Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Freelancing


Corinne McKay

The end of year to-do list

Because you’re not doing anything else at this time of year (insert laughter here…), it’s time to review your end-of-year business checklist so that you can set some goals for next year as soon as 2010 kicks off. Here are a few things to consider, and feel free to add your own end-of-year action items in the comments!

  1. Log your business expenses. I prefer to just enter all of my business receipts for the year in one swoop, normally in late December. I log my income as every payment comes in, but I just find it easier to get into the expense-entering mindset and handle all of my expenses at once. This is much easier if you have separate business bank account (put that on the to-do list if you don’t have one!).
  2. Issue 1099s to anyone who did more than $600 of work for you in 2009. Make sure to do this promptly so that you don’t muck up your subcontractors’ tax preparation processes as well as your own.
  3. Decide how you are going to prepare your taxes. If you’re considering using an accountant for the first time, switching accountants, etc., the time to do your research is now, not on April 10. If you’re looking for an accountant, solicit recommendations from other freelancers or small businesses in your area.
  4. Purchase some durable goods if you have extra money. If you a) have money in your business account and b) need some items such as a new computer or monitors, pricey computer software (i.e. speech recognition, OCR, CAT), a desk, etc., now is a good time to buy and take the tax deduction for 2009. This applies especially if the item you want/need might go on sale after Christmas and you can purchase it at a discount just before the year ends.
  5. Review your clients. If you use accounting software, it’s easy to sort your clients by how much you earned from them in 2009. The results may surprise you! Use these results to decide who needs more of your attention next year, who you need to re-connect with and what clients can serve as models of ideal clients (so that you can find more of them in 2010!).
  6. Review and renew your professional association memberships. Whether to renew just before or just after the first of the year depends on how much money you have and which year you’d like to take the deduction for. Whichever option you choose, take a look at how much you are paying for professional association memberships and whether you need to weed out any associations or add some new ones. If you belong to an association and did not attend/participate in any of their events in 2009, consider dropping your membership.
  7. Contribute to your retirement plan(s). Here again, if you’re not saving for retirement, put that on the list too. Freelancers can use various retirement savings strategies; I have an Individual 401K (also called a Solo 401K or Super-Simplified 401K) and follow a pretty basic savings strategy. Whenever I receive a payment from a client, I immediately transfer 40% of the money into my business savings account. I use that money to pay my taxes and then deposit the rest into my 401K, investing mostly in index funds. Regardless of your retirement savings strategy, make sure to save something!


Corinne McKay

Managing your time as a freelancer

Time management is always an important issue for freelancers, and especially so at this time of year. It always seems that November and December are a triple whammy of the winter holidays, clients realizing that they need to squeeze in the last few projects of the year, and trying to finish up all of our own goals that we set back in January, so things get out of control very quickly.

When you think about how to manage your time, I think it’s important to first look at the utilitarian viewpoint: in what ways is your current time management strategy working and not working? Are you habitually scrambling to meet your deadlines (or worse yet, habitually missing deadlines)? Not sleeping enough? Having to cancel social engagements or feeling as if you have no life outside of work? Or are things mostly working for you? What are the objective restrictions on your time; do you have many commitments to other people or is your time primarily your own?

In addition, think about what sort of time management personality you have. Do rules and guidelines make you feel confident or constrained? Do you work better in a free-form environment or in a regimented one?

Looking over my own time management strategies, I feel that I am doing fairly well from the utilitarian standpoint. I’ve never missed a deadline, I sleep at least seven hours a night, exercise for about an hour most days and I rarely work in the after-school time slot in order to spend time with my daughter, so things could be worse. On the other hand, I feel like I could be doing better on projects that don’t have an imminent deadline: I want to do more direct client marketing, finish the second edition of my book and do a good job in my new role on the ATA Public Relations committee, and I feel that better time management could really help with these.

