How long does it take to get established
Thread poster: Elena Diaz
Elena Diaz
Elena Diaz  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 05:59
English to Spanish
Jun 19, 2013

Hello
I was wondering how long did it take you to get established as a freelance translator? By that, I mean relying on translations as your part-time income at least.
Also, how many agencies did you apply to (approx.) in order to get to that?

I am a lawyer and I have been doing translations as a contract attorney (EN-ES) but now I am interested in working as a freelance translator. However, considering the investment I need to make to get started, I would like to kn
... See more
Hello
I was wondering how long did it take you to get established as a freelance translator? By that, I mean relying on translations as your part-time income at least.
Also, how many agencies did you apply to (approx.) in order to get to that?

I am a lawyer and I have been doing translations as a contract attorney (EN-ES) but now I am interested in working as a freelance translator. However, considering the investment I need to make to get started, I would like to know how long did it take you see the fruits of that labor. And what kind of work did it take.
I am not lazy and I do not believe that the investment we need to do is big considering to starting other businesses.

I have sent some resumes to agencies and most of them do not even reply. Also I have gotten some replies where I have been told they do not do translations with US translators b/c they send the work overseas due to their low prices. Overall, it seems to me that would take a couple of years to get things going. And that the EN-ES is saturated.

I appreciate your input and advice.

Thanks
Elena

[Edited at 2013-06-19 17:07 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-19 17:23 GMT]
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Simona Micutari
Simona Micutari  Identity Verified
Sweden
English to Romanian
+ ...
Yes, please! Jun 19, 2013

As an up and coming translator, I would also like to hear the stories of experienced professionals. It can really inspire, guide and encourage me!

 
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz  Identity Verified
Poland
Local time: 11:59
English to Polish
+ ...
Depends Jun 19, 2013

Depends, Elena.

In my case, I declared myself as a translator about in February 2009 or so, but didn't really do much to find work. Then, I registered on a Polish translation portal, met people there, got involved in discussions, helped others, e-mailed more and more translation agencies, caught my first major one in May, and by July I was up to neck in work. I was pretty established then, I guess! Then I had work coming through all doors and windows in some months of 2010 and 2011,
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Depends, Elena.

In my case, I declared myself as a translator about in February 2009 or so, but didn't really do much to find work. Then, I registered on a Polish translation portal, met people there, got involved in discussions, helped others, e-mailed more and more translation agencies, caught my first major one in May, and by July I was up to neck in work. I was pretty established then, I guess! Then I had work coming through all doors and windows in some months of 2010 and 2011, in addition to enjoying a good reputation in my primary translation environment.

But it goes in cycles. I did feel the impact when my primary environment collapsed and primary outsourcers and clients suffered some setbacks around the same time. So you could say I'm less established than I was 2-3 years ago. On the other hand, I'll probably be in a much better shape in a short while, especially after finally wrapping up my Ph.D. in autumn and being able to take on a more committed approach to a couple of things.

Freelancers have ups and downs. You can rise very quickly. You can also fall quickly. And then rise. And so on and so forth.

Edit: Here's what I was looking for: clickee. Balasubramaniam does have a way of talking about those things. I'd be thrilled to hear more of his war stories, personally.

Edit2: I must be getting old. I missed the information that you are a practising attorney. You need to market yourself as one. You're not an entry level beginning translator. You're an attorney that translates. Attorneys throw their weight around, eat raw buffalo hearts for breakfast, keep pet sharks in their fish tanks and use the Georgia font (but Palatino or Trajan for more serious stuff). They have golden plates with 'esquire' on them, no matter that the 'doctor' in 'Juris Doctor' actually confers higher social precedence than that of an esquire, as all readers of Blackstone should just might remember but normal people won't ever end up knowing.

I'm kidding, obviously, and some lawyers are kind and modest people, but you really need to emphasise the lawyer part of you and your work. Don't emulate translator marketing, use lawyer marketing. Don't respond to the translation market, make the translation market respond to you. To begin with, go to http://www.proz.com/settings/ and put 'J.D.' after your name. Then include 'practicing attorney' (AmE sp.) in your tagline. (And I doubt you need more than that there.)

[Edited at 2013-06-19 18:54 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-19 18:55 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-19 18:55 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-19 18:56 GMT]
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Parrot
Parrot  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 11:59
Spanish to English
+ ...
3 years and a PhD Jun 19, 2013

(Just kidding, I was laughing at Lukasz).

