Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

FAQ for beginning translators and interpreters

A couple of beginning freelancers have sent me some questions lately, so I thought it might be helpful to compile them into a blog post for anyone who’s just starting out, especially in the pandemic! This is certainly not comprehensive, but hopefully it’s a start!

–Are translation and interpreting still a viable career path?

Let’s start out with a big and important one: is this career still worth it? My short answer: yes, absolutely, but I also understand why people ask this question. The example I always give is that if my university student daughter wanted to be a translator or interpreter, I would be very supportive of that, and I would have no problem paying for it. At the same time, it’s also true that, compared to when I started freelancing in 2002, it’s harder to make a living on low-end work and there’s a lot more competition for high-end work. Most agencies no longer “train up” promising new translators through coaching and feedback, as many did when I started out. I wrote a blog post earlier this year on whether entry-level translation clients are disappearing. When I started freelancing, there was a pretty standard “career path” where many people started working for large agencies, then moved on to boutique agencies, then to direct clients. These days I see a few issues with that: especially in language combinations like English to Spanish and English to Russian, it’s hard for me to see how US-based translators make a viable living on large agencies’ rates, but many boutique agencies don’t pay much more than large agencies (a major change from when I started out), and it’s hard (but not impossible) to jump directly into the direct client market. I also feel like our profession is a lot more polarized these days: I make around US $100,000 a year, and I know people who work a lot more than I do and make $45,000. But the bottom line is that I still love translation (and now interpreting), and I have no plans to leave.

–How viable is a full-time freelance business? Do most translators and interpreters have side hustles?

As stated above, I think it’s very viable, and it takes a lot more than good language skills. Good language skills are a must, but honestly, the vast majority of freelance translators and interpreters who fail, do so because of their business skills, not their language skills. I don’t think that most translators and interpreters have side hustles, but I do think that a diverse business is a good thing, and I think that the easiest way to make the leap to freelancing is to stick with your current job while freelancing at the same time, until your freelance income could meet your basic expenses if you quit your other job.

–What’s the difference between translation and interpreting in terms of logistics, pay, location, work-life balance?

Another big one, especially because of the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, a key difference was that interpreting was completely location dependent. But remote interpreting went from a small fraction of the market to a huge share of the market, almost overnight. It’s anyone’s guess what happens when the pandemic is over. Clients may be desperate to get back to in-person meetings with in-person interpreters. Or they may decide that remote interpreting is the way to go, because the cost of interpreters’ travel, lodging, and meals often exceeds the cost of the interpreting itself.

I also think that interpreting is a more polarized market than translation, in some ways. I get work offers for everything from community interpreting paying $25 an hour with a one-hour minimum and no travel time or mileage (which I turn down) to depositions for law firms paying $100+ an hour with a four-hour minimum.

Work-life balance is a tough one, because I see both sides, since I do both translation and interpreting. In one sense, interpreting enforces more work-life balance, because it’s harder to overload yourself. Research and preparation take a lot of time, but you can only physically interpret in one place at a time. Whereas with translation, it takes a lot of discipline to say no to an assignment just because you know you should take the weekend off. I know a fair number of translators who regularly work six and seven days a week and rarely if ever take vacation, and I think as an interpreter it’s harder to do that to yourself.

–What about undergraduate degrees, certificate programs, graduate degrees, and translator and interpreting certification?

Partially this is a question of logistics. If you’re going to go to school in the US, the first issue is whether there are programs for what you want to study. The US has a tiny number of undergraduate programs for T&I, and the graduate scene is better but not great; I experienced this when I was searching for conference interpreting Master’s programs. For French, there are only four programs in North America (no kidding), and US private school tuition is really not in my budget, so that narrowed it down pretty quickly.

In terms of whether certificate and graduate programs are worthwhile, my general answer would be yes, usually, but with a few caveats:

-I think they’re usually worth it because realistically, most translators and interpreters in the US are largely self-taught, and many have no formal training at all. Any certificate or graduate program is going to put you ahead in terms of skills.

