Fear of missing out–FOMO–is a reality of life as a freelancer. Recently, I’ve heard from various students and colleagues about situations such as:

• “I planned my first extended vacation since COVID; my family and I desperately need this, and we have a great destination planned. I’m totally on board and excited about it. Not long after, I was offered an incredible on-site interpreting job for those same dates, and I immediately thought about not going on the vacation.”
• “I referred a translation job outside my area of specialization to a colleague; honestly I had never even heard much about this specialization. Come to find out, there’s a lot of work in this area and it’s not very technical or complex; now I’m kicking myself for not having done more research before declining it.”
• “No matter how hard I try, I never seem to be able to carve out any time off work; it’s been at least a year since I even took a full weekend off, much less a vacation. I just can’t escape the idea that if I’m not available, clients won’t call me anymore, or a great assignment will go to someone else.”

As freelancers, we know that we are a non-renewable resource. We know that burnout is a risk. We know that we can’t take every single project that we’re offered. And yet, we (and by that I mean all of us, definitely including me) still feel FOMO when these kinds of situations happen. How can we work through this? Here are a few ideas!

1. Try to accept that FOMO is inevitable and even positive. You’re not doing anything wrong if you feel FOMO, because FOMO indicates that you enjoy your job, you enjoy making money, you enjoy serving clients. I’d worry about you if these things were not true!
2. Remind yourself that work will always be there, but many other things in your life will not. When you have to turn down a juicy project, it’s easy to catastrophize: nothing like this will ever come my way; this was a one-of-a-kind opportunity. But typically, those feelings are not true (my favorite bumper sticker: “Your anxiety is lying to you”). However, it is true that other things in life will not wait around while you work yourself into the ground. As someone with a young adult child and aging parents, I feel this acutely. I hate missing out on great work opportunities, but life is going to look a lot different in 10 years, and I don’t want to look up from my phone and realize that I missed it.
3. Turn the missed opportunity into a positive. When you realize that you turned down a job you really could have or should have taken, it’s unlikely that the client that approached you is the only one that needs this service. This sounds like a catalyst for a marketing campaign! Resolve that within the next three months, you’ll have at least one new client that is as good or better than the client you turned down.

Especially ahead of summer vacation season, I hope these tips are helpful if you, too, are feeling FOMO!

This week’s post topic was suggested by a reader: Is translation a dying profession?

Good question! Short answer: In my opinion, no, but I understand why people ask that.

Longer answer: Let me start with three data points…

1. I graduated from undergrad in 1993, and a professor told me then (exactly 30 years ago!), Forget about getting into translation because it’s all being taken over by computers. Annnndddd that still hasn’t happened. I think that MT and AI are changing and will continue to change our profession, but I don’t think they will replace us on a large scale, within the working lifetime of anyone active in the profession today.
2. If my university student daughter wanted to become a translator or interpreter, I would feel very positive about that and I would have no problem paying for her education for it (sadly, she wants to be an aerospace engineer but I continue to make my pitch!).
3. I’ve been a freelancer for 20+ years and I’m on track to earn my highest-ever income this year, while working slightly less (not a typo) than I did last year.

Given all of that, I definitely don’t see translation as a dying profession, but/and…

• When I started freelancing in 2002, it was possible to earn what I would consider a decent “entry level” living working for big agencies that had a pretty low barrier to entry and based their hiring primarily on their own tests. I earned 10-12 cents per word working for those types of agencies in the early aughts and I knew Spanish translators who made 9-10 cents a word, and my sense is that those rates have now decreased by at least 50%. Perhaps even more for language pairs like English into Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, etc. I’m personally not sure how people survive financially on those rates, unless their cost of living is very low, or they depend heavily on a spouse or partner’s income or another job.
• The amount of work needed to launch a freelance business has greatly increased in the past few decades. When I talk to translators who started their businesses in the 80s and 90s, many of them had a phone number and an AOL address, and within six months to a year with what today’s freelancers would think of as minimal marketing, they had so much work that they had to hire another translator to work with them. That’s not the reality anymore, and I think that a lot of beginning freelancers are disappointed by the marketing-to-translating ratio that they encounter in their first few years of business.
• The main shifts I’ve seen in the past 10ish years are a) the erosion of agency rates in general (see above), and b) a smaller distinction between “mass market” and “boutique” agencies, where the boutique agencies don’t pay dramatically better than the mass market agencies.
• This creates a real crunch in the “good” agency market. Good agencies are who most freelancers want to work for, so when a freelancer gets hired by an agency that pays well, has interesting work, and is easy to work with, they tend to stick with that agency for a long time. This is true of a boutique agency (now closed) that I worked with for a long time: they were “under the radar,” they paid well, and I worked with the exact same group of translators for 10+ years. Premium-market agencies do exist, but they’re rarely recruiting for translators.
• Finding direct clients takes a lot of hustle, and you do a lot of things other than translate. I have very little trouble getting direct clients to accept my rates, and I get the sense that some of my direct clients would pay more than what I’m charging. But to find direct clients, you have to have a clear specialization; you have to have the confidence to put yourself out there; you have to be an excellent translator; you have to know how to include the client in the translation process, not “just translate;” you have to have a partner or backup person who can edit for you, fill in if you’re on vacation, etc. Realistically, many freelancers don’t want to do any of this, or don’t stick with any direct client marketing method long enough to see some results.
• I definitely could not meet my financial goals if I worked only for agencies. According to various compensation surveys, the average US-based freelance translator earns between 55 and 60K (US dollars) per year. My guess is that this is mostly people who are charging around 11 cents a word and translating around 500,000 words per year. If that number fits your financial goals, there’s certainly nothing wrong with it. However, it’s also important to realize that when you deduct self-employment tax, benefits, professional development, office equipment, paid vacation, etc. etc., this is roughly the equivalent of a salaried job paying in the 40s, which is not a level that meets my financial goals. And if you’re working as much as you can or as much as you want to, the only way to increase your income is to work with direct clients. This is the part of the market that I see as very different from when I started, and my sense is that this is where the “dying” concerns come from.

