Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

How to set a budget for your freelance business

This post originally appeared in my newsletter, and a couple of readers asked me to post it here so that they could refer other translators to it. Here you go!

Setting a budget for your freelance business is important, because:

-Many freelancers have no idea how much they need to earn in order to achieve the same level of financial security as someone with a traditional job.
-As a freelancer, you probably need to earn more than you think in order to reach your financial goals.
-You need to know how many billable hours per week you need in order to reach your target income.
-If your rates right now are too low, you need to at least acknowledge that and make a plan to do better in the future (rather than working, working, and working, and then wondering why your bank account empties so fast).

In my online courses, I use a worksheet called “deciding what to charge.” John Milan and I also used this worksheet in our session at the 2018 ATA conference (which got very positive reviews, so hopefully we’ll present it again!). Here, I’ll give you a simplified version of how to do the calculations on that sheet.

Start with: the amount of money you want in your bank account every month, to pay your non-business living expenses such as rent or mortgage, utilities, food, entertainment, and so on. That’s your desired/required net monthly salary.

Next: to that, add every expense that you incur for your business. If the expense is not paid monthly (i.e. professional association dues), divide it into a monthly amount and enter that. Your expenses may include some or all of the following, plus anything else that you pay that is not listed here:

-Taxes: (20-50%, depending on your tax bracket and your country)
-Retirement account contribution
-Paid vacation/sick time allocation (money that you put into a business savings account so that you can pay yourself when you take time off)
-Professional association dues
-Professional development (conferences, webinars, classes, individual coaching, etc.)
-Subscription-based web services (cloud backups, PDF conversion service, LinkedIn Premium, etc.)
-Office rent
-Computer hardware and software (new purchases and/or upgrades)
-Work-related child care (if applicable; and don’t forget in that in the US, you may be able to deduct summer day camp for kids under 13)
-Work-related travel
-Communications (internet, cell phone, Skype minutes, etc.)

Add it all up, and that’s your required or desired monthly gross income. Warning: as discussed above, this will be a big number. Perhaps bigger than you want to admit; but the first step is to get a grand total. If you’re feeling energetic, do this for three income levels: the minimum you can live off, the amount that gives you the similar level of financial security to someone with a traditional job, and something in between.

Next (not done yet!), multiply that number/those numbers by 12, to get your required or desired yearly gross income. Write that down.

Now we’ll convert that to your required hourly rate.

Take 52 weeks, and subtract the number of weeks you think you will not work (vacation, sick time, time off to take care of family members, etc). Divide your yearly gross income as calculated above, by your number of working weeks. That gives you your required income per week. For example if your required/desired gross income is $90,000 and you’re going to work 48 weeks per year, your required income per week is $1,875 per week.

Next, determine how many hours per week you realistically think you can/want to bill. Non-billable time is a big variable. For beginners, non-billable time often involves time that you would like to be working, but you don’t have paying work. For experienced translators, it’s more likely to involve non-billable but necessary tasks such as accounting, marketing, professional development, research, client communications, etc. As a side note, when other freelancers ask me, “How do you find the time to work on marketing or other non-translation tasks?” my answer is “By not having to bill 40 hours a week.”

I’d advise doing this calculation for perhaps 25, 30, and 35 billable hours per week: take your required weekly income (your equivalent of the $1,875 listed above), and divide that by your number of billable hours, to determine your required hourly rate. For example at 25 billable hours per week, our $90,000 translator would need to earn $75 per billable hour to generate $1,875 in a week.

The fun continues because most translators aren’t paid by the hour. If you are, great: you’re done, other than asking whether your existing clients will pay your required hourly rate. If you get paid by the word or the project, then you need to further calculate how fast (or slowly) you translate. For example to generate $75 an hour, you could translate 500 words at 15 cents, or 250 words at 30 cents, or 800 words at 9.3 cents (these are not recommended rates or translation speeds, just examples). Translation speed is a huge factor in your income, and one that a lot of translators overlook: if you are someone who translates 250 words an hour, you need to charge a lot more than someone who translates 600 words an hour.