-But…it really depends on your goals, and on the quality of the program. For example there are many programs in the US that are language-neutral, or where all languages are combined into one class. I’m not sure that I would spend money on that type of program, because what you’re trying to do is improve your translation or interpreting skills through detailed feedback on your actual performance, not general feedback on what makes a good translation or interpretation.

-You also need to think about the return on investment: how long you’re thinking of working in this career, and what income bump you might see from this degree.

-I do think that if getting a degree or certificate helps with your own market confidence, it’s worth it. For example I’ll be the first to admit that one reason I’m doing a conference interpreting Master’s is to prove that I can do it: that I have the language skills, the interpreting skills, the content knowledge, etc. I know that an alternative would have been to just study like crazy on my own, but I really want the formal recognition of the degree as well.

–Is there work for in-house translators and interpreters?

Yes, but in the US it’s pretty limited to jobs requiring English>Spanish, or working for government agencies. Of course there are exceptions; I do know people who do languages like German and Japanese who have full-time jobs in the US, but it’s pretty rare. I believe that something like 70% of the members of the American Translators Association are freelancers, and that sounds about right to me.

One thing I think is important: I would not assume that, even if you get a T&I Master’s from a highly-regarded program, there will be a full-time job waiting for you in the US. Many/most entities that hire staff interpreters and translators do so through a competitive recruitment process where they’re really looking for the best of the best (like the dreaded UN Language Competitive Examinations). I think that pretty much anyone who wants to be a translator or interpreter in the US needs to be willing to be a freelancer. If you’re absolutely not willing to be a freelancer, I think this may not be the career for you.

Another option is to forget about the US, and if you’re financially and logistically able, to go to graduate school for translation in another country/region, and then look for an in-house job there. Especially if you work into English, this can be a very viable option, in places where into-English translators are rarer and more in-demand. Make sure you think it through: graduate school in Paris or Geneva may cost a tiny fraction of what it does in the US, but you have to live there, probably on a student visa that prohibits you from working. And you have to figure out how to stay there once you’re no longer a full-time student. But it’s worth considering.

–How has your work been affected by COVID?

Short answer: my business is fine. My income will be on target or slightly up this year. But I know multiple freelancers whose businesses have completely tanked, to the extent that they’re thinking of leaving the industry. Especially if you’re an interpreter who hates remote interpreting or isn’t successful at finding remote interpreting clients, or if you translate for industries that have been hard-hit by the pandemic, it’s a tough time. I wrote a blog post about this, and Eve Bodeux and I did a Speaking of Translation podcast roundtable with Karen Tkaczyk and Alex Gansmeier about it. I’m fortunate in that I have multiple income streams: translating for agencies, translating for direct clients, interpreting for the courts, and running Training for Translators, and I think that has helped a lot during the pandemic.

–What’s the biggest mistake that beginning freelancers make?

That’s a big one, and I have an old but probably still relevant blog post on it, called why do some freelance translators fail. I’d point to a few things:

-At the risk of overgeneralizing, a lot of people, especially those who went through the US educational system, just don’t have the skills. Case in point: I started taking French in school when I was 12, it was always my best/favorite subject, then I was a French major in college and did study abroad for a year in a program where I lived with a French family and went to school all in French, and there’s no way I would have been a competent translator right out of college. And the US simply doesn’t have much of a translator or interpreting training system the way most European countries do.

-Lack of focus. Another huge one. There was a day when you could make a decent living as a generalist translator, but now — unless you do a very niche language — those days are pretty much gone. You really have to specialize, and in some specializations you’re going to face a lot of competition from people with significant work experience in that sector.

-Many beginning freelancers radically underestimate the time and marketing effort needed to launch a successful freelance business. I did a lot of things wrong as a beginner, but I definitely did one thing right: if I sat down at my desk and had no paying work (often the case during my first year), I marketed. And if that meant marketing 20 hours a week, I did it. I get lots of woeful e-mails from beginning freelancers who say, “I’m so discouraged, having sent out 25 e-mails to prospective clients with no response.” Welllllll…I applied to over 400 agencies during my first year in business, and it still took over a year until I was earning what I considered a full-time living.

