job, to fill the demand. But what if they couldn’t? Food for thought!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

Options for self-publishing your own work

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! Registration for our April master class, Aiming for six figures as a freelancer (yes, even in the age of AI and MT!) is open! Registration ($75) includes the recording, and we’ll spend two hours looking at how to analyze your current work flow, set goals for a higher income, use green/yellow/red rate zones to guide your decisions, and what all of this means in the age of AI and MT. Come join us!

Now, on to today’s topic; a practical one! How to self-publish your own stuff. I say “stuff” because by that, I mean:

  • A book you want to write
  • A book you want to translate (with proper rights/permissions)
  • A video you want to make and sell
  • A business resource that you want to publish and distribute (How I found my first direct client, How I passed the court interpreter certification exam, etc.)

I’ve been self-publishing for a long time (the first edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator came out in 2006, when print-on-demand was a cutting-edge technology). But the options these days have increased exponentially, and I’ve recently attended a couple of webinars and listened to a bunch of podcasts to update my own knowledge of the topic for a few projects I have in the pipeline.

I honestly wonder why more translators and interpreters don’t self-publish their own work. For starters, just about any frustrated literary translator can find a source of books in the public domain and start translating one of them today. All of us have a lot of hard-won knowledge that other people would happily pay money to read about or watch. And it’s really not that hard or expensive to self-publish, at least at the entry level. Here are some ideas to get you started:

  • Bronze level: Use a digital download service like E-junkie to sell books/manuals in a simple format (Canva even has simple PDF e-book templates) like PDF e-books, or video files. I use E-junkie but this is not an affiliate deal, I just really like them, and the service isn’t expensive. With the $10/month plan, you can sell 40 digital products (PDF files, videos, really whatever you want) and you get up to 2 GB of storage space. You create “Buy Now” buttons for your website and then the person gets an instant download from E-junkie, and I’ve never had someone contact me to say that the download failed. This could be a great option if you just want to get your work out there in a simple, accessible way.
  • Silver level: When I started self-publishing, really all of the available services involved an up-front cost and you had to send them formatted files; like your cover file had to be the exact number of pixels that they needed, and the interior files needed to be formatted to their specifications. It’s still true that if you want a really professional-looking book, someone (you or a hired professional) has to do this. I would argue that high-end self-published books are now indistinguishable from traditionally published books, which is pretty amazing. But if you just want a “minimum viable product” book, there are now options that have no up-front cost, the primary one being Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (kind of a misleading name, because they also do print books, not just electronic). Amazon’s own resources are actually kind of confusing unless you already understand what KDP is and how it works, so I would recommend reading this article on the website Self-Publishing School before you dive in. KDP even has a Cover Creator tool, and there are websites where you can get a (pretty generic-looking but decent) book cover for as little as $100. Of course there are downsides to this zero-barrier-to-entry model, specifically that Amazon takes a large cut of what you earn. I personally would not go the Silver route, if you’re looking for a truly professional-looking book, but it’s an option if you have a tight budget and just want to start selling.
  • Gold level: At this level, you’re talking about something that will hopefully be on par with a traditionally published book. Thus, you want professionals to design and format the cover and the interior (some book designers do both, some only do one or the other), and you want to sell the book through a distribution service where they’re not getting a huge cut of your royalties and you’re not locked in to selling only through them. For example, you can hire your own designers, then use a service like BookBaby (again, I use them but this is not an affiliate deal) that will distribute your print and electronic books on every major sales platform, and you pay an up-front fee, but you get to keep all of the royalties. This is what I did with the third edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, and it cost me about $3,000 (total) for interior formatting and cover design, and I paid BookBaby about $600 for a distribution package (for print and electronic versions) where I get to keep all of the royalties.  Platforms like SelfPublishing.com will even, for a fee (in this case, $7,000) walk you through the entire process, from writing your book, to editing it, to formatting it, to designing the cover, to selling it.

A couple of other resources: I recently attended a self-publishing webinar by the Editorial Freelancers’ Association, and it was great! And if you’re an extreme DIY-er or you have a lot of time on your hands and you’d like to learn how to do all of this yourself (it’s possible), you want to follow Joanna Penn, a fiction author who learned to do all of her own self-publishing work, and now teaches other people how to do it!

