Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Working from home


Corinne McKay

Why do some freelance translators fail?

I’m not a great “tough love” advice-dispenser, but I’m going to give it a try. I work with a lot of beginning translators in my online course (shameless self-promo: the next session starts on April 3 and there are four spots left!). When I follow up with students over the months and years after they finish the course, or when I talk to beginning/aspiring translators in general, some of them have “made it” as freelancers and some of them haven’t. In thinking about advice for translation newcomers and translation students, I’ve unscientifically identified a few pitfalls that can cause serious problems for people who are in the freelance launch phase. I’m sure that readers have great tips and anecdotes too…so feel free to add them!

  • Expecting too much return from too little marketing effort. I get a lot of inquiries from beginning freelancers who are “very discouraged because they’ve applied to over 30 translation companies and received no work.” I know I’ve said this a few (hundred) times before, but here it is again: during my first year as a freelancer, I applied to over 400 translation companies. Then, I sent every single company that responded positively a hand-written note with a business card, thanking them for their response and letting them know that I looked forward to working with them in the future.
  • Expecting the startup phase to be shorter than it is. I think that six months is the bare minimum that anyone can expect–two months to look for work, two months to do the work and two months to get paid. A year is probably more realistic, and I think that most freelancers reach “cruising speed” after about three years.
  • Having weak language skills. As often stated by Chris Durban, author of The Prosperous Translator, it’s hard to develop the linguistic and cultural competence that a translator needs, without spending at least a year in your source language country/ies. And don’t hang out with speakers of your target language the whole time you’re there!
  • Not putting yourself out there. I get it: you’re not good with strangers, you don’t want creepy exes finding your address online, and so forth. But the simple truth of freelancing is that people cannot hire you if they cannot find you. They can’t refer work to you if they don’t know who you are. So whether it’s in person or online, or preferably both, you have to come out of hiding.
  • Getting stuck on the low rate treadmill. This is a tough one. Most beginning translators don’t set out to be underpaid, but working is better than not working, and you have to start somewhere if you want to break in to the industry. Many beginning freelancers tell themselves that in a few months or years, they’ll trade up to better-paying clients. But if you’re translating 10 hours a day just to pay the bills, it’s hard to find that time, so you’re more likely to stick with the low-paying bird in the hand.
  • Remaining in denial about how much work it is to be self-employed. A wise self-employed person once said that being an entrepreneur means working 60 hours a week for yourself so that you don’t have to work 40 hours a week for someone else. I’m a firm believer in avoiding perpetual overtime, but the essence of this statement is true. I recently gave a talk on self-publishing, after which many of the attendees commented that the idea sounded intriguing, but “like a lot of work.” Um…yeah! It is a lot of work, but I’m more interested in putting that work into my own project than into lining a traditional publisher’s pockets. The same is true of being a freelancer. It’s a lot of work! Did we mention that it’s a lot of work? But the ability to make your own decisions and take responsibility for your own future makes it worth it.

Wise readers, over to you! Why do you think some beginning translators don’t make it?


Corinne McKay

Adventures in co-working

After almost a decade of working from home and (mostly) loving it, at some point in 2012 something really changed for me. Fairly suddenly, I started feeling more trapped than liberated in my home office, and feeling like it was hard to carve out uninterrupted work time amid the myriad of household chores that needed to get done every day. In addition, my life situation is very different now than it was when I started my freelance business in 2002: my husband works outside the house, my daughter is closer to middle school than to infancy, and many of my freelancing mom friends in the neighborhood now work full time or pursue other interests like school and sports that keep them tied up during the day. So I decided to investigate the possibility of moving my office outside our house.

The quest started with a few visits to established co-working offices in Boulder, of which there are several. Stumbling block: many of them save on office rent by locating themselves in windowless basements, which is an absolute deal breaker for me (I didn’t move to a city with 300 sunny days a year to work in a basement!). In addition, there’s nothing to make you realize that you’re not 22 any more like visiting an office that’s mostly populated by tech startups. I think I’m reasonably young at heart for a 41 year old, but some of the established co-working offices reminded me of my college apartment on a bad Monday morning, complete with empty vodka bottles in the kitchen sink (actual example from one office!).

