Freelancing

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope you’re all doing well! Here’s a resource recommendation for you. One of my favorite freelance business bloggers, Jennifer Goforth Gregory, just launched a marketing newsletter for freelancers, called GoForth and Freelance. It’s free, and I highly recommend it. Jennifer writes an amazing blog and newsletter for freelance content marketing writers, and this new publication is for freelancers in general.

This week, let’s talk about nudging dormant clients. If you’re new to this concept, here’s a blog post I wrote about it earlier this year. Basically, you want to find a reason to get in touch with clients you worked for in the past, but who you haven’t heard from in a while, remind them that you exist, and that you’d like to work with them.

You can be straightforward:
-“Just checking in, because according to my records, I passed your tests and was onboarded in June, but we haven’t yet worked together. Is there anything in the pipeline that might be a good fit?”

You can refer to the last time you worked together:
-“Just checking in, because I really enjoyed the patent translation I did for you in September, and I’d love to work together again if the need arises.”

You can reference upcoming availability:
-“In looking over my schedule, I’m available for interpreting work during the week of December 4. Unfortunately I’ve been booked the last couple of times you contacted me, so I wondered if you’re looking to fill any assignments during that time?”

You can nudge them because something changed on your end:
-“I had a large project set up for this week that ended up being cancelled, and I wondered if anything last-minute might have come up on your end?”

The point here isn’t so much the actual wording, it’s making it easy for the client to book something with you. Every year, when I tell people in my March Marketing Madness challenge group that nudging is a) the world’s most boring marketing technique, and b) the world’s most effective marketing technique, they tend to respond something like, “I don’t want to nudge, because clients know where to find me if they want to work with me. It seems pushy and annoying!” To which I say, humor me and just try it! Nudging doesn’t work 100% of the time (no marketing method does). But in this year’s March Marketing Madness, people came back with results like:

• Wow, glad I tried it! A client I hadn’t heard from in six months sent me a $1,500 project
• Oh geez, it turned out that the agency was waiting to hear from me while I was waiting to hear from them; glad I followed up!
• I e-mailed a dormant interpreting client and specifically told them I’m interested in on-site work and travel assignments; a lot of their interpreters only want to work from home, so they immediately booked me for 10 days of work

If you’re still not convinced, here’s a story of how nudging worked on me. I tend to like to do my own household chores, but two years ago, I admitted defeat on the landscaping. We have a fairly large xeriscape (no grass, low-water) garden in our front yard, and it’s beautiful and environmentally great, but it takes a lot of maintenance. Rather than just running the lawnmower over it, you’re on your hands and knees, weeding for hours. I finally admitted that I hate yard work. I don’t love cleaning, and I’d actually much rather clean than do yard work. I had the money, so I hired a really great landscaping crew. They’re easy to work with, they show up on time, they work incredibly hard, and our garden looks so good that we’ve had people stop by to take pictures of it, plus the landscapers have gotten referrals to four other houses on our street. The only hitch is a) they’re fairly expensive, and b) I still have some guilt about not doing this work myself, simply because I feel like I should.

Earlier this fall, I was thinking that the garden could use one more good clean-up before winter. But I kept telling myself:

• Weeding isn’t that hard! Surely I can just take a Saturday afternoon, listen to some podcasts, and get this done!
• I shouldn’t spend the money! I have the money, but this is something I could do myself!
• And yet…I “never got around to it” (code for: avoided it and made excuses not to do it).

The garden languished. And then one day, my landscaper texted me. “Hey Corinne, I hope you’re doing well! We had a cancellation tomorrow and we’re going to be in your neighborhood. If you’d like one final clean-up before winter, I can offer a 10% discount since it’s last-minute.” I admitted defeat, and told him to come over, and the garden is back to looking amazing. This is how nudging works: you slip off the client’s radar screen, or they mean to contact you but don’t get around to it, but if you get in front of them first, there’s a much higher chance that they’ll suddenly send you some work!

If you have a nudging story, let us know about it in the comments!

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I’m headed to Miami today, for the 64th annual American Translators Association conference, and I’m excited to see some of you there! If you want to get a jump on next month’s master classes, I’m teaching How to prepare for (and pass!) an interpreting exam, and I’m teaching Breaking into the book translation market, for ProZ.com, but it’s open to anyone.

On to this week’s topic, suggested by a T4T reader: How do you find other freelancers to work with, especially if you work outside the most common language combinations? If an agency asks if you can recommend a proofreader, is it OK to just say no? How to decide who earns what, when you team up with someone else? Let’s take a look!

First, I would argue that every freelancer needs at least a couple of trusted colleagues in the same language combination, because:

• You may need to split a large project
• You may need a proofreader
• You may need someone to refer clients to, if you get sick, have a family emergency, or want to take an extended vacation
• It’s helpful to have colleagues who get it (and sometimes “getting it” involves issues specific to your language combination), when you have work-related dilemmas that could use input from another person

That being said, I don’t think it’s a disaster to tell an agency that you can’t recommend someone else. The agency may be asking this for one of two reasons: a) they want to accommodate your preference, because they want to keep you happy (I always appreciate when interpreting agencies ask if I have preferred boothmates), or b) they want you to do the work of finding someone else to work on the project, which is really the agency’s job. So, I think it’s actually fine to say that you defer to the agency’s judgment on who to work with.

