The ups and downs in business flow can be a persistent source of anxiety and annoyance for a freelance translation professional. Many freelancers seem to continue to be in the doldrums and accept it as their fate. This is a sad scenario, though some volatility in business can be expected by a freelancer, but not too much. There are ways every freelancer can assure a steady flow of work. You should integrate the following strategies as habits into your day-to-day to working life and prepared to be pleasantly surprised at the positive turn of the events.
Starting with the most basic advice, get into the saving habit if you are not into it yet. Build your savings, if you have enough money to take care of your regular expenses for a few months, you will be able to manage lean periods in a better manner. For starters you would not be as anxious, which means you would sleep well and stay alert for ideas, improvements and opportunities. On the other hand if you don’t have much saved for the dreaded “translation winter”, you will be perpetually anxious and drain yourself of sorely needed energy.
Never get complacent when it comes to marketing your services. You should keep up a steady flow of self-promotional activities even when you have more than enough work. This will keep you in practice, as well as in the awareness of potential clients. And you don’t have to start it from the scratch when the going gets tough.
Maintain a detailed and accurate schedule of projects. Keep updating it regularly, it will not only help manage your translation projects optimally but also take care of the lean phases to some extent. How? Firstly you will be able to chalk out the likely empty days; moreover you might also come across projects which are not urgent, and can be scheduled for quieter times.
Go for big clients. Make it a point to follow large companies which might have regular language translation requirements. The logic is obvious; it would ensure a regular flow of projects. Moreover, during tough economic times even large companies have to lay-off their employees, during such time they tend to rely more on freelancers. So it pays to be in their awareness!
Dear readers, you might have heard about a new search engine called Wolfram Alpha in the recent past. There’s been a great amount of hype about it with its backers claiming to take web search to an entirely new level. So what do you have to say on that?
When I heard these claims for the first time, I rolled up my eyes and thought yet another contender for the throne that has been occupied by Google…. and another likely failure. Then a colleague showed me how it worked and I was to state simply, bowled over! I also realized how severely prejudices and uniformed opinion can restrict a person.
Google stays put where it was, yet Wolfram Alpha actually takes searching for information on the Internet to an entirely new level. It is an awesome tool if you need to compare information based on facts and figures. For example if you key in English and Spanish you will get a user-friendly table which has information about the place of origin, total number of speakers, writing systems and much more pertaining to the two languages!
Wolfram Alpha might appear to be useful to people who work in fields involving a lot of facts and figures. But on a closer look it can prove to be of great use to almost anyone, including those of us associated with the language translation industry. You have to play around with it, think about how it can be used, and surely you will be able to zero in on a number of valuable search strategies. And please don’t forget share them with yours truly. 
Dear readers, why would anyone require website translation services? Obviously to reach out to people who speak in that language. Now I feel website translation as a term is not good enough as it might mislead people who require getting their websites translated. You must have guessed that I am in favor of the term “website localization”.
I think that the term ‘website localization’ is appropriate because simply getting the contents of any website translated into the targeted language would not help. A website needs to be tuned in to the culture and mentality of the target user other than being in his/her language. Tuning of the website would include making suitable changes in the design, as well as content of the web page to sync it with the prevailing culture and habit of the target country. This involves a lot more work of course but it’s the best way to translate a web page. It would require experts who specialize in the job. So if you require to get your website translated, don’t just go for anyone, get a professional website translation expert with solid experience.
A medical translation expert working with Tomedes challenged me to find a word which was like looooong but not related to medicine. Well I did find it out - FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION.
List all the words in English starting and ending with “und”
Ans. Underground. That’s the only one dear reader. If you know anything else please do not forget to enlighten your friendly Tomedes Translation Expert.
Legal translation is counted among the most challenging areas of the translation industry. Professional legal translation experts need to have a solid understanding of the various legal term and concepts that they come across in their translation projects. Now this is a tough job because legal systems are not uniform across various countries.
Even in the same country, one can come across different legal systems, for example the civil and common law systems. One can frequently come across same terms with different meanings under different systems. This is why legal translators need to have a high degree of specialization and keep updating themselves regularly. Moreover legal translation professionals also need to be acquainted with the local culture of the country for which they are translating the text; this goes a long in helping improve authenticity.
Legal translation requires accuracy in the translation of various terms, as well as the inventiveness that is required for a high quality literary translation. Translation buyers with legal translation jobs in hand should only approach translation services providers with an established track record, be it individuals or professional translation agencies.