So then, I approached the all-women freelancers’ group that I’m in, to see if we could potentially put together a group of people and rent our own office together. This seemed like a great idea (cool people, we could configure the space however we wanted and one of the potential offices is about a 3 minute walk from my house). But we learned that commercial leases are tricky: most landlords want at least an 18-month lease with the first 3 months paid in advance, the office would be completely unfurnished, and the extra expenses such as liability insurance, Internet and even tea and coffee would add up. In addition, we would have to either form a corporation to sign the lease, or one person would be responsible for the entire rent amount.

Another option (if you live in Colorado) was PivotDesk, a local service that matches small companies and freelancers with office space. I would definitely give PivotDesk another try if I’m looking for office space in the future, but this time around I couldn’t find just the right match between what I wanted and what was on offer. However, in the course of tooling around downtown Boulder looking at offices, a couple of freelance friends and I found a “hidden” co-working office in a truly stunning historic building. Populated by real grownups with real established businesses, this office is a haven for freelancers who want to get stuff done in a beautiful setting without too many distractions (“…like a really, really nice library…” was the description of a friend who went to see the office with me).

I’ve been in the new office for about a week and so far I really, really, really love it. It’s about a 20 minute bike ride from my house, which gets me outside and gives me some mental space to transition from home to work and vice versa. In addition, let me tell you some things that a co-working office has: people to talk to, things to look at other than the walls of your house, different spaces to hang out in when you get sick of sitting at your desk. And let me tell you some things that a co-working office does not have: your dirty dishes, your washing machine and your cat hair-covered rugs. But all joking aside, I find that even these 5 days have really changed the way I think about work and home. I can walk in the door of my house in the afternoon and think “What do I want to do for the rest of the day?” I can avoid letting work expand to fill the available time, and instead confine work to the time I’m at the office. Instead of checking e-mail for the first time at 6:45 AM and for the last time at 11:15 PM and feeling like I basically worked for 16 hours with some extended breaks, I feel like I actually have work time and home time. Maybe this has more to do with my habits than with anything more substantive, but I do feel like this has been a fantastic change. Mostly, I want to encourage other freelancers to explore the co-working option if you want to, rather than feeling like you should be more grateful for the opportunity to work from home. If it’s not working for you, change it!

Logistical notes: The co-working office that I’m in costs US $350 per month for my own permanent desk, wired and wireless Internet access, access to multiple conference rooms and unlimited coffee and tea (priorities!). And the office managers do the dishes! The desks also have locking storage cabinets so that I can leave my laptop there if I want to. So far I’ve been toting my laptop back and forth, but I’m considering leaving it there at least some of the time, since all of my files are synced online.


Corinne McKay

Wrapping up 2012

It’s snowing here in Colorado and the last day of school is Friday, meaning that it’s time to put some wrapping paper on 2012 and call it a year! I always find it helpful to look over my accomplishments and failures for the current year and set some goals for the next year. So here goes!

Accomplishments

2012 will have been my second most profitable year of freelancing, in terms of gross income. My highest income was in 2009, when I did a huge amount of legal translation on the heels of the global financial crisis. I would also say that this year was probably my most satisfying year of freelancing, in that I am focusing more narrowly on my main specializations (international development and corporate communications) and working with more direct clients. I still love my longstanding agency clients, but in general I find direct client work to be more profitable and more satisfying, because I’m working directly with the person who wrote the French document, the person who will use the English document, or both.

My income from writing and teaching went way up this year. Book royalties amounted to about $6,000–certainly not enough to live on, but it enabled me to take a month off to bike across Switzerland and Italy. The past four sessions of my online course for beginning freelancers have been completely full, and I find that these additional revenue streams keep my work day interesting and allow me to protect against any downturns in my translation work volume.

