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In episode 22 of the Training for Translators podcast, I wrap up the highs and lows of 2025. If you’d rather read this episode as a blog post, you can do that here. You can listen to it as a podcast episode right here (using the audio player below), or subscribe to Training for Translators on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

2025 was, financially, my most successful year in 23 years of freelancing. I did a lot of interesting work, published a new book, and took a good amount of time off. And yet, it wouldn’t be a year of being a human without a few fails, which I describe in the episode!

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Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I’m an inherently positive person, and, as I wrote last week, 2025 was my most successful year in 23 years of freelancing. And yet, lots of freelancers in the language professions are really struggling. Evidence: I’ve talked to more than a handful of freelancers lately, who’ve said:

• Things in my business are going really poorly
• To the extent that I’m having to dip into savings to pay my basic expenses, or I’m having to cut way back on my spending, or I’m depending on a spouse/partner’s income which I haven’t had to do before
• I’ve tried marketing for more/better work, but either I can’t make myself do enough marketing to make a difference, the marketing I’m doing doesn’t seem to be successful, or both
• And now I’m wondering, how do I know when it’s time to quit and do something else?

Step 1: Questions to ask yourself

First, let’s slow it down and do some analysis, by asking yourself a few questions:

• How bad is the situation? Is work slow-ish? Or reallllly slow? And for how long have things been this bad?

Example: I’m a big proponent of green, yellow, and red rate zones, and you can do the same thing with income levels: what’s your ideal monthly income, your not great/not horrible monthly income, and the monthly income that is the absolute bare minimum you can live off?

In my case, I think (always hard to know until it happens, but I’d surmise) that if I earned below my “red zone” monthly income for six consecutive months, I’d start asking some hard questions.

What are the hard questions to ask?

If your business is really struggling, I’d recommend asking yourself the following questions, which all depend on your specific situation:

1. What are your other options? To me, this is the most important question. If you quit what you’re doing now, what then? Maybe you’ve already thought about this and you’re looking at in-house jobs, or at another type of freelancing. You don’t need my permission to do this, but here it is: it’s 100% OK to not want to be a freelancer anymore, or to not want to do what you’re doing. But you need to be going toward something, not just away from what you’re doing right now, unless you have both the desire and the financial resources to stop working.
2. What’s the root of the problem? If the root of the problem is that your agency work has crumbled and you don’t want to work with direct clients, that’s a pretty clear signal. Maybe you can pivot to a type of freelance work where the agency model is still going strong. That exists: I know a number of writers who are making six figures working for content marketing agencies; if you have a legal or medical background, I think linguistic validation for agencies is viable. But if the root of the problem is that you hate or can’t make yourself do what it takes to be a freelancer, that’s a bigger issue, one that I talked about in my recent podcast episode, Do you have a freelance business, or two clients and a Gmail address?
3. Are you trying to get blood from a stone? I’m looking for a less graphic metaphor here, but I mean: are you still thinking that there are tons of translation agencies wanting to pay you good money to translate 10,000 words a week on a regular basis? Because, in my opinion, that way of working barely exists anymore. I know. I miss it too, but things change, and clients want different things. I just don’t think that there’s that much well-paid “pure” translation work for agencies these days, and I think that if you want that kind of work, you have to work with direct clients. For what it’s worth, my direct clients never cared about technology and still don’t. I really have no idea if they assume I use MT/AI, assume I don’t use it, don’t care because mostly they’re paying me so that they deal with translation as little as possible? No idea, but that kind of work is out there if you work with direct clients.
4. How much are you really (really) marketing? Another tough question. The vast majority of people I know who are really turning up their marketing, are finding interesting, well-paid work. But most freelancers aren’t doing enough of any kind of marketing to really make a difference. For example, when I started freelancing in 2002, I applied to more than 400 translation companies in my first year of freelancing, and it still took a year and a half until I had steady work. And well-paid agency work is harder to find now than it was then. In the course of my direct client research lab class, I’m constantly stunned (and I mean this in a factual way, not as a judgment) by the number of people who have no visible contact information anywhere online (clients couldn’t work with them, even if they wanted to), their LinkedIn About section tells their (very interesting) life story and has zero information on the results and benefits of working with them, which is what clients care about. Or the top search result for them is a ProZ.com profile that was last updated in 2012. See my post Online profile mistakes we’re all making for more on this! Expecting too great of a return from too little marketing effort is a huge problem for many of us.

