Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

The books I read this year (2023)

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! Welcome to the final post of 2023, and thank you so much for your support this year. I hope you’ve found the blog helpful, and if you’re looking to get a jump on your 2024 professional development, our January classes (Using objective data to set your freelance rates; Getting started as a translator or interpreter in the age of AI) are now open for registration!

As I did last year, I’ll wrap up this year with some mini-reviews of the books I read, then the newsletter will take a holiday break, and I’ll be back in your inbox in January with some new content!

I read 15 books this year, and I have one on deck for winter break. In the order in which I read them, here we go!

1. Olav Audunsson: Crossroads, by Sigrid Undset, translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally. Admittedly, I’m obsessed with the Olav Audunsson series: I read the first two volumes in 2022, and couldn’t wait to dig into this one. This is medieval historical fiction set in Norway, written by a Nobel prize winner, and it reminds me quite a bit of Hilary Mantel’s Henry VIII series. I think with this series, you love it or you don’t, and I love it: I love the medieval stuff, the family drama, the stories about traveling around Norway during that time…bring it on!

2. The Ransomware Hunting Team, by Renee Dudley and Daniel Goldin. A complete 180 from the first book I read this year, this is an excellent non-fiction book by two technology reporters at ProPublica, focusing on how ransomware attacks happen, and a team of cybersecurity specialists who work in the ransomware recovery world.

3. No One Would Listen, by Harry Markopolos. I got sucked into the whole Bernie Madoff story after watching the Netflix series “Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street,” and I wondered if there were any interesting books on the topic. I really loved this one, by the forensic accountant who was a primary whistle-blower on the Madoff case. It’s just nerdy enough, and gives you a lot of the financial details on how Madoff pulled off such an extraordinary level of financial fraud, and what it took to uncover it.

4. The Prodigal Child, by Irène Némirovsky, translated from the French by Sandra Smith. I read this in English because Sandra Smith is a friend and gifted me the book, plus I just love Sandra’s translations. This is a beautiful and heartbreaking short (80 pages) novel, set in turn-of-the (last)-century Russia, about a boy with a gift for storytelling, who is adopted and then rejected by a wealthy patroness. It’s so incredibly well-written and well-translated; I don’t typically read “downer” fiction (to be honest) but I highly recommend it for the quality of the prose!

5. Inseparable, by Simone de Beauvoir, translated from the French by Sandra Smith. If you’re into Simone de Beauvoir, you need to read this. It’s the semi-fictionalized story of Simone de Beauvoir’s close friendship with Zaza Lacoin (names are changed in the novel) and it’s so good! Here’s the New York Times review of it.

6. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, by Deborah Feldman. Another book that I found via the Netflix miniseries! I liked both the TV show and the book, but/and they’re very different. Both are worthwhile; the TV series is a lot more sensational and dramatic (how unusual for a TV series…haha), but Deborah Feldman is an excellent writer, particularly for someone who was prohibited from even having a library card as a child, and her path from Brooklyn to Berlin is really gripping as a story.

7. Ducks, by Kate Beaton. I’m not a graphic novel person in general, and this was one of my absolute favorite books of this year, and maybe even the past few years. Kate Beaton is an artist from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, who ended up working in the oil sands of Alberta to pay off her student loans, then drew/wrote a graphic novel about it. I actually heard about this book on a Marketplace podcast about the offbeat jobs that people do to pay back their educational debt, and I was absolutely captivated by it. I’ve since gifted it to three other people who loved it too. A must-read!

8. Hello, Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano. I was honestly pleasantly surprised by this book. It’s a fairly long novel (not my typical thing), and an Oprah’s Book Club Pick (with all due respect, also not my typical thing), and I honestly really liked it. It’s a multi-generational family story about a group of four sisters in Chicago, intertwined with the complex family story of one of their husbands. I like reading about complicated family dynamics, and Ann Napolitano is a great writer. This book is not something I would have ordinarily picked up, and I’d actually recommend it!