I attended some excellent translation conferences this year, including the SFT financial translation conference in Paris and the ATA conference in San Diego. Both of these presented excellent opportunities to learn and network! And eat great pastries and drink fancy cocktails under palm trees! Oh, and I was elected to the ATA Board of Directors; that was very exciting as well!

My next book, a compilation of posts from this blog, should be for sale in about a month. I’m excited about it, and I’m already at work on book #3 (or #4, depending on whether you count two editions as two books or one!). It’s a freelance business guide that’s not industry-specific, tentatively titled “The Fearless Freelancer.”

Failures. Shortfalls. Basically, stuff I wanted to do this year and didn’t

The blog book took much longer than I had hoped. No major technical difficulties, just my high load of paying work (not a bad thing!) and my procrastination because of the lack of a real deadline (a bad thing!).

I didn’t do much networking at client events this year. I really believe in this type of outreach, but I have to travel by plane to get to any conferences or seminars where my potential clients would be. However, I’m determined to do this in 2013! More on that in the next section!

After years of saying that I want to pursue interpreting, I persist in doing absolutely nothing about it. I say I’m going to practice for 15 minutes every day, then I do that for one day and “don’t have time” for another three months. At this point, I’m re-evaluating what exactly about interpreting appeals to me and doesn’t appeal to me, and taking it from there. More on that in the next section too.

Looking ahead to 2013

I have a good feeling about 2013. First, I’m going to rent a desk in a local co-working office for January and February and see how it goes. After 10 years of working from home, I’m starting to feel like I need a) some boundary between home and work b) some more social interaction during the day and c) a reason to get out of my workout clothes before 2 PM, so I’m going to make the leap to a beautiful building in downtown Boulder which has both individual and group offices. I’ll report back on the results!

I’m planning to attend some client-side events for the international development sector. One of them is already on my calendar although it’s in June, because with the trip planning, I need to think about it well in advance.

I have a few projects for ATA that I’m very excited about. One of them, a new roundtable discussion column for the ATA Chronicle, will start appearing in the February issue. And soon it will be time to start submitting proposals for next year’s ATA conference in San Antonio, so lots of irons are  in the fire on the association front!

In terms of my “I love it, I hate it” relationship with interpreting, I’ve decided to explore the option of doing English voice-overs. I’m thinking that maybe I just need some language-related work that doesn’t involve the high pressure and drama of interpreting, but that gives me a little break from reading and typing. So I’ve signed up for an introduction to voice-over class that my local adult education program is offering.

Feel free to add your own thoughts, hopes and fears in the comments! And with that, I’m going to wrap some presents, deliver one final translation and then go skiing; see you in 2013!


Corinne McKay

Getting it done: managing your time as a freelancer

As freelancers, we wear a lot of hats. Some days, I feel like translation is the easy part of my job: the harder parts being my roles as an accountant, marketing director, customer relations manager, office ergonomics expert, and so on and so on, not to mention the rewarding but time-consuming gigs as a wife, mom, daughter, friend, chef and suboptimal housekeeper. Based on my own experiences and some ideas that I shared during a previous Speaking of Translation conference call, here are some tips. These range from quick-and-dirty to big-picture, so just bear with me as I jump around! And of course, feel free to add your own ideas too.

Prioritize what really matters to you

This involves accepting that you simply cannot do everything you want to do and remain sane, unless you only need 45 minutes of sleep a day. But you can make time for the things that are critical to your happiness and/or to the success of your business. For example, I find that when my e-mail inbox is backlogged, I feel panicky about work. So I make that task a priority, and I really try to end every weekday without pending items in my inbox. In my personal life, I know that if I don’t exercise for about an hour on most days, I start to, for lack of a better way to put it, go crazy. So even if that means doing a YouTube yoga video at 10 o’clock at night, I do it. In the same vein, no matter how busy my family is, we really try to cook a real dinner and eat together almost every night. Other things (see above reference to suboptimal housekeeping) might slide, but we try to maintain our family dinner routine. Also, I absolutely do not do all-nighters or really even work past 11 PM. I feel that this is important to my mental health and my family harmony, so I force myself to avoid really crazy deadlines that require this kind of work.

