***START OF SELF CENTERED BLABBER***
I was 18 when
I decided.
At the end
of my first ever assembly chain night shift, 8 hours in rubber parts
manufacturing hell, I decided. I was going away, going somewhere far, and
different, somewhere where I could learn, grow, feed my hopes for an
extraordinary life to come.
And so I
went to Dublin, learned a language, got my solo traveler feet wet.
During the
past 9 years on the road, I’ve seen so many people having to leave a paradise
right when things had started happening for them, right when they fell in love,
or found adventure, true friends, and a perfect lifestyle, to go back to rainy
England or some boring little hometown to work a shitty job they were hoping to
find, probably moving back in with mum and dad, to make enough money to come
back to paradise.
I have been
incredibly lucky and made it, in less than 2 months, getting established and making
a living from freelance translation. Maybe I can help somebody else to hold on
to their paradise and find a dream job that will let them be free, live
anywhere in the world, stop or stay as they please.
The cons?
Honestly, I could bullshit you about tight deadlines, long waits for payments,
inconsistent flow of work, endless boring hours typing away while the world is
partying right outside your door and you can hear it even through your
earplugs. But honestly, there is no cons. This is the best job in the world.
Damn, I think I just found a better one! Check this out!
If you still want to give translation a shot, read on!
***END OF SELF CENTERED BLABBER AND START OF
THE REAL USEFUL STUFF***
HOW TO BECOME A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR AND TRAVEL
THE WORLD
Choose your language pair.
One thing very few people know is that a real professional only translates from a second language into his own mother tongue. Only this way you can provide the quality expected in the translation market.
I work from English (and rarely from Spanish and French) into Italian. I've spoken English for 9 years straight, but reading through this blog you'll still find mistakes and expressions that give me away as not being English mother tongue.
Visit these websites:
www.proz.com (biggest translation portal in the world, it collects
all professionals, agencies and many job offers).
You need to
pay 120 Euros a year or so to reply to the job offers. It is well worth it.
Read the
Forum “Getting established”. Start
answering some Kudoz
questions to be known in the industry by colleagues and customers.
Start
putting together some contacts searching the highest rated agencies in the Blueboard section (http://www.proz.com/blueboard).
Focus on
agencies in the country where your mother tongue is spoken, but also check the
big ones from USA, England (they pay very well and are very professional) and Asia
(like singapore, big volumes of jobs, mostly electric devices manuals).
www.guru.com (freelancing job offers)
Free to
join. Many offers, but not just for translating. Also programming, graphics,
writing and editing. Bid for a low price, and you will probably get the job,
even with no experience. Usually small projects, very good to start. That’s how
I started.
www.translatorsbase.com (translation job offers)
You need to
pay (around 100 Euros) but you receive a good number of job offers, and little
competition.
Get some online
feedback (positive!) from your first customers, it’s gonna help you get new
jobs and establish on the market.
Create a
good CV in all the languages you work with.
If you have
zero experience and no translation degree, it’s going to be harder, but it can
be done, I am living proof!
Don’t let
anybody tell you otherwise and do not listen to negative people. Some people
are just trying to hog all the work for themselves or justify all the years
they spent studying making sure no mister nobody without a degree becomes more
successful then they are (and rest assured I am not saying that a degree is not
the best way to go. If you can, by all means, get one).
Check out
this post:
I also did
some work for this site, I like it a lot:
I know how
tempting it can be to pump up your CV to make it more appealing in this digital
era of faceless interaction. I am not suggesting you do, mind me, but if you do
be ready for the consequences.
If you do exaggerate
your experience, be ready to offer big discounts when and if you make mistakes
or if you deliver a low standard of quality.
When I
started, I learned on the field, and it took a lot of mistakes, discounts, and
swallowing up my pride in front of angry emails.
Usually a
sincere apology and a big discount or in some cases the waiver of the full rate
(if you really messed up) can solve the situation to both parties content. The
customer gets a free, if lacking in quality, translation, and you get the
experience. Also, a professionally revised translation full of red marks is the
most precious gift you can get, at the beginning. It’s still freaking scary
when you get it in your inbox, but it’s something we all need to go through at
the beginning. One day soon you’ll be able to send out work without any fear of
quality issues, and it will feel amazing. But it’s not going to happen on week
one.
