Training for Translators: Blog - Page 46 of 245

Jul 18 2023
Corinne McKay

The first six months of this year: how business is going

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! As it’s now mid-July, I did a review of the first six months of 2023 and how things are going in my business; I’d encourage you to do the same, because you still have half the year left to make some changes if you’re not where you want to be.

I recognize that I’m a bit of an outlier among translators and interpreters for sharing my income statistics. If you find this weird or off-putting, feel free to just skip it. Such topics seem to be more common among freelance writers (examples here, here, and here, and here, and some of those include much more detail about the writer’s sources of income than I typically provide, which I found interesting!). My goal here is not to brag about how much I’m earning, but to say that I started from zero (twice: once as a translator and once as an interpreter), and if can do it, you can do it!

Income and where it came from

At the beginning of 2023, I set an income goal of US $125,000, an increase of $15,000 over my 2022 income. When I say “income,” I mean gross income minus subcontracting: I don’t include money that I took in and immediately paid out to someone else (typically online course instructors), but I include everything else. My 2022 income was almost equally divided between translation, interpreting, and teaching (31-35K from each of those).

At $110K, I definitely was not worried about how to keep the lights on, but I was frustrated with the stagnation. My income had stayed stable at around that level for four years, and I wanted to bump it up a bit. Specifically, I wanted to move more toward the equivalent of a six-figure salaried job, which I feel that I (and anyone else with two Master’s degrees and 20 years’ experience) would merit.

So far, I’m ahead of this goal; minus subcontracting, I earned about $86K in the first six months of 2023, for an average monthly income of slightly over $14K. Where did the 86K come from, and what are the trends?

My translation income was slightly behind last year, at 14K for six months (my total translation income in 2022 was 31K)
Interestingly (since I haven’t published a new book in a number of years, but hopefully that’s changing soon!), book royalty income, while not a huge portion of my overall income, was way up, at $3,500 for six months as compared to around 4K for all of 2022
The remaining 69K was divided between two line items that are up: interpreting, and teaching. Teaching is up about 25% (I offered some new Training for Translators courses that did well, and I did some training for other entities that also did well), and interpreting is way, way up: my total interpreting income for 2022 was 35K, and I earned 34K from interpreting in the first six months of this year

What went well:

I honestly really enjoyed all of the work I did, even when I was working a little too much. I got my conference interpreting degree exactly two years ago, and I’m seeing that conference interpreting clients are starting to trust me with larger, more important, and multi-session assignments, rather than occasional or one-off things
I did a lot of remote court interpreting work for entities outside Colorado, which brought in some additional income and proved to be interesting (and who knew there were so many francophone defendants in court cases in the US; there really are!)
Court and conference interpreting are starting to balance out. In 2022, I did a bit over 110 court assignments and around 50 conference assignments, and so far this year, I did 47 court days and 52 conference days, which is more like what I’m aiming for
Even when I was working a little too much, I made my own health and happiness a priority, and mostly kept going to yoga at least 10 times a month (sometimes 15-20 times), meditating pretty much every day, and doing the daily stretch/strengthen routine that I really enjoy, and that keeps my body feeling good when I’m sitting a lot. I was able to go on a week-long trip to the Navajo Nation with our animal rescue group, I took a really great trip to Iceland, we took a very fun family trip to Bryce Canyon National Park, and we fostered some really great cats who have now moved on to their forever homes. It felt really good to do all of this during a time when I also made a good amount of money.

What went less well (or failed completely!):

