Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Marketing


Corinne McKay

The importance of being intentional

A short but important thought about freelancing (and maybe about life in general, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog!): whatever you do in your freelance business, do it intentionally, not because you’re a) being passive or b) letting some external force dictate your decisions and then blaming the external force instead of yourself. A few examples:

-Which of these statements applies to you: I work on whatever comes my way OR I actively seek out work that I enjoy and am good at?

-Have you ever said A client forced me to lower my rates OR A client made me translate something I knew was outside my expertise? If so, you’re adding to the already-problematic situation by putting yourself in the passive seat. Instead, think A client asked me to lower my rates, and I agreed; time to do some marketing so that I’m not in that position again OR I took on a project that I really shouldn’t have, mostly because I really needed the work. I will work on finding more clients in my specializations so that I don’t need to do that again.

I find that this kind of mindset switch really helps; like every freelancer, I get into situations where I wonder if I said yes to something that I shouldn’t have. But I feel much better saying This deadline was really, really tight, but it was for an A-list client who I wanted to help out or I took a financial hit on this project, but I’ve been wanting to translate this book for a long time, so I’m not as focused on the money. The intention is important. Thoughts?


Corinne McKay

Reader question: how do I find good agencies to apply to?

A reader asks: I’d like to apply to more translation agencies, but how do I find good agencies to apply to?

This question applies to a lot of people who want to work with agencies, so let’s talk about it. There are various online databases of translation agencies; for example I launched my freelance business back when ATA still mailed every member a paper membership directory, like a phone book for the translation industry. I opened it to the agencies section, started at A, and applied to a couple of agencies every day. By the time I had gotten to M or so, work started coming in from the As and Bs. It was a spaghetti-against-the-wall system, but it worked. But many translators want to know how to find good agencies to apply to. This is important, and tricky, because you can’t just Google “high-quality translation agencies” or “agencies that will treat me like a professional and value my work.”

If you’d like to pursue a less spaghetti-against-the-wall system, you could use the system I used, but with some improvements. Resources like the ATA directory are great for finding a heap of agencies, but you need to vet them somehow, to determine a) whether they’re hiring new translators, b) whether you fit what the agency is looking for and c) whether the agency is credit-worthy. So, you could:

  1. Use a resource like the ATA directory to find agencies’ names and websites
  2. Never contact the agency directly by using the contact information in the directory (don’t e-mail the person whose e-mail address is there, because it’s often a violation of public directories’ use policies to use them for marketing purposes)
  3. Take a look at the agency’s website: are they hiring freelancers, and do you fit what they might need? If it’s a financial translation agency and you do IT and patents, move on.
  4. If the agency seems like a potentially good fit, then check their creditworthiness. Because when you do a job for an agency without being paid in advance, you are extending credit. My favorite translation agency rating service is Payment Practices (not an affiliate deal, I just love them). A subscription is $19.99 per year, and you can get 25% off and a 7-day free trial through the ATA member-to-member program. Other potential resources are the ProZ Blue Board (some access with the free ProZ membership; full access requires the paying membership or payment with ProZ points), or various industry blacklists (I won’t list those here because I don’t use them and thus can’t vouch for their trustworthiness, but they’re easy to find on Google).
  5. If the agency is hiring, looks like a potentially good fit and is creditworthy, then visit the agency’s website and apply to them. Most agencies now use online forms or even an online vendor management portal, but some still use a dedicated e-mail address where you send your resume.

Or, especially if you want to target agencies in a specific geographic area, you can start with a database like Payment Practices. For example you could search only for agencies in Switzerland, or Boston, or Florida, that are rated 4.0 or higher in both of the categories that Payment Practices rates. Again, do not use the agency’s direct contact information as you find it on Payment Practices; go to the agency’s website and use the application information that’s there.

