Freelancing

This week’s post topic was suggested by a reader: Is translation a dying profession?

Good question! Short answer: In my opinion, no, but I understand why people ask that.

Longer answer: Let me start with three data points…

1. I graduated from undergrad in 1993, and a professor told me then (exactly 30 years ago!), Forget about getting into translation because it’s all being taken over by computers. Annnndddd that still hasn’t happened. I think that MT and AI are changing and will continue to change our profession, but I don’t think they will replace us on a large scale, within the working lifetime of anyone active in the profession today.
2. If my university student daughter wanted to become a translator or interpreter, I would feel very positive about that and I would have no problem paying for her education for it (sadly, she wants to be an aerospace engineer but I continue to make my pitch!).
3. I’ve been a freelancer for 20+ years and I’m on track to earn my highest-ever income this year, while working slightly less (not a typo) than I did last year.

Given all of that, I definitely don’t see translation as a dying profession, but/and…

• When I started freelancing in 2002, it was possible to earn what I would consider a decent “entry level” living working for big agencies that had a pretty low barrier to entry and based their hiring primarily on their own tests. I earned 10-12 cents per word working for those types of agencies in the early aughts and I knew Spanish translators who made 9-10 cents a word, and my sense is that those rates have now decreased by at least 50%. Perhaps even more for language pairs like English into Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, etc. I’m personally not sure how people survive financially on those rates, unless their cost of living is very low, or they depend heavily on a spouse or partner’s income or another job.
• The amount of work needed to launch a freelance business has greatly increased in the past few decades. When I talk to translators who started their businesses in the 80s and 90s, many of them had a phone number and an AOL address, and within six months to a year with what today’s freelancers would think of as minimal marketing, they had so much work that they had to hire another translator to work with them. That’s not the reality anymore, and I think that a lot of beginning freelancers are disappointed by the marketing-to-translating ratio that they encounter in their first few years of business.
• The main shifts I’ve seen in the past 10ish years are a) the erosion of agency rates in general (see above), and b) a smaller distinction between “mass market” and “boutique” agencies, where the boutique agencies don’t pay dramatically better than the mass market agencies.
• This creates a real crunch in the “good” agency market. Good agencies are who most freelancers want to work for, so when a freelancer gets hired by an agency that pays well, has interesting work, and is easy to work with, they tend to stick with that agency for a long time. This is true of a boutique agency (now closed) that I worked with for a long time: they were “under the radar,” they paid well, and I worked with the exact same group of translators for 10+ years. Premium-market agencies do exist, but they’re rarely recruiting for translators.
• Finding direct clients takes a lot of hustle, and you do a lot of things other than translate. I have very little trouble getting direct clients to accept my rates, and I get the sense that some of my direct clients would pay more than what I’m charging. But to find direct clients, you have to have a clear specialization; you have to have the confidence to put yourself out there; you have to be an excellent translator; you have to know how to include the client in the translation process, not “just translate;” you have to have a partner or backup person who can edit for you, fill in if you’re on vacation, etc. Realistically, many freelancers don’t want to do any of this, or don’t stick with any direct client marketing method long enough to see some results.
• I definitely could not meet my financial goals if I worked only for agencies. According to various compensation surveys, the average US-based freelance translator earns between 55 and 60K (US dollars) per year. My guess is that this is mostly people who are charging around 11 cents a word and translating around 500,000 words per year. If that number fits your financial goals, there’s certainly nothing wrong with it. However, it’s also important to realize that when you deduct self-employment tax, benefits, professional development, office equipment, paid vacation, etc. etc., this is roughly the equivalent of a salaried job paying in the 40s, which is not a level that meets my financial goals. And if you’re working as much as you can or as much as you want to, the only way to increase your income is to work with direct clients. This is the part of the market that I see as very different from when I started, and my sense is that this is where the “dying” concerns come from.

I hope these thoughts are helpful, and I definitely don’t see us as a dying profession!

So many freelance translators and interpreters have so much website anxiety. They’ve been meaning to/planning to/thinking they should set up a website for the past three years and it’s still not done. Or, they hate their website. I’ve observed that it’s kind of “a thing” with translators and interpreters: it’s hard to even find people who will let their websites be used as examples, because so many people hate their website.

