Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Freelancing


Corinne McKay

Goals for 2012: are you halfway there?

Shockingly enough, June 30, and with it the end of the second quarter of 2012, is on Saturday. It’s a great time of year to evaluate your progress on your 2012 goals, while you still have six months left before December 31. Before you panic and refuse to think about any goals at all, give yourself some slack. You still have six months, maybe your goals have changed since January 1, and now is a good time to refocus. So ask yourself:

  • What exactly were you planning to do this year? Did you write down some goals in January or just formulate some ideas in your head? Were some of your goals more critical than others? Have you achieved something that you hadn’t set as a goal but that felt good nonetheless?
  • How are you doing on your critical goals? If you haven’t made any progress on them, why? If you’ve branched out in other directions, why?
  • What’s your plan for the next six months? Keep chipping away at your general 2012 goals? Set some new ones? Take a break?

I know it’s always hard to go first, so I’ll go first! Overall, I feel good about the first half of 2012. In terms of work volume and income, the first quarter was slow-ish; not scary slow, but slow enough that I wanted things to pick up for the rest of the year. After finally getting my act together to do a direct client marketing campaign that had been on the back burner for approximately forever (one goal achieved!), the second quarter roared along at almost double my target income. So from the financial standpoint, things are looking good. My family is spending the summer in Switzerland for my husband’s job and I don’t have to stress out about how much I work while we’re here, which is a good feeling.

I also did a bit more marketing for my online course and my book, and three consecutive sessions of the class were full. Another goal achieved! My next book, a compilation of entries from this blog, is ABC (all but cover) and just today I updated my professional website for the first time in about two years. My super colleague Eve Bodeux motivated me to buy and learn Trados Studio 2011 and whaddaya know, I love it.

Not that 2012 has been all roses and kittens. During the past few months I’ve been largely in survival mode, working nearly every evening and barely keeping up with my non-translation tasks. On the day before we left for Switzerland, I answered 97 backlogged e-mails and my Inbox still wasn’t empty. In addition, I put a fair amount of time into some direct client bids that didn’t come to fruition; of course we all know that this is just part of the ebb and flow and freelancing, but it’s still a downer when it happens. So, my primary goal for the second half of 2012 is to try to achieve a better balance between sanity and income by continuing to work on marketing, finding new sales channels for my book and having specific tasks that I want to work on when I’m not translating.

Readers, how about you?


Corinne McKay

Speaking of Translation call recording

On June 13, Eve Bodeux and I broadcast the latest installment in our series of Speaking of Translation conference calls. This call focused on “taking your freelance business on the road,” and we talked about issues related to working while you’re in another country for an extended period of time. With some great input from Tess Whitty of Swedish Translation Services, we answered questions related to technology, mobile communications, choosing a location for your freelance sabbatical, including your family in the sabbatical and managing your money while overseas. You can listen to the recording (it’s about 45 minutes) without downloading anything; just hop on over to the Speaking of Translation website!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on saturated markets

There are a lot of disparities within the translation and interpreting industry, and one of those is the difference between language pairs/specializations that are fairly rare versus those that are fairly saturated. In this post I’ll both offer and request advice, since I often have students in my online translation course who work in saturated markets (and I’d like some fresh tips to offer them!).

First, let’s look at some numbers from the ATA membership directory, in terms of the number of people who have the following language combinations listed in their profiles:

  • English to Spanish translators: 2,111
  • German to English translators: 800
  • Russian to English translators: 480
  • Japanese to English translators: 394
  • Arabic interpreters: 148
  • Burmese interpreters: 3

Obviously I selected these to prove a point. But even the number of people registered for a fairly large language pair such as German to English pales in comparison with the 2,000+ English to Spanish translators. I’ve recently begun the process of preparing for the French court interpreter exam in Colorado. French isn’t exactly an obscure language, but there are currently no certified French court interpreters in the state. By contrast, the list of certified Spanish interpreters takes up several pages. I would assume that the situation is the same for certain language pairs in other countries (for example English>French translators in Quebec).

Saturated markets have a few issues:

  • Competition among translators and interpreters is often intense and very price-based.
  • Clients, especially large clients, are often able to keep rates on the low end of the spectrum. For example, PRI’s The World recently ran a story on pay cuts to court interpreters in Nevada, and certified Spanish court interpreters here in Colorado make $35 an hour.
  • Freelancers who work in saturated markets are often reluctant to share information with their colleagues; they are afraid to disclose who they work for or how much they charge, for fear of being undercut by someone else who charges less.
  • Freelancers in saturated markets have less incentive to get new credentials or improve their skills, because they don’t feel that they can charge commensurately higher rates.
  • The sheer number of people in the saturated market creates an “anyone can do it” mentality, and the market becomes even more saturated with people whose skill levels are not up to par.

