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Our master classes and challenge groups for this “school year” have now wrapped up and are on hiatus until September, but my weekly newsletter articles and blog posts will still be coming out. In addition to this week’s post, you can check out a bonus post on my recent trip to Iceland if you’d like to!

This week’s topic: Are dominant clients a good thing, or a bad thing?

Many of us face this situation: we have a good client that sends us a lot of work; we keep accepting their work; and then one day we run our numbers and realize that this client accounts for 50%-75% of our work volume and income. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Let’s take a look!

The great thing about dominant clients is that they greatly decrease your administrative overhead and non-billable time. You’re not spending hours going back and forth about rates, TM tool usage, project specifications, interpreting platforms, and everything else that you negotiate with a new or one-off client. You know that they like you (otherwise they wouldn’t send you so much work!), and you know how to work to their specifications.

The hard thing about dominant clients is that they represent a risk. I’ve lost good clients literally overnight: several years ago, a five-figure client e-mailed me to say that in hiring a half-time marketing person, they found someone who had previously been a translator, and decided to bring that person on full time and stop outsourcing their translation work. I never worked for them again, after receiving assignments worth several thousand euros, several times a year, for many years in a row. Clients’ own workflows go up and down, and as a freelancer, you have zero guarantee that a dominant client will continue using you. 

There are a few ways to look at this:
-In one sense, your safest bet is to diversify, and to avoid having any one client represent too much of your work volume. “Too much” is open to debate: I generally say, “not more than you can afford to lose overnight,” but I’ve read various articles recommending that you try to keep all clients below 25% of your work volume. Once a client starts pushing past one quarter of your income, you ideally want to branch out.

-On the flip side, everyone in the world who has a salaried job, essentially has a “dominant client” that in fact provides 100% of their work volume and income. And in the US, you can be let go from a salaried job without much advance notice or severance benefits; the legal guideline is typically one week of pay for each year of service, which doesn’t amount to much. 

I think that the best course of action is:
–Keep accepting the dominant client’s work, if you like them, they pay well, they treat you well, and their work is interesting.
–But at the same time, cover your bases, in two ways. First, use some of your income from the dominant client to increase your cash reserves. If the dominant client dropped you tomorrow, it could take…I’m guessing…three to six months for your work volume to rebound. Thus, it makes sense to have that much cash in reserve, so that you’re not left scrambling to pay the bills if the dominant client disappears. Second, at least think about what you would do without the dominant client in your portfolio. Would you look for other clients like them? Look for different clients? Are there other clients like them, and could you start marketing to them now, or at least have them on your radar screen (connect with them on LinkedIn, follow their website or blog, etc.).
-I also think it’s important to acknowledge the reality of the situation. Force yourself to say, at least in your own head, “My income right now is great, but that’s partially because I’m getting 60% of my work from one client.” Just saying that to yourself forces you to be honest about why your business is going well, rather than just saying, “Things are great!!”

Our February 2023 master class is open for registration! Karen Tkaczyk will be teaching Editing and proofreading for into-English translators. The live class runs from 12 noon to 3 PM on Tuesday, February 7, and registration ($75) includes the recording. Karen will cover practical strategies for editing and proofreading your own work and documents written by other people. Hop on over to the registration page for a full description!

To close out 2022 and in case you’re looking for some holiday reading, here’s a list of the books I read this year and a short review of each one. I hope that all of you get some well-deserved time off to enjoy the people and activities that make you happy!

I read 13 books this year, and I have two on deck for my holiday break, spanning the full range from current events, to humor, to really good novels:

1. Crossroads, a novel by Jonathan Franzen. At almost 600 pages, you’re not going to read this in a day, but it’s so worth it. The summary of this book is pretty unassuming: basically a day in the life of a family in the American mid-west. But I don’t even know where to start with how good this book is. Perhaps it particularly resonated with me because it’s about middle-aged parents with young adult children (my life in a nutshell), but I stayed up way too late reading this book. Highly recommended!

2. The Impossible First, a non-fiction outdoor adventure book by Colin O’Brady. Now here’s a book that you probably could read in a day, or at least a weekend. It’s the story of extreme adventurer Colin O’Brady’s solo crossing of Antarctica, an incredible story and he’s a good writer. Recommended!

