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Lots of freelancers wonder about whether it’s a good idea to expand your freelance business, or even turn it into an agency! Particularly if you’re in a situation where:

• Clients ask you for referrals to translators in other language pairs
• Clients need more work than you can do by their deadline
• You look at some of your agency clients and see room for improvement

Key questions to ask

This is a topic that I think about with some regularity! Although, to spoil the surprise, I’ve concluded that I have almost no desire to expand my business or become an agency. Why?

• I’m happy with the volume and quality of work I have right now; I make what I consider a healthy income on my own
• I don’t like being responsible for the quality of other people’s work
• I don’t want more constraints on my free time
• I don’t enjoy the management aspects of the business enough to want to expand them; mostly, I enjoy translating and interpreting

However, I don’t think that expanding your business is a bad idea. In fact, I think that, as most medium-to-large agencies move toward, or have already embraced, the high volume/low-margin work of machine translation with human editors, there’s actually an opening in the market for true boutique agencies, run by translators and interpreters who do some of the work themselves and subcontract some of the work to high-quality freelancers.

If this is something that interests you, I would mull over the following:

• Do you consistently have enough work that you could keep more people busy?
• Do clients consistently ask you for referrals to other translators and interpreters?
• Do you enjoy project management, client relations, potentially proofreading, and other tasks that go along with running an expanded freelance business or an agency?
• Would you enjoy expanding your freelance business into an asset that you could potentially sell at some point?

To me, here’s the kicker

Here’s what I bump up against, whenever I think about potentially expanding: quality work is not cheap. There are really only two ways to earn a profit margin on agency-type work:

1. Keep your rates the same as your freelance rates, and outsource work to good translators and interpreters who charge less than you do
2. Raise your “agency” rates above what you charge for your freelance work

To me, this is the hard part. Most people you’d really like to hire, probably charge about the same as you do. Sooooo, where’s the profit margin going to come from? Admittedly, there are ways to do this, such as:

• Find good, up-and-coming translators and interpreters who are at the beginning of their careers, actively looking for work, and willing to work for less than what you charge
• Find good translators and interpreters who might want to give you an attractive rate for a guaranteed volume of work; i.e. you’ll “retain” them for 5,000 words a week, or 10 hours of interpreting, regardless of whether you use the time

Still, make sure you think this through before you dive in!

 

My conclusion: No!

I’ve had a number of agency/quasi-agency ideas over the years. Maybe I should start an “only official documents” agency, or an agency that only does French to English international development? And, in the end, I decided against it, for the reasons I mentioned above. At the same time, I think that, particularly in the translation world, there’s a niche waiting to be filled. Hopefully these tips are helpful if you’re considering this for your own business!

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The next session of my four-week online course, Getting Started as a freelance translator or interpreter, in the age of AI, starts on September 9! We have a good group signed up, and there’s still room for you!

This class is for beginning and aspiring translators and interpreters who want to launch and run a successful business.

• Completely self-paced; you don’t have to be online at a specific time, and you have access to the course materials for six months
• The course materials combine video lessons, weekly tasks, and the opportunity to submit questions for the weekly recorded Q&A sessions
• Topics include an overview of the language professions, income potential, specializations, creating a CV/resume, deciding what to charge, getting paid, marketing to agencies and direct clients, creating an online presence, certifications, and where this whole AI/MT situation is headed!

Registration is $195, and members of the American Translators Association can use coupon code ATA for $30 off. I hope to see you there!

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Websites are a major source of stress, for beginning and experienced freelancers alike. Do you absolutely need a website? Is there a way to get a nice-looking website for a reasonable price? What’s the best platform? Additionally, tons of freelancers hate their websites. I’m really not sure why; it’s just kind of a “thing” that freelancers often say, “Ugh! I hate my website!” Hating your website is already unpleasant, but then it gets worse: hating your website often leads to avoiding marketing, especially to direct clients, because you don’t want them to see your website. What’s going on here?

Is a website still necessary?

