Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Freelancing


Corinne McKay

A few financial management tips

After working all day on my business taxes (year-end and fourth quarter…I need a mocha!), my thoughts are firmly stuck in the financial realm. So let’s stick with that topic and talk about some tips for managing your freelance finances. Some of these are US-specific and some apply worldwide, so especially if you’re an overseas reader, feel free to contribute your own tips too!

  • Have a business bank account and business debit card. Your business and personal finances should be completely separate, and the debit card statements save you from dealing with a shoebox full of receipts at the end of the year.
  • I posted this one on Twitter earlier today. Set up a business savings account. Every time you receive a payment from a client, immediately transfer at least 30% of the payment into the savings account (the exact amount depends on your tax bracket, retirement goals, etc.). Use the saved funds to pay your taxes, fund your retirement account, etc. Over the years, I’ve heard numerous freelancers lamenting “…made more money than I thought this year…owe $6,000 and I don’t know where that’s coming from…” This year-end downer can easily be avoided with the business savings account plan.
  • Keep a running total of your receivables. Let’s say that your gross income goal is $6,000 per month. If you only have $4,000 in outstanding invoices, it’s time to get cracking; you can’t afford to be too picky about what you accept and what you decline. If you have $8,000 in outstanding invoices, it’s a good time to raise your rates, be choosier about what you accept, or work on some non-paying projects that interest you. I use an Excel spreadsheet for this task. Whenever I issue an invoice, I enter it into the Excel sheet and it is automatically added to my running total receivables.
  • Set up a paid vacation account. Lots of translators insist that they can never take time off because if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. Part of the solution is to raise your rates so that you don’t have to be working all the time. The other part is to give yourself paid vacation. For example if you typically gross $1,500 per week and you want to take 4 weeks a year off, you need $6,000 in savings in order to pay yourself $1,500 per week off. Divided by the 48 weeks a year that you would be working, that’s $125 per week. Stash that amount in your paid vacation account and when your vacation time rolls around, you’re set!
  • If you subcontracted more than $600 of work to anyone during the year, make sure to send that person/entity a 1099-MISC by January 31. I use FileTaxes.com to prepare these online and mail them to the recipients. My accountant recommends sending 1099s to both individuals and corporations.
  • Within the limits of the law, deduct, deduct, deduct. I’ve been freelancing for 10 years and I’m still finding out about new deductions: this year’s discovery was the potential to deduct my daughter’s summer day camp costs (may apply to private babysitting too) under the Federal child care credit. Some restrictions apply: the child has to be under 13, sleepaway fees are not eligible, and if you are married, your spouse has to be employed. Plus, of course there’s a cap: you can probably claim only $3,000 per child or $6,000 total, and that includes work-related child care during the school year if you use any. Here’s the IRS page about this topic. And as always, ask your accountant!


Corinne McKay

My favorite mistake

No, not the Sheryl Crow song, the Newsweek/Daily Beast Column. Maybe I just love reading about other people’s mistakes, but the last-page “My Favorite Mistake” essay is my favorite part of the redesigned Newsweek. Written by famous people of various flavors, these columns just reinforce the fact that whether it’s Madeleine Albright wearing her “three monkeys” pin for a meeting with Vladimir Putin, Ricki Lake doing online dating or Dennis Quaid using cocaine, we are, as my yoga teacher would say, all on the path.

This week’s essay, by violinist Joshua Bell, particularly grabbed my attention. Although I’m not a rabid fan of Bell’s music, he’s the subject of one of my favorite newspaper articles ever, Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pearls Before Breakfast, in which Weingarten chronicles Bell’s incognito performance in the Washington DC subway at rush hour. Bell’s “My Favorite Mistake” column tells the story of his first international violin competition performance, in which he flubbed the opening of his piece and decided to stop, apologize to the audience and start over rather than soldiering on through the performance. This got me thinking that we translators and interpreters, who by nature thrive on being right about everything, could also benefit from hauling our favorite mistakes out of the archives. Here’s mine. I told this story during the “Smart Business” panel at the Boston ATA conference so it’s not totally fresh, but this is its first time in writing!

I started freelancing in 2002, right after my daughter was born. I had a Master’s in French and had done a translation internship, but I really had no clue about the conventions of the translation industry. Plus, I was very, very hungry for work because I knew that my goal of working from home to be with my daughter was completely dependent on my success as a freelancer: if I didn’t make it, it was off to full-time daycare for her and off to a cubicle for me.