For various reasons, I decided to scrap an upgrade to the Training for Translators website that I had already paid for a lot of web programming on; it was the right decision, but I should have thought this through before I went ahead with it.
As expected (but it never seems real until it actually happens!) one of my largest direct clients completely discontinued working with me because their six-year contract with USAID ended. I knew this was going to happen, but it really sunk in after the usual start of their translation cycle went by and I didn’t work for them.
My conference interpreting work from clients in the US is still sporadic, with the bulk of my conference interpreting work coming from Canada and Europe. This doesn’t necessarily bother me (I love Canada and am spending the whole month of July in Canada, and I went to a Canadian interpreting school), it’s more that I feel like haven’t really “cracked” the US conference interpreting market. I have clients who say they’re sending me all the French conference interpreting work they have (maybe one to two assignments a month), and there are many clients that won’t pay the rates that Canadian and European clients offer.
I switched accountants, which took a lot of time and was a major hassle. I hate accounting, and I just want to pay someone to deal with it for me. My longtime accounting firm made some errors (that I caught…not good), took too long to fix mistakes that they made, and had a bunch of billing hassles, so I decided to switch to a new firm. However the first person I tried turned out to be even more disorganized and unresponsive, and on attempt #3 I think I’ve found a winner, but this still involved switching all of my payroll accounts and previous tax documentation over to their online portal, which was time-consuming. Hopefully this is now resolved (stay tuned!).

Other observations

I’m still getting used to the seasonal nature of interpreting, and along with that, what it feels like to earn a big chunk of money at once, and very little money at other times. For example, QuickBooks tells me that I earned $1,100 in January (!), followed by three months in a row where I earned more than 15K per month. Experienced conference interpreters tell me that they expect and even look forward to this, and that they expect little to no work from mid-July to early September. I’m filling these gaps in by doing more translation and court interpreting, but it’s a big change to get used to, even when I’m happy with my overall income.
Don’t give up on translation agencies. I haven’t worked with any new agencies in a long time, but earlier this year, an agency found me in the ATA directory, and sent a 30,000 word project paying 14 cents per word. They were easy to work with, the project was interesting, and they paid on time. Never say never!
It takes time to build up a new line of business. Not an earth-shaking observation, but worth noting. When I finished my conference interpreting degree in July 2021, my only interpreting client was the Colorado state court system, essentially a “captive audience” client because Colorado has a lot of court work for French, and only a handful of certified French interpreters. I started from complete ground zero with conference interpreting work, and it’s only in about the last six months that my client base feels solid. Interestingly enough, this aligns with the 18 months it took me to replace my previous full-time income when I started my freelance business in 2002.

What’s ahead
At this point, things for the second half of the year look good. I’m currently working on a large translation project for an agency (there we go, another good agency!), I have inquiries or confirmations for at least 30 days of conference and court interpreting in September-November, and I’ve finally made some decent progress on the interpreting version of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator that I’m determined to finish before the end of the year. As always, freelancing involves a lot of uncertainty, but I’m feeling good about how things are going right now.

I hope these observations are helpful to you, as you assess your own first half of the year!

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!

Jul 11 2023
Corinne McKay

“It’s too late!”…and other unhelpful things we tell ourselves

Let’s talk about the feeling that “it’s too late” to make progress on your freelance goals. Here’s how this shows up in my own freelance career, and when I talk to other freelancers:

The feeling that you’ve waited so long to do something, that it’s no longer worth doing. “I’ve been planning to redo my website for two years, so maybe I’ll just forget about it.” “I’ve been saying for the past three years that this is my year to start working with direct clients; I’ve waited so long that it’s never going to happen.”
The feeling that a goal will take so long to achieve, that it’s not worth starting. I experienced this (big-time!!) in my own freelance life, when I “thought about thinking about” going back to school for interpreting for fifteen years before I actually did it. By the time the stars aligned (my kid grew up, remote interpreting was more of a thing, I had the option of doing a conference interpreting Master’s without relocating), I thought is this worth doing at age 48, or should I just shelve the ambition?

Here’s the truth:

We need to embrace the Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” The months/years that you’ve spent not doing something are water under the bridge. If you find a way to change the past, let me know. Otherwise, start today with, let’s say, 15 minutes of effort on a business-related project that you’ve been putting off. Investigate what it would take to get that new certification or degree. Contact two people on LinkedIn who might need a translator like you. Dredge up the e-mail from that web designer whose work you really liked. Create that retirement account. Acknowledge that you didn’t do this when you planned to/should have, but that literally doesn’t matter. Do it now!
We also need to embrace the idea that time passes at the same rate, no matter what you’re doing with it. When I was contemplating going to interpreting school, people told me two very helpful things: 1) Every expert was once a beginner. The only choices you have are to start from where you are, or to never pursue this goal; and 2) The time is going to pass anyway. If it takes you, let’s say, a year to get your skills to the point where you have a reasonable chance of being accepted to an interpreting program (side note: it actually took a year and a half!), and then a year to do the program, those two years are going to pass anyway, whether you’re sitting on your hands or pursuing this goal.