-Lots of freelancers are unwilling to adapt. A toxic belief amongst dissatisfied or unsuccessful freelancers (and maybe dissatisfied and unsuccessful people in general?) is that they already know it all. They’ve seen it all, tried it all, done it all, and would love to tell you about it. By contrast, every time I attend the ATA conference, I make a point of either attending a session for beginners, or a session on a topic I already know a lot about, to make the point to myself that there’s always more to learn. At this year’s ATA conference, I attended Sam Mowry’s presentation on official document translations; although I’ve translated around 3,000 pages of official documents, I actually got a bunch of really good ideas. So, keep learning and be willing to adapt!

Readers, over to you! What else do beginners these days need to know?


Corinne McKay

NMT master class sold out

This coming Wednesday (December 2, 2020)’s master class on neural machine translation (NMT) with Joachim Lépine is now sold out. E-mail classes@trainingfortranslators.com to be added to the wait list for a future session. We have two other upcoming master classes that are still open for registration:

–Profitable negotiations and personal finance for freelancers, taught by Jason Willis-Lee on December 9 (recording provided)

–Direct client marketing, for people who think they can’t, taught by Corinne McKay on January 7 (recording provided)


Corinne McKay

Upcoming master classes

Training for Translators has three great master classes coming up in December and early January. Master classes are a great way to take an in-depth look at a specialized topic in two to three hours, at a cost of $75. Recordings are provided if you can’t attend live. Here’s the lineup:

  • On Wednesday, December 2, Joachim Lépine kicks things off with Harnessing the power of neural machine translation. Learn how to let NMT handle some of the routine parts of your translation work, freeing you up to work on the creative and challenging parts.
  • On Wednesday, December 9, join Jason Willis-Lee for Profitable negotiations and personal finance for freelancers. Jason will combine two key — yet often overlooked — skills that can improve both your bank account balance and your job satisfaction.
  • On Thursday, January 7, I’ll kick off the 2021 lineup with Direct client marketing, for people who think they can’t. This session is for anyone who’d like to create a doable plan for identifying and marketing to direct clients. This class has sold out three times, so don’t wait too long to register if you’re interested; I may add a second session if this one fills up.

Also starting January 7 is Dorothee Racette’s four-week coaching and challenge group, Complete what you started. If you’d like to move a major business project from “pending” (and pending, and pending) to “done,” join Dorothee — a translator and highly-praised productivity coach — for this intensive four-week group.

I hope you see you there!


Corinne McKay

Are pandemic discounts a good idea?

The pandemic is doing odd things to people’s freelance businesses: something I’ve discussed in a pandemic roundtable podcast, and a blog post. About all that can be said is that some things are up and others are down. I’ve heard from multiple freelancers (translators and interpreters) who’ve never been busier, and from others who are considering a career change because their businesses have crashed. It really just depends on who you work for and how your clients, or your clients’ clients, have been affected by the pandemic.

In my case, what was true in June — direct client work stable, agency work slim to nonexistent, court interpreting work slim to nonexistent, online courses selling out as fast as I can get them posted — held true until this month, when I landed a large new agency client. More on that below.

