Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Freelancing


Corinne McKay

Webinar question: Does age matter?

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar on Getting Started as a Freelance Translator as part of ATA’s ongoing series of online educational sessions. I think that it went well, with huge thanks to Lucy Brooks of eCPD Webinars and Mary David and Naomi Sutcliffe de Moraes of ATA. Lots of participants submitted questions, but we only got to a few of them before our time ran out. I’ve started a new blog category, “Webinar questions,” in order to answer some more of them here. Thanks to everyone who participated!

A participant asks: Can one be too old to begin a translation business (for example, as indicated by degree completion years) or do prospective employers generally not care?
Short answer: As a freelancer, I wouldn’t worry about age too much. If you’re up-to-date enough to participate in a webinar and even submit a question, I think you’re fine.

Longer answer: This worry applies to both ends of the spectrum: 22 year old new graduates and 68 year old retirees often ask “Will clients take me seriously?” In both cases, I think the answer is “yes,” if you keep a few important factors in mind:

  • As a group, freelance translators aren’t that young. Case in point: I’m 39 and have an 8 year old child, and I’m regularly referred to as a “girl” or “young lady” by elder members of the profession. The oldest freelancer I’ve heard of was in his early 90s and I know of  numerous successful freelancers in the 70+ bracket.
  • Degree completion years? For a US resumé, I’d leave them off. After all, age discrimination is illegal and as long as you can do the job, your clients really don’t need to know how old you are. Likewise, I know several translators in their 60s and beyond who deliberately do not put their photo on their marketing materials.
  • Whether you’re on the young or old end of the freelance spectrum, keep the negative stereotypes of your age group in mind and defy them. For example, take the stereotype that older workers are set in their ways and resist new technologies. Beat this image by pointing out that you’ve recently participated in a webinar (or even more than one!) for freelance translators, that you use Skype to communicate with your clients and colleagues and that you’re really looking forward to getting to know your clients’ preferences and style guidelines. If you’re in your 20s, pay particular attention to being reliable, responsible and possibly more formal than you would be otherwise. For example, a conference interpreter training program director in the UK recently attributed the EU’s difficulty in finding new into-English interpreters to the candidates’ poor skills in their native language: Many of the young hopefuls cannot speak in the appropriate “register” for the event they would be interpreting. Their only modes of speech are informal, peppered with “like”, for instance, she says. They misuse words and don’t know the subtle differences between synonyms. So, brush up on your formal speaking skills before you go for the interview!
  • For better or worse, freelance translation is a real meritocracy. On the one hand I think that most clients, at least in the US, are largely concerned with your ability to do a good job and don’t really care if you’re older or younger than they expected. On the other hand, one flubbed assignment can get you kicked to the electronic curb, so make sure to keep your focus on outstanding work.

I’ll be answering more questions from the webinar soon!


Corinne McKay

Why netbooks are better than smartphones

Back in the summer of 2009, I wrote about my decision to purchase a netbook. Over a year later, my Asus Eee is still going strong and I still love it. I paid around $300 via Newegg and I haven’t had any software or hardware problems with my netbook despite some heavy use. And it’s really, really small and light:

I have pretty big hands but you get the picture: it’s small.

At the time I wrote my 2009 post, I was hemming and hawing between a netbook and a smartphone. I understand many of the reasons that people use and love smartphones, but I’ve since come to believe that at least for my purposes, a netbook is a much better option. Because:

  • It forces you to decide when you really need to work on the go. I’m firmly against being always on duty; I work hard while I’m working, and then I shut the computer off and go play. In fact, I think that there’s growing evidence to suggest that people who work in the low 30 hours per week are the most productive. If I owned a smartphone, I know that I would take it with me most of the time: why not use those few minutes while I’m waiting for my daughter at school or standing in line at the supermarket? But, at the risk of sounding like a Luddite, where do those “few minutes” end, and why not engage with the offline world for a few minutes? With a netbook, I only take it with me when I really need it, but because it’s so small, I do take it sometimes. My family recently went on a multi-day bike trip while I was working on a book translation. I was faced with the option to work three or four 12-hour days before we left, or to take the netbook with me and work at night on the trip. I chose the latter, stuck the Eee in my bike bag (no kidding, it fits in a bike pannier!) and felt much less stressed. My Eee also fits in the messenger bag that I use as a purse, so I take it when I get my car’s oil changed or when I know I’ll be stuck waiting somewhere for a long period of time.
  • You can do real work on it. My typing accuracy on my Eee is only marginally lower than on my desktop’s keyboard. By contrast, I think that a lot of e-mails that people write from smartphones have a smartphone quality to them; that’s OK if it’s a quick note to a colleague, but I wouldn’t want to respond to a client that way. And if I’m just reading the e-mails for the sake of reading them, why not just wait until I’m in my office? In addition, I think it can be really hard if not impossible to look at attached documents on a smartphone. My netbook has a 10 inch screen which is too small for some tasks (i.e. having multiple documents on the screen at once) but works well for word processing, reading PDFs and browsing the web.
  • A netbook can do most of what a laptop can do. Full-size laptops certainly aren’t obsolete; if you need a big screen or a really big hard drive or a lot of processor power, a full-size laptop is probably still your best choice. Netbooks are pretty amazing for their size, but I don’t think that running your speech recognition software on top of your translation memory program on top of your office suite would work very well on one. However, my netbook has completely replaced my full-size laptop for traveling (it has a standard VGA port so can be hooked up to a projector) and I wrote most of the second edition of my book on it using LyX.

