Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Working from home


Corinne McKay

Everyone's talking about work/life balance

It must be something about the holiday season that makes bloggers’ thoughts turn to the work/life balance or lack thereof. Here are some excellent posts from around the blogosphere:

  • Jill Sommer’s post ‘Tis the season for no work/life balance points out what many of us are experiencing: clients who have tons of work for us at the end of the year. I have vowed not to complain about having too much work until the unemployment rate falls back to a reasonable number, but I agree with Jill. Especially if you have clients in countries where the holiday vacation season lasts from about December 15 until January 6, it’s a very busy time to be a freelancer!
  • Penelope Trunk, one of my favorite non-translation bloggers, has a great post entitled Maybe no moms are working moms, focusing specifically on the work/life balance issues that moms face. Much of this post rings true for me; I think that many of the moms at my daughter’s school think that because I come in to frost gingerbread houses and shelve library books, I’m a stay-at-home-mom. However, I do think that some of the issue is location-dependent. Here in Boulder where the cafés are full at all hours of the work day and signs in store windows read “Mondays and powder days: closed,” working 30 hours a week from home as a freelancer is definitely considered “having a job.” This post made me realize that because I live in a community where I have a lot of freelancing mom friends, I don’t really identify with the “scared, lost and lonely” stereotype in Penelope’s post. So here’s one solution to the work/life dilemma: move to a town where people don’t work that much!
  • Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. Roth posted In Praise of Work-Life Balance, discussing his current situation and the freedom that it affords him. One key tip here: once you hit the sweet spot of work/life balance, resist the urge to add more commitments. J.D. describes his decision to indefinitely delay a planned project because he can’t add another task to his list right now. In the past, I’ve implemented a similar strategy and declined all new (non-paying) requests for my time for two weeks, or a month, or however long I need to feel sane!

Feel free to add your own work/life tips, and have a great holiday season!


Corinne McKay

Handling summer as a freelancing parent

Here in Colorado, school has been out for a couple of weeks. Elsewhere in the U.S., summer vacation is fast approaching. If you’re a freelancing mom or dad, it’s both the best of times and the worst of times! Each morning in the summer, I wake up and have a little gratitude moment: I’m grateful for a job that is so flexible; I’m grateful for a husband who supports both my work and my parenting; I’m grateful for a child who enjoys spending time with me; I’m grateful that I have a wonderful group of friends with kids of similar ages; I’m grateful that I enjoy what I do for work. On the flip side, if it’s hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the regular school schedule, it’s really hard to fit a semi-full-time job into the summer, no-school schedule. What’s a freelancing mom or dad to do?

As I see it, there are a few basic options: pay for child care in the form of a babysitter or summer camp, try to work while your kids are at home with you, work less or take the summer off, trade or barter child care or find a source of free child care, or patch together some combination of these strategies. As with all things parenting-related, I think that the ideal solution depends on how much you need or want to work, how many kids you have and how you get along with them, what financial resources you have available and how your spouse or partner (if you have one) can pitch in.

Here at the world headquarters of Thoughts on Translation, we tend to use the patchwork strategy and so far it has worked out well. Out of a 10 week summer break, we’ll be away for 3 weeks, my daughter will go to half-day or full-day camp for 5 weeks and we’ll have 2 free weeks at home. I feel that this gives me a good balance of uninterrupted work time and extra time to spend with my daughter and our friends, but I can also see that I’ll be working at night a lot more than I normally do. In addition, I think that the patchwork strategy works best if you only have one child. For example, the total tab for our 5 weeks of day camp was $1,500. Not bad as a percentage of my income, but if you are enrolling 2+ kids, the enrollment fees start to add up.

In mulling over how to plan our summer, here are a few creative solutions that I came up with; feel free to add your own!

