Greetings, readers! Don’t forget to sign up for our second master class of the year, Editing and proofreading for into-English translators, taught by Karen Tkaczyk on September 29. This three-hour class always gets rave reviews, and will teach you processes and tools that you can start using right away. Past participants tell us that it has increased the quality of their work, given them more confidence that they’re not submitting translations with typos in them, and allowed them to start offering editing as a standalone service. Registration ($75) includes the recording.

On to this week’s newsletter topic: the value of giving yourself 30-day challenges.

I like 30-day challenges, because I think they help us see that:
-Whatever the challenge is, we can do it
-And/but, we don’t have to do it forever

Every year, I tell my March Marketing Madness challenge participants two things:

1. I hope that you see that doing some marketing every work day for a month is doable, and it won’t kill you
2. I hope that you form a marketing habit, but you don’t have to market every single day for the rest of your life once the challenge is over

The same is true of any 30-day challenge you might want to embark on: pick something that you want to do more of (or less of; more on that below!), but also tell yourself that this effort doesn’t have to last forever, only for 30 days.

I’ve been thinking about 30-day challenges because I recently needed a new planner. I still use a paper planner–honestly not for technophobic reasons, but because I travel a lot, and I hate the automatic time zone adjustments in Google Calendar. I’m starting to get some things on the calendar for 2024, so I went looking for a new planner, hoping to find something a little jazzier than the plain black one I purchased at Office Depot last year!

I’m honestly not much of an impulse purchaser (of anything), but as if Facebook could read my mind, up popped an ad for the Commit 30 planner (not an affiliate deal), which, who knew, is also a woman-owned small business right in my home state of Colorado. Commit 30 was running a special where you got a free 2023 planner when you bought 2024, so I ordered it up, and I love it. The planner pages are great (week-at-a-glance), there’s lots of room for extra notes (bullet journal pages in the back), it has two page-marking ribbons, one for that month’s 30-day challenge page and one for the current week (it’s the little things; I love this feature!), and it encourages you to give yourself a 30-day challenge every month of the year.

For the rest of 2023, I decided to try two types of 30-day challenges: something I’m going to do every single day of the 30 days, and something that I don’t necessarily do every day, but that I want to do regularly, within that 30-day period. For September, I picked:

• Meditating every day with the Calm app
• Not looking at Facebook or Instagram on weekends

I’m already very happy with both of these: I’ve meditated a lot with the Calm app since December 2020 when I first started using it. Basically around the time that we realized that COVID and the associated restrictions were not going away any time soon. But I’ve only meditated 30 days in a row one time during the almost three years that I’ve used the app, and I wanted to try it again. I feel like the consistency is really beneficial: my mind feels slower (in a good way) and quieter, my blood pressure is consistently really low (114/65 when I went to the doctor the other day!) and I feel more relaxed in general.

The “no social media on weekends” challenge is an example of something I don’t want to give up forever, but the 30-day challenge has been beneficial. My husband and I usually go for a long mountain bike ride or hike on the weekends, and when I get home, I often spend too much time on my phone in the name of recovery. This past weekend, I was able to knock off a couple of projects around the house that had been hanging over my head, which felt good. I can see myself using this technique to cut back on things I don’t want to completely give up but that I have a tendency to overdo (coffee) to see what happens.

I like the 30-day challenge because it gives you a taste of what consistency in certain areas can do for you. I’m thinking that next month I’ll try practicing music every day that I’m home, and I’d also like to try going to bed at 10 PM for a month and see what benefits I get from that. I think that trying something new for a month can help you determine:

• How onerous it is to do the thing; in the case of meditation, the answer is “not at all.” I’ve listened to the Calm app in all kinds of places: on the bus, while waiting for a Zoom call to start, while waiting for the oven to preheat, while waiting for my sandwich in a restaurant. I can definitely see myself continuing this habit.
• How much benefit you get from the thing: is the effort worth continuing?
• What the pleasure/pain tradeoff is. For example I wonder if I would actually have more energy if I consumed less caffeine, but I honestly don’t know because I rarely go even one day without it.