3. The Man in the High Castle, a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. I’m admittedly a little late to the party, as this book was published in 1962, but I got completely hooked on the TV miniseries based on the book, which prompted me to read it. Philip K. Dick’s stuff is weird, no way around it, but the premise of this book is fascinating: what would the U.S. have looked like if Germany and Japan had won World War II? Recommended!

4. The Pale-Faced Lie, a memoir by David Crow. This book was recommended by a fellow volunteer on a trip I took with our animal rescue group to the Navajo Nation. It’s really well written and really hard to read: an intense story of a highly dysfunctional family (think The Glass Castle) but with the added dysfunctionality that the abusive family patriarch is essentially pretending to be Native American. Recommended, as long as you have a high tolerance for really heartbreaking family stories.

5. The Other Dr. Gilmer, a memoir by Benjamin Gilmer. I heard the author of this book interviewed on NPR and immediately ordered it. It’s a fascinating story of a doctor named Gilmer, who goes to replace another doctor named Gilmer (no relation) at a rural health clinic, after the original Dr. Gilmer goes to prison for brutally murdering his own father. No spoilers, but the plot is fascinating: part medical mystery, part psychological thriller, part analysis of the criminal justice system. Highly recommended!

6. Chatter, a non-fiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe. I read this book because I love everything Patrick Radden Keefe writes, and I was trying to bide time while waiting for him to hopefully write another book. The book is about global government eavesdropping, and I’d say it’s very interesting but also pretty outdated. The book was published in 2005 and the author did a lot of the research while he was a grad student in the UK in the late 90s, so the information is more than a bit dated by now. Recommended if you really like this author, but otherwise probably only of interest if you’re really into government spying.

7. Olav Audunsson: Vows, a novel by Sigrid Undset, translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally. Oh my gosh, folks. Oh. My Gosh. Talk about a book I never in a million years would have picked up, except that I was a reader for a literary translation competition and I impulsively picked it, and I immediately became obsessed. I had honestly never heard of Sigrid Undset (she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928), and I had heard of Tiina Nunnally but never read any of her translations. This epic novel (published in multiple volumes: see below) is set in medieval Norway and it’s just amazing. Family drama, mental illness, church/state struggles, dynastic struggles…this book has it all, and the translation is just amazing. Highly recommended!

8. Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, a memoir by Seamas O’Reilly. Another NPR pick, an easy read, and one of those funny/sad books that I tend to really like. O’Reilly is a columnist for the Guardian, The Irish Times, and other publications, and this book chronicles his childhood in a family of 11 children, focusing particularly on his mother’s death from cancer and the aftermath, in which his father is left to raise the family alone. Recommended!

9. Olav Audunsson: Providence, a novel by Sigrid Undset, translated by Tiina Nunnally. The second volume in the Olav Audunsson series! Highly Recommended!

10. Thanks for Waiting, a memoir by Doree Shafrir. I think this was a recommendation in Real Simple magazine? Maybe? It’s a memoir by a middle-aged woman who’s a self-proclaimed “late bloomer,” focusing on her career, meeting her life partner, and having a child. She’s a good writer, but to be totally honest, I agree with a reviewer of this book who said it’s basically 280 pages of “dating in New York is horrible and infertility is tough.” Perhaps I just don’t identify with those experiences, but I would skip this one unless the subject matter really resonates with you.

11. The Stolen Year, a non-fiction book by Anya Kamenetz. Another NPR pick! It’s a book about the effect of the pandemic on American children; to be honest, I’m not really sure why I bought it, other than that I generally love NPR’s recommendations. But this has the distinction of being the only book on the list that I didn’t finish; the book is really well written, well researched, and honestly fascinating, but I just was not in the frame of mind to read 350+ pages about how awful the pandemic was for kids. I loved the NPR interview with the author but the book was more on the topic than I wanted to read. Highly recommended if you’re an education researcher or similar!

12. Any Other Family, a novel by Eleanor Brown. I think this was another Real Simple pick. The plot of this novel is really interesting: four children from one birth mother who are adopted by three sets of parents, who then form an “intentional family” around the kids. It’s an easy read, and I liked the description of family dynamics in complicated situations. Recommended!