I don’t have all of the website answers, but here are a few tips to hopefully get you unstuck if you’re having this issue:

• You need at least a basic website. When you’re going to hire a professional service provider (accountant, web designer, etc.) what’s the first thing you do? Google them! Take a look at their website and see who they are. Even if your website is used only for passive purposes (having it there so that clients can check out who you are), you need a website.
• Basic can mean basic. Even one page is a whole lot better than nothing.
• Personally, I think Squarespace is the easiest website creation tool to use. That’s not an affiliate deal, and I don’t actually use Squarespace, but having dealt with WordPress (very flexible but usually requires manual updates and is not super-intuitive to use), and Wix (easy to use but limited customization options), I would recommend Squarespace. If you have a complicated website that really requires WordPress (this is the case with my Training for Translators site), you may need to consider hiring a website manager to run updates on your plugins and theme. I made this switch a couple of years ago after I broke my entire website while trying to update the theme!
• The entire website should not be an About page. Lots of freelancers’ websites are one long About page, because they don’t know what else to talk about. “I learned Russian on my grandmother’s knee.” “Here’s a photo of me studying abroad in France 25 years ago, ” etc. etc. You definitely can talk about your professional credentials and background, but we also need to know what services you provide, and how to contact you. It continually amazes me when I have to hunt for this information (language pair, specializations, e-mail address) on someone’s website.
• If people can’t find you, they can’t hire you. If you’ve never promoted yourself before, it can feel weird to put your photo, e-mail address, etc. directly out there on the web. But unless you’re getting tons of work through word of mouth, people need to be able to find you online if they want to work with you.
• If you’re stuck on a domain name, just use yourname.com if it’s available. It’s always a bit haphazard as to whether the domain name you want is going to be available. In my case, corinnemckay.com was already taken when I made my first website in 2003 (I’ve since been able to buy it!), but I was shocked that both certifiedfrenchtoenglishtranslator.com and frenchconferenceinterpreter.com were available. You have to just check and see, but if you’re stumped as to what your domain name should be, the easiest and most flexible is just your name.
• If needed, give yourself a deadline. Whether you’re hiring a designer or doing the site yourself, the website timeline that drags on into the next decade can be a real problem. You need a deadline: if you’re doing a simple site yourself, commit that you will spend no more than two days on it. Don’t accept any work for those days, and just get it done. If you’re working with a designer, ask how long their sites typically take and what typically causes delays (most often, lack of response from the client, so don’t do that!!).

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re struggling with website anxiety!

Last month’s March Marketing Madness challenge group was a lot of fun, and I always enjoy learning from the group participants and coming away from the month with some new ideas. I’m always trying to refine and improve my mindset tips around marketing and business management, because I think it’s an area that a lot of us struggle with: we want/need more/better work, but we tell ourselves (incorrectly…but we still tell ourselves…):

• marketing is spammy; if we were really any good at this job, we wouldn’t need to market
• marketing won’t work anyway, so we just keep working on what lands in the inbox
• we need to feel motivated; inspiration has to strike us before we do any marketing

Instead, I think most of us are happier, more productive, and we find better and more lucrative work when we embrace these three truths about freelancing:

1. We do our best and most successful marketing when we ask ourselves these questions: Who should I be serving? Who needs me but doesn’t yet know about me? When we start from there, we’re automatically looking for clients who will not perceive our marketing inquiries as spam; they may even say, “We really need someone like you!”
2. We do our best and most successful work when we actively pursue work that we enjoy and are good at, rather than waiting for dream clients to come to us. Doing work we enjoy and are good at helps us stay motivated, avoids procrastination, and pairs us will clients who need and value our skills rather than seeing us as replaceable.
3. We need to stop relying on motivation and instead, just stay consistent with our marketing. You don’t wait to feel inspired to brush your teeth or do laundry; even if it feels like a chore, you do it without even really thinking about it, so that your teeth don’t fall out and you have something clean to wear. Treat marketing the same way: set a timer for 15 minutes at the beginning or end of every work day, work on marketing for just those 15 minutes, and you’ll see a big difference in your business.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that these tips are helpful to you! If you’d like to add anything, just drop a comment below!