I had other terms in mind before I settled down for the final title of this post. I considered “firing translation clients” or “getting rid of translation clients”. But I rejected them as they did not go with the spirit of my thoughts. They are too negative for my liking. Face it guys if you are a professional freelance translation provider, you wouldn’t like to see a post with a title on the lines of firing or getting rid of your translator. Rude is not Good.
So getting to our main purpose, professional translation services providers frequently face situations where they feel that they cannot continue with a current client for some reason. A few such reasons might be –
- The client is troublesome - a pain to work with
- The client cannot pay your standard rates
- The client is always late with payments
The above reasons can also make for broad categories, under which you can list several other ‘sub-issues’.
Whatever be the kind of client you are dealing with, you should always maintain a high level of conduct or professionalism when you are dealing with him or her. Even for clients who have bugged you to developing suicidal tendencies
Just write a note to such clients, which refers to a mismatch in working styles that has led you to decide on ending the relationship, and request the client to remove you from their list of available translation providers. You can use the same strategy for clients who are bad with payments.
The most difficult translation client to part with is a good client whom you have liked working with, but who is unable to pay your increased charges. But sticking with the client would mean continuing financial loss for you. You should, for obvious reasons, treat such clients gently. While communicating with them let them know that you have increased you rates, which might be more than what they can pay. Furthermore, tell them that you would definitely like to work with them provided they can pay you according to your new rates.
This was just a brief overview of my thoughts on the issue of parting ways with a translation client. Hope it helps you. I would end by reminding you again the necessity of avoiding nastiness and mudslinging, and being as professional as possible.
Well I just had to tell you this dear reader. I came across this story on the Forbes website and it made my day. It is a true fairy tale involving a translation business that started in a small dorm room and continues its success story at Park Avenue.
TransPerfect Translations which is now the biggest privately held translation firm in the world was started by Elizabeth Elting along with her boyfriend Phil Shawe, from their dorm room. Elting began with the help of a big credit card advance, a rented computer and a fax machine. After a month of making hundreds of calls and faxes, she landed up with her first project that involved translating a 3-page document from English to Slovak for a small law firm.
Their well thought out plan worked awesomely and now TransPerfect Translations is a $205 million business spread out over 4 floors at Park Avenue with over a thousand full time employees. Check the detailed story at Forbes.
Yesterday we had a pleasant coincidence at Tomedes. Believers of New Age philosophy might eagerly describe it as “Law of Attraction” or “Synchronicity”. We added a new pair of languages to our already burgeoning repertoire of language translation services at Tomedes. The service in question was Bulgarian to English translation, and we had already got some highly qualified professional Bulgarian translation experts registered with us.
The pleasant surprise was that within a few minutes of going online with the Bulgarian to English translation service we got a request for a Bulgarian to English email translation. The client was a Bulgarian businessman with business interests in America.
As is our usual practice, we delivered the completed translation in a very short time. The client was impressed by our irresistible combination of quality, delivery time and low cost and sent in another set of emails with the comment “I am going to keep you guys busy” – as translated from Bulgarian to English by one of our professional Bulgarian translation providers.
This is an all too familiar and dreadful experience for many professional language translation providers. It can be as bad as having no work at all for a long stretch of time. But if one doesn’t face this situation well then the repercussions can turn out to be worse than not having any work at all. Mismanagement of too many deadlines can result in botched up translations which would disappoint old clients and discourage new ones from working with you in future. So how do you handle an overload of translation jobs and come out with flying colors? The key is good management. Let’s elaborate on that –
Getting overloaded with work maybe a first sign that you have not managed your work-flow well. You might have taken/promised more work than you can deliver, or you might have just used up more time in one or more projects than you initially assumed it would take. Good management includes an ability to make accurate forecasts about time and other resources consumed. So first of all get a good idea about your strengths and weakness against the requirements of various projects. It would help you develop an effective translation management strategy.
Then there are situations where you just can’t help it as work lands on your lap which you just can’t refuse for some reasons. In such a situation you have to attack the workload in a well-planned and methodical manner. Some or all of the following tips might be helpful, depending upon your circumstances –
Make more time by cutting down unimportant tasks whether they are time-consuming or not. Even apparently small time-wasting activities can add up to a big whole. Furthermore, postpone tasks that can be done later, preferably after the tough stretch if work is over. Treat the stretch of multiple deadlines the way a reasonably good student would treat examinations. Get the drift? It would be a little stressful, but include periods when you can get adequate relaxation.
Other effective ideas would include stuff of common sense like –
- Writing faster than you usually do
- Focusing on one job at a time
- Delegating work whenever possible
- Maintaining a positive attitude