It’s important to think about what you want out of the self-publishing process. In the 18 (!!) years since I started self-publishing, I’ve made over $90,000 in book royalties. I’m not going to retire from translation and interpreting and live off that money, but it’s paid for some nice family vacations! I’m actually really glad that I did not go the “quick and dirty” route with my flagship books, and that I invested the time and money to make them look professional. And, I’m glad that quick and dirty options exist, for when you just want to create something and get it out there!

I hope that these tips are helpful if you have some of your own self-publishing ambitions!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

Narrowing down, when you want to do everything

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I’ve really been enjoying working with all of you who are doing March Marketing Madness this month (150 participants; a new record!), and the April T4T master class is open for registration:

  • On April 10, I’ll be teaching a two-hour master class on Aiming for six figures as a freelancer (even in the age of AI and MT), using real-world examples from my own business. I started as a freelancer earning $9,000 in 2003, and I’ve earned US $100,000 or more, every year since 2017. Even in the face of AI and MT (which I agree are factors affecting us all), I earned my highest-ever freelance income in 2023. Registration is $75 and includes the recording.

Now, on to this week’s topic: How to narrow down, when you want to do everything? I don’t think I’m the only freelancer with this characteristic (I refuse to call it a problem, it’s just a characteristic!). I always tell my family that my whole thing in life is that I want to do Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

For me, this shows up in many areas of my life, not just work. When I thought about what I wanted to do this summer, I honestly thought, I want to spend July on a workcation in British Columbia (as planned), but while we’re there, I want to fly to California for a week to attend my online cello group’s in-person camp. Then in August, I want to go to at least two Renaissance/Baroque music festivals in Europe (one in Italy, one in Holland), and as long as I’m paying for the plane ticket (are you rolling on the floor laughing at me yet??) why not walk the Camino de Santiago for a month? That’s literally how my brain works.

Here’s how this shows up in my work life. I’m a big believer in diversification, and also in following the money, and I love learning new skills. As an example, over the past five years or so, I’ve had the spontaneous thought:

  • Maybe I should go to law school!
  • Maybe I should become a subtitler!
  • Maybe I should get into grant writing!

These thoughts weren’t just random squirrel brain/shiny object moments (although I’m certainly not immune to those, either!). They had a rational basis.

  • I love court interpreting, I even loved studying for the court interpreter certification exam, and I find the legal system fascinating. So maybe I’m meant to be an attorney!
  • I really like audio-based work; subtitling seems like a cool combination of interpreting and translation, and a good way to diversify.
  • I do some low-stakes volunteer grant writing for our animal rescue group, and we’ve actually been awarded all of the grants that I’ve written. Maybe this could be a good line of business!

The key here, if you know that you have this tendency, is to ask yourself some questions for discernment. This is different than talking yourself out of something that could actually be a good idea. When I decided to do a conference interpreting Master’s (MCI) during COVID, I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to use it, because there’s very little French conference interpreting work where I live, I’m not interested in moving to a major city, and I assumed (incorrectly) that remote interpreting wouldn’t last past the peak of the pandemic. But the MCI ticked a lot of boxes:

  • I had been interpreting-curious for a long time
  • The opportunity to do an MCI online presented itself, which saved me from having to relocate for 1-2 years
  • I theorized, correctly, that I would love interpreting
  • I theorized, correctly, that interpreting was a good business line to get into, from the work volume, job satisfaction, and financial points of view

Here’s how I gave myself a reality check on those other goals; these are big-picture questions that you can ask yourself in a similar situation.

  • Is this goal aligned with the parts of my current work that I like the most, or that I like the least? This is how I talked myself out of going to law school. I realized that, honestly, I enjoy being the messenger. I love court interpreting because I’m immersed in the case, while being relatively detached from the outcome, whereas the public defender literally has someone’s life hanging in their hands. I realized that I would not relish that feeling, and that as a relatively self-critical person and an empath, I would always be asking, How else could I have helped this person? What did I miss? What more could I have done?
  • Does this goal put me at risk of burnout, in an area of my current work that I really enjoy? This is how I talked myself out of a significant commitment to subtitling. I volunteer for Ted Translators and I enjoy it. But I also realized that, particularly when I do a full-day interpreting job, I’m so done with listening to words. I love (love) interpreting, and if I interpret for a full day or close to it, I can’t even bring myself to listen to a podcast on the bus on the way home. I just need something like low-fi instrumental music that uses my brain in a different way. So, adding subtitling didn’t seem like a great idea.
  • Does this goal involve more job stress than I want to take on? I’ve really enjoyed the grant writing I’ve done for our animal rescue group, and it’s been gratifying when we’ve been awarded the grants. But, I’ve done this work as a volunteer and the grants have been small, like $1,500. It’s a big help to the rescue group, but it’s not a make-or-break amount of money. This made me realize that what I enjoy about this grant-writing work is the lack of pressure. And if I were getting paid, and if the amounts were larger, it wouldn’t be “just for funsies,” “yayyyy we got $1,500” any more.