My freelance origin story

When someone asks me how long I’ve been a freelancer, it’s not a difficult number for me to calculate, even as a non-numbers person, because my freelance business is the same age as my daughter. I’ve been freelancing since October 2002, which means that my business and my kid are now (not sure how this happened?) an amazing twenty years old.

Over the years, I’ve written and talked a lot about being a freelancer and being a parent. A few resources from the archive are:

• A post I wrote in 2009
• A podcast interview that Eve Bodeux and I did with Jennifer Nielsen and Elena Langdon
• A podcast interview that Eve Bodeux and I did with Miguel Armentia, Jonathan Downie, and James Perry
• A podcast interview that Eve Bodeux and I did with Karen Tkaczyk, Marianne Reiner, and the late Andy Bell

Now that my kid is an adult (legally, at least!) and launched (as an engineering student on the other side of the country), I thought it might be time for a report from the other side, for those still in the trenches. Note: For the purposes of this post, I’m going to use the term “parent,” (rather than “mom”) in order to include all freelancing parents.

The early years

Before my daughter was born, my husband (who works in IT) and I decided that we both wanted to work very part-time for a year after she was born, so that one of us would always be home with her. We were able to do this (by living very frugally both before and during this year), and we also made a major move, from Boston to Colorado, when my daughter was 10 weeks old. This was a lot of transition, because both of us worked full-time in pretty demanding jobs before having a kid. However it worked well for us, and I was able to work 10-15 hours a week without hiring outside child care, and during that first year of freelancing I made $9,000.

Then, our division of labor bounced around a bit: our savings cushion was getting thinner, so my husband took a full-time job for a year, at the same time my freelance business was ramping up, and we hired a babysitter to come to our house for two to four hours every weekday. For the next three years (ages three, four, and five for my daughter), we both freelanced and my daughter went to half-day preschool and then half-day kindergarten and my husband and I traded off taking care of her in the afternoons. When my daughter was six, my husband got an IT job at one of the government research labs in Boulder (where he still works), first working three days a week for a few years, then four days a week for a few years, and finally five days a week when my daughter went to high school.

The pluses

Typing all of this out, I realize that we had a lot of advantages. We live pretty frugally and have no debt; we paid off our mortgage more than 10 years ago and have never had a car loan, credit card debt, or other consumer debt. We’re also really, really fortunate that my husband’s job has been both stable and flexible, and that we get very good benefits (specifically, health and dental insurance) through his employer at a very reasonable cost. We also live in an area where tons of people are freelancers or patch together multiple part-time jobs, so our way of organizing our work/life balance was never seen as weird or even atypical.

The minuses

Despite all of these advantages, I, like many freelancing moms, still did the majority of the juggling: stopping work at 2 PM to pick my daughter up at school, covering school days off and vacations, snow days, sick days, arranging summer camps so that I could work at least a few hours a day, etc. I love my job and I honestly like working in general, so as my freelance work volume bumped up, I was reluctant to turn down work that I wanted to do, and by the time my daughter was eight or nine, I was trying to work more or less full time, with no child care outside of school. This meant that for years and years, I essentially considered evenings after my daughter went to bed as part of the work day. I recently came across some old project notes, and (fortunately the memory of this has since faded…) saw that I had worked until after 11 PM for 10 nights in a row to finish a big translation. This was honestly pretty draining because I’m really not a night person, but I got through it.

The view from here

From the perspective of having a 20 year-old, I can now think a little more clearly about how the whole process of being a freelancer and being a parent shook out, what worked, and what I would do differently.

What worked:

• Prioritizing. I’ll put this one in bold. You can’t be a full-time freelancer and a full-time parent. There just aren’t enough hours in the day, unless you only need two hours of sleep a night (I need eight to nine hours!). Fortunately, I always felt clear about my priorities: to do interesting and lucrative work while being available when my daughter needed me. There’s no wrong answer here: I’ve worked with freelancers who stayed home for 20 years and then re-launched their freelance businesses, and I’ve worked with freelancers who put their kids in full-time day care at three months old. You do you. But be clear about what your priorities are, because there are going to be tradeoffs to whatever you choose.
• In a big-picture way, I have a fulfilling career and a thriving business while being the kind of parent I wanted to be. I always said that at the end of the day, the thing I wanted to be able to say about my daughter’s childhood was: I was there for her. Given the things we were able to do as a family (we typically took the entire month of July off and did a big trip), I honestly don’t think any in-house job would have been flexible enough for my needs, while providing the level of income I wanted to earn.
• It’s sad that this still has to be said in the 21st century, but my husband is a great dad and partner. Whenever I do presentations about work/life balance, I always ask, “Does it still need to be said that it’s a big advantage to have a partner who’s actually a partner?” And the audience’s answer is always: yes, it still needs to be said. The fact that my husband has always been super-supportive of me as a freelancer and that he loves spending time with our kid is a huge advantage. A key example here is that I was on the Board of the American Translators Association for seven years, from when my daughter was in fifth through eleventh grade, and that involved a lot of travel. My husband never (literally: zero times) complained about taking the primary responsibility for our daughter while I was gone, and many times rearranged his own work schedule to accommodate mine.
• Personally I’m glad that I never completely stopped working. Everyone has to make their own decision, but I think that it can be a lot harder to get back in the game after you’ve stopped working, even if continuing to work means (as it did for me) working just a few hours a week when you have a very little kid. I personally feel that I would have felt unfulfilled as a person if I had stopped working completely, and I would have felt unfulfilled as a mother if I had worked full-time when my kid was tiny, and in the end I think I had a good balance of the two.
• Another personal decision, but I’m glad that I had my daughter at the age that I did. She was born two weeks before I turned 31, so by the time she approached independence, I was still young-ish, or at least young enough to go back to school for an interpreting degree! Again, personal, but I also don’t regret having only one kid: I’m also an only child (my poor husband, who has two younger sisters and then lived for 18 years with two only children!) and to me, having one kid was a good balance between the joy of having a child and the independence of still having my own life.

What I would change

Fortunately, I have almost universally positive things to say about my experience with being a freelancer and being a parent. I really have no major regrets, but I will say:

• Being any flavor of working parent in the U.S. is expensive and exhausting; that’s just the reality. I love the U.S. in many ways, but our situation with parental leave and child care is pretty dismal. In my family’s case, which I think is pretty typical for a middle class family, neither my husband nor I had access to any paid parental leave, nor any free or subsidized child care until my daughter went to public school. As a result, even half-day babysitters and half-day preschool were extremely expensive. Even when my daughter went to kindergarten, only half-day kindergarten was free, so we paid for three days a week of full-day kindergarten. For most freelancing parents, especially if you’re still building up your freelance business, this creates a chicken and egg situation where childcare can consume most of what you earn, especially if you have multiple kids.
• In hindsight, I think I was a little phobic about putting my daughter in child care. I think it was an advantage that we used no outside child care for her first year; it was a really special time, and I still have great memories of the three of us spending most of our time together. Still, I did a lot of shortchanging my own health and sanity (working six to seven nights a week) in order to keep that up until she was old enough to be unsupervised.

Looking back on the experience

In closing, I would say this: if you’re a freelancing parent, I think you need to have an “and” mentality. It’s exhausting, and it’s worth it. You’re going to be burning the candle at both ends, and that doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong, it’s just the reality of the situation. It’s definitely survivable, and when your kid is/kids are adults, I think you’ll be very glad that you had the opportunity to run a (hopefully) fulfilling and thriving freelance business while spending those years with them.

Greetings, readers! I hope that 2023 is off to a good start in all of your various corners of the world!

Why talk about income?

As usual, I’m kicking off the year with a review of last year and how it went in my freelance business. Also as usual, this article contains real income numbers from my business; if this bothers you or you find it tacky, no pressure to read on. I provide this information for a simple reason: because I teach classes on how to make money, and on how to make more money, as a freelancer. Personally, when I take those types of classes from other people, I want to know their real income numbers, because I like to know:

• When someone says “a low/high/decent/solid income,” I want to know what they mean. 25K? 200K?
• When someone talks about charging what I would consider a high rate, I want to know how much work they have at that level: are they charging high rates, but finding very few clients at that rate, or do they have a steady flow of work at that rate?

I also realize that some people find it weird, in poor taste, or “a sign of someone desperate for attention” to talk about one’s real income numbers. If that’s your feeling, no problem, and no pressure to read this article. That being said, let’s dive in!