I’ve actually found multiple advantages to pursuing long-delayed freelance goals. First, it feels so amazing to finally get it done (whatever “it” is), perhaps even better than if you had just done the task when you meant to. If getting a certification, or finally setting up a retirement account, feels good when you do it right away, it feels really, really good when you’ve achieved it after years of avoidance!

Also, when you pursue a new line of business and you’re not 22 years old, clients immediately think that you have a level of experience commensurate with your age. You don’t want to lie, but you don’t need to correct them! If you’re a newly minted freelancer who’s middle-aged, and clients assume you’ve been doing this job for 25 years (this has happened to me multiple times with interpreting), just smile and nod and thank them for their trust. By this I don’t mean misrepresenting your experience, but I do mean that when, let’s say, it’s your first time interpreting for a deposition, and one of the attorneys says (actual example…) “Impressive! You’ve clearly been doing this for a while!” your only job is to thank them for the compliment.

And now, go get it: chip away at something you’ve been avoiding! It’s not too late!

Jul 05 2023
Corinne McKay

Tips for maintaining your language skills

I’m working remotely from British Columbia this month, and Training for Translators classes are on summer break until September, but the weekly newsletter and blog posts will still come out during that time.

This week, let’s talk about maintaining your language skills as a freelance translator or interpreter! Many of us are tempted to say, I don’t need to work on my language skills, because I use them all the time. I would disagree with this, for a number of reasons:
-You use certain language skills all the time. For translators, this is mostly reading comprehension in your source language, for example. But other language skills are very useful, and for translators, I think that speaking well in your source language(s) can help inspire confidence in your clients, and can allow you to participate in client-side events in your source language(s).

-Even for interpreters who speak all of their languages, all the time, it’s important to keep your skills on point. Keeping my French up to date is a constant goal for me because I do not use French in my daily life, and I also recognize that I fall into interpreting ruts: if I’ve been doing mostly court interpreting, I’m interpreting the same things, all the time. So when a conference interpreting client calls with an assignment for a banking client, I’ve got some work to do.

What are the best ways to keep up, or improve your language skills?
-First, you should definitely own Eve Bodeux’s book Maintaining Your Second Language, and I say that not only because she and I are BFFs! This book has many, many suggestions for language skill maintenance and development, from lifestyle tips (change your phone interface to your non-native language) to things that are just fun (sing along with songs in your non-native language).

-My personal favorites are: shadowing, reading aloud, and using conversation teachers on italki. More on each of those below.

Shadowing. If you have time for one activity to improve your non-native language skills, let this be it! Shadowing means repeating after the speaker, in the same language. It’s like simultaneous interpreting, without the interpreting (it’s sometimes also referred to as “parroting,” for that reason). Shadowing helps with all kinds of things: speaking speed, intonation, pronunciation, expression. When I first started working on my interpreting skills, a huge problem was my speaking speed in French: I spoke so slowly (in an effort to speak clearly) that I couldn’t even shadow native French speakers at full speed, much less interpret. Hundreds of hours of shadowing later, things got better. You can do all kinds of things with shadowing: just repeat after the speaker to practice; slow YouTube videos down if you can’t keep up; shadow particularly expressive speakers to help with your expression; shadow really boring speakers and add your own expression; shadow and paraphrase; shadow and try to stick as closely as possible to the speaker’s speed; shadow and try to stay as far behind the speaker as possible, without losing meaning. Shadowing gets a bad rap (“boring, baby skill”) but I personally love it and I think it’s the first place to start.
Reading aloud is another great practice technique, because you can read something you want to read anyway (anything from the news to a novel) while practicing your speaking. I find that reading aloud helps with my speaking endurance, so that I don’t get too tired during a 20-30 minute interpreting shift.
Finally, I highly recommend italki if you want to work with live conversation teachers. I learned about italki from Sara Maria Hasbun‘s presentation at the 2019 ATA conference, and I used it a lot when I was improving my French skills ahead of going to interpreting school. Italki has literally thousands of teachers at all price and experience levels, and the great thing is that (as opposed to a pre-planned class), you tell them what you want to work on, and you ask them to help with your particular issues. I worked with three different teachers, and asked them specifically: pick apart my accent and pronunciation; tell me what about my French sounds least like a native French speaker and let’s work on that. Italki is really great if you just don’t have a lot of opportunities to actively use your non-native language and want someone to practice with.

