Freelancing

Here’s something I thought about a lot, while preparing my keynote for the recent National Association of Judiciary Interpreters & Translators (NAJIT) conference (the conference was great; I’m working on a writeup for my blog!).

💥Disruptive change is always polarizing💥

Here’s what I mean:
I recently talked to two interpreters with completely opposing views on remote interpreting.

Terp 1: “I hate it.” 👎 “To me, the human connection *is* the job. Being there in the heart of the action, getting a sense of the mood in the room, sitting at the table. With remote, we’re reduced to icons on the screen. Bad audio is a constant problem; we’re even asked to interpret for people who are in their cars, standing on a street corner, riding public transportation, and the client’s response is always the same: Sorry! Do your best with it!”

Terp 2: “Remote interpreting is, hands-down, the best thing that’s ever happened in my career.” 🌟 “In 2019, I was thinking of looking for another job. I was sick of being on the road all the time, and I wanted to start a family. With remote, I can work from home, and I have access to clients I never would have been able to work with before.”

This is to say, if we’re looking for consensus on any disruptive change, we’re unlikely to find it. I personally despise editing MT/AI-generated translations; the writing all sounds the same, and I find it mind-numbing. I’d much rather start from scratch. Yet I talk to a lot of translators who say, “Sure, MT requires a lot of editing. But if DeepL saves you even a third of the time it would take to start from zero, why wouldn’t you use it?”

To me, the key is realizing that not everyone thinks the way you think, and that we’re (mostly!) fortunate to live in an age where there are lots of ways to work as a language person!

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If you’re more of an audio person, you can listen to me talk about this topic on episode 84 of the Smart Habits for Translators podcast. Madalena and Veronika are no longer releasing new episodes, but we discussed my 2023 workcation a few months back, and they asked great questions! I’ve also thought about workcations in more detail lately, as my husband and I are in the “thinking about thinking about” stage of doing a longer digital nomad experience (six months, maybe a year?) within the next three to five years.

What is a workcation, and why might you want to take one?

As the name suggestions, a workcation is a combination of work and a vacation. Case in point: in July of 2023, my husband and I loaded our mountain bikes, hiking gear, and work stuff into the car and drove approximately 20 hours north of our home (Boulder, Colorado) to the small town of Fernie, British Columbia, where we rented a house for a month, worked full time, and spent the evenings and weekends mountain biking and hiking. That’s a workcation.

Why? Why do this, when you could just go on vacation? As a huge proponent of vacation, that’s definitely a valid question! I think workcations are a good option to consider, if:

• Your spouse or partner isn’t a freelancer and doesn’t have unlimited vacation time or flexibility. This is our situation; my husband works remotely, but for a government research lab where he can work outside the US only 20 work days per calendar year, plus he wanted to save his actual vacation time for other things.
• You’d like to travel for a longer period than you can afford to go without income.
• You’d like to visit family or friends in another location, but work while you’re there (I wish remote work had been more of a thing when my daughter was little and my parents were in the Foreign Service).
• You’d like to immerse your kid(s) in another culture (maybe your home culture, maybe something else) while you’re working. Madalena and Veronika and I talked about this a lot on the podcast; both of them have young kids and also have family in other countries, which I think is a great basis for a workcation.

Choosing a location

We had our eye on Fernie since going there on a non-working vacation in 2022. One of us, now I can’t remember who, observed that it’s light outside until almost 10 PM in the summer, which prompted the realization that we could work a full day, then go mountain biking for two to four hours, and still get home before dark. An idea was born! We also liked the fact that we could drive to Fernie (opening up the possibility of bringing work stuff plus recreational stuff), and that it’s in the same time zone as our home, meaning that my husband (whose job involves a fair number of meetings) wouldn’t have to rearrange his work schedule.

Your criteria may be different. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn Italian at a language school in Rome. Maybe you’ve always wanted your kids to experience Argentinian winter during American summer vacation. Maybe your best friend moved to New Zealand and you’d like to spend a month there, but you can’t afford to take a month off. Think about what adventures you could take, while continuing to generate income, and see what ideas you come up with!

How to work effectively during a workcation

If part of your goal is to continue working more or less full time, you need to think about the physical setup that you need to be productive. This was particularly important now that my work is about 60% interpreting, which requires fast and stable internet and a silent environment. I really wanted a location where I could bring my own ethernet cable and plug in to the modem, and I needed a very quiet space.

In our case, this meant that we rented a two bedroom house so that I had a separate room to work in (my husband is totally happy working on the couch or the kitchen table, which I’m not). This actually worked out well because we had friends and family visiting us for about half the time we were in Fernie, so they slept in the second bedroom and I then kicked them out when I needed to work. It’s important to be self-aware about what kind of work space you need: if you’re workcationing alone, maybe you want to look at co-working offices where you’re going. If you’re workcationing with someone else, be honest about whether you need a separate workspace.

