Posted in Freelancing, Marketing on June 26, 2008 | No Comments »
People posted such great suggestions in the Comments section for Break on Through that I think they deserve their own post.
Jill Sommer made a number of really helpful points. First, I should have clarified in the post that although working as an FBI Contract Linguist was the job that allowed me to get through the [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, tagged Boulder, tourism on June 4, 2008 | No Comments »
Yesterday, ever-observant EN>FR translator Marianne Reiner sent me a link to an article about my hometown, Boulder CO, in the online French publication Courrier International. In addition to being just plain amusing (I think I’ll start referring to Boulder as “a mini-Copenhagen with a view” as the author does!), this article struck me as illustrative [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, tagged translation clients, payment practices on June 4, 2008 | 3 Comments »
One of the most frequent questions that I see from beginning translators is how to decide if a new client or a job offer is legitimate. It’s a delicate process, and it’s not an exact science. Sometimes even experienced translators get scammed, and sometimes a client that seems a little shady during the first contact [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, Technology on May 21, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Like many independent professionals these days, I’ve started using a few social networking tools such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn and MySpace. My experience with them is fairly limited, but I’ve been thinking about some of the positives and negatives of using these websites for networking and marketing.
To me, the primary advantage of social networking sites [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing on May 5, 2008 | 4 Comments »
What with the U.S. economy on a downward slide and the euro continuing its climb above U.S. $1.50, many translators are marketing these days. Following are some tips on writing a translation-targeted résumé that will pass muster with potential clients.
Let’s start with the obvious but often overlooked: prominently state your language pair(s). It sounds crazy, [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, Technology on May 1, 2008 | 6 Comments »
The issue of translation memory discounts, whereby a translator charges a lower rate for words that appear as repetitions or fuzzy matches in a translation environment/CAT/TM tool, is a contentious one. On the one hand, a client might reasonably argue that changing “press the green button” to “press the red button” doesn’t involve translating four [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Links, Marketing on April 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Michelle Vranizan Rafter’s blog, WordCount, has an excellent post about ways to promote your freelance writing, most of which are applicable to translation as well.
When it comes to things like blogs, e-newsletters, podcasts and even websites, part of the appeal for translators is that the market is quite open. While some demographic groups (moms, artists [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing on March 22, 2008 | 9 Comments »
At last year’s American Translators Association conference in San Francisco, I overheard a few conversations about how the translation industry would be affected if translators started billing by the hour rather than by the word. In some cases and for some jobs, translators do bill by the hour, but the tried-and-true per-word charge is still [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing on March 22, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Recently, several newly established freelance translators have asked me about how and when to say no to clients who are offering translation projects. It’s a delicate topic, since as freelancers we need to accept work in order to stay in business, but we also need to decline work in order to maintain a good quality [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Links, Marketing on March 4, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Michelle Vranizan Rafter’s blog has a great post
entitled “Freelancers’ Strategies for Prospering in Bad Times.” Although my sense is that most translators are not feeling the hit of the economic downturn, this post has some very useful information for growing your freelance business under any circumstances; even a beginning freelance translator could apply this information [...]