A few other potential ways to find better-quality agencies to apply to:

  1. Ask translators who work in a different language pair or specialization than you do. Approaching people whose profile is relatively similar to yours is always tricky, because it looks like you might poach their clients. But if you translate German, ask some French translators; if you do legal translation, ask some medical translators (as long as the agencies aren’t medical-only).
  2. Ask translators who work primarily or exclusively for direct clients: what agencies have they heard good things about? If these translators don’t actively apply to agencies any more, or if they charge more than most agencies will pay, they’re not likely to view you as competition.
  3. Look at agencies that exhibit or present at industry conferences. You still want to check them out on a site like Payment Practices, but this is an indication that the agency could be good to work for.

If you’re interested in what happens after you do this marketing campaign and get some bites from good agencies, check out our Speaking of Translation podcast, Insider tips for working with translation agencies.

Readers, any other thoughts on finding quality agencies?


Corinne McKay

Warm e-mail marketing: a success story

In 2014, I listened to two episodes of Tess Whitty’s podcast Marketing Tips for Translators that got me thinking about the whole “warm e-mail marketing” idea. Tess interviewed Joanne Archambault about marketing to direct clients that you can’t meet in person and then interviewed Ed Gandia about his warm e-mail marketing system, including his online class on the topic. I’ve always been a bit wary of e-mail marketing (seems spammy, hard to find the right contact person, hard to know what to say), and I’ve generally stuck with letters, postcards,  in-person networking and referrals to find my direct clients. But these two podcast episodes made me think a) maybe it’s just that I’m approaching e-mail marketing in the wrong way, b) it’s good to evolve and try new things and c) now that I travel for the ATA Board, I have less time to travel to client conferences, so e-mail marketing might be worth a shot.

First, I downloaded Ed’s free cheat sheet on warm e-mail marketing. The whole idea, drastically simplified, is to send short, highly personalized e-mails to potential clients, and to hopefully create a meaningful connection that might lead to some work. The concept appealed to me, so I signed up for the next session of Ed’s warm e-mail marketing class. Again, I was a little skeptical: I’m not a huge fan of pre-packaged online classes where there’s no interaction with the instructor, but the registration fee of under $200 was low-risk, and I forced myself to carve out the time to listen to all of the audio lessons over the course of a couple of weeks. Then, it was time to give the system a try.

My first two e-mails were to potential international development clients who had recently won a big contract involving French-speaking countries; I felt positive about what I wrote, but got no response from the recipients. But I forged on, surmising that I needed to send at least 10 e-mails before I could get a representative sample. My next e-mail was to a publishing house that I’d contacted a couple of years ago with a book translation idea. At that time, the publisher was interested, but the foreign rights arrangement was complicated and the project ultimately fizzled. Flash forward to a few months ago, when I read an excerpt from an interesting book by a French author, and out of curiosity I went to her website to learn more about her. Whoa; right there on the “News” page, the author (whose books are selling really well in Europe), stated that she was actively looking for an English-language publisher, and her books struck me as being right up the alley of the publishing house I’d contacted back in 2012. So, I composed a warm e-mail to my contact person, along the lines of, “I’m not presuming that you’d hire me, but here’s a potential translation that looks like a great fit for your audience.”

Within a day, I got a response from my contact person, saying that she’d look into the book I had suggested, and that as luck would have it, the publishing house had just acquired the translation rights to another French book on a similar topic, and would I be interested in submitting a sample? Well, right there, I knew that the time and money I invested in Ed’s class had just paid off: I had resisted the urge to write a long e-mail, to be overly self-promotional, or to just ping my contact person for no apparent reason (“Got any work for me?”). I had shared a piece of useful information, and it had really paid off. So, I’m excited to say that I submitted a sample, the publisher was happy with it, and I’m now under contract to translate the book between now and May…at which point I can tell you the details instead of referring to the project in veiled terms! But the point being, give warm e-mail marketing a try…


Corinne McKay

Marketing by e-mail, on paper, or both

In marketing your freelance services, you may wonder (or at least I do!) whether it’s better to market to direct clients by e-mail, on paper, or both. I don’t have a succinct answer to that, but here are a few thoughts.

