Uncategorized

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

Burnout (feeling like you resent your job, you don’t want to do your job anymore, you’re too exhausted to do your job, etc.) can be a big issue for freelancers. While we don’t have bosses chaining us to our desks, we have the reality that, the more you work, the more you earn, and you don’t get paid if you don’t work. This can lead to phenomena such as:

• Constantly working excessively long hours, “perpetual overtime” mode where a 60-hour week, or working every weekend, starts to feel normal
• Never taking time off, because we fear that we can’t afford to, or we fear losing clients if we’re ever unavailable
• Turning down or cancelling plans with family and friends, because we’re always working
• Having no time for non-work interests, because we “don’t have time”

Let’s break this down a bit!

Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, or it’s the best of a few not-great options

I don’t meant this in a negative way, it’s just true. Generally, I love my job, and I really enjoy working. However, for a few years when my daughter was little (approximately ages two to six), I deemed it preferable to consistently work at night, rather than putting her in full-time child care. She would go to preschool or kindergarten in the morning, then I would spend the afternoons with her, have dinner with her and my husband, and then work from about 7:30-11 PM, often six nights a week. This was not fun. I’m not a night person. TBH I’m not really a morning person either, I just sleep a lot. During that phase of life, I also (TBH) cried a lot because I was so tired, and felt so torn between the stable life I wanted for my daughter, and the career that I wanted for myself. And by the way, my husband is fantastic; he’s a great dad and a very supportive partner. It’s just the reality that in the U.S., child care is incredibly expensive, we were living off pretty moderate incomes, and it felt like the better choice for me to inconvenience myself.

Looking back, I honestly wouldn’t do things differently. Now that my daughter is 22 (!!), I feel grateful to have had the time with her, while developing my business. I’m glad that I never stopped working completely, and I’m glad that I was there for all of the important moments of her childhood. Moral: sometimes overwork and burnout just is what it is, and the only way through it is through it.