At the end of all this, you should at least have a better sense of whether the numbers for your freelance business add up the way you want them to; and if you’re not making enough money, why you’re not.

  • Perhaps you have tons of work, but it’s pervasively low-paying.
  • Perhaps your rates are fine, but you need more work.
  • Perhaps you translate very slowly.
  • Either way, these calculations should help you base your pricing decisions on objective data, rather than on fear and vague speculation about “what the market will bear.”

In closing, a huge thank you to Jonathan Hine, who presented the pricing presentation at the ATA conference for many years before passing the baton to me and John, and whose booklet “I Am Worth It!” goes into greater depth on the calculation methods I’ve mentioned here!


Corinne McKay

Podcast: Website and online presence tips for freelancers

Eve Bodeux and I just (today!) recorded a new episode of Speaking of Translation, and we hope you find it useful! This episode covers website and online presence tips for freelancers, including:
-Why are a website and an online presence important, or not important?
-What are some factors to consider when choosing a web designer, and how much should a website cost?
-What other online platforms might you want to be on?
-How can blogging be used as a marketing tool?
-What does Eve look for in the online presence of people to whom she might subcontract work?

Note: we appreciate all of your comments, and we’d particularly enjoy hearing from anyone who has found a translation client through a “non-traditional” online presence such as Instagram, Pinterest, etc. (listen to the episode for Corinne’s story of finding a client on Yelp).

If you enjoy Speaking of Translation, you can subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher, or listen to the audio file below.

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Website and online presence tips for freelancers


Corinne McKay

Wrapping up 2018

As the final week of 2018 dawns, it’s a good time to take stock of what went well and what could have gone better in your freelance life this year. I’ll suggest a few metrics that might help you assess how this year went, and then it’s time to set some goals for 2019.

Most importantly, thank you so much to all of the readers who keep the Thoughts on Translation community going strong. As this blog prepares to turn 11 (!) in February, I really appreciate everyone who reads, comments on, learns from and shares my posts, and I hope to keep this blog relevant for many years to come!

First, please do this. Give yourself credit for what went well. As freelancers, it’s so easy to get caught up in the negatives: the goals we set and never worked on; the clients we meant to look for and never did; the project that went disastrously off the rails. Those can be useful learning tools, but in order to move forward, I really think it’s important to build on what went right. So, first, do that: make a point of focusing on what went well. In my case, my primary fear at the start of 2018 was how I would balance my own translation work, my books and classes, and my ATA work. Happily, the juggling act went–for the most part–well. There were a few overcaffeinated, holding-on-by-a-thread days in there, but on the whole, I feel happy with my balance in 2018.

Did you reach your income goals? This is a basic but very important question. Income goals will vary widely, depending on your phase of freelancing. During my first year of freelancing (2002), I was ecstatic to earn US $9,000. To me, that meant that I could actually generate income as a freelancer. These days, I set two income goals: a gross revenue goal, and a goal for how much of that revenue should come from translation work versus books and classes–largely because I want to keep translating, not just telling other people how to translate. Happily, I met both of those–my gross income was in the 90-110K range that I aim for every year, and more than 50% of that came directly from translation.

Did you enjoy what you worked on? This is a factor that a lot of people overlook. But to keep freelancing over the long term, it really helps if you enjoy your work. And–as I’ve said before, but it bears repeating–way too many freelancers are translating whatever falls in the inbox rather than looking for work they enjoy and are good at. In this category, I’ll give myself about a seven out of 10. I have a good balance of “bread and butter” work and work I feel passionate about, which is good. I still work with lots of clients I’ve worked with for over 10 years–also good. But after resolving to build on having a book translation shortlisted for a fairly high-profile outdoor book award, my enthusiasm–for marketing, not translating–just kind of fizzled. The publisher I worked with on that book isn’t doing many translations, nor are several outdoor publishers I contacted. Still, there’s a lot more I could have done in that department–I’m always encouraging other translators to find little-known authors, negotiate for their translation rights and then self-publish the translation–and I just kind of stalled out.

