Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Freelancing


Corinne McKay

Keeping your freelance finances in order

Disclaimer: I’m not an accountant or an attorney; these are just some tips from my own experience and what works for me in my freelance business. Managing your freelance finances is a) time-consuming and b) absolutely critical to your survival as a freelancer. So, it’s worth taking some time to consider whether you’re optimally managing your money. And those of you who are more financially oriented than I am, please chime in in the comments.

  • Before you do anything else, separate your business and personal finances. Even if you do business as a sole proprietor (meaning that you are not incorporated), open a separate checking account that you use only for business purposes.
  • People use various accounting tools and processes, but at the very least, track your total freelance income for the year. Every time a client pays you, enter that amount into something (a spreadsheet, QuickBooks, Translation Office 3000, etc) so that you have a running total of how much you have earned.
  • Always, always have a savings cushion, especially if you are your (or your family’s) only income. Freelancing has its highs and lows; some months go like gangbusters and other months drip along. Big clients may unexpectedly change their plans or hire an in-house translator. And if you (or a family member) are too sick to work for an extended period, you’re left without income unless you have disability insurance. So don’t let yourself live paycheck to paycheck. Keep at least 3-6 months’ living expenses on hand in cash at all times.
  • Track your total outstanding invoices. For me, this is a big one. Of course you’re going to record your outstanding invoices so that you know whether clients have paid you or not, but you also want to know how much money you should be receiving in the next 30-60 days. This statistic will tell you how aggressive you need to be about looking for or accepting new projects. For example, let’s say that your income goal is $7,000 per month. Every time you issue an invoice, you enter it into an Excel file with a column that totals your outstanding invoices, so that you know how much money clients owe you. So for example if your outstanding invoices only total $5,000, you know that the next month is going to be lean unless you take on a lot more work. But if your outstanding invoices total $9,000, you know that you can afford (at least from the financial point of view) to be choosier about the work that you take on, to work on some non-paying tasks such as updating your website or marketing to higher-paying clients.
  • Track your business expenses. The easiest way to do this is by using a debit or credit card associated with your business bank account. That way, you don’t have to comb through your records at the end of the year, wondering whether that trip to the office supply store was for home or for work.
  • Establish a business savings account. Another big one: at the very least, you need to set money aside for taxes. Depending on your situation and your tax bracket, this could be anywhere from 25-50% of what you earn. Every time a client pays me, I deposit the check in my business checking account and then immediately transfer 40% to my business savings account so that I am never in a bind when tax time rolls around. And also…
  • Use your business savings account as a paid vacation fund. Freelancing doesn’t have many downsides, but one of them is no paid vacation. So, provide yourself with a good quality of life by having a paid vacation fund. For example, if you want to take off 4 weeks per year and work 48 weeks, start by putting $100 a week into your paid vacation fund. Then you’ll have $4,800 to “pay” yourself during your month off.
  • Have some sort of retirement plan. My accountant likes to say that “Everyone has a retirement plan. Either you’re saving for retirement or you’re planning to work until you drop.” Retirement strategies are really diverse, and they depend a lot on your expenses, how long you plan to work, if you have kids and how old you’ll be when they leave home, and so on. Plus the not insignificant question of how long you’re going to live. But whatever you do, have some kind of plan in place.
  • Set money aside for professional development and (why not) bonuses. It amazes me how many translators spend absolutely nothing on professional development and then wonder why their businesses are stagnating. In order to stay current in our industry, you have to keep your skills, knowledge and contact base current. Meaning that you have to learn new things. Take webinars, read books, do teleconferences, attend in-person conferences, join the Chamber of Commerce. But set aside at least 5% of what you make for professional development. And, if you have a good year, you really deserve a bonus. I once had a boss who left $50 in everyone’s mailbox on the last day before winter break; a manageable amount for the company, and an amount that everyone was excited to go and blow on something fun over the holidays. Consider earmarking some “fun money” for yourself, getting a new technology toy or treating your most valuable colleagues to a good meal at the end of the year!

Other ideas??