Obviously the title of this article is an overstatement; if you work on projects for which you just need to monitor e-mails, I think that a smartphone can be a great choice. And I think that the urge to work too much pulls at all of us freelancers regardless of whether we have a smartphone or not. But I do think that netbooks are worth a look if you’re in needs analysis mode!


Corinne McKay

Are your marketing materials missing critical information?

In the course of preparing for the ATA conference coming to Denver in October, I’ve been visiting the websites of a lot of Denver-area businesses. Many have excellent sites, but it amazes me to see the information that is missing from some of them. Actual examples: a restaurant that does not have its address or location on its website, and several restaurants that either don’t list their hours at all or bury that information in a non-obvious location. Don’t do this to your potential clients!  Prominently feature your language pair(s), e-mail address, phone number and other important information, or those potential clients will become someone’s else’s actual client!


Corinne McKay

Projects large and small

At the moment I’m working on one of the larger projects I’ve ever taken on; a bit over 40,000 words. This has gotten me thinking about the pros and cons of large projects versus small projects, as well as which type of projects I prefer working on. I’m interested to hear what other translators think about this as well.

I think that there are a few issues associated with project length: income potential, job satisfaction and quality control (and probably others that I’ll depend on you to point out!). In terms of income potential, I don’t give volume discounts because I am usually as busy as I want to be. However, I do like that a large project gives me the opportunity to earn a guaranteed large chunk of money at once rather than a few hundred dollars at a time. Large projects have some economies of scale: one invoice, one client, one glossary for 40,000 words as opposed to multiplying all of that by 10 for a slew of 4,000 word jobs. However, I find that the higher the word count, the higher the chance of client sticker shock regardless of the per-word rate. I charge $50 per page to translate official documents, which often comes out to $1 a word or more. Still, very few potential clients ever object to that rate. But when you’re talking about 30,000 or 50,000 or 75,000 words, even a very reasonable per-word rate just comes out to a pretty huge number (and numbers tend to sound bigger when you have to say them out loud!). So, in some ways I find that it’s easier to charge high rates for short documents than it is for long ones.

Job satisfaction. I think this can cut both ways. When you land a huge project that you really love working on, it’s a treat. Life is predictable because you know what the day’s agenda is and you can really enjoy the work. But when you commit to a big project and things go wrong, it’s really excruciating. Rather than telling yourself “one more day and I never have to look at this document again,” you might be facing a month or more of slogging through a book or manual that you wish you’d never come eye to eye with.

Quality control
 on very large projects is hard. I seem to forget this every time I take on a huge project. I use CAT tools and I have a pretty good memory for terms, but when you’re getting that “haven’t I read this somewhere before?” feeling on a project that you’ve been working on for 3 weeks, it’s not always easy to pull up the section of text you’re thinking about. And when you were mulling over “CEO” versus “Chief Executive Officer,” which one did you choose? Did you change your original term or just think about it?

In general, I think that my ideal project length is about 5,000 to 8,000 words: long enough to really get into, long enough to generate a decent invoice but not long enough to start getting bored. A project of that length represents about 3-5 days of work for me, and I find that to be an appealing amount of time to work on a project. Thoughts?


Corinne McKay

Providing your own benefits

Today’s Get Rich Slowly post on saving money on insurance got me thinking about benefits in general. This is one of the most common questions I hear from beginning or aspiring freelancers: how to handle health insurance/retirement planning/disability insurance, and so on. Here’s an overview of the freelance benefits I’ve researched and used; obviously the specifics vary according to your location, and these apply mostly to freelancers working in the U.S. Also, obviously I’m not an insurance consultant or a financial planner, so please follow this advice up with a professional before you implement it.