One of the first assignments that I received was from an agency, a very simple birth certificate translation, maybe 100 words total. I think that my minimum charge at the time was $30, and the agency didn’t give me any special instructions, just asked me to “translate the birth certificate.” So there I am at my computer, thinking that this is the easiest $30 I’ve ever made. I mean, for 100 words, why even put the translation in a Word document? Why not just type it into an e-mail to save the client some time dealing with the attachment. Obviously the missing link here is my lack of knowledge of the conventions of translating an official document: the big time investment isn’t translating the 50 or 100 words, it’s re-formatting the translation to look as much as possible like the original. So off I go, typing the translation into an e-mail and firing it off to the client, feeling really proud of myself (aren’t I efficient?!).

I have to say that the client was fairly understanding; probably more understanding than I would have been had I been on the receiving end of that e-mail. In any case I think they paid me the $30 we had agreed on, which was more than generous on their part since they ended up hiring another translator to do the job. But when I think back on this Favorite Mistake, I think that it really helped me. Obviously I learned something about official document translation, but I also learned a few larger lessons:

  • Knowing how to translate and knowing how to run a freelance business are completely different things; to succeed as a freelancer, you need to know both.
  • Try as we might to forget it, we were all new, inexperienced freelancers once. Maybe someone else’s stupid mistake wasn’t quite as stupid as mine, but we’ve all made them.
  • When translation newbies ask uninformed questions (Why doesn’t my TM tool spit out a translation after I type something into it? How much do I have to pay to get work from an agency? I charge 2 cents a word, is that about the industry standard? I’m looking for a business that’s easy to run in my spare time, would conference interpreting be good?), it’s hard not to be condescending, but it’s important to at least try. Whenever I answer a question like these, I think back to my “this is the easiest $30 I ever made!!” moment and try to give a thorough and non-condescending answer. Although these questions (and my birth certificate mistake) are completely off the mark, I also think it’s fair to ask how someone who’s never worked as a translator would know that TM and MT are two different things, or that agencies don’t charge up-front fees, or that the highest-paid freelancers make 40 or 50 cents a word, or that conference interpreters go to school for years  just to learn the basics of the job.

Readers, any other Favorite Mistakes out there?


Corinne McKay

Update on communication tools

Back in March, I wrote a post about my search for a different office phone setup. I had been using a custom ring number (inexpensive but doesn’t allow separate outgoing messages for the home and office numbers) and had excluded the option of a business cell phone, simply because I dislike carrying and talking on a cell phone (there, I said it!). After much hemming and hawing and gnashing of teeth, I decided to switch my office phone line to Vonage’s minimum VOIP (Internet phone) plan, and around the same time I purchased a WebEx Event Center account for my translation webinar business.

My verdict on both of these services is: meh. Which, now that it’s been added to the Collins English Dictionary, is a legitimate expression of indifference and mediocrity. So here we go with the details:

For now, I’m sticking with Vonage, but I don’t love them. I have their “US & Canada 300” plan, which runs $11.99 per month plus taxes and fees. I set it up myself with no problems, Vonage ported my custom ring number with no problems, and the service worked as soon as I connected the Vonage box. Given the overall reputation of telcos and customer service, you have to give them credit for that! However, the sound quality on the Vonage line is far from stellar. It’s definitely not as clear as a land line or even Skype; I haven’t had any dropped calls, but the sound quality just is not smooth: lots of blips and skips and missed half-syllables, which can be irritating on a business call. And it’s worth noting that my DSL connection is fast enough that Skype, YouTube, etc. are no problem. In addition, the outgoing sound (meaning what the person I’m talking to hears) seems to cut out completely for a second or two if I’m talking on the Vonage line and my home land line rings. Still, for $16 a month including taxes, it’s workable. I mainly have the line so that my clients get a nice, professional outgoingl message, and so that I can update the message when I’m out of the office. One Vonage feature I’ve really come to love is the e-mailed .wav files of voicemail messages. When I’m away for a few days, for example at the ATA conference, I can just listen to my voicemails on my netbook and then decide if I need to respond. No more calling the office line a few times a day to check for messages! Executive summary: not a bad value for the cost, but not advisable if you talk on the phone a great deal for business.