  • Enlist your kids in the planning. This summer my daughter wanted more unstructured time, so we struck a deal that when she’s not at camp, she will read or listen to an audio book for at least an hour a day while I’m working.
  • Steal an hour here and an hour there. If your kids sleep later in the summer, get up as early as possible and work then. Maybe there’s an hour between when your spouse gets home and when you eat dinner; maybe you can get a netbook or small laptop and take it to the pool, park, playdates, etc. I have an Asus Eee netbook and I make a habit of always having it with me in the summer in case I get some unexpected work time.
  • Get your spouse on board. Maybe your spouse can arrive early at work and then leave early, so that you can have some extra work time in the afternoons.
  • Barter child care. You’re not the only one in the freelancing parent boat; maybe you could even form a child care co-op with other freelancing moms and dads. Maybe you have a friend who’s a stay at home mom or dad and wouldn’t mind watching your child (either for pay or as a trade or favor) some of the time.
  • Use a less expensive babysitter while you work at home. For example, we know several neighborhood middle-schoolers who will babysit for $3-$5 per hour while a parent is home. This is a significant savings over the $10-$15 per hour that “full-fledged” babysitters in our area charge.

When my daughter was really little, a wise older woman in the supermarket line said to me, “When they’re that age, the days are long and the years are short.” I find that in the summer, that advice is still true; the days often go slowly, but when school starts I’m always amazed at how fast summer vacation went. So, the last piece of advice for freelancing moms and dads with a long, hot summer ahead? Enjoy it!!


Corinne McKay

Link: the psychology of passive barriers

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly, and I was particularly enthralled by a recent guest post (by Ramit Sethi, whose own blog is I Will Teach You To Be Rich). Ramit’s post on the psychology of passive barriers (subtitled “Why your friends don’t save money, eat healthier or clean their garages”) really struck a note with me. Ramit picks up on ideas promoted in some recent bestsellers like Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, and gives some powerful examples of the ways in which seemingly small barriers can lead to success or failure. As Ramit says, “I think the source of 95%+ of barriers to success is…ourselves. It’s not our lack of resources (money, education, etc). It’s not our competition. It’s usually just what’s in our own heads. Barriers are more than just excuses — they’re the things that make us not get anything done. And not only do we allow them to exist around us, we encourage them. There are active barriers and passive barriers, but the result is still the same: We don’t achieve what we want to.”

Many of his examples made a lot of sense to me on both a personal and a professional level. When I started running again after my daughter was born, I joined a running training club and the coach gave some excellent suggestions of how to eliminate passive barriers to exercising: before you go to bed, put your running clothes on the bathroom floor so that you step on them in the morning; put a list of running routes of various distances on your front door so that you don’t have to think about where to go; make a running date with a friend that is so early in the morning that you wouldn’t dare call them to cancel for fear of waking up the whole household at 5:30 AM. Passive barriers also go the other way, as in Ramit’s example of freezing your credit card  in a block of ice; if you say you’re really only going to use it for emergencies, why not keep it where it takes some effort to get at it? After reading this article, I realized that this phenomenon is one reason why our family watches very few movies; we own only a few DVDs and don’t have Netflix, so procuring a movie involves biking or driving to the library or video store. Normally when I’m confronted with that option, I just choose to do something else.

I think that we can apply these passive barrier techniques to many aspects of freelance translation work too. In my case, I habitually avoid doing banking tasks and accounting because I just despise them. Because I despise these tasks, I seek out passive barriers that are “preventing me from getting the job done.” Can’t find the calculator, don’t have any more deposit slips, etc. This habit got so bad that I came within a couple of dollars of bouncing a check from my business account at the same time that I had over $4,000 in payment checks sitting on my desk. So, I created an “accounting kit” which is within arm’s reach of my desk. In it I keep my business account checkbook, deposit slips, envelopes, stamps, a calculator and (the clincher) my favorite roller-ball pen, which I only allow myself to use for doing accounting. A little gimmicky? Sure! But it gets the job done; I find that now, I don’t enjoy accounting any more than I used to, but at least I do it.

Any thoughts on the passive barriers that you need to add to or remove from your work life?


Corinne McKay

Dealing with job stress

As job stress goes, translators seem to fall somewhere between anesthesiologists and air traffic controllers (most stressed-out) and florists and historians (least stressed-out). Still, dealing with job stress is a big issue because it has a dramatic effect on both your enjoyment of your job and on your longevity in the profession; and the longer you keep your translation business running, the more efficient you get at your work and the more money you earn (hopefully!). So, what are some of your best tips for dealing with job stress? A few of mine are:

  • Have confidence in the quality of your work. A few years ago, I decided to start proofreading a hard copy of every document I translated. Interestingly enough, although this step takes time, it has actually decreased my level of job stress because I am more confident that I haven’t skipped a section of the source text or grossly mis-translated something.
  • Accept that you’re going to make mistakes. This sounds like the antithesis of point #1, but it’s not. A certain amount of perfectionism is an asset to a freelance translator, but it’s also important to own up to your failures. When a disgruntled client has a point about an error in your work, apologize, offer to make it right, and move on.
  • Minimize financial worries by living beneath your means. This is definitely a personal choice, but in this economy, I think it’s an important one. Spending less than what you earn frees you from taking on unpleasant work just because you need the money and reduces your incentive to produce huge volumes of work at low rates. The Thoughts on Translation household is an extreme example, as we have two incomes but live off one (and bank the other), but whatever your financial philosophy, spending *more* than you earn is a road to serious job stress.
  • Get out of your head. I really believe that knowledge workers who are at the computer for many hours a day need to unplug when work is over. In addition to getting your body moving, give your brain a little candy especially if the documents you work on are very dense. This can be hard; before I became a translator I was a lifelong voracious reader, and now I find that gardening manuals and cookbooks are about as much as I can handle after translating all day.
  • Set objective boundaries around your time. “I’m too busy to take that on” is a subjective statement; maybe you could just stay up later, or work faster, or work more efficiently. “For quality reasons, I translate no more than 2,000 words per day” is an objective statement, and gives you a policy to abide by, which is a lot less stressful than trying to decide if you can squeeze in just one more job.

    • Feel free to contribute your own thoughts on stress management as well!


Corinne McKay

The best and worst of working from home

This fall marks my six year freelance-iversary, and I’ve been thinking about the pluses and minuses of the past six years in order to plan for the future. Before becoming a translator, I was a high school French teacher, which is about as far from the home office environment as one can get (think screaming seventh graders hanging off you all day!). In general, I really enjoy working from home and I also think that it has a lot of benefits for the environment and the community. I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts on the ups and downs of the home office, here are a few of mine:

The best:

  • Flexibility. This is probably my favorite thing about working from home. If I want to go for a bike ride or to the grocery store or library during the day when most people are at work, it’s rarely a problem. If I want to work for 4-5 hours during the day and then 2-3 hours at night, again it almost always works out well.
  • Being available. When I was a teacher, scheduling an appointment with my dentist, financial planner, etc. was a serious logistical challenge. Now, it doesn’t require taking a personal day to let the furnace repairman in or wait for the new door to be delivered.
  • Improved quality of life for the family. Because of the flexibility of my work situation, we don’t use any after school programs or child care outside of school hours, which I think is a big benefit for my daughter.
  • No commute. Although I don’t mind the occasional commute by bus (a good chance to catch up on reading or pay bills), commuting by car is something that I now find intensely frustrating from the standpoint of wasting time and resources.
  • It builds community. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in my neighborhood and other parents at my daughter’s school because I’m around a lot, which really adds to my (already high) enjoyment of where I live.
  • Resource conservation. Working from home maximizes the resources that already exist in your house. Even if you’re gone 12 hours a day at the office, you still have to heat/air condition the house, run the hot water heater, have a phone line, leave the digital clocks plugged in, etc. When you work from home, at least you’re using these resources rather than leaving the house standing empty while you use similar resources at the office.

    • The worst:

  • Flexibility. To me, flexibility is both a plus and a minus. When a friend asks me to do a favor during the day (watch a sick kid, let the plumber in, go out to lunch), it’s harder to say no than it would be if I worked at an office and was clearly “at work.” I find this especially hard when we have friends or relatives visiting; if I had an office job, I wouldn’t feel guilty about going to work, but the same is not always true when you work at home.
  • Social isolation. Even if you have an active social network, it’s still a little odd being completely alone for 5-10 hours a day. Sometimes I find myself making an excessive amount of conversation with the bank teller or supermarket checker, and I know it’s time to plan a date with a friend! Lately I’ve started seeing more press about “co-working environments” such as The Hive and have thought of those as an additional option.
  • The feeling of always being at work. Since I’ve been freelancing, I’ve found that I don’t really feel like I’m “out of the office” unless I’m away from home. Admittedly, this is a good excuse to plan lots of ski weekends and camping trips, but I do sometimes envy people who shut the office door on Friday afternoon and don’t think about work until Monday.

Any other best and worst out there?