Technology setups in general have gotten much more portable in the last decade. We took a proto-workcation in 2012, when my husband did a summer consulting job in Switzerland (we’re all dual Swiss/US citizens), and we put my daughter, then nine years old, in summer camp. At that time, international cell phone service wasn’t much of a thing, so we had to buy a Swiss burner phone, to which no one had the number (kind of a plus/minus situation!). This time, our Verizon phones worked in Canada exactly like in the US, at no extra charge.

My secret mobile office weapon is my Dell 14 portable monitor, which is the size of a regular laptop screen, weighs less than half a pound, is less than a quarter-inch thick, and runs power and data through one cable, so you plug it only into the computer (no separate electrical plug). I love this thing! It fits in my laptop backpack alongside my computer, and it’s large enough to use as a true second monitor.

You also want to make sure that none of your clients have location restrictions. I have one client that requires me to be physically located in the US, and I just didn’t work for them for that month. With my Canadian clients, I made sure to let them know I was there. Even though I don’t typically work on site for them, I thought they would find it interesting that I was in Canada! Use your judgment on whether your clients need to know where you are.

Keeping the “cation” in workcation

To allow ourselves to enjoy the reasons we went to Fernie, we put some pretty strict parameters around work while we were there. Mainly, we tried to get up relatively early, start working by around 8, and wrap up by 4:00-4:30 so that we could have the late afternoon and evening free for outdoor activities. Personally, I liked this. It helped me avoid having work “bleed” over into the evening, and it honestly felt like I was kinda/sorta on vacation while still earning a full-time income.

Here again, time zone is a surprisingly major factor. At the outset of this workcation idea, I kind of assumed we would go to Switzerland. I got my dual Swiss citizenship in 2022 and I was excited to use it, we have friends and family there, and we just love the country. However, logistical factors dissuaded us. We’ve traveled to Europe with bikes before, but it’s a pain and can be expensive, and Central Europe is eight hours ahead of US Mountain Time, meaning that my husband would have been working approximately 4:00 PM – midnight, which didn’t seem that appealing.

Overall, I think that workcations can be a really good way to travel for an extended period of time without a huge loss of income. We’re in the early stages of planning this year’s workcation 2.0 (probably to the Vancouver area), and actually thinking about a 6-12 month workcation for after my daughter finishes college. If you try this, let me know how it goes!

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T4T is on Instagram!

Ever since I quit Twitter (and honestly, I don’t miss it at all), I’ve been meaning to put Training for Translators on Instagram. I finally had a day without translation or interpreting work and got it done…@trainingfortranslators is freshly stocked with posts, and ready for followers!

Newsletter recommendation

My new favorite newsletter about freelancing is writer Lisa Beach’s Expert-ish Freelancer. Not an affiliate deal; Lisa shares really practical, well-written tips for freelancers who want to feel more confident, make more money, and save time. Having written 1,000+ articles for Training for Translators, I’m a pretty discerning consumer of newsletters for freelancers, and I really like what Lisa writes!

Should you think about incorporating your freelance business?

Thanks to a couple of readers who suggested this as a newsletter topic! Most importantly, I’m not an accountant, tax planner, or attorney. Verify these tips with a pro!

As with many things related to freelancing, we tend to overcomplicate. If you’re just getting started as a freelancer, or if you haven’t thought much about freelance finances, you can put yourself ahead of at least 70% of other freelancers (trust me on this one…) if you:

• Completely separate your business and personal finances, even if that’s just a separate checking and savings account in your own name, that you use solely for business purposes; and
• Earmark a percentage of every client payment for taxes and other business expenses. “A percentage” is going to vary depending on your tax bracket, whether you pay for your own health insurance, etc., and “earmark” is going to depend on your needs. When I made less money, I would just chop 40% off every client payment and move it to my business savings account. Now, I keep a lump sum (in my case, $15,000, which is enough to keep my business afloat for three to six months) in my business savings account and don’t touch it; and
• Know how much you need to charge in order to reach your target income. Again, basic, but lots of freelancers are working for whatever clients seem willing to pay, and hoping that it adds up to enough money to pay the bills! Two helpful resources: my Deciding What to Charge worksheet, or JT Hine’s booklet I Am Worth It.

If you haven’t done those things yet, don’t even think about incorporating. Set up the framework first.