Objective signs

Unless, as mentioned above, you have both the desire and financial resources to stop working, I think it’s important to give yourself an end point, rather than just watching your business wither until you can’t pay your bills. I’d recommend something like:

• Giving yourself three months to do a huge marketing push (every second you don’t have paying work is spent on marketing) and seeing what comes of it. If the answer is “nothing,” or if you literally can’t make yourself do this, it may be time to move on.
• Giving yourself a financial parameter, which is going to depend a lot on your specific situation. Maybe it’s:
  • If you dip into savings for six months in a row just to pay your basic expenses, you’re moving on from this type of freelancing
  • If you earn below X amount for six months in a row
  • If you have three consecutive quarters of decreasing earnings
  • If your 2025 income was way, way down (I’ve talked to freelancers whose income dropped by more than half between 2024 and 2025) and you have zero desire to market for new clients

What about diversifying?

I’m a huge fan of diversification. I do direct language work (and that’s divided into translation, interpreting, and writing), and teaching/writing/consulting, and I enjoy all of those “prongs” for different reasons. If you already have an established freelance business, you could diversify into a different translation specialization, a different language-related skill (interpreting, subtitling, editing for non-native speakers), or a different kind of “word work” entirely (fact-checking, humanizing AI-generated content).

I’d recommend this as the #1 thing to do if you’re struggling; but it doesn’t solve the problem if you simply can’t make yourself do what it takes to run a freelance business. If this is the case, it’s not a personal failing. I’ve heard from so many freelancers who’ve said, “For 15 years, I made decent money working for four agencies; in the past year, two went out of business, one switched entirely to MTPE, and one sends me only minimum charge jobs.” This has to do with forces larger than you, so try to take it easy on yourself, and focus on how to move forward from here.

Post a comment below if there’s anything you want to ask me or tell me!

I did quite a bit of traveling in 2025, and I’m way behind on writing about it, but here we go with an interesting destination: Fiji!! For a bucket-list trip, I told my best friend from high school to pick anywhere (literally, anywhere) in the world, and she picked Fiji, so off we went in May. I’ve never been to the South Pacific or even to Hawaii, so this was a whole new experience for me.

How it all started: Marriott Vacations

Perhaps, a shocker: this trip was actually quite reasonably priced, because my friend found an incredible package deal on Vacations by Marriott Bonvoy. This got us round trip airfare (LAX-Nadi) on Fiji Airways, plus four nights in a very nice room at the Fiji Marriott Momi Bay for $1,500 each (no kidding). So there’s my first tip: if you want to do a resort trip to somewhere that has a Marriott, start on their website!

Off we go to Nadi

I was able to get a points ticket on Southwest from Denver to LAX, so that cost me nothing. My friend and I met at LAX, and then we flew overnight, nonstop 11 hours from Los Angeles to Nadi, the major international airport in Fiji. Here’s another tip: A short-ish trip to Fiji is actually totally doable if you sleep well on planes (I sleep like a rock on planes), but could be really challenging if you don’t.

Because it’s a long flight and you go across the international date line, you lose a day on the way there (we left on Monday night and arrived Wednesday morning), so a one-week trip is really five days, and it’s a looong way to go for that amount of time. However, if you sleep well on planes, this is less of a factor because, at least from LAX to Nadi on Fiji Airways, you fly overnight both ways (leaving around 11 PM). For me, this was fantastic: I fell asleep before we took off, and woke up maybe two hours before we landed. But if you can’t sleep on the plane, you might never recover from the jet lag in that amount of time. Something to consider!

Momi Bay Marriott: Wow!

