The Training for Translators school year kicks off on September 17, 2026 when guest instructor Ashley Cisneros Mejia teaches Breaking into the corporate ghostwriting market. Registration is $75 and includes the recording.

Many of us are familiar with book-length ghostwriting. In this class, Ashley will focus on all the shorter pieces that corporate executives have to write, but don’t have the time, headspace, or necessarily the writing skills to create. This class applies to any language!

In episode 28 of the Training for Translators podcast, I read and comment on a blog post I wrote in July, about what happens when you lose a big client with little to no warning.

If you’re in this situation, know that there are only two types of freelancers: those who’ve already lost a major client with no warning, and those who will at some point in the future lose a major client with no warning.

Learn how to prepare for this kind of situation, and how to decide what to do next if/when you lose a client that represents a large percentage of your income.

I’ve long said that I’m really disciplined about tracking where my money comes from and goes to, but I’ve consistently failed at doing the same with my time. How much do I work? How much of that is billable? Where is all my time going? Honestly, who knew? Certainly not me! 

My issues have been:

• Forgetting to turn the timer off. This sounds basic, but I’m being honest: I was always leaving the timer running and ending up with “Accounting: 14 hours” in my time log. 
• Not really seeing the value. I think this was the bigger problem. 

What changed 

This is an unlikely shift, so stick with me here. In June, I took a couple of classes through the American Literary Translators Association summer course series. Both were great, and I particularly enjoyed “How to make a living as a literary translator,” taught by Julia Sanches. In that class, Julia showed screenshots of her Toggl dashboard and talked about the value of seeing where her time goes, plus the ability to calculate an effective hourly rate on any project. 

Honestly, it was at that moment that I thought, respectfully, if a highly creative literary translator can do this and sees value in it, surely I can do it and surely there would be value in it. I decided to give it another try and really commit this time. 

Five weeks and what I’ve learned 

I revived my dormant Toggl account and got to it, creating projects for various tasks and clients that I regularly work on or for. This is an important part of the process, because you want to really think about what data you’re looking for. Do you want to measure billable and non-billable time? How much time you work for a specific client? Translating versus proofreading your own translations? 

Results so far:

• I hate it less than I thought I would. How’s that for a compliment??? Now that I’ve used it for five weeks, it’s become more of a routine and less of an irritation.
• If you bookmark Toggl on your toolbar, the icon turns purple when it’s timing. This helps me remember to turn it off. Additionally, turning it on and off just gets more automatic the more you use it.  
• Toggl helps me remember to take breaks. For better or for worse, you can’t pause a timing session, you can only turn it off. This is kind of annoying because you have to start a whole new session, but on the positive side, it tells me how long I’ve been sitting (currently 29 minutes which means it’s about time to walk around for a few minutes). 
• Just like looking at your financial data, you’re bound to find some surprises. I’ve always said that most of us can name our top three clients. But what about the fourth and fifth? Or, even if you closely track your income and expenses (I do), some things will be higher or lower than you would have predicted. Last year I made almost $6,000 from book royalties. I’m not going to quit my day job and live off that, but it paid for some nice vacations! And I spent more than $7,000 on subscription-based software (Zoom, Thinkific, Gusto, QuickBooks, web hosting, Google Workspace, podcast hosting). If I add up that and my office rent ($500/month, so $6,000 a year), it’s more than I earned in my entire first year of freelancing! Time tracking is likely to give you some shockers as well.
• One shocker for me: At least in the summer, I work less than I would have expected. Partially, this is expected, because conference interpreting drops off a lot in the summer, and even court interpreting slows down because a lot of people are on vacation. I’m really interested in getting some averages over time: how many hours a week I work, how much of that is billable, etc. It’s already kind of fascinating! 

The takeaway: try it!

I’m too new at time tracking to have any big-picture insights, and I feel like July and August are very skewed because I’m doing less translation and interpreting, and more of my own stuff.  For example, in other months this year I’ve interpreted for week-long conferences, where I would have had 30+ hours of just interpreting. I think it will be at least October until I can draw some meaningful conclusions. But in the meantime, I’ve already learned a lot.

My immediate takeaway: try time tracking (using Toggl, Clockify, or just your phone time and a spreadsheet) if you want to see where your time is going! 

“Help! How do I find the time to market??” 

Here’s another question I often get from readers (the last one was “Help! I lost my biggest client with no warning!”). How do I find time to market, when I’m already really busy with work?? 

Because everyone’s brain works differently, let’s look at this from a bunch of viewpoints:

1. Do you really not have time to market, or do you just hate it so much that you’ll do anything to avoid it?? I say this because a) lots of freelancers will outright admit this; and b) on the current T4T survey, by far the most common response to “How do you feel about marketing your freelance business?” is “I know I need to market more, but I can’t make myself do it.” So first, there’s that: maybe you really don’t have time, and maybe you “don’t have time.”
2. Do you have 15-30 minutes? I also think that a lot of people “don’t have time” to market because they’re thinking of a big block of time. “I’m going to clear my schedule and work on marketing all day on Tuesdays.” Some of us can do this, but most cannot. Nearly every student I talk to, who’s made a big marketing breakthrough this year, they’ve done it through small, consistent marketing increments rather than one massive push. 
3. If you really, really, don’t have time, are your rates too low? If you have to translate or interpret 40 hours a week in order to meet your income goals, it doesn’t surprise me that you have no time to market. The key here is to set an income goal that you can meet in about 25 billable hours (not working hours, billable hours, or hours in which you generate income) per week. 
4. Do you know your productivity tendency? I’ve talked before about Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework: why you do (or don’t do) the things you do (or don’t do). I’m an Upholder; a rule-follower in the extreme, so I make a rule related to marketing. But I think most of us can benefit from this rule: “Market First.” Take care of *your* business before you take care of your clients’ businesses. If I have to interpret really early in the morning, I market after that, but otherwise I do it first thing. 
5. Are you being too vague? Maybe you’re paralyzed by a lack of specifics: “work on marketing for 30 minutes” feels amorphous. Instead: nail it down. “Monday, nudge two dormant clients. Tuesday, send five LinkedIn connection requests to potential new clients. Wednesday, e-mail two potential new clients. Thursday, follow up with two potential new clients.” 
6. Can you make marketing hard to avoid? Keep a list of next marketing steps where you can see it. Defeat analysis paralysis, because you’re looking at “Respond to new LinkedIn connections.” “Follow up with XYZ.” 
7. Are you in maintenance mode? If you’re currently meeting or exceeding your income goals, you may not need to be actively marketing, but you can’t get out of the Always Be Marketing habit. It’s too easy to never pick it back up again, but you can be doing maintenance activities like posting on LinkedIn, attending a client-side event online or in person, reading the publications your clients read, etc. 
8. Do you need templates? This really helps me. There’s nothing worse than blank page syndrome when you’re writing marketing e-mails (my preferred way to market to direct clients). Instead, I keep a Google doc of all the marketing e-mails I’ve sent this year, and I’ll customize them only slightly; so much better than starting from scratch.

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re feeling like you don’t have time to market!

The end of the school year! 

Greetings, T4T community! Well, here we are at the end of the “school year,” wrapping up with today’s content marketing class. I’m grateful to all 5,007 newsletter subscribers, and to the 1,254 (!!) of you who took T4T classes in the first half of the year. 

What’s on tap? First, a couple of self-paced classes in August, while I write the 20th anniversary edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator. Then we’ll dive into a new school year in mid-September, and I’m also launching a T4T Plus tier (don’t worry, the free newsletter isn’t going anywhere!) for those who want some mentoring and targeted mini-courses. Whatever the second half of 2026 has in store, we’re in it together! 

But first, this week’s topic:

“Help! I lost my biggest client with no warning!” 

There are two kinds of freelancers:

• Those who have already lost a major client with no warning
• Those who will, at some point in the future, lose a major client with no warning 

Here’s how I was brutally introduced to this reality, back in about 2010

My big direct client at that time: a private university in France. They had international programs taught in English, into which they accepted students who spoke not a word of French. For that population, the school had to translate absolutely everything: how to register for classes, find a place to live, eat in the school cafeteria, get on the Wi-Fi. 

I loved their work, they paid well, and they were a high-volume client, with predictable peaks of work around the start of the new school year. 

Until I opened up my e-mail one morning, to this. “Hello Corinne! Thanks so much for all of your work for us over the years, we’ve really enjoyed the collaboration. Just wanted to let you know that we’ve hired a new communications specialist for our office. That person is bilingual in French and English and has also worked as a translator. She’ll be handling our translation needs from now on, but we’ll certainly keep you in mind if any additional needs arise.” 

And with that one e-mail, there went a significant percentage of my income, and a huge amount of my business confidence. 

Now what??

These days, lots of translators are getting a version of this e-mail, but the replacement is AI, not a bilingual communications specialist. LinkedIn is exploding with some version of this story: big client disappears overnight…now what? 

This led me to five observations:

1. When you have a dominant client, acknowledge the risks and benefits. Benefit: consistent work, less administrative overhead, getting to know their people and processes. Risk: A quarter, or half, or three quarters of your income disappears with one e-mail. A dominant client may be the right thing for you, but you need a business savings account that’s commensurate with the level of risk. Unscientific calculation: figure that it’s going to take you a month of marketing for every 10% of your income that this client represents, and round up. If they’re 25% of your income, figure that you need three months reserves in savings in case they dump you. 
2. After you get dumped, decide *right then,* before you start marketing to new clients, what percentage of your time/income you’re willing to give to one client in the future. Personally, I’m hesitant to give one client more than 25% of my time, or to have their work represent more than 25% of my income. But “no more work than you can afford to lose overnight” is a good guideline as well. 
3. Huge thanks to my past business coach Treasa Edmond for these next two; versions of which she wrote about it her most recent newsletter. Think about how clients are buying now, not how they bought in the past. The way you sold translation services even a year ago is really different from now, and really, really different than how you sold pre-ChatGPT. Because…
4. Treasa also pointed out that strategy and implementation are becoming way more important than pure execution, or what Ed Gandia calls “order-taking.” Lots of clients are (sadly) totally happy with a “good enough” translation that they got for free from ChatGPT. It’s harder to compare you to ChatGPT if you’re selling more than words. You have to emphasize the results and benefits of your work. In today’s content marketing class, guest instructor Lee Densmer suggested using wording like, “I help clients avoid costly and embarrassing mistakes when entering the German market.” “I make sure that your brand voice comes through in Japanese.” 
5. The hardest, and perhaps the most important: really, really try to embrace this as an opportunity to reinvent. Losing a big client can be a huge financial hit, and a huge blow to your confidence, and it also gives you a clean slate. You don’t have much to lose, so think about what you’d absolutely love to be doing. What kind of work would put you in a financial position where you’ve got six months to a year of savings, ready for the next time this happens? 

I hope these tips are helpful! Have a great week and I’ll be back in touch in a bit with some information about self-paced classes in August.