But enough doom and gloom: the real question is, what’s a translator or interpreter in a saturated market to do? Here are a few suggestions, and (please!) feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

  • First, a pep talk: remember that you do not need enough work to keep all 2,000 English to Spanish translators in the ATA busy. You just need enough work for yourself. I would venture a guess that many established translators earn the bulk of their income from their 3-5 main clients. Do you think there are 3-5 clients out there who will pay real money for your services? Right, I think so too. So let’s figure out how to find them.
  • For translators who are not restricted to working with clients in their home area, the obvious solution is to look for clients in other areas. For example, for English to Spanish translators who live in Latin America, I would definitely recommend looking for clients in the US and/or the UK.
  • In order to do that, make sure to solicit the help of a native English speaker who lives in your target market country. For example if you want to apply to translation clients in the US, your application materials must be in error-free US English.
  • Look for direct clients. I work for and enjoy working for both agencies and direct clients. But I think that many direct clients get attached to translators they like, and are also less price-sensitive than agencies are, so they are a good bet if you work in a saturated market.
  • Get some credentials. For example, of the 2,111 people registered as English to Spanish translators on the ATA website, only 484 are certified for English to Spanish. 484 people is still a lot, but here we’ve already narrowed the pool down to 1/4 of what it was. I think that any credential you can earn: ATA certification, a translation certificate, court interpreter certification (if at the Federal level, even better!), etc. is a big plus.
  • Concentrate on the advantages that you offer: familiarity with the source language culture, ability to do on-site work, ability to provide multiple services (voiceover, transcription, subtitling, etc.) all spring to mind.

And please tell me that you have some more tips too!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on rates and quotes

I really enjoyed reading The Freelancery’s recent post on whether or not to publish your freelance rates on your website. Since my website redesign a few years ago, I’ve struggled with this same dilemma: I grow weary of preparing quotes for clients whose budget turns out to be 1/3 of what I charge, so I post my rates on my website. Then I feel like having posted rates is too restrictive and doesn’t steer the conversation toward value for money, so I take my rates down. Here’s my current line of reasoning, which is, of course, subject to change!

No question about it, handling inquiries from prospective clients who have little to no budget can be draining. Sometimes the slim to nonexistent funding isn’t mentioned until 25 minutes into the phone conversation (this happened to me recently), and sometimes it’s brought up with a tone of righteous indignation on the prospective client’s part (“If you can’t do it for $25 an hour, our marketing manager’s son who studied abroad in Belgium will be happy to do it for $15”). It’s just a bummer to spend so much time talking to prospective clients who expect so much for so little. However, I agree with The Freelancery’s suggestion that these interactions are also opportunities: maybe an opportunity to refer work to a beginning translator who charges less, maybe an opportunity to mention that professional translators don’t generally work for what the client’s budget is, etc. In the end, I do think that we perform a service on behalf of the profession when we have these types of conversations.

In terms of posted rates, I feel that I’ve found somewhat of a happy medium that works for me.

  • I removed my general “Rates” page from my website and I ask prospective clients to call or e-mail for a quote. However, I don’t prepare a detailed quote until they confirm that my rates are at least somewhat within their budget. This avoids the time-suck of preparing a full quote only to find out that the client’s budget is less than half of what I charge.
  • I left my rates for “fixed-price” items on my website. For example for certified translations of official documents, I always charge $50 per page for the translation and $15 for a notarized certification, and most of these clients are first-time, one-time clients. The Freelancery’s post hits this one on the head (and they mention translation in their examples!); clients who want their birth certificate translated into English don’t want to call for a quote, they just want it done fast and for a not exorbitant amount of money. My rate to translate official documents might be more expensive than some other freelancers, but I know it’s much cheaper than most agencies’ minimum charges, so I feel fine about posting it.

In closing, although I think of myself as a kind and understanding person and as someone who tries to be helpful whenever it’s possible, two aspects of rates and quoting really raise my blood pressure. I’ll admit them publicly in order to get them off my chest:

  1. Why do so many prospective clients seem to lose the ability to do math when it comes to translation quotes? If I give the example that at 25 cents per word, a full page of single-spaced text would cost approximately $125 to translate, why is it then a surprise that a 10-page document costs $1,250 to translate?
  2. Why do so many prospective clients feel that it should take a couple of hours to translate something that took months or even years to write? I get this a lot from authors: “But the book is so short! It will really take you 10 hours to translate it?” I can’t decide whether it would be helpful or nasty to ask if it really took them more than 10 hours to write the book, but I try to just answer the question objectively since I enjoy doing literary translation and working with authors.

Feel free to add your own observations on rates and quotes too (or associated issues that you need to get off your chest!). Thanks for listening, I feel so much better.


Corinne McKay

Two cents, or $10,000?

If you’re a freelancer, you probably conduct price negotiations with clients or potential clients almost every day of your professional life. For translators, especially translators who work with agencies, these negotiations often come down to a difference of one or two cents. Your minimum rate is 15 cents per word and the client will only pay 14, or 13.5, and so on.

Price negotiation is a difficult part of freelancing. The fact that translation is normally priced in such small increments (words or lines) makes it even more difficult; kind of the opposite of negotiating the price of a house. For example when we moved from Boston to Colorado a number of years ago, my husband and I sold our house for about $300,000. When we were negotiating the sale price, we had to remind ourselves that these seemingly huge amounts of money ($6,000 to have the siding replaced! $500 to have a hauling company come take away old furniture!) represented only a tiny fraction of the house’s sale price. Translation works the other way around: we’re talking cents here, not thousands of dollars, so declining a project because the client won’t pay one more cent per word can leave a translator feeling like kind of a petty miser.

But here’s the thing: say that most full-time freelancers translate 400,000 or 500,000 words per year.  Let’s say 500,000 because I’m not that great at math and it’s easy to multiply by five. That seemingly petty one cent per word? If you extrapolate that over 500,000 words per year, it’s actually $5,000. Two cents? How about $10,000?

Forcing yourself to think about prices by the project rather than by the word can help you avoid caving in to the “it’s just one cent” mentality. Instead of negotiating the per-word price, how about calculating how much money you’re giving up per project, or per year? Rather than seeing your negotiations as “just a cent,” you’ll have a more realistic idea of the effect on your total income.