Create as much uninterrupted work time as you can

The reality of life in the 21st century is that our attention is constantly pulled in 127 different directions. And in order to produce good translations, you need some mental space and some time that is free of distractions. Here are a few of my strategies to carve out this time:

  • Keep a running to-do list next to the computer. When, as seems to happen about every 12 seconds, a to-do item (“buy cat food;” “can I make electronic deposits into my retirement account?;” “did Southwest announce when they’re starting flights to Hawaii?”) pops into my head, I write the item down instead of interrupting what I’m doing to perform that task. Then, when I need a mental break, I go through a few to-do items at once. I try to do the same with phone calls: write the item down, then book the snow tires, the dentist and the furnace cleaner all at once.
  • Avoid inbox alerts. “You’ve got mail” almost all of the time, and if you read it as it arrives, you’ll spend your entire day doing that. So, shut off the alerts and just check e-mail every so often. I say “every so often” because ideally, I’d like to check e-mail only a few times a day and answer it all at once. But realistically, clients sometimes need a quick answer right away, so I’d say I check e-mail about every 15-30 minutes.
  • Find a time of day when you can catch up. For many people, this is the early morning. I’m getting my family out the door at that time, so although I don’t love it, I often work from about 9-10:30 at night. This slot has the added advantage that neither my US clients nor my European clients are normally at work at that time, so I can send e-mail without generating an immediate response that then requires another response from me.

Work on long-term projects in small, daily chunks

Here’s an illustrative example. I published the first edition of my book How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator in 2006. On January 1, 2008, I shook my fist in the air and said “If I finish one long-term project this year, it’s the second edition of that darned book!” Who wants to guess the actual publication date? May, 2011 (no, really). Basically, I was waiting for a big chunk of uninterrupted work time, fantasizing that I would take a month and do nothing but work on the second edition. News flash: unless you’re independently wealthy and have no responsibilities to anyone but yourself and have someone who cooks your meals, cleans your house and does your laundry, that chunk of time is never coming. So after taking two years to accept that reality, I resolved at the beginning of 2010 that I would work on the second edition every single day, even if I only wrote one sentence. This sounds like overstating the obvious, but here it is: even if you work on a project for only 15 minutes a day, you will eventually finish it. But if you never work on it, you will never finish it. So stop waiting for that elusive block of time, and start working with the amount of time you have. This works for other goals too; I once did a training program to run a marathon, and the coach told us that we were never allowed to use the “not enough time” excuse to avoid training. His advice: “If you only have 5 minutes, do Burpees for 5 minutes and you’ll be ready to drop. If you only have 20 minutes, run sprint intervals for 20 minutes. Even these small amounts add up.”

Fit stuff in, within reason

I kind of hate the term “multi-tasking” because I like to give my attention to one task at a time. Also, I have ways in which I absolutely will not multi-task. For example I don’t talk on the phone while I’m driving, even with a hands-free device. But I do try to combine certain kinds of activities to save time. We don’t have a clothes dryer (more on that in a forthcoming freelance frugality update), so I often talk on the phone while I’m hanging laundry on the clothesline. I’ve learned that I can prep a batch of bread dough while my husband and daughter are eating breakfast and getting ready for work and school in the morning, then it can rise while I’m working. And sometimes, you can fit in extra work time in a way that works well for your family: now that my daughter has 30-45 minutes of homework per night, I make a habit of sitting with her at the dining room table while she’s working, and that’s when I work on my long-term writing projects.

Accept that your other options are worse

I admit it: there are times when I get tired of being highly effective. There are days that I wish I could just fluff off, hit the celebrity gossip websites and then go to a hot yoga class. But I try to focus on my other options: making less money, having less time to spend with my family, using after-school child care or being up until 2 in the morning to finish my deadlines. In that light, things seem pretty good!