But my case was the roundabout way (as is everything with me). I took a couple of translation courses to help me with my office work, which I was thinking of quitting anyway. I needed to find something more flexible. I had some clients from a previous internship, but it was not until I cracked down to the thesis (and did the maths and statistical work on my income) that translation proved to be the most flexible solution.

Having
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(Just kidding, I was laughing at Lukasz).

But my case was the roundabout way (as is everything with me). I took a couple of translation courses to help me with my office work, which I was thinking of quitting anyway. I needed to find something more flexible. I had some clients from a previous internship, but it was not until I cracked down to the thesis (and did the maths and statistical work on my income) that translation proved to be the most flexible solution.

Having to do research helped. It's kind of a state of mind; by the time I got my diploma I was translating full-time.

Some colleagues advocate direct marketing with a lot of clients. Since I took the easy way -- went for repeat business -- I can actually live with 6 steady clients for any given period of time. More than that and I find myself saying "no" -- we only get 24 hours in a day. The population and their profiles may change, but go for those steady clients.

Law is a good deal. Within that you could find subspecializations: contracts (I read all my father's form books, the whole family was into law), tax and finance... with an academic Fine Arts background and UNESCO field experience, I painted myself a niche in heritage law, for instance.
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Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz  Identity Verified
Poland
Local time: 11:59
English to Polish
+ ...
Here's a biscuit! Jun 19, 2013

Parrot wrote:

(Just kidding, I was laughing at Lukasz).


Look who's talking! Two Master's degrees and a Ph.D. summa cum laude yourself.

In my case, three years is more like the number of years I'm late on that Ph.D. Hope to finish it this year and be done with it. Should be like a new birth. I'll be celebrating by printing adds in magazines that lawyers read, with 'sworn translator, doctor of legal science' stamped all over the allotted space. That or, more likely, playing Starcraft for a month without a break.

(By the way, it was fun writing off the law Ph.D. and translation post-Master's in the same fiscal year.)

But my case was the roundabout way (as is everything with me). I took a couple of translation courses to help me with my office work, which I was thinking of quitting anyway.


There were plenty of people like that in my translation school. A film maker, a lawyer, a legal secretary, in fact, even a girl from the border guard.

I needed to find something more flexible.


Translation is all about flexible! Especially being flexible with your rates.

I had some clients from a previous internship, but it was not until I cracked down to the thesis (and did the maths and statistical work on my income) that translation proved to be the most flexible solution.


Take a one-year tax degree with that and you can translate financial statements by the truckload.

Having to do research helped. It's kind of a state of mind; by the time I got my diploma I was translating full-time.


Oh yes, plenty of problems with translation come from 1) insufficient research, and 2) lack of imagination/probing. And inquisitive mind and the ability to question presumptions and appearances is a precious asset in a translator.

Some colleagues advocate direct marketing with a lot of clients. Since I took the easy way -- went for repeat business -- I can actually live with 6 steady clients for any given period of time. More than that and I find myself saying "no" -- we only get 24 hours in a day. The population and their profiles may change, but go for those steady clients.


I've been toying with the idea of plain old magazine ads. Not newspapers but magazines that are read by an audience coextensive with one's own natural target group. It costs money, but so does DIY-ing your own marketing instead of making money doing what you're good at, i.e. translating. Money exists to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. The marketer works for you, you work for a translation customer, the money is basically a common denominator here. We love talking about how bad it is for our could-have-been clients to rely on DIY translations instead of hiring the pros, i.e. us, don't we.

Law is a good deal. Within that you could find subspecializations: contracts (I read all my father's form books, the whole family was into law), tax and finance... with an academic Fine Arts background and UNESCO field experience, I painted myself a niche in heritage law, for instance.


It's awfully hard to be actually good at legal translation without having the benefit of solid legal education. Plenty of people don't even realise the extent of their mistranslations, miswordings and everything else. A couple of my visits to the Kudoz board have been quite traumatising. On the other hand, if you go ahead and get that law degree, you're in for a rock-solid specialisation. (Except you just might make more money practising the law instead.)