Here are a few time management strategies that work well for me, and I would be interested to hear what works for other people:

  • Use a prioritized to-do list. I rank my to-do items in high, medium and low categories so that I’m not tempted to focus on the fun but not urgent items (i.e. designing a marketing postcard, picking a new header image for my blog) rather than on the excruciating but urgent items (i.e. quarterly payroll taxes, entering receipts into my accounting software).
  • Put a leash on e-mail. Unless I’m waiting for a particularly urgent message, I check e-mail only on the hour and the half hour. Then, I respond immediately to any e-mail that requires only a really short response so that I don’t have a big stack to deal with at the end of the day. Also, I have all of my e-mail list subscriptions set to the daily digest mode so that I receive only one e-mail per day from them.
  • Break rules as needed. You know the “never eat at the computer” rule? I have to admit that I eat at the computer a lot, because it allows me to take exercise breaks in the morning or at lunch. I know some people think that eating at the computer is totally uncivilized and horrible (and I don’t do it all the time) but I’d rather run or do yoga at lunch time for half an hour and then eat a peanut butter sandwich while checking my e-mail when I get back. I think that the point here is to take the “always do this…never do that” rules that other people espouse and bend them to fit what works for you.
  • Work during the work day. This seems like an obvious one, but when you work at home, it’s sometimes hard to ignore the phone, friends wanting to get together, and all of the myriad other things you could be doing instead of working. My policies are: no answering the home phone during the work day (people who would be calling in an actual emergency have my work and cell numbers too); only one non-work commitment (school volunteering, etc.) per day, and the commitment has to last an hour or less, and no socializing during the work day unless I can combine it with another priority item such as exercising.
  • Set an overall limit on how much you are going to work. Know yourself and your capabilities; although I might really push myself for a couple of days in a row to finish a big project or do a good client a favor, I know that if I translate more than 10,000-12,000 words a week, I get tired and sloppy. So, I force myself to manage my time so that after the big push, I get at least a day off to recover and rejuvenate.

    • Now, over to the readers!


Corinne McKay

Overcoming psychological barriers to success

This week, two blog posts on the psychology of freelancing caught my eye: this one from Get Rich Slowly, entitled “Knocking out the beliefs that hold you back” and this one from I Will Teach You To Be Rich, entitled “Success and the shrug effect” (and by the way, it’s not that I love blogs about how to get rich, but these two are interesting!).

In the Get Rich Slowly post, GRS staff writer April Dykman points out how “limiting beliefs” hold us back from success. In April’s case, a college professor once told her that it was impossible to make a living as a freelance writer, which led April to a miserable stint in real estate while her freelance career went nowhere. Far from advocating a “make a wish and it will come true” approach, April gives a detailed, step-by-step guide to destroying your limiting beliefs and getting through to success by setting defined goals, finding mentors, ignoring other people’s limiting beliefs and taking small, concrete steps toward your goals. Likewise, Ramit Sethi argues in his post that we often sabotage our own success by focusing on why other people have “made it” but we can’t. For example we focus the external factors that separate us from the successful businesspeople we admire and convince ourselves that it’s those unchangeable factors that are holding us back… that person went to a name-brand school, that person has connections, that person is so much smarter than we are, etc. Ramit points out that focusing on those types of beliefs is  “an excuse to stay in your current state and do nothing.”

While I don’t agree with everything in these posts, I think that this self-defeating phenomenon is really prevalent among freelance translators, and I don’t exclude myself here. The real question is how to overcome these psychological barriers to success. Here are a few techniques I’ve used, and I would be interested to hear from readers a) what are your psychological barriers to success and b) what are you doing about them?

  • Keep tangible reminders of your success. April says that she keeps a Word document with positive things that people have said about her. I keep two files (one in my e-mail and one on paper) called “Inspiration” where I store e-mails and notes that say something nice about me. I know, it’s a little cheesy…but when I’m feeling discouraged about a goal that I’ve been struggling to reach (such as finishing the second edition of my book), I crack these files open and remember that someone once said “no one is as thorough as you” or “your book changed my life.”
  • Force yourself to accept compliments. Many translators are naturally self-effacing people who naturally discount anything positive that someone says about them. Try this: when someone says something positive about you, just say “Thank you, that’s so nice of you to say” or something like that, rather than “My work isn’t really that good” “I’m not really that smart” or whatever else you were thinking of saying in order to negate the compliment!
  • Rewind. One of my struggles this year has been figuring out how to add more direct clients to my portfolio. It has really helped to take myself back 7+ years to the start of my freelance career, when the idea of being successfully self-employed seemed like such a dream. When I think back to how hard I worked during my first two years of freelancing, I think that if I could start out with *no* clients and get to where I am now, I can certainly continue making the jump to *better* clients.
  • Do something about your deficits. Once upon a time, I spoke French really well. I lived and went to school in France for a year, then went back pretty much every summer for six or seven years after that, during which time I also had a job where I spoke French for a large part of the work day. Over the years since then, I just haven’t had as much of an occasion to speak French even though I read it all day for work. I realized that in terms of marketing to direct clients in France, one of my limiting beliefs was that “I can’t do it because my spoken French is not strong enough” and I was probably right! So, I decided to start taking French conversation lessons with a native French speaker for an hour every week. This has made a *huge* difference in my confidence level; although my spoken French is not where it was when I got off the plane from living in France, it’s actually enjoyable for me to speak French in social situations with native speakers again.
  • Quit waiting for that big block of time. If I had to single out just one psychological path to success, this would be it. Whether it’s writing a book, marketing to direct clients or keeping your office more organized, any goal is more achievable when you do a little bit every day. If you wait until you have nothing on the calendar in order to do some marketing, three months could easily go by until you find the time. But if you send out just one résumé per work day day during those three months, you will have contacted 60 potential clients.