On the other hand, WebEx proved to be a fairly crashing disappointment. Speaking of Translation purchased a subscription to Event Center 100 for $99 a month, a fairly large investment for our small venture. However, we were convinced that WebEx was the webinar platform of choice for enterprise-quality events, so we felt that the investment would pay off. It took us a few tries to get the platform working (and we’re not technophobes!) and the user interface has some definite flaws. For example when you schedule an event, the default number of attendees is “99999,” regardless of the number of attendees that your account allows. So, if you forget to change that number, your webinar can be oversubscribed before you realize the error. In addition, the interface allows you to enable both the over-the-phone audioconference option and the VOIP audioconference option, but they are not compatible with each other; and that’s before you find out that the VOIP feature is essentially unusable due to its poor sound quality. On three of the webinars we hosted, the presenter’s audio connection suddenly dropped in the middle of the session (different presenters using different phone providers) and our attendees had many problems configuring WebEx’s viewer widget to view our live webinars and our recordings. WebEx’s tech support reps were always polite and helpful, but in the end it took a huge amount of our time to resolve (or attempt to resolve) these problems and we ended up issuing a lot of complimentary webinar vouchers to make up for them. There are also some features that seem pretty basic that WebEx just does not have: no on-hold or waiting music for attendees, no way to block attendees from hearing what the presenters are saying before the session starts, etc. So, we’re all through with WebEx for now!

On a more positive note, I recently discovered a very neat audioconferencing tool, FreeConferenceCallHD. Like other free audioconference services, this one allows your call attendees to phone a toll number and participate in your conference call while you control things via a web dashboard. The dashboard allows you to mute and unmute people, record the call, etc. The very appealing feature of FreeConferenceCallHD is the option for attendees to connect by Skype, using a Skype-to-Skype contact (free) rather than a Skype-to-phone contact. For example, attendees just add “freeconferencecallhd.XXXXXXXXXX” (where the Xs represent your toll dial-in number) as a Skype contact; the contact request is automatically accepted, then the attendee initiates a call to that number and they’re placed into the audioconference. This is nice because it eliminates international access number problems; no more “I live in the Czech Republic but I have a Slovenian cell phone number, so what number should I call???”  I’ve conducted two very successful tests with this platform; at first I was honestly skeptical that a free service could provide a high-quality product, but the two calls I’ve done have honestly gone better than any of the WebEx sessions that we did. So, this looks like an attractive option for 2012!


Corinne McKay

5 things to do before 2012

Hello readers! Thoughts on Translation is back from an incredible two weeks in Costa Rica: we visited Corcovado National Park and the Arenal volcano area and it was truly amazing. I highly recommend Corcovado Adventures Tent Camp and the Sirena ranger station for a truly off-the-beaten-track experience. Think wild tapirs wandering down the beach and 10-foot crocodiles floating in the surf (seriously!). We rented a small but beautiful house in Arenal and had a lot of fun rafting with Costa Rica Descents, paddleboarding with Desafio and zip-lining with EcoGlide; I skipped their famous Tarzan Swing but my husband and my daughter loved it! And now…it’s seven degrees here in Colorado and we have eight inches of snow in our front yard. I’m not completely sure why we came back from Costa Rica but there’s plenty of translating to be done, so I’m trying to focus on the positive and look forward to ski season!

While I was on vacation, I started thinking about wrapping up 2011 and setting goals for 2012. I’ve assembled a list of five things I think every freelance translator should do before 2012, and I hope that you’ll add your own in the comments! Addendum: In catching up on Google Reader, I just found this post on the same topic from Sara Freitas-Maltaverne. Excellent suggestions for those who read French!

  1. Do a searching and fearless assessment of 2011. Did you meet your financial goals or did you fall short? Did you finish the major items on your business to-do list or are they still taunting you from the sticky note on your monitor? Think about what needs to change. If you’re like me, some of the same goals appear on your goal list over and over. It took me years (literally) to realize that when that happens, it means that my current method for achieving those goals is irreparably broken. For example I had been trying to finish the second edition of my book for literally three years. Finally I decided that I just had to block out an hour a day and treat that time as sacrosanct, only to be used to work on the book. I won’t say it was easy to follow through on that, but the project got finished! So if you keep saying you’re going to… (upgrade your computer, learn a new TM tool, use your speech recognition software more, attend more client networking events, have a face-to-face meeting with at least one client a month, or whatever) and it hasn’t happened yet, don’t just write it on the list for 2012, make a new plan for actually accomplishing it.
  2. Make any end-of-year purchases or contributions. Before you make your final tax payment for 2011, it’s a good time to burn some money out of the business account if you have a surplus. If you pay your 2012 professional association membership dues before December 31, you can deduct them from your 2011 income. If you need a new piece of durable goods (printer, expensive software, office furniture, netbook, etc.), you can decrease your 2011 taxable income by buying it now. Ditto with contributions to most, although not all, retirement accounts. I have an individual 401K for my corporation, which has the advantage of having a very high contribution limit but the disadvantage that the withdrawals will probably be taxed as ordinary income once I’m old enough to take money out of the account. Other investment vehicles such as the Roth IRA work in the opposite manner: your contribution may not be tax-deducible, but your withdrawals may be. Definitely ask your accountant or financial planner about the pluses and minuses of various year-end contributions.
  3. Get your 2011 deductions in order. Make sure that if you are claiming more than $600 of subcontracting expenses to any one person or corporation, you get their tax data and send them a 1099. And make sure to claim every legal deduction that you can. I don’t like to stretch the rules, but I’m always finding new deductions that I was unaware of. This year’s: if you have kids age 12 or under, you may be able to deduct up to $3,000 of summer day camp costs per child as work-related dependent care. Make sure to get the camp’s tax ID information and make sure that you meet the requirements for the deduction; for example in most cases you cannot claim any work-related dependent care expenses (day care, summer camp or otherwise) if your spouse doesn’t work, and if your kids go to sleepaway camp, you may have to research whether the deduction applies.
  4. Decide whether you are going to raise your rates. I find that with my agency clients, it’s helpful to raise my rates a little bit every year rather than trying to impose a large increase all at once. If you’ve been thinking of raising your rates, the end of the year provides a good reason to do so. You can even prepare a rate sheet with your 2012 rates and send it out to your clients individually.
  5. And of course…start setting your goals for 2012! Whether it’s to earn more, work less, diversify your client base, upgrade your skills or attend some new conferences, now is the time to think about next year. Think about how quickly 2011 went: doesn’t it seem like a short time ago that you were setting your 2011 goals?