I hope these tips are helpful, and maybe you’ll have some time this summer to work on your language skills!

Jun 27 2023
Corinne McKay

Dealing with anxiety as a freelancer

Happy solstice; it’s officially summer here in the northern hemisphere! This week, let’s talk about how to deal with anxiety a a freelancer. Whether or not you’re an anxious person, freelancing can bring up a lot of anxiety, in various ways.

As freelancers, we have pretty much zero job security (clients can use us, or not, at will), our incomes can be unpredictable, and we don’t get regular performance reviews. Sometimes clients don’t contact us for a while, and we fantasize that we made some catastrophic error the last time they worked with us. Maybe, but probably not! But in the meantime, we tend to concoct plenty of crazy mental stories about our own real or perceived incompetence. We tend to wonder:
-Am I earning enough money?
-Am I going to have enough work next week (month, year…)?
-Do my clients like me? What about the ones I haven’t heard from in a while (anxiously conjuring up images of clients talking amongst themselves about how incompetent we are)?

Our fears might even spiral into questions like, is AI going to replace me and do I need to look for a new career??

I’m definitely not a psychotherapist. I’m also not an overtly anxious person; I rarely cry and pretty much never yell. I tend to believe that things in life either work out, or don’t work out, and yet the world keeps on turning and life goes on. However, in my adult life I’ve realized that I have some anxiety-driven behaviors: specifically emotional eating, cuticle biting, and overtalking (repeating myself or just talking too much instead of listening). Thus, I’ve thought a lot about anxiety and how to address it. Here are a few tips:

First, distinguish between rational and irrational anxiety. Worrying about having enough work is rational. Worrying about being good at your job is rational. But many or even most of us tend to spiral into irrational anxiety: like, as of today, I will never have any more work, because of that all of my friends will abandon me, and I’ll die in friendless poverty. Not really rational.

Personally, I like to address rational anxiety through action and data. Here are a few examples:
-I keep enough money in my business account to cover at least three months of business and personal expenses. Thus, if I had literally no work for three months, or I had a health crisis, or someone in my family had a health crisis, or I decided to take the summer off and go bike or hike in some cool destination (now we’re talking!), I would be OK financially. This helps me avoid the anxiety of missing out on a freelance project or having a temporary dip in income, because I’m earning the money that pays the bills for four months from now, not the money that pays the electric bill that’s due next week.
–I constantly work on my translation and interpreting skills and get external assessments of how I’m doing. Realistically, a lot of interpreters don’t have a ton of formal training. After I passed the Colorado court interpreter exam, I was still too scared to accept conference interpreting work, which meant that clients would sometimes hire (actual example) the local middle school French teacher to interpret for their meeting. But, deep in my heart, I knew that until expert interpreters gave me the seal of approval, I would never have the confidence to accept conference interpreting work. So I got a Master’s in conference interpreting; not cheap, or easy, or quick, but that was what I needed to do to eliminate my own performance anxiety and impostor syndrome.
–I have a one-click way to look at my financial statistics. I use QuickBooks online (which has its issues, but its reporting feature is good!). And if I wonder, how much am I going to get paid in the next month? Am I ahead of or behind my income goal for the year? Who’s my dominant client right now? It’s literally one click to find that out, which really helps me decide whether my fears are rational or not.