Let’s talk about discounts in general

By far one of the biggest questions on freelancers’ minds seems to be: should I offer a pandemic discount? Former students have told me that their clients are pressuring them for pandemic discounts; others whose work volume is way down wonder if discounts might help it rebound. Let’s take a look:

  • Most importantly, never give a discount unless there’s a business case for you to do so. Make sure you can complete the sentence, “I am offering this discount because…” It always irks me when freelancers say, “The client made me lower my rates (do extra work without extra pay/agree to be paid by the word for editing/etc. etc.).” No, sorry, the client didn’t make you do that, because you’re not even their employee, much less their indentured servant. The client asked for that, and you said yes, or at least did not say no. So first, make sure that you are intentionally offering a discount for a specific reason.
  • Second, remember that there can be economic reasons for not offering discounts, and there can be non-economic reasons for offering discounts. Here’s what I mean: if your work volume is low, consider whether you’d in fact be better off raising your rates and looking for higher-paying clients, rather than offering discounts to your current clients. In my case, I offered a new agency client a discount for a non-economic reason: because, for a while, I’ve had a goal of landing a new high-volume agency client, especially since one of my main direct clients (a grant-funded NGO) is winding down their work on the project I translate for. My income this year will be almost exactly what it was last year, which I’ll put in the “win” column considering the pandemic and that I’m in grad school. I didn’t have an economic reason to offer this client a discount. But for various reasons, I’ve been interested in landing a new agency client with large international development projects, so I jumped at the chance to do that, and I offered them a rate that “split the difference” between their ideal rate and mine. In the end, I think both parties were happy.
  • Third, remember that if you look for lower-paying work, you’re likely to find it. And then…you’re stuck doing that work, putting in longer hours for less money, perhaps resenting it, and so on. There are valid reasons to give discounts, but before you take a self-inflicted pay cut, make sure you’re clear about your reasons.

Is the pandemic itself a reason to give a discount?

Honestly, this depends very much on the sectors in which you work. If clients are approaching you, claiming that their own business has been affected by the pandemic and thus they want lower rates from you, that might or might not be true. If they’re in the hotel industry, or commercial real estate, or aviation, then they are probably correct (which still doesn’t mean that you have to offer a discount; it just means that the client’s revenue is probably down by quite a bit). If they’re in the medical supply or online education sectors, then it’s a different story. Yes, lots of businesses have gone, or will go bankrupt because of the pandemic. But it’s simply not true that all businesses are suffering: if you bought Zoom stock a year ago today, you would have paid around $50; today, over $400. Not every industry has been affected equally.

And again, the client’s financial situation is not your problem. Your financial situation is very much your problem. But it’s worth considering whether your clients’ businesses have actually been affected.

What’s your mental state right now?

This is a non-economic factor worth mentioning. The other day, a former student told me that she offered her biggest client a pandemic discount, because she’s homeschooling two kids, feels constantly stressed out, and needs a steady flow of work that she can do without too much extra stress. Her take: now is not the time for a demanding new client, even if they pay well. Fair enough. I’m on board with that line of reasoning.

Could some sectors have a delayed reaction to the pandemic?

This is something I think about a lot. For example, my international development work is relatively unaffected at the moment, and I’ve even landed a new client. But I wonder if, because NGOs tend to operate on long funding cycles — sometimes three years or more — there could be a bit of a boomerang effect next year or even later than that. I really don’t know.

Is it better to just look for new clients?

This is always the question: when are you better off sticking with a long-term client who is easy to work with and sends you lots of work (but asks for a discount), versus looking for new, higher-paying clients. Of course there is not a yes/no answer to this, but I’d consider factors such as:

  • Is this client’s request based on their specific situation, or do you work in a sector that’s been hard-hit by the pandemic in general?
  • What is your financial cushion like right now? Again, there’s a huge range: if your spouse has been unemployed for six months with no end in sight, now may be a time to stick with the bird in the hand. If you’ve been earning the same as before the pandemic but spending less because there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do (this is the case at my house!), perhaps it’s a good time to make the leap.
  • How much time and energy do you have for marketing? Realistically, it’s a very tough time to be a freelancer if you have young kids doing online school from home. That’s a valid consideration right now.
  • What new clients would you market to, and what’s your pitch? Here again, you want to think in a sector-specific way. With the recent news about highly-effective vaccine trials, it seems like there’s at least a shred of a chance that we might see the other side of the pandemic in mid to late 2021 (is that wishy-washy enough…I’m trying not to make predictions here!). So it might be worth doing some “get ready for the rebound” marketing to industries that have been hard-hit. Or those industries may be reeling so badly that you don’t want to rub salt in the wound. That’s something that you need to research and think about on an individual basis.