Did you do enough professional development? This is a hard one, because it’s hard to define “enough” and there’s always more professional development to do. Still, you want to make sure you’re not stagnating–a risk that increases the longer you’ve been in the business. I feel mostly positive about this category: I of course attended the ATA conference, and I really pushed myself to work on my interpreting skills in a series of online courses (more on this in the “back burner dreams” category below). I also presented a bunch of webinars that required research and creativity even though I was the presenter instead of the student, and I branched out into offering online courses with instructors other than myself–a longtime goal on which I finally took action. My major regret is that I attended zero client-side events this year. To be fair, I simply didn’t have much time or energy once I took care of everything else, but this is something I’d like to do next year.

Did you give yourself the tools to do a good job at your job? Imagine if you were interviewing for an in-house job, and the boss explained that this position came with demanding and irregular hours, minimal vacation or comp time, minimal benefits, a paltry professional development budget, an aging and flaky computer loaded with outdated software, and so on. Would you jump at that opportunity? If not, then don’t treat yourself that way: make sure you have what you need to be a good translator. Because I pay a lot of attention to these factors, I tend to prioritize them. My main “benefit” is working at a co-working office. I simply hate working at home, and this was a year of serious upheavals in my co-working life.

The office where I’d worked for over two years needed more space for their own employees, so I worked from home for the summer, then moved to a large and well-established office…which announced that it was going out of business two months later. An office nearby was offering a special deal to all the “orphans” from the going-out-of-business office, so I signed up there, only to find out that I was the only person regularly working there (no “co” in the co-working…). I lasted one very lonely week, then relocated to office number four in four months. Happily, I love office number four. It’s cozy, and lively, and filled with interesting and ambitious people and a super-cute dog who sometimes even brings dog friends. All of these moves forced me to accept that the physical environment where I work is extremely important to me, and it’s something that I’m willing to spend a significant amount of money on, in the name of happiness and productivity.

Are you simmering a back burner dream? Perhaps I’m just a sucker for all things positive and dreamy, but I do think this is important, so let’s wrap up on this note. When you’re in the trenches of freelancing, it’s so easy to focus on what’s due tomorrow, or how next month’s mortgage or rent is going to get paid, and then you look up from your monitor in 10 years and realize you’re not where you hoped you’d be. To avoid that fate, keep slowly nurturing that perhaps-crazy dream of what your freelance business might become. Maybe you want to expand into an agency. Maybe you want to be the next winner of some major translation book award. Maybe–like me–you’ve always wondered about another facet of the language professions. This year I started taking interpreting classes, and I’m hoping to take an interpreter certification exam in 2019. This falls into the “we’ll see” category, but if you’re reading this, make a commitment to keep your own back burner dream simmering!

And with that, happy 2019 to everyone who reads this blog, and feel free to add your own year-end wrapup thoughts in the comments.


Corinne McKay

Health insurance for US-based freelancers

Note: this post originally appeared as a newsletter to my mailing list, but I received so much feedback on it that I decided to publish it here as well. Thanks to all the readers who responded with your own stories about health insurance!

Here in the US, it’s health insurance open enrollment time, which means that you can purchase a new plan, change plans, switch to a new flavor of plan, etc. For many freelancers (and from here on out, by “freelancers,” I mean those who work in the US), health insurance is a source of great stress and frustration, not to mention great expense, so let’s look at various options, and some out-of-the-box options as well.

-Under the Affordable Care Act, the good news is that ACA-compliant policy issuers cannot decline you because of your health history, cannot refuse to cover pre-existing conditions, and cannot drop you for using the insurance too much. Under the ACA, insurance companies can only ask your age, income, family size, address, and what type of coverage you want. For those of us who purchased (or tried to purchase) individual insurance on the private market in the pre-ACA days, these two things are a huge relief.

-But…even under the ACA, health insurance premiums can be extremely expensive. If you want to geek out on the statistics, here’s the report from the National Conference of State Legislatures on that topic. Many people do qualify for subsidies under the ACA, so it’s worth talking to an insurance broker about what the options are in your state and whether you would qualify for a subsidy.

