Many beginning translators are (understandably!) very concerned about how long it will take them to establish a viable business. For obvious reasons, including differences in the demand for certain language combinations, variations in different people’s business and people skills, etc., it’s hard to give hard and fast figures on how long it takes to get started as a freelance translator; I would be interested to hear about other people’s experiences, and I’ll offer some of my own here.
My initial startup phase, during which I set up a basic website, wrote my translation-targeted resumé, had business cards printed up, joined ATA and the local translators’ association and started to make some contacts in the area took about a month. This part was fairly easy because it was fun; writing copy for a website is actually a lot of fun compared to sending out 400 cold e-mails, so this phase was pretty painless.
I then started going through the ATA directory to look for potential clients; in those days every member received a paper copy of the directory every year. You can still get a paper copy now, but you have to purchase it from ATA’s website. I went through the ATA directory and one by one went to each agency’s website to see if they were taking resumés from translators in my language combination. If they were, I sent them my materials, and if anyone responded to me in a positive way (even if it was just the “we’ll keep your resumé on file” e-mail), I sent them a handwritten note with some business cards. I also asked about five local agencies for informational interviews. I set a goal of applying to ten agencies per day; I’m not sure if I actually met that target, but the whole cold e-mailing process took about three months and I contacted over 400 potential clients.
After about six months, I started to feel like a legitimate translator. Work was still very sporadic, but I had a few actual clients that were sending me small but steady projects like birth certificates, school transcripts, etc. I also began the application process to become an FBI contract linguist, a job opportunity that materialized about two years later. Personally, I think that the phase that went from months six to 18 of my freelance career was the hardest. I had some work but not many big projects, and a dry spell could involve the better part of a month with no paying work. In the back of my mind, I wondered whether this freelance thing was really going to work out or whether I should just look for a full-time job. Feast or famine was really the name of the game during that period; no work for two weeks, followed by a 6,000 word project that had to be done over a weekend.
After year one was over, I had made $9,000 freelancing. For the amount that I had worked, this wasn’t a bad amount of money but I clearly needed to earn more if I was going to have a viable business. I relaunched my marketing efforts and expanded them to publishing companies, agencies in France and Belgium, and other potential clients I hadn’t considered. I also sent marketing postcards to a lot of agencies I had contacted in my initial marketing efforts. After eighteen months of freelancing, things looked a lot better. I was earning as much as I had at my previous full-time job (granted, this was teaching high school French, so we’re not talking six figures!) and I was starting to get some larger projects. In addition, I passed the exams and security clearance to become an FBI contract linguist and I started working 10-15 hours a week at the Denver FBI office, a level that I kept up for about the next two years. At that point, probably around the end of my second year of freelancing, I stopped worrying about whether I should get a full-time job, and decided that freelancing was going to work out. During that year I saved $100 a month toward attending my first ATA conference (and back to the topic of freelance frugality, I stayed in a hostel and brought some of my own food!) where I met several new and big clients.
The final major breakthrough in my freelance career came during year three, when I realized that my business had become like a regular job where I could, to a large extent, set my schedule and rates. At that point I started being able to concentrate on the appeal of the work I took on rather than just the volume; I was able to ease out a couple of low-paying clients and replace them with higher-paying ones, which is a technique I still use in year seven of freelancing!
Hi,
May I use some of your timeline for the ‘getting started’ presentation I’ll give later this year? I only have my own to give as an example at the moment and I know it was much faster than most.
Of course I will plug your book ferociously during said presentation!
P.S. Thanks to your podcast I finally took the plunge and set up google reader! I know: I’m hopelessly behind on Web 2.0.
Hi Karen, thanks for your comment! Definitely feel free to use the post in your presentation; ferocious plugging of my book is always welcome
Actually another good post would be factors that affect the startup time frame (like having a PhD in chemistry!), I should work on that too. Definitely lift whatever you’d like for your presentation.
Hi Corinne,
My own experience (many years earlier) confirms a start-up phase of about three years: very little work and money the first year, more (but still not enough) the second year, and too much work from the third year on.
Different country, and it feels like almost a different profession: the kind of Internet marketing you did was out of the question then (no Internet, yet), so it was a lot of leg work going from one agency to another (all customers were local, way back then), but some things seem never to change.
Hi, Corinne
I definitely have to tahnk you for your posts lately, since I am preparing things to start as a freelance, and reading your blog is making such a difference!
Also, I want to extend those thanks to everyone who comments. I think other people’s experience is very interesting, and I’m learning a lot from everybody.
Up to now, I am still at the “preparing” phase: preparing documents, preparing a website, preparing information on who to contact and how… it is scary, but thanks to you I already feel I am in the right path: a lot of work, but very little translation!