We landed in Nadi around 6 AM and took a shuttle to the Momi Bay Marriott, a seriously amazing place. It’s about a 45-minute drive from the Nadi airport, and we really loved the remoteness. I’m not that much of a resort-goer, and what I really didn’t want was Cancun, with side-by-side high-rise hotels and no nature. The Momi Bay Marriott isn’t that at all: it’s low-rise buildings (max two stories) in a very quiet environment with lots of jungle. The tradeoff is that there’s literally nothing else there: you could walk to a local convenience store, but that’s about it, meaning that unless you go on a day excursion (which we did, more on that below), you do everything else at the resort, and you eat only at their restaurants.

As you see in these photos, the Momi Bay Marriott is mostly over the water (the building with the barn-style roof is the main restaurant); when my family travels to the tropics we’re mostly tromping through the jungle, so this overwater luxury experience was totally new to me! We had a very nice “standard” hotel room (two queen beds, large bathroom, balcony overlooking the water) and for food, we did the “Momi Meal Deal,” which gets you the breakfast buffet, one item off the lunch menu, and either two items off the dinner menu, or the dinner buffet, depending on the night. I thought the food was excellent, and getting vegetarian food (always a bit of a roll of the dice on an international trip) was no problem. The resort had food packages at various price points; we got the least expensive which was around US $80 each per day for all three meals, and I thought it was totally sufficient! The servers were very helpful and considerate, we didn’t feel rushed, and we had no bad food.

I’ve never been to a five-star resort before so I have zero points of comparison, but this type of trip offers the opportunity for lots of stuff to do, or you can do nothing in a very beautiful place. We did some of each!

Tours and activities

The resort itself has various things to do: it’s a gorgeous place to hang out, and unlike stories I’ve heard of other resorts, it was no problem finding beach chairs or even a cabana (and you don’t pay extra for any of those), particularly if you get to the beach fairly early. There’s a gorgeous infinity pool looking out over the ocean, a nice, large swimming pool (with water aerobics, which I went to), extensive walking paths (but you can also be driven around in a golf cart), a nice gym, a spa (extra cost for that), and other activities like feeding the fish that live in the lagoons on the property.

I also felt like I wanted to see something of Fiji outside the resort, so we did two day trips: a full-day cruise to a small island off the coast of Nadi (Fiji consists of more than 300 islands so it was interesting to see some of them!), and a half-day land trip to the major sights in the Nadi area: the largest Hindu temple in the South Pacific (very cool!), a traditional Fijian village, and, believe it or not, American actor Raymond Burr’s botanical garden, where you can see tons of orchid varieties and also go hiking. Both of these trips were totally worthwhile and not expensive by US standards (around $100 per person including transportation from the resort). The entire Nadi area felt very safe, and the guides for all of these trips were very helpful (essentially everyone in Fiji speaks English).

The Momi Bay Marriott is overall a quiet place (which we enjoyed). There’s not much nightlife other than the on-resort restaurants and bars; there were rumors of a fire show on the beach, but it was raining that night and thus was cancelled.

Who goes to Fiji?

Fiji is not very close to, well, anything, so you might wonder who goes there. We encountered pretty much two categories of travelers: families from Australia and New Zealand (it’s a four-hour flight from the East coast of Australia) and American and Canadian honeymooners. I think the resorts there all have their own flavors: we saw some of the other resorts while picking up and dropping off other people on the tours we took, and I really liked the low-key nature of the Marriott. Some of the other resorts seemed more party-oriented, and the Marriott definitely attracts a lot of families. I like kids and don’t mind being somewhere that has a range of ages, but there also seemed to be adults-only resorts if that’s more of your thing.

Overall impressions

I’m generally more of an adventure travel person than a resort person, but I’ll say that this was a top-tier resort vacation. If you’re a resort person, Fiji is definitely the place to go. For example, one place I would absolutely never choose for a resort vacation is Cancun; I love Mexico, and I would go to Cancun to hang out with people I enjoy spending time with, but the wall-to-wall high-rise luxury hotel scene is 100% not my thing. Fiji, or at least where we went, is very different from that. The resort was all low-rise buildings, and it didn’t feel like they killed every living thing on the land in order to build it.