Corinne McKay

I love TracFone…there, I said it!

For someone who doesn’t love talking on the phone, I seem to talk and write about phone service quite a bit. My 2011 post about options for home office phone service generated a lively discussion, so now let’s talk about cell phones! And for what it’s worth, I’m still quite happy with my Vonage line, and I think that the sound quality has actually improved since I originally set it up.

If you’re a freelancer, or even just a human on Earth in 2012, chances are you have to have a cell phone. Maybe you only have a cell phone. But I bet that you have one. And in my conversations with many freelancers about their cell phones, here’s what I’ve found out:

  • Almost everyone hates their cell phone company. Nearly everyone will tell you that their coverage, sound quality, tech support or customer service are abysmal, or that all of those are abysmal, or that none of those are abysmal but the cost of that non-abysmalness is far too high.
  • Almost everyone thinks that their cell phone bill is too high. Many people in the US have an unlimited talk, text and data plan with a smartphone, and I’m guessing that if you have that, you’re paying between $60 and $100 a month for your phone.
  • Lots of people feel that they don’t use all of the features that their cell phone plan offers. Unscientifically, it seems to me that most people either talk a lot, text a lot, or browse the Web a lot, but not all three. But if they have an unlimited plan, they’re basically paying for all three whether they use them or not.

I know that for some people, an unlimited plan with a smartphone is the only way to go. If you don’t have a land line and/or you talk on the phone a lot; if you are an interpreter and you are out of the office almost all of the time; if you live in an area where Wi-Fi is scarce but cell service is good, or maybe even if you’re really hungry for work and you don’t ever want to miss an e-mail. Those are all good reasons to sink $1,000+ a year into your cell phone. However, I think that a lot of people spend that money without really casting a critical eye on their need for a full-featured cell phone. For a lot of people, I think that the 90/10 rule could be applied to cell phones; meaning that there could be a phone plan that does 90% of what you want, for 10% of the cost of the full-featured plan. If you don’t really need the full-featured cell phone’s features, you could take a pretty nice vacation for what you’re saving by switching to prepaid.

So here’s my confession: I love Tracfone and the prepaid cell phone service that they sell. This review perfectly sums up what I like about TracFone, and I fully agree with the author’s take on their service (“If you can keep your cell phone minutes down to a bare minimum, or really only use your phone for texting, quick chats, and emergencies, then Tracfone is a great option. It’s essentially taking what has typically been a high-priced subscription model product, and taking it to a frugal, bare bones extreme.”) Like the author, I’ve never had to deal with TracFone’s customer service to activate or add minutes to my phone, even when I accidentally let the service expire while I was out of the country. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dropped call either.  Best, I’ve spent about $100 per year on my phone in the eight years I’ve had it. Also, on the odd occasion when I hate TracFone for a few minutes (their coverage in remote locations is not great), I remind myself that I’m paying $9 a month for the privilege of hating them, not $100 a month.

After eight years of using a totally bare-bones Samsung phone that (get ready) only makes phone calls, I did recently upgrade to one of TracFone’s “smarter” models that has a Qwerty keyboard, Wi-Fi and some type of “mobile web,” although I’m still figuring out what that means. I’ll report on that model once I receive it and activate it! If you’re a heavier phone user, TracFone also owns two other companies, Net10 and StraightTalk, which offer unlimited talk, text and data plans for about $45 per month.

Like other frugal lifestyle options, a prepaid cell phone isn’t the right choice for everyone. Neither is living without a clothes dryer, but my family has managed that for 8+ years. I’ve nearly taken the smartphone plunge numerous times. But after realizing that, like the review author I quoted above, I largely use my cell phone to be available in emergencies, quickly check in with clients or friends when I’m out of the house, and to provide an alternate number in case clients really need to reach me, I’ve stuck with TracFone and saved a ton of money.