[Edited at 2013-06-19 23:54 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-19 23:56 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-20 00:00 GMT]


 
felicij
felicij  Identity Verified
Local time: 11:59
German to Slovenian
+ ...
1 year Jun 19, 2013

and a lot of patience with moody PMs.
I started translating back in 2000 and became full time translator in 2005 and had 2 clients (more or less regular) who paid me enough to earn an average income. In 2010 one of the clients changed his staff and they probably started sending work to their acquaintances and friends and the other client was even less regular, so I needed to find new clients. I started looking for potential clients here and on another portal. Due to my previous experience
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and a lot of patience with moody PMs.
I started translating back in 2000 and became full time translator in 2005 and had 2 clients (more or less regular) who paid me enough to earn an average income. In 2010 one of the clients changed his staff and they probably started sending work to their acquaintances and friends and the other client was even less regular, so I needed to find new clients. I started looking for potential clients here and on another portal. Due to my previous experience it was quite easy to find them.
Now I have 8 regular clients and the projects are divided equally, so if one or two clients have problems with their business, it won't affect me much...
IMHO sending your resume to agencies is a waste of time. I did that in 2010 and got 10 % replies but only 1 of them decided to hire my services.
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Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz  Identity Verified
Poland
Local time: 11:59
English to Polish
+ ...
That's a bit of a different investment mechanic... or a different perspective, perhaps Jun 20, 2013

felicij wrote:

IMHO sending your resume to agencies is a waste of time. I did that in 2010 and got 10 % replies but only 1 of them decided to hire my services.


That's a bit of a different investment mechanic. You write to 100 agencies to have 10 reply and 1-2 give you work. Writing to all the rest is a necessity and a cost, since you don't know which one of the 100 will end up giving you work. Sort of like paying for 1,000,000 impressions of a banner or text ad (in Google or anywhere else). You don't know which people will be clicking on them or which of those will eventually hire your services, so you pay for advertising to several thousand or so of them just so that a few might become clients.

That's a little different from spending quality time targeting a single specific potential client, e.g. a huge IT/construction/mining/film-making/whatever company from your specialisation area, where you invest everything in just 1 lead in an all or nothing kind of scenario. (Well, they can give you more work or less, but they're 1 company that either hires you or not.)


 
Balasubramaniam L.
Balasubramaniam L.  Identity Verified
India
Local time: 16:29
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
My experience Jun 20, 2013

The experiences of each translator would be different, so I am not sure how this will actually help you, for your subject area, language pair, and location are entirely different and all these have significant bearings on translation success. But here is my case for what it is worth.

I started off as an English and Hindi Writer with a national-level (India) centre of excellence in environmental education and continued with this job for 20 years before branching out as a freelancer.
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The experiences of each translator would be different, so I am not sure how this will actually help you, for your subject area, language pair, and location are entirely different and all these have significant bearings on translation success. But here is my case for what it is worth.

I started off as an English and Hindi Writer with a national-level (India) centre of excellence in environmental education and continued with this job for 20 years before branching out as a freelancer. In the job I worked in various capacities from content writer to copyeditor to translator and proof-reader. I also worked with various target groups such as children, decision-makers, politicians, teachers, and the general public. And with various media such as print, electronic, three-dimensional and folk media.

This varied experience was crucial in developing my language skills. Another crucial factor was the multi-disciplinary teams in which I worked which included people of various skills such as artists, photographers, model-makers, computer specialists, designers, DTP specialists and subject experts. This gave me the opportunity to see how my work fits in into the large scheme of things.

I then due to personal reasons decided to strike out on my own and based my skills with two world languages, English and Hindi, as the centre-pin of my decision. I had previously experimented with freelancing while in the job and had convinced myself that I wouldn't starve if I quit my job.

Fortunately, I did well from the first day, mainly thanks to proz.com which helped me tap into the international translation market. Earlier I was working exclusively with local clients whom I personally knew and could just walk across and discuss the work.

So you could say it took me twenty years to establish myself or no time at all. It all depends on how you look at it. Personally I feel all the experience that I gained in the job situation were critical for the success of my translation career.
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XXXphxxx (X)
XXXphxxx (X)  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:59
Portuguese to English
+ ...
Too many variables Jun 20, 2013

This question crops up all the time and it's a little like asking 'How long is a piece of string?'. It depends on your language combinations; your qualifications; your experience in your specialist fields; your business, marketing and negotiation skills; the "market" and when you set yourself up. As a rule of thumb, I think many people say 6 months -1 year but some hit the ground running, others take 3 years and still others never make it at all.