9. There There, by Tommy Orange. My mom was reading this with her book club and loaned it to me; it’s definitely really well-written (Pulitzer Prize finalist, PEN Hemingway award). It follows various Native American characters in Oakland, CA whose paths become intertwined on the way to a Powwow. I’d recommend this book if you don’t already feel relatively beaten down by the reality of Native Americans in the U.S. That may sound like kind of a weird way to put it, but, having done a bunch of trips to the Navajo Nation with our animal rescue group, I sort of felt like, I’m so sad when I think about all of this (“this” being stories about alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, early death due to substances and despair, grandparents raising their grandkids) that I don’t really have it in me to read 12 characters’ stories about it. But the book is very well written!

10. Who Gets What–And Why: The new economics of matchmaking and market design, by Alvin Roth. I’d call this, “The book that could have been a podcast.” Actually, it’s the book that was a podcast, and that’s how I found out about it. I think I heard the author interviewed on the Freakonomics podcast, and I thought, “Whoa, really interesting, I want to read his book!” and it turns out that the most interesting parts of the book were what he talked about on the podcast. The author is obviously brilliant (Nobel Prize winner), and has designed “markets” for things like organ donation. It’s a fascinating topic, but the book makes the same point many, many times, and I’d recommend just reading an article or listening to a podcast with this author instead.

11. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, by Mary Roach. I love Mary Roach, and I’m an animal person, so this book was a winner for me (a gift from my sister-in-law). It’s a non-fiction look at the intersection between humans, animals, and other forces of nature (an entire chapter is devoted to how you can be killed by a tree). I find Mary Roach’s books really informative but also funny and easy to read. Definitely recommended!

12. Passion Simple, by Annie Ernaux (I’m including the French title here because I read it in French, it’s “Simple Passion” in English). I was really excited to read this book after Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize, and I hope I’m not going to hell for saying this, but I hated this book and found it honestly kind of cringe-y. Annie Ernaux is (it goes without saying) an excellent writer, but this is kind of a stream-of-consciousness account of the main character’s love affair with “a mysterious foreigner” who becomes her all-consuming obsession. Partially, I think that the subject matter just hasn’t aged well: it was written in the 90s, and maybe (maybe??) at that time, a book about a grown, independent woman who saves a glass that her aloof, unreachable lover drank out of so that she’ll have a relic of his saliva came off as less…anachronistic?? I don’t know…I’m going to give Annie Ernaux another try (“The Years” is on deck) but I was not a fan of this book.

13. Going Infinite: The rise and fall of a new tycoon, by Michael Lewis. I know, this is one of those books that everyone read this year, but I got really drawn into the Sam Bankman-Fried story, so I had to read it! You’ve probably heard the controversy by now (that Michael Lewis kind of goes easy on SBF, who, we now know, may be headed for multiple decades in prison), but Michael Lewis is a good writer, and this is a fun, captivating read, plus I knew almost nothing about the whole crypto sector before I read it.

14. Lone Women, by Victor Lavalle. OK, speaking of not my typical read: a fantasy-horror Western?? But wait, I actually really liked this book. It was featured in the book recommendations of one of my favorite podcasts, Melanie Padgett Powers’ The Deliberate Freelancer, and I had a couple of long airplane rides coming up, so I was, like, what the heck. This book is so good! It’s based on the true concept of “Lone Women” (solo women homesteaders) in Montana in the early 1900s, and I got soooo drawn into the story (what’s in the trunk?????). Highly recommended, particularly if you like fantasy-horror novels (which I normally don’t, but I really liked this one).

15. How to Say Babylon, by Safiya Sinclair. Oh. My Gosh. I’d say that this, along with “Ducks,” is my other must-read recommendation for this year. Safiya Sinclair is a poet, and I found out about this book because it was excerpted in The New Yorker. The book is a memoir about the author’s childhood in a Rastafari family in Jamaica, through her experience as a graduate student in the U.S., and it is crazy/beautiful/captivating/educational/heartbreaking/eye-opening. Like, it is all the things that a really good memoir should be, plus Safiya Sinclair is such a good writer that I would sometimes read the same paragraph over and over, just because it was so beautiful. I had no idea that “Babylon” is the Rastafari term for “mainstream Western society” (my husband lived on St. Croix for a couple of years after college and enlightened me about this). Another must-read.

