Freelancing

Let’s talk about the feeling that “it’s too late” to make progress on your freelance goals. Here’s how this shows up in my own freelance career, and when I talk to other freelancers:

• The feeling that you’ve waited so long to do something, that it’s no longer worth doing. “I’ve been planning to redo my website for two years, so maybe I’ll just forget about it.” “I’ve been saying for the past three years that this is my year to start working with direct clients; I’ve waited so long that it’s never going to happen.”
• The feeling that a goal will take so long to achieve, that it’s not worth starting. I experienced this (big-time!!) in my own freelance life, when I “thought about thinking about” going back to school for interpreting for fifteen years before I actually did it. By the time the stars aligned (my kid grew up, remote interpreting was more of a thing, I had the option of doing a conference interpreting Master’s without relocating), I thought is this worth doing at age 48, or should I just shelve the ambition?

Here’s the truth:

• We need to embrace the Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” The months/years that you’ve spent not doing something are water under the bridge. If you find a way to change the past, let me know. Otherwise, start today with, let’s say, 15 minutes of effort on a business-related project that you’ve been putting off. Investigate what it would take to get that new certification or degree. Contact two people on LinkedIn who might need a translator like you. Dredge up the e-mail from that web designer whose work you really liked. Create that retirement account. Acknowledge that you didn’t do this when you planned to/should have, but that literally doesn’t matter. Do it now!
• We also need to embrace the idea that time passes at the same rate, no matter what you’re doing with it. When I was contemplating going to interpreting school, people told me two very helpful things: 1) Every expert was once a beginner. The only choices you have are to start from where you are, or to never pursue this goal; and 2) The time is going to pass anyway. If it takes you, let’s say, a year to get your skills to the point where you have a reasonable chance of being accepted to an interpreting program (side note: it actually took a year and a half!), and then a year to do the program, those two years are going to pass anyway, whether you’re sitting on your hands or pursuing this goal.

I’ve actually found multiple advantages to pursuing long-delayed freelance goals. First, it feels so amazing to finally get it done (whatever “it” is), perhaps even better than if you had just done the task when you meant to. If getting a certification, or finally setting up a retirement account, feels good when you do it right away, it feels really, really good when you’ve achieved it after years of avoidance!

Also, when you pursue a new line of business and you’re not 22 years old, clients immediately think that you have a level of experience commensurate with your age. You don’t want to lie, but you don’t need to correct them! If you’re a newly minted freelancer who’s middle-aged, and clients assume you’ve been doing this job for 25 years (this has happened to me multiple times with interpreting), just smile and nod and thank them for their trust. By this I don’t mean misrepresenting your experience, but I do mean that when, let’s say, it’s your first time interpreting for a deposition, and one of the attorneys says (actual example…) “Impressive! You’ve clearly been doing this for a while!” your only job is to thank them for the compliment.

And now, go get it: chip away at something you’ve been avoiding! It’s not too late!

Happy solstice; it’s officially summer here in the northern hemisphere! This week, let’s talk about how to deal with anxiety a a freelancer. Whether or not you’re an anxious person, freelancing can bring up a lot of anxiety, in various ways.

As freelancers, we have pretty much zero job security (clients can use us, or not, at will), our incomes can be unpredictable, and we don’t get regular performance reviews. Sometimes clients don’t contact us for a while, and we fantasize that we made some catastrophic error the last time they worked with us. Maybe, but probably not! But in the meantime, we tend to concoct plenty of crazy mental stories about our own real or perceived incompetence. We tend to wonder:
-Am I earning enough money?
-Am I going to have enough work next week (month, year…)?
-Do my clients like me? What about the ones I haven’t heard from in a while (anxiously conjuring up images of clients talking amongst themselves about how incompetent we are)?

Our fears might even spiral into questions like, is AI going to replace me and do I need to look for a new career??

I’m definitely not a psychotherapist. I’m also not an overtly anxious person; I rarely cry and pretty much never yell. I tend to believe that things in life either work out, or don’t work out, and yet the world keeps on turning and life goes on. However, in my adult life I’ve realized that I have some anxiety-driven behaviors: specifically emotional eating, cuticle biting, and overtalking (repeating myself or just talking too much instead of listening). Thus, I’ve thought a lot about anxiety and how to address it. Here are a few tips:

First, distinguish between rational and irrational anxiety. Worrying about having enough work is rational. Worrying about being good at your job is rational. But many or even most of us tend to spiral into irrational anxiety: like, as of today, I will never have any more work, because of that all of my friends will abandon me, and I’ll die in friendless poverty. Not really rational.