In my opinion, a website is part of establishing yourself as a serious professional translator or interpreter. Can you just use LinkedIn? Sure. But think of yourself looking for a professional service provider: would you be enthusiastic about an accountant who has only a LinkedIn profile instead of their own website? Don’t you at least want a website so that clients can check up on who you are, even if that’s not how they found you?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has gotten a lot more complex lately. If you have the impression that Google search results have gotten worse, it’s not just you, according to various articles such as this really interesting piece in The Week. A team of German researchers found that Google is relatively poor at identifying spam websites, the web has been flooded with low-quality content, and Google tends to prioritize affiliate marketing sites. Yet, all is not lost, for highly targeted search terms. About six months ago, I took the HubSpot Academy SEO class (free, decent quality), partially just for my own edification, and partially to try to improve the ranking of the Training for Translators site for the search term, “classes for translators.” Apparently, at least some of what I learned was effective, because (after some Google-inserted ads and videos), T4T is now the fourth result, after Metro State University in Denver (perhaps because I’m located nearby?), Coursera, and ATA. You’re unlikely to hit it big on a search term like “legal translator,” but for more specialized terms, I still think SEO is worthwhile.

What’s the best way to create or improve your website?

A website created and maintained by a web designer is always going to be your best option; for the Training for Translators website, I hired a designer to create it (in WordPress), and I have a website manager who runs all of the updates and monitors the traffic. But for my professional website, this isn’t really in my budget. That site is kind of patched-together (I don’t hate it, but I’m getting close), and could really use an upgrade. My thoughts on this:

• If your budget is lower than around US $1,500, I wouldn’t expect to get something much better than what you can create yourself with reasonable computer skills. In my experience, it’s not until you spend in the vicinity of US $2,000-$3,000 that you’re going to get a website that’s really unique-looking, has custom graphics, and doesn’t look like 10,000 other websites designed on the same platform. I would argue that this expense is worthwhile as part of your professional image, but it’s also a big chunk of change, particularly for a beginning freelancer.
• That being said, I think that basic and professional is fine. A colleague recently turned me onto the website creation platform Carrd. Important: because Carrd creates only one-page websites, they are, as far as I can tell, not indexed by search engines. Don’t use Carrd if you’re looking for SEO! However: It’s really inexpensive (like $19 a year), you can use your own domain name, it’s easy to use, and you can make a halfway decent website in a couple of hours. Just for kicks, I made this website for my conference interpreting services, using a domain name (frenchconferenceinterpreter.com) that I bought a while ago and never did anything with! I’d argue that this type of site is better than nothing, because you can put the URL in your e-mail signature, on LinkedIn, etc. and direct potential clients to it.
• If you’d like to make your own site, the big players in DIY website creation are Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, and maybe Weebly. I’m a WordPress girl, but I know that some people find WordPress confusing to use and prefer Squarespace (I feel the opposite; I don’t really get Squarespace!). If you go with a custom domain and domain name e-mail, these services aren’t free; you’re probably looking at around US $300 a year, and it will take you a chunk of time to create something nice-looking, then if it’s on WordPress and you use an external hosting provider, you’ll need to run updates on it yourself.

If you don’t currently have a website

If you don’t currently have a website, or if your site is from 2002 and you can’t stand the sight of it, here’s what I’d do: put up something basic and professional, while saving up money for a professional designer. Pick a website creation platform, allocate maybe 10 hours to the project, and just get something up there. Meanwhile, put away maybe $100 a month, with the goal of hiring a designer when you can afford it.

Wherever you are in the website process, I hope these tips are helpful!

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Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! Here’s what’s up with T4T this week!

Keep a list of things you say “no” to

We all know that saying no is both difficult and important. Saying no is how we preserve our time and energy for what matters to us, and saying no can be really, really hard. One of my new favorite things is the weekly e-newsletter from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. It’s short, to-the-point, and has tips you can implement right that second. Last week’s issue featured a great one: keep a list of things you say no to. “Turn each no into an achievement.” As a recovering people-pleaser, I love this!

GDPR-compliant e-mail marketing

It’s hard to know how to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if you’re doing e-mail marketing. My friend and colleague Molly Yurick sent me this really helpful article from Hunter.io, titled Is Cold Email Legal? Definitely worth a read if you do e-mail marketing to clients in countries with e-mail privacy laws (not the U.S., for better or for worse!)

This week’s topic: The red zone! What is it, and why do you need one?