If you’re looking for some holiday break reading, I’d suggest (in no particular order, and depending on your literary tastes): Ducks, Lone Women, and How to Say Babylon.

And with that, thanks for a great 2023 and I’ll talk to you in 2024!

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

How to handle mistakes and perfectionism

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I hope you’re all doing well and hopefully getting some time off over the year-end holidays! This is the final “substantive” newsletter of the year; next week I’ll send out my annual “books I read this year” post (here’s last year’s if you’re looking for some holiday reading), and then the newsletter will take two weeks off while I do some skiing, beaching, and pajama-ing.

The T4T online training year has wrapped up, and I’m excited that 633 people participated in our master classes and challenge groups in 2023! If you’re looking to get a jump on things for 2024 (or if you need a year-end tax deduction!), our January offerings are open for registration:

  • On January 16, I’m teaching a special one-hour “flash session” on Using objective data to set your freelance rates. This “quick start” webinar will help you use actual numbers to decide how much to charge (imagine that!), at a special price of $50.
  • On January 17, my four-week, self-paced class, Getting started as a freelance translator or interpreter…in the age of AI kicks off. I teach this four-week class once or twice a year, and it’s continually updated to reflect the actual working conditions that beginning and aspiring freelancers encounter. Registration is $190, with a $30 discount for American Translators Association members (use coupon code ATA).

Now, on to this week’s topic: How to handle mistakes and perfectionism

When I teach classes for freelancers, I often tell people that if you’re making it as a freelancer, I already know that you’re a go-getter and an overachiever, because it’s basically impossible to succeed as a freelancer without those characteristics. In most salaried jobs, if you think of people on a scale of 1-10, the 1s and 2s might get laid off or demoted, the 9s and 10s might get a raise or a promotion, and everyone else sort of cruises along being neither great nor horrible at their job. That’s completely untrue of freelancers, where if you’re not a 9 or a 10, clients can easily just go find someone else.

This has its downsides, namely that when we make mistakes (which we all do), or if we suffer from perfectionism (which a lot of us do), we can have a hard time dealing with it. This happened to me last week: for a variety of reasons (none of them catastrophic), I had a bad day at work. I love my job, so it hits me hard when things don’t go well. But here’s what I did well: I realized that I was spiraling into panic mode, and I paused for some perspective instead of continuing to freak out. And then:

  • I didn’t have any particular plans that evening, so I decided to walk home from my office to clear my head. This walk takes more than an hour, so it’s a good amount of time for reflection.
  • I remembered that Sophie Llewellyn Smith, who hosts The Complete Interpreter podcast (sooo good; she covers mostly conference interpreting topics, but some of her episodes apply to translators as well) had done an episode on How to let go of mistakes when you have a bad day, and I had my earbuds with me, so I decided to listen to the episode while I walked home. Following are some takeaways for all of us!
  1. I really appreciated Sophie’s take on the toxic aspects of perfectionism. Namely, that we tell ourselves that perfectionism is a positive thing, sort of a “continual quest for excellence,” when in reality, perfectionism often means that we never see our own work as good enough, and we see any mistakes as a complete failure: we’re either perfect or incompetent, and nothing in between.
  2. Sophie also reinforced something I often tell people: You’re going to make mistakes; no one who does language work is perfect all the time. And when (not if, when) you mess up, you need to apologize, do what you can to make it right, and move on. However, Sophie had some really great tips for “moving on” that I had never thought of. They’re in the show notes if you want to take a look. Hint: I was on the right track by walking home instead of taking the bus!
  3. Sophie also encourages (great advice for both translators and interpreters) differentiating between mistakes that weigh on you because your work wasn’t up to par, and mistakes that weigh on you because of mindset. There’s a difference between, “I knew I should have proofread that translation more carefully / I knew I wasn’t fully prepared for that interpreting assignment,” and feeling like the mistake was something relatively minor (Sophie’s episode is inspired by an interpreter who hesitated during an on-air interpreting assignment; not a catastrophic error) but it’s still eating away at you hours/days/weeks later.