My experience with an S-Corp

As far as incorporating, I can only speak from my own experience; I’m not familiar with corporate structures outside the US, or with corporate structures I don’t use, but I think that these basic principles can be helpful as you look at whether incorporating could be helpful for you.

I’ve had an S-Corp for 15+ years and it has a lot of advantages. Most importantly, an S-Corp allows you to legally avoid paying self-employment tax on part of what you make, through a (somewhat artificial, but legal under the IRS rules) distinction between your “wages” (which are subject to self-employment tax) and the “corporation’s profit,” (not subject to self-employment tax). You sill pay regular income tax on the “corporate profit,” but you avoid the 15.3% self-employment tax on top of what you would pay if you worked for an employer.

Of course, what constitutes a reasonable wage (the IRS’s definition of the amount on which you must pay self-employment tax) is very subjective. My accountant tells me to take my gross income, subtract my business expenses, and divide the rest equally between wages and profit. I’ve heard other accountants tell people to use the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ median pay for translators and interpreters ($57K in 2023) as your base wage amount, and take the rest of what you earn as profit. There’s really no hard and fast rule.

Being incorporated saves money in taxes (back of the envelope, being incorporated saved me about $8,000 in taxes last year), but it also creates an administrative burden which is likely to require an accountant. In my case, business accounting adds up to more than $2,000 per year, because my accountant charges a monthly fee to prepare my payroll taxes (required for S-Corporations), and requires me to subscribe to Gusto, an automated payroll processor that pulls the money out of my business account, then directs it to the appropriate tax entities and pays my salary into my personal account, and an S-Corp has to file a separate corporate tax return, which my accountant prepares.

Thus, you want to consider the income level at which it would be advantageous to incorporate. Again, no hard and fast rule here: maybe $60,000 a year?? If I had to guess, something between 45 and 65K is the point at which, even if you hire an accountant, you’re probably better off incorporating.

In the US, corporations are formed at the State level. Check your State’s Secretary of State office for the fees and requirements. Here in Colorado, it’s quite easy and cheap to form a corporation, but you want to make sure that the corporation is going to confer the benefits that you’re looking for. Specifically, having a corporation protects you from some types of liability, but not others. For example, I rent an office outside my house. If I were to sign the lease in my corporation’s name, and then the corporation went bankrupt, my understanding is that the landlord could not sue me personally for the money. But a corporation does not protect you from things like errors in your work: only professional liability insurance can do that; clients can sue you personally for work-related errors.

Pro tip: If you’re going to use an accountant (for most freelancers, this is the first task I would consider outsourcing if you can afford it), use an IRS Enrolled Agent (EA). EAs will often put those initials after their name; using an EA means that the accountant can represent you in most dealings with the IRS, and you should never have to interact personally with the IRS, even if you get audited. This is a huge advantage: years ago, I received a demand letter from the IRS, saying that I owed $15,000 (!!!) in unpaid taxes on income in my PayPal account. I knew that this wasn’t true, but I had no idea what the issue was. I sent the demand letter to my accountant and signed a release form for her to talk to the IRS, and she ironed it out with one phone call (confusion between my personal Social Security number and my business EIN!).

I hope these tips are helpful!

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What’s up with freelancing these days?

Freelancing is in kind of an odd state right now. We’re hearing about mass layoffs at tech and media companies, we’re wondering how AI/MT is going to affect us, there’s a total solar eclipse coming, and the other day, I found myself wondering, “Does any of this matter, given what’s going on with climate change??” It’s an odd time all around.

We know…”always be marketing”

Harder yet, we know that the way to avoid the feast/famine cycle/being overly dependent on one client/making fear-based business decisions because we’re afraid of not having enough work, is to market consistently. Does this mean that we’re applying to 36 new clients a day? Definitely not. Here’s a post I wrote back in November about what “Always be marketing” means to me. But yet, the majority of freelance translators and interpreters do little to no active marketing (believe me, people tell me the truth about their businesses, so I see this first-hand).

Avoiding analysis paralysis

We avoid marketing for lots of reasons. We’d rather translate or interpret (fair enough). We suffer from “be careful what you wish for” syndrome, where we think, yikes, what if my dream clients respond and then I have to be good enough to do their work?? We feel like we shouldn’t have to market; shouldn’t the juicy work be coming to us??? But an additional factor is analysis paralysis: we can’t decide whether to:

• Apply to agencies
• Market to direct clients, and if so, how? E-mail them? Connect on LinkedIn? Send them a postcard? Call them?
• Try some inbound marketing: improve our website SEO, beef up our LinkedIn profile
• Attend a client-side conference
• Forget all of that because our website is horrible and our profile photo is from the 90s