Corinne McKay

Keeping statistics about your freelance business

It would be hard to top the buzz (furor?) generated by the guest post on translator pet peeves, so I’m going to stick with a dry topic for today!

Statistics and performance metrics are important keys to tracking the success of your freelance business. Hopefully you at least track your income and expenses, but there are many other tracking possibilities out there. I’m not a great statistics user, but I do find it extremely helpful to keep a running total of my outstanding invoices. I do this using a simple OpenOffice spreadsheet. Whenever I issue an invoice, I put the invoice details into the spreadsheet and set the spreadsheet to total up the column that includes the invoice amounts. Then, if I’m on the fence about whether to take on a project or take some extra time off, I can look at the running total and see how it compares to the amount that I want to earn in a month. If the total is substantially more than my monthly target income, I know that I’m not under any pressure to take on extra work. If it’s less, I know that I have to keep my nose to the grindstone until the total increases.

I also use my accounting software to compare my year-over-year income at various points in time. I find this to be a good sanity check; this year, although I feel as if my business volume has decreased, a quick look at last year’s income data tells me that I’ve actually earned about 20% more money because more of my work is coming from higher-paying direct clients.

Other business statistics that you might want to keep (and feel free to add your own):

  • Income by client. Use this to determine who to thank profusely at the end of the year (!) and what types of clients to market to.
  • Hourly rate for various translation jobs. Forget about the word count and divide the amount you made by how long the job took. This will tell show you which projects are more or less lucrative than others regardless of the per-word rate.
  • Time spent on non-translation tasks. This could help you figure out whether outsourcing some tasks such as OCRing, accounting, putting stamps on postcards, etc. could help improve your bottom line.
  • Average translation speed under various circumstances. If you want to know whether you work faster, and thus make more money using translation memory software,using speech recognition software, working on your laptop at a cafe instead of at home, measure it. Calculate how many finished words per hour you produce using these techniques. This might help you decide whether it’s worth investing in new software, hardware or training, whether it might be worth dictating your translations and hiring a transcriptionist to type them out, etc.

    • Feel free to add your own suggestions for things that other freelancers might like to track!


Corinne McKay

It's personal

As a freelancer, it’s always difficult to decide how much personal information your clients need or want to know about you. In one sense, Americans in general are relatively disinclined to share personal information with employers. Unlike in much of Europe, where it’s customary to include your birth date, marital status and a photograph on your resumé, standard practice in the US is to omit almost all personal information, even down to the dates you graduated from college or held a certain job. On the other hand, we all want to appear “real” and approachable to our clients, and part of this involves allowing our clients to know a bit about us.

As translators, we have some specific considerations. For example, we have to decide whether to mention (overtly or casually) that our spouse is a native speaker of our source language, or our sister-in-law is an intellectual property attorney and occasionally proofreads our translations.

Recently, I’ve talked to a couple of new translators who are faced with a dilemma; say nothing about their personal lives and let the client guess what they’ve been up to for the past 10 years, or risk providing too much information. For example, if a freelancer has been technically unemployed for the past decade but in reality has been raising a disabled child, running a homeowners association, serving as the general contractor for large-scale home renovations etc., does this show the person’s dedication, energy and ability to multi-task, or provide information that the client really doesn’t need to know?

I’ll admit that I normally err on the side of saying too little. Although I’ve combined freelancing and parenting since my daughter was an infant, I take on a standard volume of work and have never missed a deadline, so I feel that my family situation really isn’t the client’s concern. However, I’ve heard other freelancers be a lot more open, even telling clients that they are typically not in the office from 3-8 because they’re getting the kids at school, having dinner and putting the kids to bed.

Readers, what do you think? Is personal information relevant or irrelevant to a freelancer’s clients?