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on leaves of absence (maternity and otherwise)

A former student recently contacted me to ask some advice about taking maternity leave as a freelancer; she is pregnant with her first baby and her new freelance business has recently been gaining momentum, so she wants to take time off but doesn’t want to lose all of the energy she’s put into her business. My daughter is entering middle school this year so my experience is a bit dated, but I’m interested to hear other people’s thoughts as well. Whether you’re taking maternity or paternity leave, taking care of an aging parent or various other reasons, here are some factors to consider:

  • As a freelancer, taking time off is always anxiety-provoking. Let’s just admit that and get it out of the way. Building up a financial cushion to tide you through the period when you’re not working; stressing out about whether clients will find another translator (who, in your paranoid fantasies, is always better, faster and cheaper than you); stressing out about how long is too long to take off, and on and on. That part, you just have to live with, and maybe do a lot of yoga and meditation to help calm the inevitable anxiety!
  • I think it’s best to be up front about the reason for your leave. To me, it’s unnecessarily vague to contact your clients and say “I will be unavailable for the next six months” with no further explanation. If you’re taking a medical leave, I would not provide the details about your health problems; just say you’ll be on medical leave.
  • But you want to keep it a little vague as well. When you have an in-house job, you have to be really, really ready to go back to work before you commit to a return date, because you have to feel up to working a full day, and you have to have child care in place. But as a freelancer, you have no paid leave time, so you don’t want to close the door for longer than you need to. For example you might say “I’m expecting a baby in mid-October and I plan to be on maternity leave until approximately the end of November, but my exact return date will of course depend on how the baby and I are doing by that point. I’ll plan to contact you by November 25 with an update” or “I will be working reduced hours for at least the next two months to care for my ailing father. I anticipate that it may take me longer than usual to respond to e-mails and phone calls and I will probably not be able to handle rush projects. But please let me know if I can help out with any non-rush work during that time.”
  • How long you need to take off depends on a lot of factors that you can’t control. We’re talking about maternity leave here: I commented to my former student that although I felt completely fine within a few weeks of my daughter’s birth, her habit of wanting to be held and nursed for about 23 hours a day kind of precluded doing any substantive work. In addition, she didn’t sleep through the night until she was over a year old, so I was pretty exhausted a lot of the time. Other babies are the opposite: if your kid is happy napping in a crib for hours at a time, you might be working close to full-time within a few months.
  • Be honest with yourself about your choices and tradeoffs. I’ll address this one from the mom/wife point of view because it’s the one I’m most familiar with. At some point during my daughter’s first years of life, I realized that for me, the work/life balance will always swing toward life rather than work. I realized that when my daughter is grown up, I will have gotten some things right, and I will have messed some things up, but mainly I want to have been there, and to have had not only quality time but quantity time with her. Same with my husband: if he’s really sick, I don’t go into the co-working office and I stay home with him; if he has to have some medical procedure, I go along.In a lot of ways we’re pretty traditional: we cook a real dinner and eat together pretty much every night. We mostly socialize as a family; my parents live near us so we basically never use babysitters even if we go out at night, and so on. I recognize that this choice involves tradeoffs. Essentially every moment of my day is scheduled, because I work primarily while my daughter is at school. I could make more money if I didn’t take a month off every summer to go on an extended family vacation; I turn down pretty much every out-of-town speaking engagement request that I receive, because my ATA Board responsibilities already require me to travel at least four times a year. In order to fund our travel habits, we practice freelance frugality to a pretty extreme extent. But I accept that this is the way of life that makes me happy, and that in order to maintain it, I have to prioritize.

    On the other side of the coin, there are lots of moms who need to work full-time, either for financial reasons or because that’s what makes them happy. In a doctor’s office waiting room a while ago, I read an interview with Ivanka Trump in Redbook (I know, that’s not normally where you’d expect enlightenment to come from, but I take it where I can get it!), in which she unapologetically admitted that she spends just an hour and fifteen minutes with her toddler daughter on a typical weeknight because she works up to 16 hours a day. It goes without saying that if you’re Ivanka Trump, part of the reason you can do that is because an armada of nannies and housekeepers and cooks are picking up the slack during those 16 hours. However I really appreciated Ivanka’s candor: she seems to really adore her daughter, but also says that working hard at a job she loves makes her happy, and makes her a better mom when she’s with her kid. So I think it’s not so much a matter of saying “if you’re a mom and a freelancer, you must do this,” but of finding a quasi-balance that works for you.