For a long time, I was a devotée of marketing on paper: writing out a full-page cover letter, attaching my resumé and a business card, sticking it all in an envelope and mailing it to the potential client. I also did a number of postcard marketing campaigns, and I do think there’s a place for paper marketing materials:

  1. They stand out: most people’s postal mail is 95% ads and bills. So, although your marketing packet is a type of ad, it’s also interesting, and personalized, and shows that you took more than 30 seconds to put something together for this potential candidate.
  2. They stick around: once someone deletes an e-mail, it’s gone. But I’ve gotten inquiries from clients (literally) years after I sent them a marketing pitch in the mail, because my business card was still kicking around their office.
  3. They let you say more than you would in an e-mail: no one is going to read an e-mail that’s the equivalent of a full-page cover letter. But I’ve had fairly good success with full-page cover letters sent in the mail. They let you describe your recent projects, something about the client that makes you feel there’s a good fit, etc.

The downside of paper marketing materials is that they’re time-consuming and potentially costly to create and send, and your prospect has to make a very deliberate effort (in the form of calling or e-mailing you) to respond. There’s no reply button on a paper letter, so the prospect has to be really interested in order to follow up.

Just because I wondered what I might be missing, I recently joined Ed Gandia’s Warm E-mail Prospecting course. It’s online and self-paced, and I really like it. It’s helped me see the advantages of e-mail marketing–not blast e-mails that you send to 1,000 potential prospects with one click, but short (125 words or less), targeted, personalized e-mails that you send when you see a meaningful connection between you and the potential client. The appeal:

  1. They’re short: it takes me under one minute to read 125 words. I get a lot of unsolicited e-mail (marketing pitches from other translators, requests for information about freelancing, requests to speak or write or present, etc.) and when I open an e-mail and it’s short, personalized and to the point, I actually feel interested in reading it (here’s something written just for me and it will take two seconds…maybe it’s interesting!). But when I open an unsolicited e-mail and it’s 500 words, or begins with “I’d like to start by telling you about myself,” I often leave the e-mail “for later,” which usually means much later, or if the e-mail isn’t personalized, I end up deleting it without reading it.
  2. They invite immediate action: if your prospect is interested, they can click Reply, and simply answer, “Sounds interesting; can you send me some more information?” or “We may need someone like you in the future; feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn,” and they’re done with it.
  3. They’re easy to create once you get the hang of it: and easy is good. Easy is what gets done. Instead of tailoring the cover letter, then printing it, then printing your resumé, then locating a business card and an envelope, then stressing about whether the paper should be white or off-white, and whether it’s OK to use your leftover Christmas stamps on business letters, and so on, you just fire the thing off and you’re done.

Readers, other thoughts on this?


Corinne McKay

Using clients' names: OK or not?

A reader asks: On my website and resumé, is it OK to use my clients’ names? Does it matter if I worked for them directly or through an agency?

Short answer: To be safe, never use a client’s name without their permission. If you’re “sure that the client won’t mind,” then why not take two minutes and write them an e-mail, just to make sure. Clients may have their reasons for not wanting you to use their name, so why risk the relationship over it?

Longer answer: Using clients’ names in your marketing materials is a big asset, especially if the client is a big-name one. But if you use a client’s name without permission, you can create a very bad situation for them, and thus for yourself as well. Here are my personal recommendations for using clients’ names, with the caveat that these fall on the conservative side. Only use a client’s name in your marketing materials if:

  • You worked for them as an employee, not as a freelancer;
  • Or, if your name appears in the credits of a published translation for that client;
  • Or, if you have the client’s permission in writing;
  • Or, if the client wrote you a public testimonial or LinkedIn recommendation (or similar) and included their name on it.

I recommend never using the name of an end client that you worked for through an agency. They’re the agency’s client, not yours: the agency presumably found, landed, and retains the client, and you have no direct relationship with the end client. For similar reasons, an agency should never use the end client’s non-payment as a reason not to pay you, but that’s another post entirely!

I think that these (fairly restrictive) guidelines help avoid misunderstandings, and respect the fact that even a client with whom you have a good relationship may decline to be named publicly as one of your clients. By the same token, I always ask my direct clients to put my name on the translation (and many of them agree), but I never push back if the client declines this request.

Other thoughts on using clients’ names?