Resorts have their appeal, in that you don’t have to plan anything “extra” unless you want to. I really enjoyed the day trips we did, and it seemed like most people at the Marriott just stayed there and enjoyed it. I was also somewhat concerned about the “cruise on land” vibe (drunk people at the pool at 9 AM or whatever) and there really was zero unpleasant party action where we were. Thus I give Fiji two thumbs up if you can manage the flight and if you’re looking for somewhere beautiful and relaxing!

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It’s time for my annual year in review post! I’ve also been posting on LinkedIn this week, including a piece on “How do I work up the confidence to market to direct clients, when I know that I’m not the cheapest option??” And remember this year’s mantra…I’ll keep reminding you! Marketing: Do something! Just do more of any kind of marketing.

I’ve been writing year-end review posts for a while. Here’s 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021. I’ll say that this year feels different. I had a great year, due to various factors including luck, experience, working hard, and being willing to try new things. And at the same time, I’m aware that a lot of people in the language professions had a truly terrible year. My goal here isn’t to rub it in, it’s to give some examples of what’s working for me, a few fails, and what I’m looking forward to this year.

Goals!

First, let’s see how I did on the goals I set in my 2024 post.

• Higher income: Check. I earned US $145,000 after paying my subcontractors; the most I’ve earned in 23 years of freelancing and 20K more than I made in 2024. I set this goal in 2021 and finally reached it. I also achieved a sub-goal: more consistent earnings. In 2024, I earned less than $10,000 in four out of 12 months (not ideal) and in 2025, that was down to one month out of 12. In April, I made $6,596, partially due to a delayed payment for a large translation project, but in the other 11 months, I earned more than 10K, and I also had my highest-earning month ever, 26K in March.  
• Maintain roughly the same mix of translation and interpreting: Check. My income is 50/50 between direct language work and teaching/writing consulting, I interpreted 95 days in court and 95 conference/non-court days, did a lot of really interesting translation work, and worked on Training for Translators the rest of the time.
• Mix it up with Training for Translators. Check. I launched a new class (Direct Client Research Lab, now in its fifth session), started offering monthly free webinars, increased my mailing list by almost 500 people (to almost 5,000 as of today), and had the largest-ever session of March Marketing Madness.
• Prepare the 20th anniversary edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator. Half a check? After publishing Getting Started as a Freelance Interpreter in June, I needed a break from book writing, then I worked so much from September-December (more on this below) that I did sporadic work on the book, but it’s nowhere near done.
• Spend an hour a day on my passion projects. Nope! Fail! I took on so much paid work that this didn’t happen. More on this below.
• Meditate, exercise, and cultivate my non-screen hobbies, including attending summer cello camp. Three quarters of a check? A theme of last year is that I feel like I worked slightly too much. But I attended cello camp (amazing), I finished climbing 14 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, and my husband and I did the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim hike for our 25th anniversary, plus I went to Fiji (no kidding) with my best friend from high school.

Fails

It wouldn’t be, well, a year of being a human, without a few fails. And honestly, I think that trying something and having it not work out isn’t necessarily a fail, it’s a learning experience (“You’ll only make that mistake once,” is an oft-repeated saying at my house!). For me, this year’s non-successes included:

• Paying a virtual assistant to prepare and format a compilation of my blog posts that has sold a total of 18 copies. Total revenue, about 15% of what it cost me to create the thing!
• Creating a Start Here page on my website, including recorded webinars on getting started, working with agencies, and working with direct clients, that has now sold exactly one recording of one webinar (zero sales of the other two).
• Radically under-pricing the first session of Direct Client Research Lab, which I offered at $110 and it sold out in two hours. Since then I’ve been increasing the price incrementally, but multiple participants have told me that they paid $500+ for coaching programs that were less valuable than this one. Just goes to show, even when you teach other people how to do these things, you still make the same mistakes that everyone else does!
• Creating a hardcover edition of Getting Started as a Freelance Interpreter that no one (no one) bought. This cost me only $300 extra when I published the book, so we’ll just put it in the “a mistake I’ll only make once” category. The book is selling well overall, but nobody wants the hardcover!

Successes

Despite the events referenced above, this really was an excellent year.