I’m a rule-follower, so I really like the Commit 30 planner’s little date bubbles that you get to cross off when you do your challenge for that day, but you could also use any sort of carrot/motivator, or stick/negative consequence that helps you maintain a new habit for a month!

I hope these tips are useful!

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope you’re all doing well in your various corners of the world!

Here’s a question for you: What kind of marketing works?
Here’s the honest answer: The kind of marketing that you do. Any kind of marketing that you do. Not the kind of marketing that you only think about, and definitely not the kind of marketing that you talk yourself out of without ever trying it.

Here’s a typical conversation between me and a freelance translator or interpreter who would like to have more work, find better clients, or make more money:

Freelancer: I’m stuck on what marketing method to use and who to contact. I don’t know if I should e-mail people first, but I’m afraid that they won’t write back. Or maybe I should start on LinkedIn. But do people really check LinkedIn that often? And I guess I could fill out agencies’ applications, but it seems like maybe they don’t respond.

Me: Well, let’s back up for a second. In, let’s say, the past six months, how many agencies or direct clients have you applied to or contacted, and what kind of results did you get?

Freelancer: Ummmmmmmmmmmmm

The reality is that so many of us are overthinking our marketing strategies, engaging in a lot of talk and not much action (and I include myself and lots of other experienced freelancers in this category). The kind of marketing that works is any kind of marketing that you do and that you stick with.

If you had a slow summer and you’re actively looking for work, here’s what I’d suggest. Don’t overthink it. Keep it simple.
–If you’re looking for agency clients, apply to five agencies per day by filling out their online forms or e-mailing them your CV (look for instructions on their website). After the first week, keep up with the online applications but add in contacting those agencies’ employees on LinkedIn, using the 300-character note that you can add to a connection request and saying that you applied via their website and are interested in the next steps. Let’s say you’re going to do this three days a week, so you’ll apply to 60 agencies a month, which is pretty good!

–If you’re looking for direct clients, follow a similar process, but obviously they don’t have translator applications on their website, so you need to either e-mail them (if they’re not in the EU GDPR zone) or contact them on LinkedIn, or approach them through a mutual connection. Aim for a similar number of contacts: five per day, three times a week. Following up with direct clients is always tricky, because many people don’t respond on the first try, but you also don’t want to hassle people who don’t need you. If you’re contacting clients in the US, I would recommend starting with e-mail (use a tool like Hunter.io to find addresses if they’re not on the client’s website), then adding LinkedIn after a week or so.

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re currently looking for new clients!

Greetings, readers! This week’s topic, whether agencies care about quality, or mostly about rates, is based on a question from a reader:

One of my reasons for not wanting to raise my rates with an agency is that it would make me less competitive against other freelancers. However, when some agencies now place jobs on “impersonal” portals, for anyone to grab, I wonder if the agency doesn’t care anymore about the rates …  nor about who does a better job. When I worked as an in-house translator, both of these were important factors when outsourcing work. Thus, this has puzzled me for some time, and I don’t feel like I can ask the agencies directly.

This is a pretty loaded question, so let’s take a look at a few different aspects. But first, a couple of disclaimers:
–Agencies are not evil. I honestly really like working for agencies; I just don’t find that many agencies that will pay what I want/need to earn
–Translators are not evil either. Most translators are die-hard word people who are fundamentally good at the job of being a translator, and less good at the job of running a business, and there’s always a balancing act between wanting to charge higher rates and wanting to have enough work that you can pay your bills
–This reader’s fear is rational. Back when I worked mostly for agencies, I lost agency jobs over a difference of one cent per word (maybe even half a cent?), so I think this reader’s fear is based in reality

First off, things change over time, in our profession just as in every other profession. Back in the day (insert nostalgic soundtrack music…) when I started freelancing, agencies did quaint things like call on the phone to see if you were available, and have every one of your translations proofread, and then call you again on the phone to talk about the suggested changes. What used to be the industry-standard TEP (translate, edit, proof) process is, I think, now pretty rare, with the proofreading process often or even usually being compressed, or skipped entirely, except for documents that are going to be published, or where there is a legal or reputation risk. Call me old-fashioned, but it surprises me when agencies even admit to this: like I’ll ask a prospective agency client, “Would my translations be proofed by a second French to English translator?” and the agency will respond, “The project budget doesn’t allow for that.”