Personally, I like to address rational anxiety through action and data. Here are a few examples:
-I keep enough money in my business account to cover at least three months of business and personal expenses. Thus, if I had literally no work for three months, or I had a health crisis, or someone in my family had a health crisis, or I decided to take the summer off and go bike or hike in some cool destination (now we’re talking!), I would be OK financially. This helps me avoid the anxiety of missing out on a freelance project or having a temporary dip in income, because I’m earning the money that pays the bills for four months from now, not the money that pays the electric bill that’s due next week.
–I constantly work on my translation and interpreting skills and get external assessments of how I’m doing. Realistically, a lot of interpreters don’t have a ton of formal training. After I passed the Colorado court interpreter exam, I was still too scared to accept conference interpreting work, which meant that clients would sometimes hire (actual example) the local middle school French teacher to interpret for their meeting. But, deep in my heart, I knew that until expert interpreters gave me the seal of approval, I would never have the confidence to accept conference interpreting work. So I got a Master’s in conference interpreting; not cheap, or easy, or quick, but that was what I needed to do to eliminate my own performance anxiety and impostor syndrome.
–I have a one-click way to look at my financial statistics. I use QuickBooks online (which has its issues, but its reporting feature is good!). And if I wonder, how much am I going to get paid in the next month? Am I ahead of or behind my income goal for the year? Who’s my dominant client right now? It’s literally one click to find that out, which really helps me decide whether my fears are rational or not.

And yet, we still have to deal with irrational anxiety, and not just by telling ourselves that it’s irrational. As a wise friend of mine said, “No one in the history of the world ever calmed down because they were being yelled at by someone else, telling them to calm down.” I also think that translators and interpreters tend to have (over)active brains that need a little taming. In order to calm my own “squirrel brain,” I’ve accepted that I have to:
–Meditate daily or at least five times a week. I use the Calm app and I am not at all a religious person, but I find a lot of mental and emotional value in meditation. My thoughts are less noisy, I’m less reactive to things that bug me, I’m a better listener, etc.
–Get a lot of physical activity to counteract the effects of sitting at a desk all day. I go to yoga 15-20 times a month (I know, it’s a lot, and that level was totally impossible when I still had a kid at home, so don’t take that as what you “should” be doing) and I spend at least one full day on the weekend away from screens, usually mountain biking, hiking, or skiing, depending on the season. Again, I realize that this is a privilege of having the time and money to recreate outside and living in a place where I can do all of that as a day trip, but I think that for most of us, we feel better with a significant amount of time in motion and away from screens since our work is very sedentary and screen-dependent.

I hope that these tips are helpful for you and for any freelance anxieties that you may have!

Greetings, readers! I hope you’re all doing well in your various corners of the world. This week, let’s talk about referral fees!

It’s a situation we’ve probably all encountered: a client (whether you’ve worked with them before, or not) approaches you about a translation or interpreting job, and you can’t accept it. Maybe it’s in a different language combination or specialization; maybe you’re too busy; maybe it’s for a service you don’t provide. You can’t help the client, but you know someone who might be able to. What should you do? Just pass that person’s name along, or offer to refer them in exchange for a cut of what they earn from the job?

And even if you know what you’d do in that situation, what about more complicated scenarios:

• A trusted, long-term client that sends you a lot of work wants a referral to a translator in the opposite language direction, or another language combination
• You want to completely “hand off” a client to someone else, for whatever reason
• You’re taking a leave of absence and you want to hire another freelancer to completely take over your clients for that period of time, but then give them back when you return
• You’re thinking of retiring, and your client base represents an asset that you’d like to sell

It’s a complicated question, and it’s a very personal decision, but here’s my take:

In general, I am not a fan of referral fees. I’m more of a, “what goes around, comes around” kind of person, and in 20+ years as a freelancer, I have never charged a referral fee, and only rarely, when I was first starting out, have I paid a referral fee. I’ve had other freelancers refer me to five-figure clients without asking for a referral fee, and I’ve done the same for other people. In fact, I know that some of my referrals (for example English to French translators who started working with some of my direct clients) have gone on to earn more money from my clients than I have (because the clients needed them more often than they needed me), and it honestly doesn’t bother me.