And yet, we still have to deal with irrational anxiety, and not just by telling ourselves that it’s irrational. As a wise friend of mine said, “No one in the history of the world ever calmed down because they were being yelled at by someone else, telling them to calm down.” I also think that translators and interpreters tend to have (over)active brains that need a little taming. In order to calm my own “squirrel brain,” I’ve accepted that I have to:
–Meditate daily or at least five times a week. I use the Calm app and I am not at all a religious person, but I find a lot of mental and emotional value in meditation. My thoughts are less noisy, I’m less reactive to things that bug me, I’m a better listener, etc.
–Get a lot of physical activity to counteract the effects of sitting at a desk all day. I go to yoga 15-20 times a month (I know, it’s a lot, and that level was totally impossible when I still had a kid at home, so don’t take that as what you “should” be doing) and I spend at least one full day on the weekend away from screens, usually mountain biking, hiking, or skiing, depending on the season. Again, I realize that this is a privilege of having the time and money to recreate outside and living in a place where I can do all of that as a day trip, but I think that for most of us, we feel better with a significant amount of time in motion and away from screens since our work is very sedentary and screen-dependent.

I hope that these tips are helpful for you and for any freelance anxieties that you may have!

Jun 20 2023
Corinne McKay

Dominant clients: A good thing, or a bad thing?

Our master classes and challenge groups for this “school year” have now wrapped up and are on hiatus until September, but my weekly newsletter articles and blog posts will still be coming out. In addition to this week’s post, you can check out a bonus post on my recent trip to Iceland if you’d like to!

This week’s topic: Are dominant clients a good thing, or a bad thing?

Many of us face this situation: we have a good client that sends us a lot of work; we keep accepting their work; and then one day we run our numbers and realize that this client accounts for 50%-75% of our work volume and income. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Let’s take a look!

The great thing about dominant clients is that they greatly decrease your administrative overhead and non-billable time. You’re not spending hours going back and forth about rates, TM tool usage, project specifications, interpreting platforms, and everything else that you negotiate with a new or one-off client. You know that they like you (otherwise they wouldn’t send you so much work!), and you know how to work to their specifications.

The hard thing about dominant clients is that they represent a risk. I’ve lost good clients literally overnight: several years ago, a five-figure client e-mailed me to say that in hiring a half-time marketing person, they found someone who had previously been a translator, and decided to bring that person on full time and stop outsourcing their translation work. I never worked for them again, after receiving assignments worth several thousand euros, several times a year, for many years in a row. Clients’ own workflows go up and down, and as a freelancer, you have zero guarantee that a dominant client will continue using you.

There are a few ways to look at this:
-In one sense, your safest bet is to diversify, and to avoid having any one client represent too much of your work volume. “Too much” is open to debate: I generally say, “not more than you can afford to lose overnight,” but I’ve read various articles recommending that you try to keep all clients below 25% of your work volume. Once a client starts pushing past one quarter of your income, you ideally want to branch out.

-On the flip side, everyone in the world who has a salaried job, essentially has a “dominant client” that in fact provides 100% of their work volume and income. And in the US, you can be let go from a salaried job without much advance notice or severance benefits; the legal guideline is typically one week of pay for each year of service, which doesn’t amount to much.

I think that the best course of action is:
–Keep accepting the dominant client’s work, if you like them, they pay well, they treat you well, and their work is interesting.
–But at the same time, cover your bases, in two ways. First, use some of your income from the dominant client to increase your cash reserves. If the dominant client dropped you tomorrow, it could take…I’m guessing…three to six months for your work volume to rebound. Thus, it makes sense to have that much cash in reserve, so that you’re not left scrambling to pay the bills if the dominant client disappears. Second, at least think about what you would do without the dominant client in your portfolio. Would you look for other clients like them? Look for different clients? Are there other clients like them, and could you start marketing to them now, or at least have them on your radar screen (connect with them on LinkedIn, follow their website or blog, etc.).
-I also think it’s important to acknowledge the reality of the situation. Force yourself to say, at least in your own head, “My income right now is great, but that’s partially because I’m getting 60% of my work from one client.” Just saying that to yourself forces you to be honest about why your business is going well, rather than just saying, “Things are great!!”