I think that this I want to do everything mindset is common to freelancers; we’re good at the job because have busy brains, and yet, diving head first into a new venture without thinking it through can be a real time and money pit. I hope that these tips are helpful if you, too, suffer from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once-itis!!
Have a great day. Just reply to this e-mail if there’s anything you want to tell me.

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!


Corinne McKay

A few of my favorite resources

Greetings, Training for Translators readers!! This week’s post is pretty basic, but something all of us think about: a few of my favorite resources that might also be helpful to you.

Here they are, in no particular order, and with no affiliate deals

  • The Neuron. You can hate AI, you can love AI, you can be terrified of AI, but the one thing you really don’t want to do is ignore AI. I wanted to subscribe to an AI newsletter written in human-speak, and my friend and colleague Veronika Demichelis recommended The Neuron, which I’ve really been enjoying and from which I’ve learned a ton. They have everything from a daily newsletter (it’s short and engaging; I do actually read it most days) to a free class about the basics of ChatGPT. Even if you see zero use for AI in your own work, The Neuron is a great resource.
  • I wanted to buy a new interpreting headset, because I’ve had my current headsets (two Sennheiser SC65s, one for my office and one for home) since I did the Glendon MCI in 2020. I really like them, but a headset is a single point of failure (can’t interpret without it!) so I wanted to get a backup and try a different brand just for kicks. Unfortunately, my first try, a Jabra Evolve 40, was a fail. I love the rich, warm, sound of the microphone on Jabra headsets (contrasted with the crisper sound of Sennheisers), but the headband was way too tight (admittedly, I have a very large skull) and the ear cups felt like pleather muffins gripping my ears and blocking a ton of ambient sound, which I need to hear (my own voice!) in order to interpret. So I returned that and bought an Audio-Technica open-back gaming headset, and I love it! It’s super-comfortable, the incoming sound quality and microphone quality are excellent, and it’s light on my head (no neck strain). Definitely a win!
  • Setting “dormant client nudge” reminders in Todoist. I’ve been a huge fan of the to-do app Todoist ever since my friend and colleague Meghan McCallum turned me onto it. It’s basically an electronic to-do list, but it’s way better than a reminders app, because you can pre-schedule things for way in the future (a conference that you want to attend next year), and you can set whatever reminder interval you want (I have mine set to remind me to meditate with the Calm app every weekday, to reconcile my accounting on the 5th of every month, etc.). And here’s another good use for it: Remind yourself to nudge your dormant clients at the beginning or middle of June and the beginning or middle of December. Why? Because in June, you’re “letting them know your availability for the summer,” and in December, you’re “letting them know your availability over the winter holidays.” We all struggle with nudging: it works, but it feels annoying. Make it less annoying by having these reasons to contact clients!
  • Using TextAloud for text-to-speech proofreading. I love TextAloud so much that I wrote a blog post about it, and every once in a while, I’m reminded of how much I love it. I struggle with detailed editing because I read too fast. I recently did a complex legal translation that needed to be completely error-free for a court submission. TextAloud slows me down, helps me identify errors that I would miss if I were just reading the document, and it has a lot of convenience features that are missing in the MS Word “Read Aloud” function (see the blog post for details).
  • Melanie Padgett Powers’ podcast The Deliberate Freelancer, and Jennifer Goforth Gregory’s new newsletter, “Goforth and freelance.” These are two freelance writers who I really admire, and I listen to/read pretty much everything they produce. I have long admired Jennifer’s blog with detailed monthly income breakdowns (including even a lot more detail than I put in my yearly income breakdown posts), so I really enjoy her new “for all freelancers” newsletter!

Thanks for reading, and I hope these resources are useful!