Readers, over to you: your thoughts on pandemic discounts?


Corinne McKay

Does it make sense to translate into your non-native language?

Does it make sense to translate into your non-native language? Someone asked this on my monthly alumni call in October, and I think it’s an interesting topic, so let’s take a look.

The short answer

The TLDR version of this is: for most professional translators, it does not make sense to translate into your non-native language, but there are exceptions. Reasons for sticking to your native language include:

  • most importantly, translation quality
  • also, translation income, particularly if you get paid by the word, and you work more slowly into your non-native language
  • industry conventions

But interpreters do this all the time…

Right. Here’s the big exception. I would never, in a million years, translate into French, other than something short, informal, and informational. Once in a while, a US-based client will ask something like, “Can you write an e-mail in French, asking when the Senegalese consultant will have the final version of the report?” Sure. But otherwise, I never ever translate into French, because I’m not a native speaker.

However, pretty much every single time I interpret, I interpret in both directions, because it’s unwieldy and expensive to have two interpreters for every court appearance, attorney-client conference, etc. Nearly every interpreter in the US works in both directions, all the time. In Europe, it’s more common for interpreters to have only one active language (their native language), and then work from multiple passive languages, but in the US, things don’t really work that way. So the big exception to the “only into your native language” rule is that interpreters are expected to, and do do this all the time.

My take: the key here is that interpreters are trained (at least in all the training I’ve done so far) to use specific techniques when interpreting into their B language. For the non-interpreters, a B language is one that you interpret from and into, but it’s not your native language. Into-B techniques include using the simplest phrasing that is accurate; using concise phrasing even when the speaker is very wordy; using voice expression to convey meaning; “when in doubt, leave it out” if you can do that without compromising meaning; using phrases like, “the interpreter will paraphrase,” when you know that you don’t know the equivalent of a quote, idiom, or proverb in your B language, etc. And you can’t really use those techniques when you’re translating.

Why stick to your native language?

As stated above, there are many reasons to translate into your native language only. The most important is translation quality. Even if you have near-native fluency in your source language(s), you’re still not a native speaker. It’s likely that all of us know people who are really, really, fluent in a language, but still say things that, while they make complete sense, aren’t something a native speaker would say, or the tone is completely wrong. Like asking someone, “What’s wrong?” (empathetic) versus, “What’s your problem?” (rude). My husband and I went to Nepal on our honeymoon, and I took a picture of the sign outside a trekking lodge that proudly proclaimed, “We will welcome you so warmly, you will feel like going home.” That’s the kind of thing a fluent non-native speaker might say or write, without realizing that it means the opposite of what it’s supposed to mean.

The whole point of a good translation is to convey more than word-for-word meaning, and that’s really hard to do in your non-native language.

Additionally, most translators are going to work more slowly into their non-native language(s), which will drag down your income if you’re getting paid by the word.

A final risk is looking unprofessional. In the US, where the vast majority of translators work into their native language, it can look unprofessional to even offer translation services in the opposite direction.

But of course, there are exceptions

Exceptions to the native language rule include:

  • Translators whose dominant professional language is not their native language. If you came to the US from Italy when you were 18, then went to college and grad school here and have lived and worked in English for 25 years, your dominant professional language may no longer be Italian.
  • Translators who work with small-diffusion languages. If you need a translation from Tagalog, or Bulgarian, or Amharic into English, chances are it’s going to be hard to find a native English speaker to do that. You’ll probably have better luck with a native speaker of the non-English language, and then a native English proofreader.

I think that the native language convention is also at least partially cultural. Anecdotally, it seems that the US market has a strong preference for translators who work into their native language only, while the European and Asian markets are a bit more tolerant of non-native speaker translators.

Readers, over to you; any thoughts on this?