13. Happy Go Lucky, a humor book by David Sedaris. This book is a compilation of essays by David Sedaris, whose writing I’ve loved for a long time. As usual, it’s a combination of stuff that’s actually funny, with things that are decidedly not funny (his sister’s suicide and his father’s slow death from natural causes). Most people either like his writing or they don’t, so that’s my recommendation: read it if you like David Sedaris, because it’s pretty similar to his other books of personal essays.

On deck! I’m taking two weeks off over Christmas and New Year’s, so I have two books ready to read:
-The third volume of the Olav Audunsson series (as I said, I’m obsessed!), and The Ransomware Hunting Team, a non-fiction book about cyber counterterrorism by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. This is another NPR pick by two reporters at Pro Publica and I’m excited to read it!

That’s it for 2022; Training for Translators will be taking a break until January 6 and I’ll talk to you after that! Happy holidays and thanks for your support throughout the year.

As I recently wrote about, I recently marked the one-year anniversary of graduating from the Glendon College Master of Conference Interpreting program. Personally, I find that conference interpreting is a lot like playing a musical instrument: there’s always more to learn, and consistent practice and feedback is really, really important. To that end, I participated in the August 15-19, 2022 of the CoLab conference interpreting intensive, held at…Glendon College in Toronto, Canada! This was a uniquely COVID-era experience, because the workshop was held at the school I graduated from but had never been to, and four of the other participants were people I attended the Glendon program with, but had never met in person. This edition of CoLab was coordinated by Laura Holcomb and Lauren Michaels, with Gillian Misener on logistics, and they were all fantastic!

Executive summary: I really enjoyed CoLab, and would highly recommend it to other conference interpreters at all levels. It was well organized, well run, included a ton of interpreting practice and other activities, and it’s one of the rare opportunities to attend a week-long conference interpreting workshop in North America. CoLab is a very supportive environment in which to practice, and it’s very affordably priced. CoLab is based on peer feedback. If you’re looking for feedback from expert instructors rather than peers (for example, to prepare for a high-level certification exam), you might want to look at the Cambridge Conference Interpreting Course (which I attended in 2020), but I think CoLab is an excellent opportunity for almost any conference interpreter.

The logistics of CoLab

As mentioned above, this edition of CoLab was held in person, in the interpreting lab at Glendon College (the bilingual campus of York University, in Toronto, Canada). The Glendon campus is beautiful, and the interpreting lab is very well-equipped with really nice interpreting booths and a “soft console” Zoom-based system, the hard console system having died from lack of use during the pandemic.

The registration fee for CoLab is very inexpensive, less than US $500 for the whole week. Participants secure their own housing and figure out most of their own meals (Glendon has a completely decent cafeteria for lunch, and Toronto doesn’t lack for food options for dinner). I shared an AirBnB with two classmates from the Glendon MCI program; we were about a 30 minute walk from Glendon, so we typically had breakfast at our apartment (and I hit the nearby Tim Horton’s to caffeinate!), then walked together up to the campus.

I found a reasonably priced flight into Toronto, and the city is easy to navigate. There’s a train to the city center from the main airport (Pearson) and Ubers/Lyfts/cabs are also plentiful.

What happens at CoLab?

CoLab uses a peer feedback model; there aren’t “instructors” per se, which is a big difference from the Cambridge Conference Interpreting Course. This session of CoLab had about 20 interpreters participating; I’d say most were mid-career interpreters, with a few new/aspiring interpreters and a few people who’ve been at it for many decades. It was a very dynamic group, and many people in the group were French A or B, so I had a lot of people to choose from as listeners and listenees.

Everyone at CoLab signs up in advance to give a 20-minute simultaneous speech, and you can also sign up to give a five to seven minute consecutive speech, but the consec speech is optional. All of the speeches are live. The topics for the simul speeches ranged from SCUBA diving, to molecular biology, to neurodiversity, to recycling, and everything in between. I gave a consec speech on the environmental benefits of being a vegetarian, and a simul speech on mountaineering and the world’s 8,000-meter peaks. I had fun with both of them!

For each round of two speeches, you sign up to interpret one and give feedback to someone else on the other. Most days have either three or four rounds of speeches (six or eight speeches total), so it’s a lot of interpreting and feedbacking. After each round, there’s 30 minutes for peer feedback, then a break, or lunch, or it’s the end of the day.