• I’m finally (finally!) earning the freelance equivalent of a six-figure salary.
• Oddly enough, I did a lot more translation work than in 2024, largely for one end client, but I also landed a new law firm client.
• Getting Started as a Freelance Interpreteris out in the world and doing well, and I’m already at break-even (it cost me $4,000 to publish it and last year’s book royalties were $4,992).
• I love interpreting. I still feel that doing an MCI during COVID is one of the best decisions I’ve made in 20+ years of freelancing.
• I love helping people through Training for Translators. I know this sounds cliché, but in addition to getting positive feedback on individual classes, it’s incredibly gratifying to hear from people who say, “I followed your business advice, and this is the happiest I’ve been in my adult life because I’m doing work that feels meaningful and earning what I want to be earning.”
• I took a literary translation class through ALTA and loved it. This sparked the idea for a translation of a book that’s in the public domain; stay tuned!

• I put almost all of my additional earnings into savings. I’m not going to brag about how much I made, because I hate the “Don’t you wish you could be me???” attitude among high-earning freelancers. But I will give myself credit here: of the 20K more I earned this year, I put 16K of it into savings, avoiding lifestyle inflation and impulse spending, which I see as the two biggest pitfalls of earning a higher income.
• Not lowering my rates in a tough economy. I realize that I’m very fortunate in multiple ways, not least of all that I don’t have to make six figures in order to survive. This year, I wanted to earn more money, for a variety of reasons: some big travel goals, the concern that my husband may lose his job (he works at a government research lab that is in the Trump administration’s sights), and wanting to do some deferred maintenance on our house, among others. But in practical terms, our mandatory expenses are very low. Our house is paid off and we have no other debt, and my daughter is in her last semester of university and is planning on getting a job that uses her engineering degree, so our expenses are actually going down instead of up. I realize this isn’t the case for everyone, and this gives me the ability to say no to low-paying work, plus I’m happy to report that none of my current clients asked me to lower my rates.

Why?

I feel like in this very challenging moment for a lot of freelancers, it’s good to break down some of the “Why” behind what was, for me, a very good year.

• Experience certainly helps, for a few reasons. When clients come to someone with 20+ years of experience, they typically know it’s not going to be cheap, and they either need someone with that level of expertise, or they just want to find someone who seems reliable and get the project done. Also, the longer you freelance, the more highs and lows you survive. In these crazy times, I tell myself, hey, I freelanced through the 2008 financial crisis, two of my husband’s major health crises (pacemaker, mountain bike accident), COVID, etc. etc. and I’m still here, so surely I can get through AI fever and the current geopolitical disruptions.
• Finally deciding, enough already with the income. I set this goal five years ago and I’m still not there. When is someday, if not now??
• The ongoing benefits of the business coaching I did at the end of 2024.
• Luck. Honestly, anyone who had a great year and doesn’t attribute at least some of it to luck is a big liar. For example, one of my largest interpreting clients was an “Oh by the way…” referral from a colleague. Another one resulted from a video interview that I initially thought wouldn’t turn into anything. There’s definitely an element of right place, right time.
• Thinking ahead. When I decided to pursue an interpreting Master’s in 2020, it was a combination of factors: time on my hands (COVID), something I had always been interested in, and feeling that interpreting would be less affected by technology than translation would be. I’m not saying I had the crystal ball (I didn’t), but it does frustrate me when people say, these days, “I’m sitting here watching my longtime business crumble to nothing!” As I said to someone the other day, unless you have both the financial resources and the desire to stop working, don’t do that! Don’t just sit there and watch; turn your marketing up to 11 while looking at diversifying your business.
• Trying new things: I tell students all the time, you literally don’t know until you try. This year, I tried a few new marketing initiatives. Some led to literally nothing (newsletter sponsorships: big fat zero), while others have already led to about as much work as I can handle. The important thing is having the courage to try!

2026 Goals

So, now what??? Here are some of my goals for 2026, both tangible and “soft.”