Knowing other translator’s have already been there, I feel more confident in this step I am taking, so thank you, thank you, thank you all.
LRA.
[...] Corinne McKay over at Thoughts on Translation has an interesting post about how long it took her to become established as a freelance translator. [...]
Hi Corinne,
I find your posts always very useful. I’m running a translation agency in Italy (after having been a freelance translator and editor) and at the beginnining of my career I’ve spent nearly six months – and perhaps something more – to find all the informations you’ve gathered in your blog and in your book (I’m reading it these days!)! Regarding this single post, I can confirm what you are saying: to establish a regular translation business a period from six months to 1 year is the first step, the necessary time to discover this “world” and to start working regularly with few agencies and direct clients (more agencies in my experience than direct clients…). Then, during the next two years is really important to invest on networking and marketing, to increase the business. Yes, three years are a common time to establish a regular freelance translation job.
Marina
When I first read your comment about “three years”, I was inclined to disagree, but thinking back on my own experience in detail, I think that is fairly accurate. I tend to forget about the first two years, because I was busy with a full-time job and getting settled in a new country. I started translating to cover what the translation department at my employer couldn’t deal with, and my own moonlighting clientele was built up slowly over several years because I had way too much time on my hands and needed something interesting to do. A friend of mine (now my partner) had been a translator for many years, and I respected the work she did for clients of mine over the years, so I looked closely at how she did business and asked for advice on how to get started. In the first year I think I had three occasional clients, one of them an infamous bad payer. The second year was better and fairly steady; I think I might have been able to make a living off translation in the second year toward the end if I had given it a try. But I was enjoying my day job at that point, and I wasn’t up to the risk. A year later the situation had changed; the dot-com bust had hit the company, more than half the employees were laid off, the fun was gone and I was tired of the commute. My moonlighting constituted a substantial fraction of my income and it was clear that I could make a go of it full time, so I arranged to be laid off and started full time freelancing.
At that point I nearly failed, because my client base, though larger than that of many, was too lop-sided, and more than half of my income came from one source. When that company was bought up along with another client, I took a huge hit, but I learned a lesson about spreading risk and earnings across a broad client base, which has kept me secure since then. It took about a year to achieve that diversity, so in my case I suppose you could say it took four years to have a stable, secure, viable business.
I was fortunate, when I started freelance, to benefit from what is called “portage salarial” in France, a system by which you use a third party company to invoice your clients, and this third party then pays you a net salary. I also qualified at the time for unemployment benefit. So this was a good ramp up from a couple a translations a week to full time translating/interpreting, without having to pay heavy social contributions (a French speciality) upfront. Contrary to you I did not know about translation agency databases at the time, so I just contacted the local translation stakeholders through the yellow pages.
Answering “how long does it take?” is always difficult since very commercially agressive people will get to cruising speed quicker, while people with a “life is unfair” attitude may take longer. This is connected to the subject of “how much should I charge ?” too.
Interesting post, Corinne. Despite the total absence of any business plan, I was earning a regular income after 6 months and after a year, I was earning a good living. I guess endless reserves of enthusiasm made up for my amateurish approach.
I was really aggressive in the beginning and sent out about 400 resumes per month – I was really motivated because of a less than ideal situation for starting a freelance business, but that’s another story. After 2 months of intense resume emailing, I had my first few clients. Even though I only made about $10,000 the first year, we survived (along with my husband’s unemployment check – part of the less than ideal situation…).
I have tried to mentor other people whom I already knew were good translators but were not freelancing. They said they wanted to get started, but gave up after several months because they didn’t see the work they wanted. When I think back, I had nothing but time on my hands, so I had the time to be really aggressive with the marketing, whereas others I’ve worked with were trying to deal with another job at the same time. Your post and the comments here would be a good resource for providing a realistic estimate. Thank you!
Thanks to everyone for your comments, it’s really fun reading other people’s startup stories as well. I definitely agree that the length of your startup phase depends on what else you have going on in the background; if you can devote yourself full-time to launching your business, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think that you could be doing pretty well in six months to a year. Along the lines of Kevin’s comment that if he had to, he could have supported himself from translation during his second year, I think that if I had put my daughter in day care, I could have earned about the ATA average for full-timers during my second year in business. In my case, the deciding factor was that one of the reasons I chose to freelance was to spend more time with my kid, so I really didn’t make the leap to semi-full time until she started school. And I think that attitude really has a lot to do with it too (as Celine commented!). I worked 2-3 hours a night, 5-6 nights a week for about 3 years, but although I’m really not a night person, I really looked at this as a way to be available to clients without taking time away from my family. Thanks for the great comments!