Ten things that help me avoid burnout

1. Charging rates that allow me to bill (not work, bill: generate income) around 25 hours a week. This sounds like a weird tip for avoiding burnout, but I think it’s critical. If you have to generate income 40 or 50 hours a week in order to reach your target income, you’re going to be working a lot more hours than that, because clients don’t pay you to do administrative work, issue invoices, market, attend conferences, work on your website, maintain your computer, or anything else besides translation and interpreting. Personally, I think 25-30 hours of billable work is good. More than that, and you’re running two risks: either you’re not spending enough time on non-billable work to keep your business healthy, or you’re working too much. And if you’re, like, what is this whole billable hours thing, fill out my Deciding what to charge spreadsheet!
2. Compartmentalizing my work and non-work time. I find it hugely draining to have work bleeding into personal time, and personal time bleeding into work. I’m very bad at setting this boundary, so I’ve worked at an office outside my house (first, a series of co-working offices; now, my own office) for around 10 years.
3. Actively seeking out work that I enjoy and am good at. I think people burn out for two reasons: mostly because they just work too much, but also because they constantly do work that they don’t enjoy. This leads to my next point:
4. NOT working on “whatever lands in the inbox.” To me, one of the root causes of burnout is a lack of fulfillment, a feeling that what you’re doing doesn’t really matter, it’s tedious, it’s not meaningful, etc. If you’re feeling like this, go back to step three, actively seeking out work that you enjoy and are good at.
5. Spending less than I earn, and maintaining a business and personal savings cushion. Again, a perhaps seemingly unrelated tip, but I think it’s really important. Financial desperation isn’t a great catalyst for good business decisions; you really want to be working today to pay the bills that are due in three months or six months, not next week. The corollary to this is always spending less than you make (my first job out of college, I earned $700 a month plus free room and board, and I still saved money), something I wrote about in this post. 
6. Making strategic decisions about when to work overtime. Note here that I’m not saying, “Never working nights or weekends.” Sometimes, I do work nights or weekends, but I make a deliberate decision to do that, I don’t do it by default. For example, I have an interpreting client for whom I work ongoing sessions of online courses, which once in a while meet on weekends; I deem this worthwhile. Likewise, I have a law firm client who pays very well and sometimes needs rush work; also worthwhile.
7. Taking real vacations. As a freelancer, vacations can be kind of amorphous. I really love the ability to work from anywhere, and part of the point of a real vacation is to disconnect. I try to take one completely computer-free week twice a year: generally one week around Christmas and one week in August. This has actually gotten easier since I’ve been doing more interpreting, because conference interpreting really slows down at those times. Then, I typically take around four additional weeks of vacation, where I might work for an hour or two in the evening, work on the airplane, etc. Which leads me to my next point…
8. Maintaining a paid vacation fund. I think that a business savings account is really important, for a few reasons. Unexpected tax bill (this happened to me in 2023, when I “made too much money,” a concept I only think about when I talk to my accountant!), dead computer, can’t-miss conference…and paid vacation! Budgeting so that you can still pay yourself for a couple of weeks while you don’t work can really help push you out the door for some much-needed vacation.
9. Viewing myself as a non-renewable resource. Rebounding from burnout takes a long time, and burnout itself can have serious repercussions in your business. It’s better not to empty the tank completely; when you feel yourself on a quarter of a tank of energy, that’s the time to take some burnout-prevention actions. Which leads me to my next point…
10. Being a really great boss (of myself). My husband has a salaried job, and he has an excellent boss. When she sees that the team is really tired, she’ll cancel a meeting and tell everyone to log off a few hours early. She sends out Starbucks gift cards. She notices who deserves a raise or a promotion. And honestly, that’s the way I try to treat myself. I’ve been doing a lot of interpreting assignments on East Coast time, meaning that I have to get up around 5 AM, and yesterday I decided to leave work at 1 PM and go to yoga. The instructor said, “I never see you here at this time of day!” to which I responded, “My boss said I’ve been working too much and I should take the afternoon off.” Obviously, this involves various factors, such as those listed above, but I think it’s really important to be the best boss you’ve ever had, if you’re in this job for the long haul.

I hope these tips are helpful! If there’s anything you want to ask me or tell me, just reply leave a comment!

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

This month’s master class, Aiming for six figures as a freelancer, is on October 23. Registration ($75) includes the recording.

The class is designed for freelance translators or interpreters who want to achieve a six-figure income, or who have a lower goal that represents a significant increase over their current income. We will cover:

• Analyzing your current workflow and revenue streams to identify what factors are holding you back from earning a higher income
• Calculating how much you need to charge in order to reach a six-figure income; implementing green, yellow, and red zone rates
• Identifying limiting beliefs that freelancers often have, and mindset shifts that six-figure freelancers have made
• Acknowledging the role of diversification in a high-income freelance business Identifying practical strategies for easing out your lower-paying clients and replacing them with higher-paying ones Where is the whole AI/MT situation headed?

A past participant says: “The very positive, motivational mindset promoted was good and I liked that the host consistently encouraged participants to shift their mindsets in a more positive direction. I liked her tone, it wasn’t braggy or preachy, she came across as humbly knowledgeable and approachable.”

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

Here’s episode four of the Training for Translators podcast! It’s based on this blog post, in which I answered a reader’s question, “How do I find the motivation to market??” If you’d like to read the text of the episode (minus my commentary on what I wrote!), access any of the links, or leave a comment, just click that link! Otherwise, you can listen below:

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

When I started freelancing in 2002, buying a translation memory tool was a major rite of passage, and the tool you used was somewhat of a signifier of what “translation team” you were on. The solid, established translators making good money used Trados, those looking to spend less money or who didn’t want to learn to use Trados used Wordfast Classic, and the nerds used OmegaT (memoQ didn’t exist back then!). The TM tool landscape has changed a lot, with beginning freelancers wondering whether they need to buy a tool, and if so, which one, and with experienced freelancers wondering if they should stick with what they have, or migrate to something new

I’ve gotten a few questions on this topic lately, so I thought it was worth a look, with the caveat that I’m not (by any means!) a translation technology expert. 