Two tips that we often share in my family, and that I think are helpful in work situations as well, are:

  • Progress doesn’t happen in the comfort zone. You never want to sell a client something on which you can’t deliver; “fake it ’till you make it” is actually terrible advice for a freelancer, IMO. But, when you challenge yourself, things aren’t always going to go perfectly, and yet you can grow from the experience.
  • The only way never to be disappointed is never to try. If you stay in your safe zone, you’re never disappointed in your own work, because you stick with things you’re already good at. I always appreciate it when my yoga teachers will say, “If you’ve never tried this hard pose, you literally don’t know whether you can do it or not.” Trying involves the risk of not succeeding, and you need to give yourself credit for trying.

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

OT: Shopping for and purchasing an electric car

I haven’t done an off-topic post in a while, so here goes! This is a long post that I decided to write for the benefit of other people who are shopping for an electric vehicle (EV); only read it if you’re really interested in EVs!!

We’re a one-car family (or rather, my husband and I are a one-car couple, our university student daughter has her own minivan!), and our much-loved 2011 Subaru Outback gave up the ghost (a bunch of expensive repairs that were not worth doing) a couple of weeks ago. For about the past six months, I had been saying, “We’re never buying another gas car; when we have to replace this car, we’re going fully electric.” Somehow, I was envisioning that “when we have to replace this car” would be maybe two to four years down the road (it had 140K miles on it, which is actually not that much for a Subaru), but unfortunately the universe heard me, and “down the road” turned out to be sooner than we anticipated. I texted my husband from the mechanic and said, “You know how I’ve been whining that I’m the last person in Boulder who doesn’t have a Rivian? Welllll, that may not be true for much longer!!”

A few factors weighed into this decision:

  • We live in an area with a pretty high percentage of electric cars, so there are lots of chargers available
  • We also live in an area (Denver, Colorado metro) with horrible ozone levels from vehicle air pollution
  • We’re in a wind power cooperative, so our home electricity is fossil fuel-free

We also had some major decisions to work out, namely whether an EV would work for our driving habits, which are kind of the opposite of the way the rest of the world drives. Neither of us commutes (my husband works from home; I work at an office outside our house, but there’s very limited parking so I either bike or ride the bus), but we drive up to the nearby mountains (about 75 miles roundtrip) nearly every weekend to go hiking, mountain biking, or skiing, and we take long road trips during the summer (typically to British Columbia, about a 20-hour drive from where we live).

I started by surveying my Facebook friends, a number of whom have EVs, and our neighborhood e-mail list, which is a great source of information about the local aspect: where to charge, available rebates, etc. Interestingly enough, I didn’t encounter anyone who said, “We don’t like our EV,” or “We’re living with it for now but not planning on buying another one.” And many people said, “We had some hesitations, but we love this car,” or “Best vehicle-buying decision we ever made.” Most of all, our friends who have EVs universally assured me that, once you get in the EV mindset, it’s like any other car, but you charge it instead of putting gas in it. So we started shopping, with the following requirements:

  • Range of at least 250 miles
  • All-wheel drive
  • Good winter battery performance, particularly because we don’t have a garage
  • Decent amount of cargo space for skis, camping gear, etc.
  • Not crazy expensive (all joking aside, the Rivian would actually fit our needs, but runs US $75-95K which is outside our budget)

After doing a bunch of research on Edmunds and MotorTrend (I particularly appreciated MotorTrend’s long-term reviews, where one of their staff members drives the car for a year), we narrowed the list down to the Kia EV6, the Hyundai Ioniq (the EV6 and the Ioniq use the same power train, which Hyundai and Kia developed together), the Volkswagen ID4, the Tesla Model Y, and the Ford Mustang Mach-E. We quickly eliminated the ID4 due to its poor battery performance in cold weather, and decided that our top candidates were the EV6 and the Ioniq, and that we’d like to test drive the Model Y and the Mach-E just for kicks.