–With premiums (and deductibles) rising–anecdotally, I’ve talked to freelancers who make just over the subsidy cutoff (about $52,000 if you’re single) and who pay close to $1,000 a month for an individual policy–people start looking at other options. Ed Gandia recently devoted an entire episode of his High-Income Business Writing podcast to the topic of medical cost-sharing plans and health indemnity plans. Long story short, these are health coverage plans that–because they are not technically insurance–are not subject to ACA requirements. This podcast episode is great, in that it gives actual case studies with costs, from people who had catastrophic health events and used this type of coverage. Definitely a recommended listen if you’re considering this type of coverage.

-If you’re under 30 years old (in which case, enjoy it while it lasts!!), or if you meet certain “hardship” criteria, you may be able to buy catastrophic insurance that is ACA-compliant. This coverage has lower premiums, but a very high (about $8,000) deductible.

My take: The US health insurance system is very problematic by any definition. Many people are in the unenviable position of paying a lot of money for an insurance policy that they are still reluctant to use, because they have high deductibles or co-pays. Still, there are two facts you can’t get around:

1. No healthy person anticipates having high medical expenses (i.e. “purchase this high-deductible plan if you don’t expect a lot of medical bills”). This kind of language–which a lot of insurers use, drives me crazy, because no one anticipates a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, or a life-threatening car accident, or the sudden onset of a chronic condition. Yet, these things happen to previously-healthy people every day.

2. No one, aside from people in the Warren Buffett and Bill Gates category, has enough money to pay out of pocket for US-priced care for a catastrophic event, or even–and this is important–to pay out of pocket for such an event and then be reimbursed. This reminds me of my accountant’s adage, that “Everyone has a retirement plan. Either you’re financially planning to retire, or you’re planning to work until you drop.” In the case of health insurance, either you have a health plan with decent coverage, or you’re planning that you’ll exhaust your savings and then declare bankruptcy if something truly catastrophic happens to you.

Here’s an example: in my family, we have the polar opposite examples of health insurance costs versus medical expenses. I’ve been an adult (off my parents’ insurance policy) for exactly 25 years. In those 25 years, I’d conservatively estimate that I’ve paid about $60,000 in health insurance premiums and perhaps closer to $100,000, while my medical expenses–including having a baby in a hospital–have probably totaled less than $25,000; perhaps even less than $15,000. The insurance companies are clearly on the winners’ side here, but that’s what insurance–whether it’s health, car, homeowners, or something else–is all about: paying for coverage that you hope to use as little as possible.

The other side of the coin is my husband, who is a case study in the two factors I mention above. Literally out of nowhere–“something didn’t feel right” after a hike in the mountains above our house–he landed in urgent care and then the emergency room with severe fatigue related to low blood pressure and low heart rate. And we’re talking about a guy who’s a lifelong endurance athlete and a vegetarian–if you made a list of 100 people who might develop a sudden and catastrophic health problem, he would be nowhere on that list. After two years and over $200,000 of medical expenses including a pacemaker, he was finally diagnosed with an obscure neurological problem that causes his central nervous system to mis-regulate his heart rate and blood pressure. On most days, he feels OK, and is able to continue working and doing his endurance athlete thing. This condition is not life-threatening or catastrophically debilitating, but it will require lifelong management and also means that he cannot go without insurance for even a day, ever again. This experience showed me a few things:

1. Catastrophic medical events come out of nowhere and have to be treated immediately. Saying that if you have high medical needs, you’ll shop around or perhaps be treated in another country is fine if you’re talking about something non-emergent. But in an emergency, you’ll be terrified, and you’ll just do what the doctor tells you to do, which will be expensive.

2. Medical procedures can cost more than you want to pay out of pocket, even if you get reimbursed later. A hallmark of many out-of-the-box health plans (like most health cost sharing plans and medical indemnity plans) is that you must pay your medical expenses up front and then be paid back by the plan. This is fine for things like routine checkups or even minor procedures. However, having been on the receiving end of a $50,000 bill for one procedure, I now see that requirement in a different light.

