A Geordie In Girona

During a circus performance the other week, I sat open-mouthed as I witnessed jugglers, trapeze artists, acrobatic teams, sword swallowers, contortionists and various other acts doing the kind of amazing things that Harry Houdini would be proud of. The clown, waddling around with his big floppy shoes and daft red nose, wasn’t quite so impressive but he was still very funny nonetheless. One act in particular caught my imagination: the tightrope walkers. There were three of them, a girl and two men. The fact they could stay on the line of rope without falling off was magic enough, but they were doing it with things balanced on their heads. Then they were juggling things, and then they were doing it blindfolded. And as if all that wasn’t enough, for their finale, the two men walked across the tightrope, balancing the girl above them who was casually lying lengthways on their heads. Taking impossible to the next level, this really blew me away.

The next morning, as I sat munching on my Crunchy Nuts, my mind soon turned to the incredible antics of the tightrope artists. And the more I thought about them, the more I found myself comparing aspects of my early years as a freelance translator to ‘walking the tightrope’. From the beginning of my career, it always felt like a step into the great unknown as I performed ‘balancing acts’, negotiating the many potential pitfalls that I would be challenged by. I was constantly trying to weigh up which areas of my business I should be concentrating on, knowing that any misjudgements could lead to failure. In this article, I have picked out 10 of these balancing acts I faced in my early years as a freelance translator where I had to make weighted decisions on the best way to proceed. Sometimes I got it just right but other times I got it completely wrong and ended up in a heap on the floor.

Balancing act 1 – agencies

When I first started out, my aim was to contact as many agencies as possible. I believed that the more I contacted, the greater chance I would have of securing work. I drew-up a spreadsheet of as many agencies I could find using the directories of the ITI, ATC and ProZ. I reasoned that if I contacted enough of them then surely I would be rewarded with success from a small percentage of them. Over a relatively short period of time I had contacted over 400 agencies. The results, however, were worryingly and consistently poor. And when I turned my attention to agencies from my source language in Spain, my luck didn’t improve. I couldn’t understand why my plan had flopped so badly. Surely a 1% success rate wasn’t too much to ask for? From 400 this would have given me 4 agencies. I had replies off many of them, but as far as actual work went, there was absolutely nothing. It was an absolute car crash state of affairs and, at the time, I didn’t really know what to do as I didn’t have a plan B.

With the benefit of hindsight I shouldn’t have pinned all my hopes on agencies in my search for work. What I should have done was to also go after direct clients. Maybe I should have focused 75% of my efforts on agencies and 25% on direct clients. However, at the time, I didn’t feel ready to advertise my services to direct clients, something I go into greater detail about in balancing act 4. When contacting agencies, it could be argued I also got the balance wrong in terms of quantity over quality. My early canvassing blitzkrieg focused solely on quantity. I played a numbers and percentages game. If I had gone for quality I would have researched agencies in greater detail and only contacted the ones that were a good match for me regarding areas of specialisation and languages. My email and CV would have also been tailored to attract specific agencies within certain niche areas. The downside to this approach is that it takes a hell of a lot more time and preparation. And would it have worked anyway because, when you think about it, if an agency was really desperately in need of a Spanish to English translator when I sent out my CV to them, I’m sure they would have been in touch, regardless of which approach I had chosen. Part of my problem was that my language pair was already heavily oversubscribed and my specialised areas did little to make me stand out from the rest.

Balancing act 2 – rates

What is an acceptable rate to work for when starting out? It is a question that everyone seems to have a different opinion about. You don’t want to go so low that you are undervaluing yourself but at the same time you don’t want to go so high that it may damage your chances when trying to secure agency work. When setting your price a lot will depend on how confident you are in your own abilities and how highly you value yourself. I had no clue what price to set but after a few calculations, taking into account what I might like to earn in a month, I settled for 0.07 to 0.08 euros per word. But what I discovered early on was that it does not matter what I want to earn or what is a fair price for someone with my level of qualifications. In the beginning, if you want to work you have to accept what the agencies are willing to pay you. In my case this was 0.05 and never rose to above 0.06. They never ask for your rate, rather they ask for your ‘best’ rate which isn’t actually your best rate, it is your best rate for them, in other words your cheapest rate. So if you are cheap enough you stand a better chance of getting work off them. If I had stuck to my principles and refused to go below 0.07, I would still be sat twiddling my thumbs in my pyjamas, waiting for my first job. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Experienced translators will tell you not to accept low rates as you would be contributing to the race to the bottom where prices continue to go down rather than up. However, experienced translators have the luxury of working plenty of hours at a decent rate. They can go after agencies from a position of power. They use their experience as leverage, targeting the agencies that pay a fair rate but inevitably are asking for their translators to have somewhere between 2 to 5 years of experience (although I have come across 10 years before). A new translator enters the market from a very weak position. We have few bargaining tools and generally suffer from a vicious circle of no work, no money and no experience. Being offered shit money is actually very enticing for someone like myself in the beginning, desperate to break through. It gives me those three things I crave: work, money and experience. To solve the no experience riddle, many tell us to do unpaid work for charities. I tried this but when I contacted various charities, I was told there was nothing available. I had already been unsuccessful on hundreds of occasions with agencies, but when I was rejected offering my services for free, that really was a low point. As a newly qualified translator, many thousands of pounds in debt thanks to the cost of my studies, working for free was not something I felt particularly partial to anyway. Working for shit rates might be shit but at least you are seeing something going into your bank account.