My sister-in-law had turned me on to Turo, a car rental service that is like AirBnB for vehicles. We decided to demo an EV6 and an Ioniq, because we wanted to take them on the kind of drives that we actually do, not just drive them around the block from a dealership. This went well and was definitely a good decision. On a snowy day, we picked up two friends in our Turo EV6 and headed up to the mountains for a hike; this gave us the chance to test the EV6’s performance in the snow (excellent), and to see how much battery range it used for this trip (a lot on the way up, not much on the way down, because of the regenerative braking). We then rented an Ioniq on Turo, drove a Tesla Model Y at our local CarMax dealership, and drove a Mach-E with the broker who we ultimately ended up using to purchase the EV6 Wind that we ended up buying (more on this below). Our initial assessments were:

  • We loved pretty much everything about the Kia EV6 Wind, with all-wheel drive and the long-range battery. It has a range of 280 miles, a good amount of cargo space, a 60/40 fold-down rear seat (so you can fold one side of the back seat down and still fit two people), and a good mix of manual and touch-screen controls. To us, the interior felt like a luxury car (we’re not car people, so take this with a grain of salt!); super-comfortable seats, excellent safety features like blind-spot cameras (these come with the Kia technology package), heated and ventilated seats (nice to have in an EV because the forced-air systems use a lot of battery power), a “charge search” feature to find the nearest charging station, and various regenerative braking modes to conserve battery power. The Kia also comes with a 10-year warranty, which was really appealing.
  • The Hyndia Ioniq wasn’t bad, and it’s mechanically basically the same car as the EV6, but we didn’t love it. Compared to the EV6, the suspension felt tighter/less cushy, and the interior felt kind of cheap and plastic-y. We’ve never bought a brand new car, so if we were going to buy brand new, we wanted to love the car, and we liked but didn’t love the Ioniq.
  • The Tesla Model Y was a totally different beast. Teslas use an all-touchscreen interface (no manual controls other than the turn signals; you use the touchscreen to adjust the mirrors, the air vents, the windshield wipers, basically everything). Everyone we know who has a Tesla assured us that you get used to this, but I had some concerns about it, and I worried that the large touchscreen (about the size of a laptop screen) could be easily broken by a lot of the stuff we typically carry in the car, specifically skis. Additionally, the “clean and minimalist” Tesla interior felt to me kind of harsh and cold (I couldn’t really imagine driving people in the back seat on a long drive), and I had some hesitations about how hot the car would get in the summer because of the glass roof. I see what people love about Teslas: the no-hassle purchasing because they don’t have dealerships, the cool navigation features (give it a destination and it tells you where to charge), and the fact that it drives like a sportscar (I floored it from a red light just to see what it did, and it was honestly kind of terrifying). I see the appeal of Teslas, but we ended up feeling like it wasn’t the car for us, and I have a hard time with the idea of giving Elon Musk any of my money, much less a huge amount of my money.
  • The Ford Mustang Mach-E is a nice car, and the “made in America” tax credit (which none of the other cars we looked at qualified for) was definitely appealing, plus we planned to pay cash for the car, but Ford offers, at least some of the time, 0% financing for 48 months. I drove one with our auto broker and liked it, but it’s more of a sports car than we’re looking for, and there’s not a ton of cargo space compared to the other options we looked at. Plus, I had some concerns about its durability and reliability, given that we tend to keep cars until they die.

We basically settled on the Kia EV6 Wind AWD long-range model. When it came time to buy, we had not one, but two horrible experiences at local Kia dealerships. The first dealer told us that the attractively priced car we saw on their website was “unavailable,” but as luck would have it (insert eye roll here), they had an “even nicer” model for only $8K more. They also refused to directly answer my questions about what sorts of rebates or discounts might be available on the EV6. We moved on to a second dealership, which, believe it or not, was even worse, in that they advertised a $5K cash discount on their website that they then refused to give us when we went to the dealership to try to buy the car, first telling us we must have mis-read the price (I had a screen shot), then that the discount was only available if we financed the car (it was specifically listed under the “Cash” tab), then finally that it was a mistake and they couldn’t sell us the car at that price. I reported them to the Colorado Auto Industry Division for deceptive pricing practices, and asked my husband, “Should we just move to Switzerland,” (where we have dual citizenship) “…and completely stop driving?” I honestly wondered if we should just give up on the whole idea.

