Strategies of an intellectual pieceworker

The professional profile of a freelance translator is indeed one of an intellectual pieceworker. You rarely get paid by the hour, and even if you do, the time frame allocated to a project is mostly limited. What this boils down to is that you don’t get paid if your brain and hands are not busy. As opposed to an in-house employee, the provision of freelance translation services involves being contacted by a client, agreeing on schedule and budget and completing an assignment within its deadline and to the client’s satisfaction. The following article presents a few ideas on how to make the best of this seemingly bleak situation and actually turn it into a rewarding experience.

First off, once you have managed to establish yourself in the language industry, the job of an independent vendor offers many pros. The most important advantage is, of course, that you are your own boss. You have the freedom to set your own working hours and you are spared from the hassle and elbowing that comes with climbing the career ladder and maintaining your position in a large business. What’s more, you do not run the risk of losing your job just because your boss doesn’t like you or your employer needs to streamline. If you have a sufficiently broad client base, there will be work requests for you to pick from on most days. And if you manage to provide convincing results and build a reputation, the praise and testimonials that you receive from satisfied clients will be way more rewarding than the occasional “well done, keep it up” from a superior.

Another major benefit is that you can work from any place you wish to. All you need is a computer and Internet access. You can work from home, set up a dedicated office (which is what I prefer at the time of writing this) or even sit out on a park bench with your laptop computer and a mobile modem. An interesting aspect of this situation is that you may even consider relocating to a random place on the globe to lower your cost of living. If you, like myself, conduct your business entirely over the Internet, your clients will not care much about whether you serve their needs from Denmark or from the Caribbean.

However, all these advantages come at a cost: You must work hard to get there. When you start out in the translation business, no one will know you. You yourself must spread the word and attract clients. You’ll have to register with translation agencies, provide free sample translations, bid on jobs posted on freelance sites, set up and promote your own website and basically spend more time hunting down jobs than actually translating and gaining experience. This can be a rather frustrating endeavor, especially in view of the fact that you are unlikely to generate enough income to sustain yourself throughout the initial stage of your translation career, which means that you’ll either have to live off someone else’s funds or have a second job.

Another point worth mentioning is that you will mainly be working for translation agencies in the beginning. While in most cases you get to work on interesting projects and receive support from competent project managers, the pay will always be lower than what you may expect from direct clients and the payment terms will typically be anywhere between one to two months after the date of your invoice. I have also learned from experience that especially large agencies tend to assign jobs strictly based on cost and not so much on the competence level of their suppliers, relying on downstream stages in their quality assurance process (third-party editing and proofreading) to fix poor translation output. Being involved in such projects is not worthwhile and you’ll have to develop antennae to detect such requests. Generally, one repeat direct customer is worth many agencies, since satisfied direct clients will pay faster and more, and probably even advertise your services by word of mouth, which you should not expect from a translation agency.

Hence the strategies of an intellectual pieceworker are to build lasting relations with direct clients, and to be as efficient as possible once an assignment has been placed and the clock is ticking away. To achieve the latter, you should – like a good cobbler – stick to your last and never accept work in fields you don’t feel comfortable with. You should also start using CAT tools (Computer Aided Translation) early on in your translation career, build client-specific TMs (Translation Memories) and glossaries, and maintain a reference master TM for concordance searches. Always strive to improve your computer skills, familiarize yourself with useful software tools and never forget that your previous translation output is your most valuable asset, which means that you must be able to search your data easily and perform regular backups. You should also network and maintain contacts with fellow translators, e.g. through industry platforms such as www.proz.com. Once your workflow is established, your typing speed is up to scratch and your clients keep coming back, being a freelance translator and doing intellectual piecework will stop being a hand-to-mouth existence and gradually become a decent way of life full of rewarding professional experiences.