Balancing act 3 – specialising and accepting work that is outside your subject area

When we start off on our career in translation, one of the most important things we need to think about is which areas we are going to specialise in. For some this is easy. If you come from a background in the legal profession you will more often than not specialise in legal texts, bankers will choose to specialise in financial documents, whilst doctors and nurses will inevitably specialise in medical texts. For me, as I have worked for various large companies, I chose business, marketing and e-commerce.  I also choose areas I was very knowledgeable and passionate about in my personal life: football and tourism. However, in the real world, when agencies finally did start sending me work, I found the subject matter was seldom in areas I specialised in. Despite the fact that my areas of specialisation were clearly stated on my CV, I have been sent projects in some complex areas including work contracts, hospital press releases about medical advances, articles on financial investments and texts on technical installations, to name but a few.

For someone starting out or simply trying to get a foot in the door with new agencies, this can create numerous problems. Naturally, you don’t want to accept anything that looks too complicated but also you don’t want to say no to an agency for fear of never being asked to do anything for them again. As a newbie you are desperate for work and this desperation can cloud your judgment. Trouble arises when you accept work that should have never been offered to you in the first place as it is in an area you know nothing about. It can take ages to complete, compared to someone who is specialised in the area, and you will really struggle to be able to produce a top quality translation. Agencies may have only won the translation with the client because they quoted a cheap price. Now they can’t afford a specialised translator so they give the work to a newbie who knows little about the subject area of the job. But as they have a head and are breathing, the job is now theirs.  Not surprisingly, the end product is far from perfect but at least the translator is being paid a bag of peanuts and only has to wait 60 days from the end of the month to receive them.

Balancing act 4 – direct clients

Many experienced translators will tell you that a healthy balance between agency and private client work is the ideal scenario. Agencies are your bread and butter as they will send work regularly but it will be poorly paid, whilst direct clients are your cash cow. Invariably, the work from direct clients may not be as regular but it will be significantly better paid. What is also evident is that direct clients will often get a better user experience and end product if they deal directly with translators who specialise in their areas of business. If a business dealing in contracts gets a legal translator to do the work directly, you can be sure an expert is dealing with your work. With certain agencies, as mentioned in the previous balancing act, they often send a translation to any Tom, Dick or Harry if the project manager has no other options. This is particularly the case with more urgent work. Regarding cost, dealing with a translator directly will also be cheaper as the middle man is cut out.

Finding direct clients can be quite a challenge and it is also hard for new translators to decide when they should start looking for them. Is it best to do it straightaway or wait a while until you have some experience? My plan had always been to build up my experience with agencies. Once I had this and my confidence grew, I would begin to figure out how to sniff out direct clients. The trouble with this was that my endeavours to find agency clients had gone fairly pear-shaped in my first year so my plans to snag a few direct clients had been placed on the backburner. Looking back now, it is evident that it was an error to wait so long to target direct clients. However, what stopped me from doing so was a lack of confidence and the know how to do so. I wasted too much time on LinkedIn which I cover in the next balancing act. I should have used it to my advantage, connecting with potential customers, writing posts that would entice them to work with me and commenting on their posts in a way that would charm their pants off. But instead, I spent most of my time fannying around on there not really knowing what I should have been doing.

Balancing act 5 – time spent on LinkedIn

For years, I didn’t really know much about LinkedIn. To me it was like a posh Facebook for business people who were full of themselves, said clever things and didn’t swear. It didn’t seem like much fun but, for the sake of my business, I started paying more attention to it. When you are just starting out as a translator, however, it can be a bit of a minefield. We are told to write posts that other translators and potential clients will be interested in. We are also told to engage with other people’s posts and write intelligent or witty comments. The trouble is though, when you’re just starting out it is very hard to think of something intelligent to say. You can’t discuss any texts you have been working on as you don’t have any work yet and you can’t say much about the business side of things, either, as your business barely exists. So what do you write, the truth? That you feel vulnerable, helpless, scared and are basically drowning in a sea of loneliness? That you still don’t have clients and are well and truly up William Shatner creek and a crocodile has just eaten your paddle?