In the three most common scenarios (new client offers a project I can’t take on; existing client wants a referral for something I don’t do; I want to hand off a client), I would personally not charge a referral fee, and just chalk it up to “freelance karma.” I think that something good will come my way because of sending good work to someone else.

The more nuanced scenarios are the last two I presented above. Let’s say you’re having a baby, caring for an aging relative, or taking an extended “bucket list” trip, and you need someone else to essentially replace you for a period of time. Whether I would take any sort of cut would depend on how involved I am in the process. I have, in the past, facilitated one of my direct clients working with a colleague while I was on vacation (when my daughter was little, my family consistently took the entire month of July off), and I have never charged a referral fee for that. However, if you are taking a more extended leave of absence and you’re going to, for example, keep editing or reviewing the colleague’s translations, I think you should definitely charge for that, and I think it would be fair to keep some (up to you to define “some”) of the money as a “head hunter/project management” fee.

I also think it’s an appealing idea to basically sell your freelance business if you want to retire, but it’s a delicate thing to do. A freelance business is very specific to the individual who does the work, and I think it’s quite rare that one freelance translator or interpreter could just replace another. Also, if you work primarily with agencies, I think it’s not really necessary, because presumably they have other translators or interpreters in your language combination. But if you work mostly with direct clients, it could be worth considering if you have an up-and-coming colleague who might see this as a way around having to do tons of marketing to establish their own client base. Various sources point to figures in the neighborhood of one to three years’ revenue as a starting point for selling a business, so you could look at how much you’ve made from the clients you’re interested in “selling,” and use that as a starting point. Still, I feel kind of hesitant about this approach. I don’t think that a restaurant’s customers care that much who the owner is; they may feel some attachment to that person, but as long as the quality and service remain the same, I think they’re likely to continue coming if the restaurant is sold. However if someone pays you a $10,000 referral fee for a client that’s been sending you $10,000 a year of work, and then the client drops them after one assignment, I don’t think they’re going to be thrilled. If this is the route you’re planning on taking ahead of retirement, I think I’d be likely to bring the new person on as a partner/co-translator, a year or two in advance of your retirement, then see how things go.

I hope these tips are helpful! If you have any referral fee stories, feel free to post them in the comments!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter and blog post on the topic, Is translation a dying profession? My opinion is: no, the translation profession is not dying, but I understand why people ask the question.

Here’s a related question: What should you do if your translation business is dying?

I’ve received a lot of interesting feedback on the initial article: several people posted comments on my blog, saying that while they are happy as translators, they would not encourage current high school or college students to become translators. More than a few people e-mailed me privately, saying that their translation work flow is a fraction of what it once was, or “I’m just hoping to hold on long enough to retire.” Also, for the record, not one but two translators I really respect, both in their 60s, told me when I went back to grad school for interpreting when I was 48, “If I were you, I sure wouldn’t be going to grad school for anything in the language professions; I’d do something completely different while you’re still young enough to get out.”

At the same time, the positive outlook isn’t just me. For every “my business is dying” translator I talk to, I talk to an equal number of people who say, “My income has doubled in the past two years,” “Even with a moderate amount of marketing, I’m finding a steady stream of new, well-paying clients,” “My clients are actually phobic about machine translation; they hire me because I do everything by hand, and they pay well for that.”

So..what’s going on here? I have a few theories that may or may not be correct:

• Most of all, adapting is hard. As I mentioned in the original article, I think many translators who started their businesses before the early 2000s have been accustomed to earning good money working for agencies and doing little to no marketing. That’s not the reality of the current market. I honestly like working for agencies, because I enjoy projects where I just translate. And this year I did land two new agency clients paying 14-15 cents per word, but the typical offer I get these days is around half of that, or even less (recently: “highly specialized” work paying $15 an hour: no thanks!). Adapting to this new reality is hard. Where these agencies are finding all of the great translators they claim to have, who will work for these types of rates, I have no idea, but they seem to be staying in business. Interestingly enough, I don’t experience this kind of downward price pressure in the conference interpreting market, even from agencies.
• Most translators don’t stick with any kind of marketing long enough to move the needle. I don’t mean that to be critical, it’s just true, and I know this because I see “under the hoods” of a lot of people’s translation businesses. When you don’t have a lot of work, you have a big advantage: time. When I started my freelance business, if I aimed to work 15 hours a week (my daughter was a baby at the time) and I only had three hours of paying work, I marketed for the other 12 hours. It’s rare that I see freelancers who are willing to put in that kind of effort, because they’d rather be translating. So would I! But if your business is withering, you need to take some sort of action.