Rather than having just one rate (“I charge X cents per word/X dollars per hour”), I’m a big fan of rate zones. The green zone is your ideal rate, where you want to be working most of the time. For me, this is any work that generates an hourly rate of around US $110, whether I’m charging by the word, hour, or day. The yellow zone is a rate that isn’t ideal, but that either works on a limited basis (for me, book translation falls into this category: I can’t afford to work for publishers’ rates all the time, but once a year or so, it works), or that works for more complicated reasons. For me, court interpreting also falls into this category. The Colorado courts pay certified non-Spanish interpreters $65 an hour (well below what I want to be earning), but with a two-hour minimum, and mostly for remote assignments that take 30 minutes or less, and they send me ~100 assignments a year, which works for me.

Then there’s the red zone. The red zone is a rate below which you do not work. No. Just no (see above for James Clear’s advice on this…haha!). The problem is that many freelancers have no red zone, which leads to saying yes to low-paying work, thinking, “It’s just one cent…It’s just five dollars an hour,” and pretty soon, you’re looking at your business finances and wondering why you’re earning so little money when you’re working so much.

The red zone can be freeing

Trust me on this, the red zone can really free you. If you don’t currently have a red zone, it can be very scary to establish a red zone, because turning down work is always scary. But, particularly in the current business environment, and particularly if you translate for agencies, you’re probably seeing a lot of downward rate pressure. There are various problems with this:

• It harms the entire profession. At a certain point, it’s just not true that working is better than not working, when you’re working at rates that don’t reflect the expertise and training that the job requires. I agree that particularly as a beginner, you have to start somewhere, but it’s just a fact that if clients couldn’t find people to work at the rates they’re offering, they would have two choices: pay more, or go out of business.
• It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re working too much for too little pay. You really want to be in a situation where, when a project goes sideways and you think, “Am I getting paid enough to deal with this??” The answer is, “Actually, yes!!”
• It never ends. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but when you’re telling yourself, “It’s just half a cent, I’m not going to make a big deal about it!” the downward slide is likely to continue.

Having a red zone can be very liberating: instead of anguishing about whether you should have turned a job down, you can just tell yourself, “It doesn’t meet my financial goals, so I’m saying no.“

How to establish a red zone

It really doesn’t matter what your red zone is, it only matters that you have one. My red zone is going to be different than yours, and your red zone can involve both specific rates, and “working conditions.” For example I don’t do interpreting jobs that involve getting up before 5 AM; that’s one of my red zone conditions, because I simply can’t fall asleep early enough to do a good job before then. After hearing a presentation by Michael Schubert at an ATA conference, I added a component to my red zone: no two-figure invoices. No invoices for less than US $100; it just doesn’t reflect the time and expertise that I put into even a small project. That idea emboldened me to raise my rate for a one-page official document translation to $100, and it’s worked well for me.

Your red-zone numbers are partly objective, and partly subjective. You’re trying to determine:

• What’s the rate at which I think, “Ugh! This just isn’t worth it!”
• What’s the rate at which I think, “I’d be better off spending this time marketing to better-paying clients”
• What the rate at which I think, “I’d be better off taking a class to improve my skills or pursue a new certification, so that I’m not working for rates like this anymore”

Those types of ideas will guide you to your personal red zone!

Thanks for reading, and I hope these tips are helpful!

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After a nice summer break, Training for Translators’ classes are back! We have a four-week class and a two-hour master class on tap for September, and both are open for registration now.

Getting started as a freelance translator or interpreter in the age of AI starts on September 9; it’s a self-paced, four-week class that runs until October 4. You don’t need to be online at a certain time, and the course materials are accessible for six months. This class combines self-paced video lessons, weekly tasks, and the opportunity to submit questions for a weekly recorded question and answer session. Registration is $195, and American Translators Association members can use coupon code ATA for $30 off.

On September 18, I’ll be teaching a two-hour master class on Marketing to direct clients and increasing your income. For many freelance translators, the time to find direct clients is now. But it’s hard to know where to start, who to market to, and how to contact them. We’ll discuss the fundamentals of direct client marketing, along with a plan for deciding how much to charge, and filtering higher-paying clients into your workflow. Registration is $75 and includes the recording.