CoLab also includes some non-interpreting activities like CoLab Conversations, a time block at the end of the day where we went to an off-site coffee shop and had roundtable discussions about various topics (finding clients, the role of into-B interpreting, etc.); there was also a trampoline jumping night (it sounded fun, but I’m more of a yoga girl and didn’t attend) followed by a group dinner (which I did attend: lots of fun and great food!). There are also a few “interlude” activities such as the B-booster exercise, where you have one minute to give an impromptu speech to the group on a specific topic: Where were you when the COVID lockdown started? What’s the best vacation you ever took? What’s the most memorable date you ever went on? This activity was a big hit and forced all of us to practice speaking off the cuff in our B language. There’s also some flexibility with the activities: for example, one of my Glendon MCI buddies and I decided to interpret one of the consecutive speeches without notes, which was a lot of fun!

How did it go?

To sum up, it was great, and I really enjoyed it. The feedback I received on my into-French and into-English interpreting was very helpful, as was the opportunity to interpret a lot of speeches on topics I don’t usually work with. In total, we had the opportunity to interpret almost 20 speeches (simul and consec). I also find that listening to other people’s interpreting is hugely instructive for me, and I like giving feedback. So, I really enjoyed the CoLab peer support model. It was also amazing to have the opportunity to go to Toronto and experience in 3D what I experienced on Zoom for a year. I give this CoLab experience two thumbs up, and I would definitely attend again.

A few caveats (I already gave Laura and Lauren this feedback on the participant survey, so I’m not talking behind their backs!):

• If you’re looking to improve the overall quality of your interpreting and break out of your comfort zone, you’ll love the CoLab peer feedback model. But if you have a very specific goal, particularly at a high level (you want to pass the UN Language Competitive Exam, you want to upgrade a C language to a B language, etc.), you want to think about whether peer feedback is going to get the job done, or whether you might want to do the Cambridge Course, where most of the feedback is from expert instructors who are senior-level interpreters or interpreter trainers.
• CoLab involves a lot of interpreting time, and there’s not really an option not to participate, because if you skip a speech, someone doesn’t get feedback. Personally, especially given the enthusiasm with which our group participated in the CoLab Conversations, I would cut one round of interpreting from each day and have an alternative activity in its place. It was fantastic to have the opportunity to do so much interpreting, and the days when we interpreted four speeches and gave feedback on four speeches felt like a lot!
• If you do a less common language, you might want to do some recruitment before you sign up for CoLab. Probably half of the people in the group had French in their combination, so I was never at a loss for someone to listen to, or to listen to me. But if you do a less common language, you might want to sign up with a couple of colleagues so that you have more than one person to get feedback from.

Logistical tips, if you go

Toronto is really a pretty easy city to navigate, even if you’ve never been there. Many people from within Canada took the train, and I was easily able to find a nonstop flight from Denver to Pearson airport. The area around Glendon is a pretty upscale residential neighborhood, so look for lodging as soon as you book your CoLab spot, particularly if you’d like to find a place within walking distance. Two colleagues and I were able to find a nice, two-bedroom AirBnB at a reasonable cost, but we booked fairly early. Be warned that the walk down Bayview Avenue (the main drag to the Glendon campus) has a good sidewalk, but it’s a pretty busy road, and there aren’t a lot of alternatives unless you allow a lot of extra time.

I’m a fan of public transportation and wanted to take the train from Pearson airport into the city, then I took a cab to the AirBnB from Union Station. However, in the end, this didn’t save a ton of money and an Uber all the way to the airport for my return flight was only around CAD $40.

I found the Glendon cafeteria totally adequate for lunch and snacks (I’m a vegetarian and they had plenty of veg options). Just be aware that there are not really any restaurants within close walking distance of the campus, so your choices are the Glendon cafeteria or bringing your own lunch, unless you have a car.

A random thing, but specific to this conference: the lined, top-bound steno pads that many interpreters use for consecutive note-taking are not widely available in Canada. Definitely bring your own if you’re coming from a country where they’re sold!

Along those same lines, in the current setup of the Glendon lab, you must use a USB headset, not a headset with an audio jack. It’s possible to buy a USB adapter for an audio jack plug, but make sure you do that before you head to Toronto.

Huge thanks to the CoLab organizers and participants for such a great week!