Which brings us to…what to do if your translation business is dying. Here’s what I’d recommend:

• Realistically assess what’s going on: My sense is that too many freelancers are pursuing the “blood from a stone” system. Basically, thinking that if they just keep half-heartedly applying to a few agencies per year, well-paying work will miraculously appear. It’s totally fine to apply to agencies: as I mentioned above, there are still good agencies out there. But you need to be strategic (search them on Payment Practices or the ProZ Blue Board before you apply to them), and you need to contact them at least three to five times (online application, follow up by e-mail, contact their employees on LinkedIn, send them a handwritten card).
• Be honest about whether the market you’re pursuing can yield the results you want: Agencies are not evil. Realistically, agencies are where most freelancers start. *And* I know that it would be impossible for me to meet my financial goals by working for agencies. Thus, I put no (zero) proactive marketing time into applying to agencies. If they find me, great (and that does happen; don’t give up hope!). But I also know that all of my active marketing time has to go toward clients who can/will pay what I want to earn.
• Accept that it’s OK to do something else, in addition to or instead of translation: I hear from a lot of translators who are branching out into something else word-related: grant writing, sustainability report writing, copywriting, etc. It’s really OK to say: I can’t make enough money working for translation agencies, I don’t want to look for direct clients, so I think I’ll narrow my translation client base down to only the clients I really want to work with, and also do other things to make money. If you need someone to give you permission to do that, there you go.
• Make sure you’re doing work that you enjoy and are good at: Again, I see way too many freelancers just going through the motions (another day, another document that no one but the translator will ever read) instead of actively pursuing work that they feel excited about doing. I honestly don’t think I have much of a “secret sauce,” but if I do, I think this is it: I actively seek out work that makes me say, “Yesss I get to do this today.” If you don’t feel that way about your work, it’s time to look for clients who make you feel that way.

Fear of missing out–FOMO–is a reality of life as a freelancer. Recently, I’ve heard from various students and colleagues about situations such as:

• “I planned my first extended vacation since COVID; my family and I desperately need this, and we have a great destination planned. I’m totally on board and excited about it. Not long after, I was offered an incredible on-site interpreting job for those same dates, and I immediately thought about not going on the vacation.”
• “I referred a translation job outside my area of specialization to a colleague; honestly I had never even heard much about this specialization. Come to find out, there’s a lot of work in this area and it’s not very technical or complex; now I’m kicking myself for not having done more research before declining it.”
• “No matter how hard I try, I never seem to be able to carve out any time off work; it’s been at least a year since I even took a full weekend off, much less a vacation. I just can’t escape the idea that if I’m not available, clients won’t call me anymore, or a great assignment will go to someone else.”

As freelancers, we know that we are a non-renewable resource. We know that burnout is a risk. We know that we can’t take every single project that we’re offered. And yet, we (and by that I mean all of us, definitely including me) still feel FOMO when these kinds of situations happen. How can we work through this? Here are a few ideas!

1. Try to accept that FOMO is inevitable and even positive. You’re not doing anything wrong if you feel FOMO, because FOMO indicates that you enjoy your job, you enjoy making money, you enjoy serving clients. I’d worry about you if these things were not true!
2. Remind yourself that work will always be there, but many other things in your life will not. When you have to turn down a juicy project, it’s easy to catastrophize: nothing like this will ever come my way; this was a one-of-a-kind opportunity. But typically, those feelings are not true (my favorite bumper sticker: “Your anxiety is lying to you”). However, it is true that other things in life will not wait around while you work yourself into the ground. As someone with a young adult child and aging parents, I feel this acutely. I hate missing out on great work opportunities, but life is going to look a lot different in 10 years, and I don’t want to look up from my phone and realize that I missed it.
3. Turn the missed opportunity into a positive. When you realize that you turned down a job you really could have or should have taken, it’s unlikely that the client that approached you is the only one that needs this service. This sounds like a catalyst for a marketing campaign! Resolve that within the next three months, you’ll have at least one new client that is as good or better than the client you turned down.

Especially ahead of summer vacation season, I hope these tips are helpful if you, too, are feeling FOMO!