Executive summary: things went well!

2022 was a good year. It was my first full calendar year of offering both interpreting and translation, and although (due to the loosening of COVID restrictions) I took a lot more vacation this year than in 2020 or 2021, my income didn’t decrease and I did a lot of interesting work. I’m happy with the scale-back in the number of courses offered by Training for Translators. I moved to a new office (my first time renting a small private office within a larger co-working space) and I love it. And yet, I have some bigger goals for 2023.

By the numbers

As I expected and similar to the past three years, I earned US $110K this year. That’s gross income, but after subtracting subcontracting payments: it doesn’t include revenue that I took in that was then immediately paid to other people—specifically, instructors for Training for Translators.

The 110K was divided almost exactly into thirds: one third interpreting, one third translation, one third teaching, writing, and consulting. I’m happy with that. The “triathlon” aspect of my business is diverse enough that there’s some resilience in the system (when one thing is down, often another thing is up), but not so diverse that I feel scattered. I’m hoping to maintain this distribution of revenue in 2023. An interesting distribution within this distribution is that the majority (23K) of my interpreting income came from agencies, while the majority (31K) of my translation income came from direct clients and individuals.

Interpreting

As mentioned above, this was my first full calendar year as an interpreter, after passing the Glendon MCI exit exams in July 2021. I love interpreting and am really glad that I pursued the degree at Glendon. In 2022, I interpreted a total of 165 days, or rather “days,” since a court interpreting “day” is sometimes 10 minutes. Of the 165 assignments, 113 were court and 52 were conference. Conference interpreting can be a tough world to break into, and I was very lucky to receive some excellent referrals from very generous colleagues. Overall, after hearing stories of people who spent more than a year looking for work after finishing a conference interpreting degree, I’m happy with my 52 assignments, and it’s definitely a goal to find more conference interpreting work for 2023.

Translation

Basically status quo, which is OK. I continued working for my regular direct clients, primarily US-based NGOs doing development work in francophone Africa, plus a few law firms. I like my translation clients and they seem to like me, but one of my longstanding NGO clients is wrapping up the project I’ve translated for (for five years!), so I’d definitely like to find another client to flesh things out.

Online courses

Some significant shakeups here. At the start of COVID, everyone was so hungry for online training that all of my online courses were selling out, some even with a waiting list. Over time, things slowed down significantly, particularly when it came to longer, more expensive classes. I also realized that I’m not particularly good at, nor do I particularly enjoy, the administrative aspects of running a large-scale online training business. So, I decided to go back to basics, focusing on one master class per month taught by me. This has gone really well. Signups have been good, the money I earn is almost all profit (as opposed to paying a host and other instructors), and I love teaching. I’m happy with this reorganization and plan to stick with it, offering courses taught by other people only on an occasional basis.

Vacation and expenses

This was the first year since 2019 that (finally) felt pretty normal in terms of travel and vacation. I definitely took advantage of that; my husband and I spent most of July on a mountain bike road trip through British Columbia, Alberta, and the Tetons, we did a bunch of long weekend ski trips, and we spent two separate weeks mountain biking in Utah while working a little bit, plus spent New Year’s in Mexico with my college student daughter and her girlfriend. No complaints in the travel department this year.

My business expenses were fairly stable, with the exception that my office rent increased slightly (to $586 per month) because I jumped on the chance to rent a small private office for only $36 a month more than I was paying for a desk in my co-working office. The only issue is that I love having my own office instead of having to reserve a conference room every time I have a remote interpreting assignment, so I don’t see myself giving it up next year, even if the rent increases.

Goals for 2023

I’d like to:

• Slightly increase my income, with a goal of around 120K, largely because I want to do more traveling that will cost money
• Find at least one more interpreting client with regular work
• Publish at least one new book (I’m working on an interpreting version of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator that I hope to publish this year)
• Translate another book (this is in the works; something in the public domain that I would self-publish)
• Continue teaching monthly master classes for Training for Translators
• On the personal side, I’m starting cello lessons while continuing to play the lute; stay tuned (haha!) on progress

Wishing all of you all the best for a healthy and prosperous 2023!