First, accept that when you’re a freelancer, benefits eat up a lot of what you earn. I think that this is yet another argument for charging real money for your services; it’s easy to think that 500 words an hour at 10 cents a word translates (so to speak) into $50 an hour in your pocket. However, once you deduct self-employment tax, health insurance, retirement contributions and unpaid vacation, you could be netting up to 40% less than you would if you worked for an employer. If you carry other coverage such as disability, dental, life or professional liability insurance, you’re probably looking at 50% of your gross income going to benefits.

Second, look at the types of benefits you really need or want in light of your life situation and don’t always follow the conventional wisdom. For example, the Thoughts on Translation household doesn’t carry life insurance even though we’re in the demographic that should carry it (30s/40s with a young child) because we are completely debt-free, our living expenses are low and we have only one child to send to college. In our case, I feel we’re better off putting the money we’d spend on life insurance premiums into a savings account. But if you’re a single parent and your children would need to be supported into adulthood if you passed away,  you might need a hefty life insurance policy in place.

Now on to some specifics:

  • Health insurance is the elephant in the room if you live in the U.S. If you’re healthy, have no pre-existing conditions and have some savings to cover deductibles and out of pocket expenses, you can get a decent policy at a decent cost. For example, we pay under $500 per month for a Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy for our family of three, with a $2,000 per person/$5,000 maximum per year deductible. In our area, Kaiser and Anthem both offer reasonably-priced individual policies for the self-employed. The real headaches start if you have a pre-existing condition or even a past health problem that you have to disclose on the insurance application. Rumor among Colorado-based freelancers has it that you’re best off using an insurance broker, since the broker can help you fill out your application in a way that gives you the best chance of being accepted. This seems especially true if you had a health problem in the past that is now considered resolved or under control, for example if you were diagnosed with high blood pressure but it is well controlled with medication. Also, some States give you the option of forming what’s called a group of one, meaning that you get a group rate on health insurance even though you’re only one person. Here’s a CNN article about ways to obtain health coverage if you have pre-existing conditions.
  • Saving for retirement is a little less anxiety-provoking. It’s not hard to set up a SEP-IRA (Simplified Employee Pension Individual Retirement Account), Roth IRA or an Individual 401K (also called a Solo 401K or Super-Simplified 401K). These types of accounts offer similar features, but most people can contribute much more to an Individual 401K than to the other types of accounts because the base contribution limit is a flat amount rather than a percentage of your income. This may not be a factor if you only contribute a few thousand dollars a year, but if you want the option to contribute more, check out the Individual 401K. When you’re planning for retirement, consider what type of retirement you envision. Since translation is not physically demanding (and your clients don’t necessarily have to know how old you are!), many of us might work into our 70s and even later. But if you’re planning on logging off at 55 or 60 and hitting the country club, you may need enough money to support yourself for 30-40 years. Here again, I would recommend looking at your own reality rather than the conventional wisdom.
  • Then there’s vacation time and the fact that as a freelancer, if you’re not tapping the keyboard you’re not getting paid. You have a few options, such as taking “paid vacation” by working while you’re away. For example you could bring your laptop along and still try to work a few hours a day. I try not to do this because I like to get a real break from work, but it’s certainly better than not going on vacation at all. I think that a better option is to provide yourself with paid vacation by setting up a vacation savings account out of which you pay yourself during your time off. For example if you normally pay yourself $1,000 a week net and you want to take 4 weeks off per year, you could put $83 per week ($4,000 divided by the 48 weeks you’re working) into savings and then use that money to pay yourself during your month off. Unfortunately, I think that most freelancers just don’t take any or enough vacation, to to detriment of their non-work lives and enthusiasm for their jobs.
  • I don’t know much about disability insurance, but I would put it in the same category as life insurance: somewhere between indispensable and totally unnecessary depending on your circumstances. My impression is that it’s important to carefully review the policy to see what you have to do to actually claim the benefits. For example if you break your arm in a bike accident and can’t type, is that covered or excluded? If you can’t type but you can use speech recognition software, is that covered? If you develop an eye problem that makes it hard or impossible to use the computer, is that covered? I’ve heard several freelancers say that they decided to forgo disability insurance after concluding that an affordable policy is too restrictive, but this is worth researching if you’re concerned about it.

    • In conclusion, make sure to set aside some time and money for little bonuses. You know how a great boss comes up with great motivations or rewards for her/his employees? Like closing an hour early on a Friday when the weather’s nice, surprising everyone with good takeout for lunch, leaving $50 in everyone’s mailbox on the day before winter vacation or buying season tickets to a great concert series and distributing among the employees? Make sure to do those things for yourself once in a while too! Remember that benefits are intended to benefit you and make your life less stressful.