Any other tips (practical or philosophical) on leaves of absence??


Corinne McKay

Dear newbie translator

Dear newbie translator: I know. The first year (or two or three) as a freelancer is/are really hard, and it’s easy to get discouraged. So for those days when you feel really down, here are a few things I want to tell you.

  1. As Dan Savage says about growing up gay, It Gets Better. The first few years as a freelancer are like the first few years of raising a child (which I’ve also done) or maybe like military boot camp (which I haven’t): if you feel totally wrung out but at the same time you’re sure that this is what you’re meant to be doing, you’re on the right track.
  2. It may get better all at once. I distinctly remember that at some point during my third year of freelancing, all of a sudden I realized that the vast majority of the time, I had enough work. Just like that.
  3. Experienced translators stress out too. It’s not just you. If you asked 100 translators whether they panic when a week goes by with no work, I bet that 98 of them would admit that they do, and the other 2 are crossing their fingers behind their backs. But in the end, the tide of work always rises again.
  4. There is well-paying work out there if you actively seek it out. But most people don’t. They wait for the sweet projects to find them, and in the meantime they complain.
  5. You work a lot harder than I do. Seriously. My work flow mainly consists of triage: deciding which project offers I want to accept and which I want to decline, and how much I want to charge. Meanwhile, you’re actively looking for new clients and new projects almost all the time. Mostly, I get to translate interesting projects that pay well or even very well. So if you can do what you’re doing now, you can surely do what you’ll be doing in 10 years.
  6. You’re a lot braver than I am. Again, seriously. When I go to a conference, I usually know most of the people there. Sometimes I’m even the one coordinating the conference. I’m not sweating through the buffet line, wondering who I could sit with, or if I should just eat lunch in the bathroom. Meanwhile, you’re walking in to the opening reception of the ATA conference and wondering which of these 1,500 people would like to have a conversation with you. I give you a lot of credit for that courage.
  7. You’re hungry, and I’m a little lazy (or something like that). When a client who’s not one of my regulars calls on a Friday afternoon with a Monday deadline, or has an icky handwritten document that will make my eyes go bleary, or needs a list of 1,000 five-digit numbers proofread, I don’t care so much about the money. The annoyance and stress just aren’t worth it. I’d rather shut the computer down on Friday afternoon and go biking or kayaking with my family and stick with the work I enjoy. But you? You’re there, bailing the client out and winning huge kudos for it. And that’s why in the end, you’ll be OK.


Corinne McKay

A couple of freelance tips

Every now and again, I feel inspired to post a random freelance tip on my Twitter feed. I could say that these are Zen master-esque pearls of wisdom that distill in my mind over the course of a few years, but they’re more like out-of-left-field thoughts that come to me while I’m washing the dishes or folding laundry. Here are two for today; feel free to add a comment with your thoughts on them!

The freelance startup phase: give it time, or pick another business.

One of the most common laments I hear from beginning freelancers is that it’s taking so long to develop a solid client base. “So long” could be defined as anywhere from a month to the better part of a year, depending on the person’s situation. First, I tell the discouraged beginners that for the first year and a half that I was freelancing–a time during which I had planned to work very part-time or not at all, since I had just had a baby–I wondered almost every day if I would be better off getting a full-time job. After about 18 months, I still wasn’t earning a ton of money, but it was enough that I felt encouraged to stay the course. It took about three years of freelancing until I got to the point where I no longer considered the option of returning to full-time work for someone else. Looking back, that was a long three years. But here’s the thing: now, after almost 11 years of freelancing, there is no way that I could replace my freelance income if I worked at an in-house job, especially if I looked for something with similar hours and flexibility. Partially this has to do with location: if I lived in a major East Coast city, there might be in-house jobs that pay more than what I make freelancing and offer generous vacation. But in groovy college towns in the foothills of the Rockies: no way.

If you need quick money–and there’s nothing wrong with that…haven’t we all been there?–pick another business. Another mom from my daughter’s school recently told me that she was in that situation, and although she’s bilingual, in a marketable language, she started a housecleaning business. Within three months, she was bringing in a full-time income. Is the work intellectually stimulating, or creative, or self-directed? Probably not so much. But if you need a source of income ASAP, cleaning houses or walking dogs is a much better option than starting a freelance language business. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, since my fantasy sideline career is to become a service dog trainer!