But then…a friend referred me to another friend, who is an auto broker. I honestly had no idea that this service existed, and now that we used a broker, I will also honestly never enter a car dealership again, ever. We used Dustin Williams with H.M. Brown, a large auto broker in Colorado. Within two days, Dustin had found two cars (an EV6 and a Mach-E) for us to try; we immediately settled on the EV6 and Dustin negotiated a nice discount on the MSRP, plus brought the car and the paperwork to our house, and the dealer paid his fee, so there was zero cost to us. This was honestly a great experience and I would recommend Dustin’s services to anyone else in Colorado.

We’ve only had the car for two days (!!) but so far, we love it. We’re still learning about its various features (lots of watching YouTube videos!) and we’re starting to plan out where and when to charge it on a couple of road trips we plan on taking over Christmas break. Our plan, at least in the short-term, is to trickle charge the car at home during the week (we have an outdoor electrical outlet right next to our driveway), using a simple charging cable that cost about $160. This adds about five miles of range per hour, but in our case, the car largely sits in the driveway during the week, so this seems doable. There’s also a Level 2 charger (fully charges the car overnight) at the middle school one block from our house, and with one of our Turo cars, we tested a Level 3 charger in a parking garage in downtown Boulder. This super-fast charging isn’t great for the car’s battery health in the long term, but it’s impressively fast: charged the Hyundai Ioniq from 30%-80% in the time it took us to drink coffee.

We’re planning some ski trips in the near future, and I’ll report back in a month or so on how life with the EV is going!

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

How to raise your rates

Greetings, readers! Our final master class of the year is next Monday (December 11)! For all of you beginning and aspiring subtitlers and audiovisual translators, guest instructor Molly Yurick will teach Breaking into the subtitling market, a two-hour class packed with practical advice on the key concepts of the subtitling market, free and paid subtitling tools, pricing models, and how to pursue training and find clients. Registration ($75) includes the recording and we hope to see you there!

This week, let’s talk about how to raise your rates, because the end of the year is a good time to strategize about this topic!

Most importantly, it’s rare to make a big rate jump with an existing client, and how/when to raise your rates depends mostly on how much you need or want to hold on to that client’s business. Here’s what I mean:

  • In many professional service businesses, it’s common to raise rates without specifically notifying your clients. My accountant, my dentist, my graphics person, all seem to raise their rates every year, but without drawing too much attention to it; I just notice that the bills from them are suddenly somewhat higher. I would say that this is uncommon in the language professions; it’s usually on us to specifically get the client’s approval before we start billing them more, unless we bill them on a per-project basis, in which case they may not notice the increase.
  • In a sense, this is an argument for per-project billing. I’m not sure that I’ve ever encountered an agency that accepts per-project billing, but lots of direct clients do. I think that some direct clients even prefer per-project billing, because it gives them one number to focus on: “How much is this going to cost us?”
  • This also means that big rate jumps normally come from new clients. If your current clients are paying 15 cents per word and you’d really like to be making 25 cents per word, you’re simply going to need to find new clients.

Assuming that you’re billing clients per word/hour/page/day (anything other than per-project), you’ll probably need to inform your client ahead of your rate increase and get their approval. How difficult that is and how carefully you need to handle it depends on how price-sensitive the client is, and how much you need or want their work. Let’s go in order of difficulty, from easy to difficult.