Overall I feel quite positive about 2011. In contrast with the larger world economy, the translation industry is still booming and I’ve had as much work as I could handle for most of the year. In terms of goals, I finally (finally!) polished off the second edition of my book, but I could have done more with my direct client marketing campaign. That’s the other advantage of reviewing 2011 in early December: still three weeks left to salvage those lingering to-do items!


Corinne McKay

ATA conference topic: low payers

Amazingly enough in this economy, my sense from the ATA conference is that most freelancers are very happy with their work volume and income levels. Especially as compared with the gloom and doom of the US economy (maybe even the world economy?), I think we’re doing quite well. 2011 has brought me as much work as I wanted and I’m happy with my income despite devoting a fair bit of time to the second edition of my book and my new webinar venture.

Still,  low-paying agencies were a hot topic at the conference. Some freelancers feel that ATA should take a stand on this or somehow get involved (not likely to happen in any case), or that freelancers should come to some sort of consensus on how to handle these agencies. I don’t have the perfect answer, but here are some of my thoughts, and feel free to add your own:

  • The best defense against low payers is simply to be too busy to even contemplate working with them. When I receive lowball inquiries from agencies, I either delete them without responding or respond and say “My minimum rate is X and I’m very busy at that rate, so I will have to decline. Please keep me in mind if you have any future projects with a larger budget.” Part of me feels that an agency looking for a professional translator for 6 cents a word doesn’t even deserve a response, while the other part of me feels that it’s a public service to communicate that professionals charge real money and that we are very busy dealing with clients who pay real money.
  • There really is enough well-paying work to go around. Judy Jenner says this all the time, and I completely agree. There is more than enough well-paying work for all 2,000 people who were at the ATA conference and then some. Leave the low payers to their business model while you pursue yours: the market is there.
  • Most translators charge what their work is worth. You know how every once in a while you have this horrible sinking fear that there are people out there charging a tiny fraction of what you charge and producing well-researched, beautifully-written translations delivered on or before deadline with a smile? Well, I would let go of that fear. As demonstrated by Chris Durban‘s “Mystery Shopper” experiment (described in her presentation at the ATA Translation Company Division conference), agencies that compete on price alone generally produce unusably lousy translations, using some combination of non-native speakers, people who aren’t actually professional translators, machine translation or all three.
  • If you don’t want to deal with low payers, step away from the places they hang out. I’m not one to name names, but auction-style translation marketplaces are not the place to be if you want to earn real money. Instead, market to quality-conscious agencies: see my post on Using Payment Practices as a marketing tool for some ideas on how to do that.
  • Don’t expect associations to get involved. It’s not really ATA’s place to disrupt the free market or set freelancers’ rates for them. Even if ATA were legally able to get involved in rates, who gets to decide what constitutes lowballing? If you currently work for 15 cents a word, 7 cents is lowballing. If you currently work for 45 cents a word, 30 cents is lowballing, and so on.
  • Put your energy where it matters. I believe in fighting for what’s right, but you’re never going to put the Wal-Marts of translation out of business or convince them to quadruple what they pay their translators. So move on; let go. You know how they say that living well is the best revenge? Get your revenge on the lowball market by charging more than they will ever be able to!

In general, I can’t say that I spend a lot of time thinking about or dealing with the Wal-Marts of translation. They’re not my target market and I have more than enough work without them. Other thoughts?