So, about
the CV. You can use this template to get an idea:
Curriculum Vitae
Name: XXXXXX
Born in : XXXXXX
Date : XXXXXXXX
Address: XXXXXX
XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX
Tax ID XXXXXX
E-Mail: XXXXXX
Native language: Italian
Language pair: English > Italian
Specializations:
- marketing, IT, SAP,
videogames, software, poker and online gaming
- medical, medical devices
manuals
- contracts and patents, code
of conducts
- finance/financial statements
- tourism, multimedia,
e-Commerce
XXXXXX
Work experience:
XXXXXX
Pro-bono cooperation with ICDLBOOKS (International
Children Digital Library)
Availability: Full-Time
Software:
Trados 2006, SDL Trados Studio 2011, Transit Satellite
PE, SDLX, Idiom, POedit, XTM, X-Bench, iQube, MemoQ, OmegaT, MemSource, Xara X,
Dreamweaver
Sound knowledge of HTML
My Proz profile: XXXXXX
Payment methods accepted:
Bank Wire, PayPal, Skrill
References:
XXXXXXXXX
XXXX
XX
XXXX
XX
Mr. XXXXXX from Translation Agency XXXX
Link to references on translatorbase: XXXXXX
Link to Proz WWA feedback: XXXXXX
Use a “good
boy/good girl” picture. It’s very important they can see your face, as they
will probably never meet you. Send out a lot of CVs... the answer rate is
around 2 or 3 %, so send at least 100 if you want 2 or 3 answers. I sent 1000
when I began. I got my first 10 customers or so like that.
Find
contacts through the Proz blueboard. Try to avoid writing to low rated agencies,
you’re gonna have a hard time getting paid.
Make sure
you send the CVs out pasting the addresses in the cc: field. Customers don’t
like to see a mass email message sent to them and all of their competitors.
Put your
source and target languages and the rate in the object of the message. Better
be low, to start, they don’t know you and that’s the only thing you can offer to
begin. These are all English-speaking agencies, so send the CV in English. Have
the CV revised by a mother tongue before sending it out. One spelling mistake
in the CV, and you are out of the game ;)
RATES:
Translators
get paid from as little as 0,010 to as much as 0,20 euro per source word,
depending how good/bad they are, how fast, whom do they work for, experience
level and marketing capacities.
I think an
average rate today, competitive on the market, goes from 0,04 to 0,06
euro/source word.
I started
with 0,02/0,03. Now I have customers that pay 0,10 euro/source word. But I
still work for my best and oldest customers at 0,04 euro/source word. I try and
raise my rate 0,005 Euro per year, usually, at least when I am marketing for
new customers.
For
proofreading, I charge half of the translation price. But it’s better to get
some experience before proofreading the translation of another pro.
SOFTWARE:
You are
going to need these software to start (I know it's expensive, but many agencies will not consider you without this tools):
SDL Trados
Studio. This is the Bible of Translation software. You can download the demo here:
http://www.translationzone.com/products/sdl-trados-studio/free-trial.html
A good
dictionary for every language you work with (I use digital dictionaries).
Microsoft Office, complete with spellchecker in your native language.
Dragon Naturally Speaking, if you want to use dictation to write (speeds you up to three
times... three times more money, I would think about it after a while you’ve
been working and begin getting established).
Note: when you use Trados, clients ask for a “Trados
breakdown”, which is a lower rate for repetitions and fuzzy matches found in
the Translation Memory. Many customers will give you a document to translate,
and a TM to use in Trados.
My Trados
breakdown is as follows:
100% matches
and repetitions: 25 % of full rate
99 to 75%
fuzzy matches: 75 % of full rate
75 to 0%
matches : 100 % of full rate
Tips and tricks that worked for me:
Answer to
the emails immediately, possibly within one hour max, at least at the beginning.
Be extremely available and polite. Start EVERY TIME with Dear (Surname of the
customer) and end up with Kind regards, (Your signature), even if it takes time
and you are in a hurry. Answer every time, even just to give a confirmation of
receipt.
At the
beginning, you’ll have to do a LOT of translation tests for free for new
customers. A normal test is no longer that 350 words. You will get feedback,
and probably some ass-kicking, at the beginning. Check every single comma,
double space, capital letter and punctuation mark in the tests and in the
translations you send out. They should be perfect.
If a good customer
asks me to translate a sentence from time to time, just a few words in the body
of an email, I don’t charge for it.
I
occasionally apply discounts, but usually just for big volumes, like above
20000 words.
ALWAYS
respect the deadline. I usually deliver at least 12 hours in advance, just in
case there is any problem to fix.
Well... this
should be it. I know it’s a lot of information and it can feel quite
overwhelming, but don’t let this discourage you. So here is some more encouraging data:
You can
make a very good living with this job, an average of 1500-2000 Euros a month,
if you work well. Bring that to India, and you are practically a millionaire.
During my most
successful month, on the second year as a translator, I worked my a** off for
the whole month of August and made enough money to chill on a Thai tropical
beach for one year.
Somehow time went really fast...
Somehow time went really fast...
You could
be making a living and on the road, travelling the world, in 3 months, if you
are willing to invest some time and energy into learning this job and don’t let
the bumps in the road stop you from succeeding!
Best of
all, you can be your own boss, becoming truly free and independent, which is really
worth a million dollar.
Best of
luck and see you in paradise!