However, you still need some trusted colleagues, for the reasons listed above. Here’s where I would recommend trying to find them:

• Hands-down, the best source is professional associations for translators and interpreters. When I started translating, all (literally: all) of my initial crew of trusted colleagues came from the Colorado Translators Association and the American Translators Association. When you meet someone through a professional association, you don’t know whether you click with them as a work partner, but you do know that they are an established professional who is willing to invest some time and money in their business.
• Next, you could try places where translators and interpreters gather online: LinkedIn (search for other people in your language combination), forums like ProZ.com (which, I think, has a higher population of people who work in less common languages), and even Facebook groups (I’m in a couple of translator/interpreter Facebook groups that are actually really good). If none of these groups exist for your language combination, you could consider starting a group, which also positions you as the go-to person in your language combination or specialization.
• On LinkedIn, you could recruit for people in your language combination (“Looking for other Spanish to Swedish translators for networking and potential work opportunities”). This would also open up the option of starting some sort of group or collective of translators in your language combination, or even a single-language agency if you’re interested. Once you find a few of those people, maybe have a Zoom meetup or coworking session to get a sense of what the other participants are like as people.
• If you work with direct clients, you definitely need at least an editor, if not another translator to work with you. In this case, I would consider the recruitment strategy listed above, but then give people a (paid) editing test. If you ask them to edit something like 250 words, this would probably fall into their minimum charge zone, and I think that testing two or three people would be worthwhile.

Then, there’s the question of how you split up the money. Again, I would have separate strategies for agencies and direct clients. When an agency asks if I want to bill them for my work and a colleague’s work (editor, boothmate, etc.) and then I pay the other person, I always decline. This is really the agency’s responsibility; it’s the reason they’re getting approximately half of the money that the end client pays, and I also don’t want to get in the middle of a dispute: what if the other interpreter gets sick at the last minute; what if they aren’t happy with the editor’s work.

As a rule of thumb, I typically assume that the translator will get 2/3 of the per-word rate, and the editor will get 1/3. So if I bill a client 24 cents per word, I would typically split that up as 16 cents to the translator and 8 cents to the editor. In my mind, that also equalizes the effective hourly rate between the translator and the editor, which I think is fair. A translator producing 500 words an hour at 16 cents per word is making $80 an hour, and an editor producing 1,000 words an hour at 8 cents per word is also making $80 an hour. I personally prefer to pay my editors by the hour so that they are free to do a very thorough job, but that’s a personal preference.

Bonus tip: If you work with direct clients, never (never) offer editing as an optional, add-on service. If you determine that the project needs a second set of eyes (and most do), include editing in your quote (whether it’s per-word, hourly, or a lump sum) and the client has to pay for it if they want to work with you.

I hope these tips are helpful! If you have additional ideas, post them in the comments!

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

I’m the guest on this week’s episode of Smart Habits for Translators (Madalena Sanchez Zampaulo and Veronika Demichelis’ really awesome podcast about the language professions!)

Madalena and Veronika interviewed me about smart habits for taking a workcation. My husband and I spent the month of July in Fernie, British Columbia (a small town in the East Kootenay region, about an hour over the US border from northern Montana). We worked pretty much full time and spent evenings and weekends mountain biking and hiking. In the podcast episode, we talk about:

• How to take a workcation
• Why to take a workcation
• How to choose a location
• What to take with you
• How to make this work if you have kids

You can listen on the Smart Habits website, or find the podcast in your favorite podcast app!

Greetings, readers! Don’t forget to sign up for our second master class of the year, Editing and proofreading for into-English translators, taught by Karen Tkaczyk on September 29. This three-hour class always gets rave reviews, and will teach you processes and tools that you can start using right away. Past participants tell us that it has increased the quality of their work, given them more confidence that they’re not submitting translations with typos in them, and allowed them to start offering editing as a standalone service. Registration ($75) includes the recording.

On to this week’s newsletter topic: the value of giving yourself 30-day challenges.

I like 30-day challenges, because I think they help us see that:
-Whatever the challenge is, we can do it
-And/but, we don’t have to do it forever

Every year, I tell my March Marketing Madness challenge participants two things:

1. I hope that you see that doing some marketing every work day for a month is doable, and it won’t kill you
2. I hope that you form a marketing habit, but you don’t have to market every single day for the rest of your life once the challenge is over

The same is true of any 30-day challenge you might want to embark on: pick something that you want to do more of (or less of; more on that below!), but also tell yourself that this effort doesn’t have to last forever, only for 30 days.

I’ve been thinking about 30-day challenges because I recently needed a new planner. I still use a paper planner–honestly not for technophobic reasons, but because I travel a lot, and I hate the automatic time zone adjustments in Google Calendar. I’m starting to get some things on the calendar for 2024, so I went looking for a new planner, hoping to find something a little jazzier than the plain black one I purchased at Office Depot last year!