The big picture 

Lots of people rush into the decision to buy a translation memory tool, and before you do that, I think it’s important to ask yourself a simple but really important question. Are you buying this tool because:

• A client that you want to work with is requiring you to use it (that’s what happened to me with Trados)
• You perceive that you’ll get more work, better-paying work, and/or more desirable work if you own the tool
• You want the tool for your own productivity or consistency reasons 

This is huge. Why are you buying this thing in the first place? And are you sure that your reason is valid? I have lots of mixed feelings about translation memory tools: the “chunked” aspect of how you work in them is kind of a curse/blessing. Personally I find that in Trados (my current main tool), I work about 10% faster even on documents that aren’t repetitive, and there’s much less chance of skipping a word or a phrase, but it’s also much harder to rework the text. You can split and combine segments, but I find it tedious, and it interrupts the flow of a text that needs to sound really good. At the same time, I really enjoy the automated glossary function; some of my international development clients have glossaries with thousands of terms, and honestly the PDF converter that comes with Trados is pretty good. 

A whole other aspect is that the market-leader tools have become either bloated or feature-rich, however you want to look at it, particularly with collaboration and project management tools. I never use these and I find them kind of aggravating, but they could be really appealing if you work on a translation team or outsource work to other people. 

Where do online tools come in 

As I said above, buying a translation memory tool used to be somewhat of a rite of passage, signifying that you had enough translation work to justify the price tag of one of the market leaders. If memory serves, I paid something like $250 for Wordfast Classic in about 2005, and close to $1,000 for Trados a few years later. The big-name tools are still pretty pricey: memoQ at 360 euros a year, Trados at $395 per year, and Wordfast Pro or Classic at $480 for an installed license. This is not to say that these tools are overpriced; if you land or retain even one client because you have them, they’re totally worth it. By this I just mean, they’re an investment! 

The new players on the scene are server-based tools that either you pay for, or a client provides you a login for. Here’s where I see a significant change in the market: I keep saying “rite of passage,” because, back in the day, I think that at least some clients used owning a translation memory tool as somewhat of a filter. LIke, if this translator has a license for the current version of a market-leader tool and knows how to use it, they’re probably a serious professional. 

That factor is less true now that a lot of tools have online versions that allow clients to buy server-based versions, which in turn allows agencies to use translators who aren’t willing or able to purchase a license for an installed translation memory tool. That’s not to say that online tools are overall a bad thing. I recently used Phrase (formerly Memsource) for a client and I liked it a lot. It’s definitely nice to be liberated from the IT management side of translation memory tools; if I never see the Trados error “Object not set to an instance of an object” again, I’ll be happy. And I think it’s true that online translation memory tools have removed (yet another) barrier to entry in the language professions, which has some downsides. 

My TM tool experience

When I first started translating, I didn’t even understand the difference between TM/translation memory, and MT/machine translation. The first time I used a translation memory tool, I wondered why it wasn’t doing the translation for me! After that significant false start, I’ve tried, owned, and enjoyed (for various reasons) three different translation memory tools:

• OmegaT, a free and open source translation memory tool. This is what I started with, because my husband is an IT guy and an open source software fan. To this day, I think that OmegaT’s matching algorithm is better than the matching algorithm in either Wordfast or Trados. OmegaT has a great support community and has been translated into about a million languages (because volunteers do the work). The major downside is compatibility: while the xliff standard theoretically allows you to exchange files with other programs, in practice, it’s not that easy, and many clients will simply say, you have to have X version of X tool, because we want to send you a package that’s specific for that tool. But there’s still a special place in my heart for OmegaT!
• Wordfast Classic, which is probably my favorite tool overall. It’s just so simple and functional. Wordfast Classic works within Microsoft Word. It’s not a standalone program, there’s no big thing to install or learn to use, you don’t have to process your files into a different format to work on them, and you can incorporate glossaries. For what it is, it’s fantastic. However, you can probably get a sense of the downside: it only works within Word. If you want to translate a PowerPoint or an Excel file, much less the more esoteric formats that the market-leader tools can handle, you’re out of luck.
• Trados Studio: I purchased Trados purely for business reasons; a client offered me and my friend and colleague Eve Bodeux a big, juicy project, and Eve convinced me that we should buy Trados, hire an in-person trainer to teach us how to use it, and accept the project. She was 100% correct; despite the fact that Trados is relatively expensive and not that easy to learn to use (I’m not a total techno-idiot, and the first time I looked at the Trados interface, I couldn’t even tell where you type the translation). I’ve used it ever since, and I think that the pluses and minuses of Trados are pretty obvious: it, Wordfast Pro and memoQ are the market leaders, they have tons of features, from letting you translate pretty much any file format, to glossaries, to QA, to project management and collaboration, but Trados can be a bit much when you just want to translate one simple Word file. If I were starting over, I think I’d pick memoQ for its reputation as being more user-friendly than Trados, but with 15 years of Trados experience, I’m planning to just stick with it. There’s honestly nothing I particularly love or hate about Trados, it’s just overloaded with features I never use. 

How to decide

I can’t tell you what translation memory tool to buy, because that depends on your specific situation, but hopefully I can help you ask the right questions. Above all, do not run out and buy an expensive tool just because you think clients may want it. Gather some data first! 

1. Ask yourself why you are buying this tool, using the questions in the “big picture” section above.
2. Assess whether you work for, or would like to work for, any clients who require a specific tool. 
3. Look at your technical requirements. Most notably, Wordfast Pro and OmegaT run natively on Windows, Mac, and Linux; obviously with online tools, your operating system doesn’t really matter, and to run Trados or memoQ on a Mac, you will probably have to run virtual machine software. 
4. Demo a few tools (they all have demo versions!) to get a sense of how they work. 
5. Ask other translators what tool they use, how they like it, and whether they use it for business/marketing reasons (i.e. “Because my largest client requires memoQ”) or because they actually like the tool (i.e. “I work mostly for direct clients who don’t care about translation memory, so I use OmegaT”). 
6. Think about how you will use the tool. Do you translate only Word files? Do you need to work on InDesign files? Are you going to localize software? Do you want something with an AI/MT plugin, or do you enjoy translating from scratch? 
7. Do you prefer an online tool, a one-time installed license, or a subscription? There are a lot of options out there, and a lot of different payment models. Wordfast Anywhere is $9.90 a month, memoQ is 360 euros a year, Phrase is $27 a month, OmegaT is free…there’s a huge range of what you pay and what you get. 
8. I would at least look at, in no particular order, OmegaT, Wordfast, memoQ, Trados, and Phrase. But you’ll meet people who are rabid fans of the less well-known tools as well: CafeTran, DejaVu, Swordfish, and more. Try them out! Particularly if your clients don’t care what tool you use, you may find a non-market-leader that you really like. 
9. Finally, once you choose a tool, unless you’re going with something free, look around for group buy programs and discounts. Most translators’ associations, and entities like ProZ.com, offer pretty sizable discounts on translation memory tools; definitely take advantage of these after you decide what to buy!

If you’re in the market for a translation memory tool, or wondering whether to stick with the one you have, I hope these tips are helpful! If there’s anything you want to add, just add a comment!

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

Episode three of the T4T podcast is live! You can subscribe (the podcast is just called Training for Translators) in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or you can listen right here, using the audio player below.

In my first year of freelancing, I applied to over 400 translation companies. Is it still worth applying to agencies? Does the answer depend on whether you’re a translator or an interpreter? And what happens after you apply to an agency: should you just wait for them to drop a sweet project into your lap. Spoiler alert: no! Expect to contact them two to six times before you get a response!

This podcast episode is based on two past T4T blog posts, which you can read here, and here.