By this, I don’t mean that no agencies use proofreaders, or that all agencies are producing slipshod work. I just think that tighter deadlines, tighter budgets, and, to be honest, a higher tolerance for non-perfect work are the new normal. This is true in other word professions as well: there’s even a Twitter account devoted to correcting the New York times; and honestly, very few people care any more about the grammar and word usage rules that those of us who were in school in the 20th century were forced to memorize. At times, I even feel that (at least in the US), being someone who cares that the supermarket express lane sign says “Fifteen items or less” (instead of “…or fewer”), or who knows the difference between “uninterested” and “disinterested” (terms that I recently heard an attorney misuse in court: “The guardian ad litem is an uninterested third party…”) is perceived as fanatically fussy, elitist, snobby, however you want to put it.

So, in one sense, I think that many agencies are simply caught in a bind of providing what the market wants: faster, cheaper, “good-enough” translations, and you honestly cannot blame agencies for using the least expensive translators who produce what the agency perceives as good-enough work. I also think that agencies themselves are under a lot of downward price pressure from end clients who are themselves shopping around for the least expensive translation that meets their quality requirements. This is the cycle that has led to agency rates dropping by approximately half in the time that I’ve been a freelancer; again, not every agency. I work with a small number of agencies that will pay my minimum rate (14-15 cents per word), and they have interesting work and are really great to work with. Here I’m talking more about high-volume agencies that produce millions of words a year for really big clients.

Then we have the role of the translator in all of this. It’s equally true that most translators:

–Are accepting the work that falls in their inbox, at the rate that the client offers, rather than proactively marketing for work that they enjoy and are good at, and that pays enough to meet their income goals

–Are unlikely to negotiate or even leave room for discomfort when a client seems unwilling to pay what they want or need to earn. I had this experience just recently: an interpreting agency contacted me to interpret for a deposition, and when I sent them a quote, they responded, “No one has ever charged us that much before.” I could have immediately written back and offered to charge less, but instead, I told myself, the agency’s response is not a question, it’s a statement, and therefore it doesn’t demand a response from me. And what do you know, the agency responded the next day and said that the end client had given them the green light. It was only because of my willingness to tolerate the agency’s discomfort that this ended up working out, and presumably the agency is also making more money on this project!

–Have an income goal that is unrealistically low. I say this all the time, and I really (really) don’t mean it to sound judgmental. But in the US at least, most freelancers who have an average level of living expenses and want to achieve a similar level of financial security to someone with a salaried job need, in my opinion, to be earning at least $75,000, and probably more like $90,000 when you account for self-employment tax, vacation time, professional development, upgrading computer hardware and software, etc. And, as I said above, it’s really hard to balance wanting to make a decent income with wanting to have enough work.

To me, the bottom line in this “race to the bottom” situation is:

• There are still good agencies out there, that don’t operate in this way, and that value quality, service, and a personal relationship (but there are a lot fewer of them than there used to be).
• Most mainstream agencies, and the vast majority of mega-agencies are in a squeeze of tight deadlines and low budgets, leading them to prioritize price and speed over quality and a personal relationship.
• Price-fixing and rate-shaming are not the way to go, and it is also true that if agencies couldn’t find enough acceptable-quality translators at the rates that they’re offering, they would have two choices: pay more, or go out of business. For example (a topic for another newsletter), I really do not see this type of rate erosion in the conference interpreting world, and I think that this is, at least in part, because conference interpreters exert significant rate pressure on each other, and will even “call out” interpreters who are perceived as undercutting industry standard rates or working conditions. Again, whether this is a good thing or a disruption of the free market is a topic for a different day, but it’s something I’ve observed, as someone who works both as a translator and an interpreter. 

This is a complicated topic, and I certainly don’t have all of the answers. If you’d like to add any input, just add a comment below.