Like most middle-class people, the majority of our family’s wealth (term used lightly!) is tied up in our house, and in assets like retirement accounts and mutual funds that cannot be immediately accessed. We don’t keep $50,000 in our liquid bank accounts, and we don’t even have a credit card that would allow us to charge that amount. After I published this article in my newsletter, I heard from readers who’ve had sudden, emergency hospitalizations that totaled even higher amounts, well into the six figures. Were I to consider a cost-sharing or indemnity plan, I would ask the company that question: what happens if I get a bill that exceeds the amount of cash or even credit that I have on hand? If I get a bill for $150,000, am I still expected to pay it and wait to be reimbursed?

In light of these factors, I still think that the best option for most freelancers is–if you don’t get insurance through another route, such as a spouse’s job–to purchase an ACA-compliant plan, combine it with a health savings account, and make sure that you see the deductible as a likely cost rather than an unlikely one. If you’re using an out-of-the-box option, I’d love to hear about how it’s gone for you. General rants about the US health insurance system are also welcome in the comments!


Corinne McKay

“I feel like a cog in the machine!”–What to do?

Here’s an issue that several readers have asked about lately: What to do when a client treats you like a cog in the machine? A podcast listener recently referred to this as “dehumanization” in our profession. Examples may include:

  • Applying to work with a client without ever interacting with a human–the application process is a series of online forms, DocuSign documents, and auto-responses
  • Translation projects assigned by mass e-mail (“Dear translator”) or through an online job portal
  • Inability to talk to a human, even when you want or need to

For us as freelancers, the real question is what to do about this if it bothers you. Here are a few suggestions that may help:

  1. Adjust your mindset. These kinds of interactions are a) transactional, and b) impersonal. No question about that. However, they are not objectively wrong and horrible. For every freelancer who longs for a personal relationship with their clients, there’s a freelancer who sees those personal interactions as a waste of time in a relationship that is fundamentally about exchanging a service for money. Feeling critical every time a client treats you impersonally will only subtract years from your life and is unlikely to change the client’s behavior.
  2. Set boundaries. When you work with a client, you are telling them that their way of working is OK with you. If their way of working is not OK with you, it is not a good use of your time to try to change the client, or–worse–to expect that they will change on their own. The best option is simply to set boundaries about what kinds of client relationships are–and are not–OK with you.
    Examples of boundaries:

    • “If you typically assign translation projects via mass e-mail, please be aware that I will not respond. I respond only to project requests sent directly to me.”
    • “Before working with you, I’d like to have a five to ten-minute Skype call with one of your project managers, to get a sense of whether we’re a good fit for each other.”
    • “I prefer to have a conversation about rates, rather than putting one rate in your online form. Would that work for you?”
  3. Stop expecting clients to be something that they’re not. I truly believe that every type of client serves a purpose in our industry. Clients who need their HR training videos transcribed, translated, and re-recorded into 28 languages are probably not the best fit for a freelancer; they really need a company. Clients who want the same translator to work on every project, and whose businesses depend on consistency and confidentiality, are probably not the best fit for a company; they really need a freelancer. Problems arise when you expect a huge agency to crave a personal relationship with you, when they’re trying to push gazillions of words out the door. The huge agency business model is not intrinsically bad, but it’s a mass market business like any other. Just as you wouldn’t expect a personal shopping concierge to greet you at the door of a big-box retailer, don’t expect big-box translation clients to call and ask how your weekend was, before they ask if you’re available for 10,000 words.
  4. Trust that there are clients who want–or even crave–personal relationships. I can attest that my direct clients have taken me out to dinner, invited me to their birthday parties (no kidding), invited me to tour their campuses, and asked to see pictures of my daughter’s bike races. These types of client relationships do exist, and you can find them. But the first step is to acknowledge that many clients do not want and will not cultivate a personal relationship with you. Once you accept that, you can free yourself to move on to clients who do want that kind of thing.

If you have a story about a personal relationship with a client–or how you extricated yourself from an impersonal client relationship—let’s hear about it in the comments.