  • The easiest way to raise your rates is to simply inform the client of your price increase. “Just checking in, to let you know that as of January 1, my per-word/per-page/hourly/daily rate will increase from X to Y.” The hard part is that if you’re going to use this strategy, you have to be willing to lose the client, because you’re essentially saying, “take it or leave it.” In my experience, this technique works well with a) clients you’re not particularly concerned with retaining, b) clients who merit an “annoyance fee,” because they are difficult to work with (you’re not interested in working with them unless they’re willing to pay the annoyance fee), and c) clients who you perceive are willing to pay more than you’re currently charging.
  • A little more on the annoyance fee. I’m a pretty tolerant person, but every once in a while, I work with a client who is…just…difficult. An example for me is clients who call on the phone with a frequency that I would consider excessive. Years ago, I worked with a client who would call me (no kidding) three to five times a day whenever I was working on a project for them. This was a direct client with a large budget, and finally I told them, you can call once a day and talk to me for up to five minutes. After that, every phone call will be billed at $75 per 15 minutes (note that I was getting paid well to translate for them, but not $300 an hour). And, guess what, they kept calling. The eventual bill just for the phone calls was in the thousands of dollars. That’s an example of how an annoyance fee can be beneficial.
  • A middle of the road option is to discuss the rate increase with your client, and see what they say. “In looking over my accounting records, I see that I haven’t raised my rates with you in over three years. I really enjoy our work together, and I appreciate the large volume of work that you send me. All new clients that I’m onboarding this year will be paying X; would it be in your budget to pay that amount, or would you be able to let me know how that type of increase might affect my work volume from you?” This strategy is tricky, because the client now knows that you perceive that they’re underpaying you, which isn’t something you want to convey without thinking it over. I’ve had successes and failures with this strategy, partially because it feels vague and waffle-y on the part of the freelancer, and because a lot of agencies simply won’t tell you (and they’re not obligated to tell you) what they’re paying their other translators. I’ve had clients who wouldn’t give any sort of substantive response (“It’s up to you” type of thing, which, in a way, is true); clients who said “You’re already at the top of our rate range,” and a very few clients who said, “That would work for us.”
  • The hardest situation is when you have a client who is paying you less than you’d like to be making, but you’re very dependent on their work. Honestly, a lot of freelancers are in this situation: they have a dominant client that also pays poorly. In this situation, make sure you’re not trying to get blood from a stone. Many low-paying clients’ business models are based on paying low rates: they simply cannot pay more if they want to retain their own end clients. As frustrating as this is (you feel taken advantage of, you’re getting burnt out), you are ultimately responsible for accepting or declining any given client’s work. If you’re in this situation (big client, low rates), it’s time to vow that you will not be in the same situation a year from now. You will start doing at least a small amount of marketing every day. You will Always Be Marketing.

I’m also guessing that in the current climate, some agencies may tell you that they’re under a lot of downward price pressure from their end clients due to various factors, including MT and AI. Remember that their business is their business, and your business is your business. A client telling you this is like you telling a client that you need to raise your rates because you bought a new car: not their problem. If your agencies are pushing their own rates down, that’s up to them, but you have a choice to accept or decline those rates.

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

The holidays are a good time to…

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! December’s master class, Breaking into the subtitling market, is open for registration! On December 11, guest instructor Molly Yurick will teach a two-hour master class for beginning and aspiring subtitlers and audiovisual translators, based on her own experience re-training as a subtitler during the COVID pandemic. This class always gets rave reviews! Registration ($75) includes the recording. We hope to see you there!

This week, let’s talk about handling the holiday season as a freelancer, depending on where you’re at in your career.

  • If you’re an experienced freelancer and you’ve reached your income goals for the year, December and January are a great time to take time off, because work is often slow anyway. Particularly if you work with direct clients, make sure to give your regular clients a referral to another translator. Don’t just send them to a directory where they can find someone else; find a trusted colleague who will be working when you’re on vacation, and either send that person’s contact information to your regular clients, or put their contact information in your e-mail auto-responder. This rule isn’t absolutely iron-clad: if you’re taking off the week between Christmas and New Year’s, your clients are probably on vacation as well. But you definitely don’t want to leave clients hanging if they really need someone; better to set them up with someone else ahead of time. If your workflow is solid, give yourself some time to recharge. This is what I’m doing: planning on some pajama time, some ski time, and some beach time.
  • It’s also a great time to remind clients that you exist, by sending them your holiday availability. I had sort of forgotten about this holiday nudging technique, until someone else mentioned it in a comment on my LinkedIn post about nudging dormant clients. Tamar Arenas Pastor commented that she followed up with a client who had said they might need her services in the future, letting them know her availability over Christmas, in case the project was going forward (the client replied, to discuss a project!). Sending out your holiday availability is a great excuse to contact pretty much any client.
  • If you’re a beginner, it’s also a great time to look for work. Why? Because everyone else is taking time off. Over the years, I’ve talked to several translators who either launched or expanded their businesses by being available during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Particularly if you work with agencies, it’s a great idea to let them know that you’ll be working over the holidays, and it’s a good time to look for work in places where you might not ordinarily look (i.e. job boards). Clients are often more amenable to taking a chance on a new person when all of their regular freelancers are busy!

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!