• Publish the 20th anniversary edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator. I honestly feel bad that the third edition is still selling well, because it’s so outdated. This is a big priority for 2026.
• Get out of the scarcity mindset with interpreting. Crazily enough, I will have finished the Glendon MCI five years ago (!!) in a few months, and I’ve dramatically exceeded my goals for how much interpreting I’m doing. I love, love, love interpreting, and it’s a lot more tiring than translation, because it’s on someone else’s schedule. So I’m giving myself permission to have more of an abundance mindset with interpreting and realizing that I don’t have to accept every single assignment.
• Work shorter days and leave more time for my creative interests. I’m not a crazy workaholic, I almost never work on weekends, and (for an American) I take a good amount of vacation. But I do sometimes work long days: last year it wasn’t unusual that I would log on at 6:30 AM my time for an interpreting assignment on Eastern time, then stay at the office until between 5 and 6 PM. This year I’m trying to set a policy that a work day is eight hours. Today I had to get to my office at 7, so I’m leaving at 3. I’m hoping that this will free up more time in the evenings for yoga classes and my creative interests, and I’m setting a goal of going to yoga and practicing both of my musical instruments (cello and Renaissance lute) on most weekdays.
• Take a multi-week computer-free vacation. As referenced above, I take a decent amount of vacation (around six weeks a year), but most of the time, I have my computer with me and I do a little work here and there. Inspired partially by a couple of presentations I attended this year with presenters who really kill it on work-life balance (i.e. working four days a week with three months of computer-free vacation), I’m trying harder in this area! Over the recent holidays, I did a 10-day family ski trip to Idaho and Utah and took only my phone. Honestly, it was fabulous. I think it’s helpful to time a computer-free vacation with my clients’ likely holidays, so I’m trying it again in August, and I’ve already booked a two-week Europe trip where I plan to take only my phone.
• Make at least some progress on a literary translation. See above: my idea for a public-domain book translation.
• Dream goal: Work a little less and earn more. Hey, it has to exist as a dream first, and I’ve also realized that sometimes, working more hours is a result of my own sloppy processes. Example: I recently paid my web developer to automate the Training for Translators registration system, and honestly I should have done this five years ago. So, pie in the sky, I’d like to do less busy work, focus more on the work I really enjoy, and earn 150K. There you go, that’s my dream.

Again, I know it was a really tough year for a lot of freelancers. I’m sharing these successes partially to give some hope, and partially to share what worked for me and help you replicate it for yourself. And whatever 2026 has up its sleeve, we’re in it together!

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Welcome back!!

Hello everyone! I hope that you all got some well-deserved time off over the holidays, and that you’re refreshed and looking forward to the possibilities of the new year.

Here’s a simple thought to kick things off. This year, let’s all try to do more of any kind of marketing at all. Instead of wondering:

• Should I e-mail the Director of International Communications or the International Communications Manager?
• It’s Friday afternoon and I have some time to market…but is it worth it? Will anyone read my e-mails or are they wrapping up for the weekend?
• What’s the perfect subject line?
• Does it look weird to contact three people from the same company on LinkedIn?

…let’s just do something.

I have a reminder in my Todoist app, and it’s set to run every weekday. This reminder literally says, Marketing: Do something! This reminds me that the important thing isn’t the details of what I do, it’s the fact of doing anything at all.

In 2023, I wrote a blog post, called What does “always be marketing” mean? In it, I make the point that marketing means a lot more than applying to new clients. If your issue is that you just need more work, end of story, then you should be applying to a lot of new clients. But even if you don’t need more work, there’s always better work, and not doing any marketing is a recipe for stagnation. My examples in the post include:

• Following up with conference speakers whose presentations I particularly liked
• Sending a thank you card to a client who paid me for the first project
• Putting some interpreting students in touch with one of my managing court interpreters so that they could observe a trial
• Nudging some agencies that onboarded me but never sent any work

A lot of marketing is more like nurturing and appreciating: for example, if a colleague refers me for more than $1,000 of work during the year, I either take them out for a nice dinner if I see them in person, or I order them a nice holiday gift (like a Christmas wreath) if I don’t see them in person.

This year let’s all set that as goal: Marketing: Do something!

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