I hope these thoughts are helpful, and I definitely don’t see us as a dying profession!

So many freelance translators and interpreters have so much website anxiety. They’ve been meaning to/planning to/thinking they should set up a website for the past three years and it’s still not done. Or, they hate their website. I’ve observed that it’s kind of “a thing” with translators and interpreters: it’s hard to even find people who will let their websites be used as examples, because so many people hate their website.

I don’t have all of the website answers, but here are a few tips to hopefully get you unstuck if you’re having this issue:

• You need at least a basic website. When you’re going to hire a professional service provider (accountant, web designer, etc.) what’s the first thing you do? Google them! Take a look at their website and see who they are. Even if your website is used only for passive purposes (having it there so that clients can check out who you are), you need a website.
• Basic can mean basic. Even one page is a whole lot better than nothing.
• Personally, I think Squarespace is the easiest website creation tool to use. That’s not an affiliate deal, and I don’t actually use Squarespace, but having dealt with WordPress (very flexible but usually requires manual updates and is not super-intuitive to use), and Wix (easy to use but limited customization options), I would recommend Squarespace. If you have a complicated website that really requires WordPress (this is the case with my Training for Translators site), you may need to consider hiring a website manager to run updates on your plugins and theme. I made this switch a couple of years ago after I broke my entire website while trying to update the theme!
• The entire website should not be an About page. Lots of freelancers’ websites are one long About page, because they don’t know what else to talk about. “I learned Russian on my grandmother’s knee.” “Here’s a photo of me studying abroad in France 25 years ago, ” etc. etc. You definitely can talk about your professional credentials and background, but we also need to know what services you provide, and how to contact you. It continually amazes me when I have to hunt for this information (language pair, specializations, e-mail address) on someone’s website.
• If people can’t find you, they can’t hire you. If you’ve never promoted yourself before, it can feel weird to put your photo, e-mail address, etc. directly out there on the web. But unless you’re getting tons of work through word of mouth, people need to be able to find you online if they want to work with you.
• If you’re stuck on a domain name, just use yourname.com if it’s available. It’s always a bit haphazard as to whether the domain name you want is going to be available. In my case, corinnemckay.com was already taken when I made my first website in 2003 (I’ve since been able to buy it!), but I was shocked that both certifiedfrenchtoenglishtranslator.com and frenchconferenceinterpreter.com were available. You have to just check and see, but if you’re stumped as to what your domain name should be, the easiest and most flexible is just your name.
• If needed, give yourself a deadline. Whether you’re hiring a designer or doing the site yourself, the website timeline that drags on into the next decade can be a real problem. You need a deadline: if you’re doing a simple site yourself, commit that you will spend no more than two days on it. Don’t accept any work for those days, and just get it done. If you’re working with a designer, ask how long their sites typically take and what typically causes delays (most often, lack of response from the client, so don’t do that!!).

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re struggling with website anxiety!

Last month’s March Marketing Madness challenge group was a lot of fun, and I always enjoy learning from the group participants and coming away from the month with some new ideas. I’m always trying to refine and improve my mindset tips around marketing and business management, because I think it’s an area that a lot of us struggle with: we want/need more/better work, but we tell ourselves (incorrectly…but we still tell ourselves…):

• marketing is spammy; if we were really any good at this job, we wouldn’t need to market
• marketing won’t work anyway, so we just keep working on what lands in the inbox
• we need to feel motivated; inspiration has to strike us before we do any marketing

Instead, I think most of us are happier, more productive, and we find better and more lucrative work when we embrace these three truths about freelancing:

1. We do our best and most successful marketing when we ask ourselves these questions: Who should I be serving? Who needs me but doesn’t yet know about me? When we start from there, we’re automatically looking for clients who will not perceive our marketing inquiries as spam; they may even say, “We really need someone like you!”
2. We do our best and most successful work when we actively pursue work that we enjoy and are good at, rather than waiting for dream clients to come to us. Doing work we enjoy and are good at helps us stay motivated, avoids procrastination, and pairs us will clients who need and value our skills rather than seeing us as replaceable.
3. We need to stop relying on motivation and instead, just stay consistent with our marketing. You don’t wait to feel inspired to brush your teeth or do laundry; even if it feels like a chore, you do it without even really thinking about it, so that your teeth don’t fall out and you have something clean to wear. Treat marketing the same way: set a timer for 15 minutes at the beginning or end of every work day, work on marketing for just those 15 minutes, and you’ll see a big difference in your business.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that these tips are helpful to you! If you’d like to add anything, just drop a comment below!