In the face of this, we often get overwhelmed and do nothing. But there’s a better way: Pare it down, and simplify. Do the simplest thing you can think of, and do it consistently. Examples include:

• Nudge a dormant client every Wednesday. This sounds so simple as to be not worth doing, but let’s say you did this even half the time. Did anyone you know nudge 26 dormant clients last year? Probably not; most of us don’t even have 26 dormant clients!
• Apply to one new agency or contact one new client on the first work day of every month. Here again, is once a month even worth it? Yes, absolutely! That would be 12 clients this year! Twelve more than you contacted in 2023!
• Work on marketing for 30 minutes, twice a week. You spend more time than that talking yourself out of marketing (“because it won’t work anyway,” which you don’t know, because you never try it). Challenge yourself to see how much you can get done in 30 minutes and motor away. For what it’s worth, this is what I do. I have a Todoist reminder that says, “Marketing: do something,” every Monday through Thursday.

Questions to ask when you’re overwhelmed

Another pro tip: When you’re feeling overwhelmed, start from the questions:

• Who should I be serving?
• Where can my skills be most useful?
• Who really needs me, and can’t work with me because they don’t know me yet?
• What kinds of work am I so passionate about, that I can honestly say to clients, “I love doing the projects that you need”?

Marketing enough to have a thriving business is a lot of work, but I hope that these suggestions can make it a little less painful.

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! My April master class, Aiming for six figures as a freelancer, is next Wednesday (April 10). Registration ($75) includes the recording, and we’ll talk about how to analyze your current workflow, use rate zones (green, yellow, red, gold) to decide what work to accept and decline, and how to create a plan for earning US $100,000 or more (or the part-time equivalent) without working crazy hours.

On to this week’s topic: Are low rates for freelance translation or interpreting work a personal decision, or a group issue?

I don’t have the answer here, and this is something that I think about a fair bit. It happens to me with some regularity (and thus, I assume other people have this experience as well): I’m contacted by a potential client, typically a translation agency (this seems less common with interpreting, more on that later), in this type of way:

• 9:00 AM: Hello! We have a project of X words, due on X date; this requires an ATA-certified translator and we can offer X cents per word. Can you let us know if you’re available?

In this situation, X is typically something outside what I would consider to be professional working conditions: a huge project on an incredibly tight deadline, at an incredibly low rate. But while I’m contemplating how, or if, to respond, I get another e-mail from the agency:

• 9:03 AM: Please disregard our previous e-mail! This project has been placed. We’ll contact you in the future if anything else comes up.

Meaning that someone (in this case, an ATA-certified translator), snapped this project up before anyone else could even respond. Here’s my dilemma:

• It’s a free market, working is better than not working, and you have to keep the lights on. Really, who am I to tell someone else what to charge?
• And at the same time, if agencies couldn’t get translators to work at these rates, they would only have two choices: 1) Pay more, or 2) Go out of business.

Interestingly enough, I find that interpreters tend to exert more rate-related pressure on each other than translators do. There’s a lot more talk in the interpreting world about, “Not spoiling the market for everyone else,” “It’s better not to work than to accept a low rate,” “If one person says yes, then clients expect everyone else to work at that rate.” It’s also easier to find reference points for interpreting rates: most state court systems, and the Federal court systems, publish the rates that they pay their interpreters. Entities like the UN publish the rates that they pay contract conference interpreters. Perhaps this also has some sort of “elevating effect” on the interpreting market?

Which brings me to my next question: is this a personal decision (live and let live/to each their own), or is this a problem that affects us as a group? Yet another issue is the US’s very strict antitrust/anti-price-fixing laws, wherein it is legal to give objective pricing information (here’s what I charge), but illegal to give anything that sounds like a pricing recommendation or collusion (here’s how much you should charge/here’s how much I think this client would pay).

I’m honestly not sure, and that’s my answer!

• There are times that I feel like telling other translators, if 2 cents per word meets your financial goals, go for it. It doesn’t meet my financial goals, but you’re welcome to that work if you want it.
• And there are other times that I feel like saying, “Hey, I’ve got a great business idea. I’m going to become like the H&R Block of legal services. I’m going to have a chain of law offices that charges a flat rate of $50 an hour, where the lawyers get paid $25 an hour and I get $25 an hour for running the business!” If that strikes you as crazy, as if I’d have to either pay my lawyers more, or go out of business, then why can’t we apply that logic to our own profession?

In my observations, this is a phenomenon that primarily (although not exclusively) affects work from translation agencies. In the 21 years that I’ve been a freelancer, translation agency rates have dropped by about half, largely due to the phenomena I describe above: agencies seem to be finding enough people, who do a good-enough job, to fill the demand. But what if they couldn’t? Food for thought!