Edited to add: As for e-mailing age
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This question crops up all the time and it's a little like asking 'How long is a piece of string?'. It depends on your language combinations; your qualifications; your experience in your specialist fields; your business, marketing and negotiation skills; the "market" and when you set yourself up. As a rule of thumb, I think many people say 6 months -1 year but some hit the ground running, others take 3 years and still others never make it at all.

Edited to add: As for e-mailing agencies, they say that you can expect a 4% hit on that. Furthermore, you can't carpet bomb, do your research and ensure you're targeting the right agencies, working in your language combinations and specialist area.

[Edited at 2013-06-20 07:30 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-20 07:37 GMT]
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Giles Watson
Giles Watson  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 11:59
Italian to English
In memoriam
And the length of a piece of string is... Jun 20, 2013

Lisa Simpson, MCIL wrote:

This question crops up all the time and it's a little like asking 'How long is a piece of string?'. It depends on your language combinations; your qualifications; your experience in your specialist fields; your business, marketing and negotiation skills; the "market" and when you set yourself up.



... from one end to the other.

To stretch the metaphor a little further, if you want to know how long the piece of string is, you need to find out where the ends are and untangle what's in between. In the case of budding translators, one end is the skill set they possess and the other is the skill set they require to interest the clients they want to reach. In between, is an "untangling" process that will probably involve identifying the two relevant skill sets, training up and a lot of patience.





[Edited at 2013-06-20 08:13 GMT]


 
Parrot
Parrot  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 11:59
Spanish to English
+ ...
I don't think so Jun 20, 2013

Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote:

It's awfully hard to be actually good at legal translation without having the benefit of solid legal education. Plenty of people don't even realise the extent of their mistranslations, miswordings and everything else. A couple of my visits to the Kudoz board have been quite traumatising. On the other hand, if you go ahead and get that law degree, you're in for a rock-solid specialisation. (Except you just might make more money practising the law instead.)


Not about the solid legal education, but depending on the KIND of law degree you can end up tying yourself to a jurisdiction. And immobility isn't very good for translators, downright bad for interpreters. Some lawyers even fall into a kind of inintelligibility trap. Comes from all those clauses. And they only get worse with cut-and-paste.

To give you a laugh, here's my legal background: Dad was a lawyer living in a compound with my uncle, who was the chartered accountant. Grandfather was a judge. On Christmas family reunions, they'd call him "Your Honour".

It got so bad I landed a graduate assistantship in an Institute of Law and Jurisprudence. That's what set me up with UNESCO. I was sent to conferences partnered with a lawyer who didn't know anything about heritage.


 
Elena Diaz
Elena Diaz  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 05:59
English to Spanish
TOPIC STARTER
Thank you! Jun 20, 2013

Hi all
I just wanted to thank all of you for taking the time to reply and share your experiences.
I appreciate your advice regarding the agencies too. Initially I was very excited about this new path but then when I starting sending out my materials and got very little replies, I felt discouraged. That is why I wanted to know your experiences.
Thanks for your generosity.
Elena


 
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz  Identity Verified
Poland
Local time: 11:59
English to Polish
+ ...
There are two sides of the coin Jun 26, 2013

Parrot wrote:

Not about the solid legal education, but depending on the KIND of law degree you can end up tying yourself to a jurisdiction. And immobility isn't very good for translators, downright bad for interpreters. Some lawyers even fall into a kind of inintelligibility trap. Comes from all those clauses. And they only get worse with cut-and-paste.


Well, the law is practiced always in some kind of jurisdiction, so it's not that bad. Plus, being a trained, professional splitter of hairs enhances comprehension and the ability to convey exactly what you want to convey (including the same level and type of ambiguity in and out). There's also a good deal of texts that have similar characteristics and patterns, just slightly different terminology, so it's just a different type of lawyering (for example, grammar is lawyering).

To give you a laugh, here's my legal background: Dad was a lawyer living in a compound with my uncle, who was the chartered accountant. Grandfather was a judge. On Christmas family reunions, they'd call him "Your Honour".




I promise myself all the time that I won't waste any opportunity to answer:
'So why did you go to law school?' with:
'I ask myself every day.'

[Edited at 2013-06-26 17:23 GMT]

[Edited at 2013-06-26 17:24 GMT]


 


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How long does it take to get established







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