Well-paying work is out there if you look for it. But most people don’t look for it; they wait for it to find them, and meanwhile they complain.

I’m not sure how much explaining this one needs: it’s all right there. Yes, our industry has its share of low-paying work and bottom-feeding clients. In addition, as freelancers we often take that aspect of the industry very personally, as if it’s a reflection of our personal worth. For more on that, see Walt Kania’s insightful post Charge what you’re worth? Please, no on The Freelancery.

But here’s the thing. There is so much well-paying work out there; even clients who are looking to pay high rates to someone who does a really good job. But those clients are too busy with their own work to comb the web looking for you. Maybe they don’t even know that you exist. Seriously: when I interviewed Joanne Archambault about how to find direct clients at industry conferences, she commented that a lot of her clients said that they never knew that someone like her existed, although they desperately needed her. You can go find those high-paying clients at their industry conferences; you can send them postcards; you can give webinars for them; you can write articles for their industry newsletters. But you cannot wait for them to find you, and meanwhile complain about the bottom-feeders and non-payers. It’s tough love, but there you go.


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on file-sharing sites and copyright violations

I’m a big believer in sharing information: for example, over the last five years I’ve written 400+ posts that are available on this site for free. I’ve found countless solutions to my own questions on other people’s blogs, also for free. However, I think that there’s a place for copyrighted work too; when applied correctly, copyrights allow authors and content creators to earn a living, and to keep on writing and creating because of the income that their copyrighted work generates.

File-sharing sites like Scribd and Slideshare (and others; I’m just using these as examples because I’ve found my copyrighted work on them…) have a complicated relationship with copyright law. In one sense, these types of sites are a great way to get your own work out there: put up an interesting presentation, and tons of people might find it. It might go viral, and you might get a book deal out of it. But, at least in my experience, these sites do essentially nothing to prevent people from posting other people’s copyrighted work.

Case in point: this morning I got an e-mail from a kind colleague who let me know that someone had posted one of my books on Slideshare. Yep, there it was, including my copyright notice, which appears on the first page of the book. To Slideshare’s credit, they immediately removed the book when I notified them, but presumably they’re not planning to reimburse me for the 1,333 times that the book had already been viewed. A few years ago, someone posted one of my books on Scribd with similar results: it was taken down after someone alerted me, but it had already been viewed over a thousand times.

A few thoughts here:

  • I see that these types of sites have legitimate uses. But it disturbs me that they cannot take the minimal amount of time it would require to prevent these very flagrant copyright violations. Posting someone else’s entire book isn’t a grey area: my copyright notice was on the first page of the file on Slideshare.
  • It disturbs me that translators would do this to each other: I know the username of the person who posted my book, and it’s a translator.
  • Violating someone’s copyright is stealing. That’s all there is to it. Especially when you post an independent author’s book, you are not taking money from a huge corporation, you are taking money from an individual who buys groceries and pays the mortgage with that money. It’s not the new media model: it’s theft.
  • If you want free information, there is lots of it out there. Go crazy with it. If you find works that are licensed under terms such as the GNU GPL, you can even sell them, as long as you license them under the original terms. But don’t steal copyrighted stuff and think that you’re doing something noble by posting it online for free. If the author wanted their book to be freely available, they wouldn’t have to look hard for a way to make it happen.

Just for fun (!), let’s put some numbers on this situation. The retail value of 1,333 copies of my book is $26,646; certainly a decent chunk of money by anyone’s standards. But of course I don’t earn the retail value in royalties, nor would all of those 1,333 people have actually bought a legitimate copy of the book. My royalties amount to between $3.50 and $10.00 per copy, depending on where the person buys the book. And let’s say that only 10% of those people would have actually purchased the book, so I would have sold 133 copies. If we take an average royalty of $5.00 per copy, that’s $665. So, dear copyright infringer, if you’re reading this and you want to make things right, I’d say that an appropriate restitution would be approximately that amount. And Slideshare, if you want to make things right, start at least minimally vetting the uploads on your site for copyright violations.