I’m honestly not much of an impulse purchaser (of anything), but as if Facebook could read my mind, up popped an ad for the Commit 30 planner (not an affiliate deal), which, who knew, is also a woman-owned small business right in my home state of Colorado. Commit 30 was running a special where you got a free 2023 planner when you bought 2024, so I ordered it up, and I love it. The planner pages are great (week-at-a-glance), there’s lots of room for extra notes (bullet journal pages in the back), it has two page-marking ribbons, one for that month’s 30-day challenge page and one for the current week (it’s the little things; I love this feature!), and it encourages you to give yourself a 30-day challenge every month of the year.

For the rest of 2023, I decided to try two types of 30-day challenges: something I’m going to do every single day of the 30 days, and something that I don’t necessarily do every day, but that I want to do regularly, within that 30-day period. For September, I picked:

• Meditating every day with the Calm app
• Not looking at Facebook or Instagram on weekends

I’m already very happy with both of these: I’ve meditated a lot with the Calm app since December 2020 when I first started using it. Basically around the time that we realized that COVID and the associated restrictions were not going away any time soon. But I’ve only meditated 30 days in a row one time during the almost three years that I’ve used the app, and I wanted to try it again. I feel like the consistency is really beneficial: my mind feels slower (in a good way) and quieter, my blood pressure is consistently really low (114/65 when I went to the doctor the other day!) and I feel more relaxed in general.

The “no social media on weekends” challenge is an example of something I don’t want to give up forever, but the 30-day challenge has been beneficial. My husband and I usually go for a long mountain bike ride or hike on the weekends, and when I get home, I often spend too much time on my phone in the name of recovery. This past weekend, I was able to knock off a couple of projects around the house that had been hanging over my head, which felt good. I can see myself using this technique to cut back on things I don’t want to completely give up but that I have a tendency to overdo (coffee) to see what happens.

I like the 30-day challenge because it gives you a taste of what consistency in certain areas can do for you. I’m thinking that next month I’ll try practicing music every day that I’m home, and I’d also like to try going to bed at 10 PM for a month and see what benefits I get from that. I think that trying something new for a month can help you determine:

• How onerous it is to do the thing; in the case of meditation, the answer is “not at all.” I’ve listened to the Calm app in all kinds of places: on the bus, while waiting for a Zoom call to start, while waiting for the oven to preheat, while waiting for my sandwich in a restaurant. I can definitely see myself continuing this habit.
• How much benefit you get from the thing: is the effort worth continuing?
• What the pleasure/pain tradeoff is. For example I wonder if I would actually have more energy if I consumed less caffeine, but I honestly don’t know because I rarely go even one day without it.

I’m a rule-follower, so I really like the Commit 30 planner’s little date bubbles that you get to cross off when you do your challenge for that day, but you could also use any sort of carrot/motivator, or stick/negative consequence that helps you maintain a new habit for a month!

I hope these tips are useful!

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope you’re all doing well in your various corners of the world!

Here’s a question for you: What kind of marketing works?
Here’s the honest answer: The kind of marketing that you do. Any kind of marketing that you do. Not the kind of marketing that you only think about, and definitely not the kind of marketing that you talk yourself out of without ever trying it.

Here’s a typical conversation between me and a freelance translator or interpreter who would like to have more work, find better clients, or make more money:

Freelancer: I’m stuck on what marketing method to use and who to contact. I don’t know if I should e-mail people first, but I’m afraid that they won’t write back. Or maybe I should start on LinkedIn. But do people really check LinkedIn that often? And I guess I could fill out agencies’ applications, but it seems like maybe they don’t respond.

Me: Well, let’s back up for a second. In, let’s say, the past six months, how many agencies or direct clients have you applied to or contacted, and what kind of results did you get?

Freelancer: Ummmmmmmmmmmmm

The reality is that so many of us are overthinking our marketing strategies, engaging in a lot of talk and not much action (and I include myself and lots of other experienced freelancers in this category). The kind of marketing that works is any kind of marketing that you do and that you stick with.

If you had a slow summer and you’re actively looking for work, here’s what I’d suggest. Don’t overthink it. Keep it simple.
–If you’re looking for agency clients, apply to five agencies per day by filling out their online forms or e-mailing them your CV (look for instructions on their website). After the first week, keep up with the online applications but add in contacting those agencies’ employees on LinkedIn, using the 300-character note that you can add to a connection request and saying that you applied via their website and are interested in the next steps. Let’s say you’re going to do this three days a week, so you’ll apply to 60 agencies a month, which is pretty good!

–If you’re looking for direct clients, follow a similar process, but obviously they don’t have translator applications on their website, so you need to either e-mail them (if they’re not in the EU GDPR zone) or contact them on LinkedIn, or approach them through a mutual connection. Aim for a similar number of contacts: five per day, three times a week. Following up with direct clients is always tricky, because many people don’t respond on the first try, but you also don’t want to hassle people who don’t need you. If you’re contacting clients in the US, I would recommend starting with e-mail (use a tool like Hunter.io to find addresses if they’re not on the client’s website), then adding LinkedIn after a week or so.

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re currently looking for new clients!