The trouble with LinkedIn is that it is mainly used as a platform for promoting yourself and your business in a positive way. People only tend to put the good stuff on there as they want to come across as successful in a bid to attract more work. Indeed to portray this image, they may even butter up their success stories even more just to attract more positive attention. So when I (up Scheiße creek without a paddle remember) used to scroll through my feed, reading everybody’s ‘Hey look at me, I’m incredibly successful and intelligent’ posts, instead of it having this ‘good vibes only’ effect, it would make me feel deflated and, after overindulging on such vast swathes of LinkedIn positivity, have me reaching for the sick bucket. I think as new translators, the amount of time we spend on LinkedIn is definitely something that needs to be carefully managed. I’ve spent hours on there procrastinating rather than doing something concrete. It’s a tricky balancing act but if we don’t use the platform in a positive way, it can be very destructive for our mental health. Speaking of which…

Balancing act 6 – mental health

I think it can be fairly true to say that my first year as a freelance translator didn’t quite go as planned. I spent a hell of a lot more time unsuccessfully trying to market myself than I actually spent translating. I wasted hours on LinkedIn without being able to work out how to use it to my advantage. My CV to large numbers of agencies plan was time consuming and a complete failure. Everything else I tried also flopped and, because I wasn’t receiving any work, I obviously wasn’t getting paid any money either. I found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that after seven years of hard graft at university, where I had picked up BA and MA degrees, I was now as good as unemployed and poorer than I had been at almost any time during my life. Instead of enjoying my fantastic new translator’s salary, I was eating into my savings that otherwise should have been used to put towards a new house. It is incredibly hard for freelance translators just starting out and when things don’t go well it is inevitable that your mental health will suffer to some degree.

How to combat all the stress and anxiety that comes with such issues is something that must be worked on every day so it doesn’t get the better of us. But trying to stay on an even keel when things are clearly not going well can be very challenging. Exercise is fundamental. I found running to be a saviour during this period of my life, as I still do now. It makes you feel stronger and gives you energy to cope with the multitude of hard knocks that will inevitably be coming your way. I also did a fair bit of meditating to calm my mind and to train my thoughts to be more positive. Other things we are told to keep an eye on are making sure we are getting enough sleep, eating a well-balanced diet and drinking plenty of water. It is important to have a plan with some structure and to try to keep to it even if you do not feel good. You should aim to take action every day, no matter how big or how small. Just keep doing things to market yourself and increase your visibility. And if something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change your approach. Be creative and don’t give up. If you keep putting the effort in, you will see results. This will lead to success which will then have a positive effect on your mental health.

Balancing act 7 – taking time off

Being able to take time off can be incredibly tricky for a translator in the early years of their career. Of course, very early on you may have little or no work coming in so there is plenty of time available for holidays – if only you’d been earning enough to afford to go somewhere. Later on, when there is a steady flow of work, however, there is a real fear to turn down work from clients and agencies, in case they go to someone else and start favouring them rather than you. You certainly don’t want to lose a client after working so hard to get them in the first place so going on holiday for a week or two may not be good for business in the early stages. And even if you want a holiday, does it make good financial sense to go off somewhere whilst you are trying to establish yourself? You have to take into consideration the loss of earnings during your time off, which added to the cost of the holiday, will be very considerable. Wouldn’t it be better to leave your earnings in the bank so they can build up and be there in the event of emergencies such as losing a client or a drop-off in the quantity of work projects.

Whilst I was still attempting to establish my translation business, I never contemplated going on holiday. Granted, I was living on a diet of porridge and water and didn’t have two brass farthings to rub together, so I wouldn’t have been able to afford going anywhere anyway, but even so, until I was financially stable with a good mix of clients who I had built a decent relationship with, time off was not something that really crossed my mind. And if I were to go on holiday, there is also the question of how much you turn off from work: completely, 50/50 or partially where you are still open to carry out a few little jobs here and there. I’m more than sure a few nice holidays would have really helped my mental state during the early stages of my career, as it would have taken my mind off my faltering business, especially after a bit of over-indulgence on the old pina coladas, but, for me, it just wasn’t an option at that point.

Balancing act 8 – doing some different work to supplement your wages

On many occasions, during the early stages of my career, I had been incredibly close to applying for different kinds of work to supplement my wages which were so bad in the first year that they rarely exceeded zero. If it wasn’t for burning through a portion of my savings, I would have been in an even graver plight than I already was. A financial hole existed which was slowly becoming a great burden and, inevitably, the question would arise as to where the money was going to come from to help pay the bills. Quite a large degree of pressure was placed on me to take a part-time job as an English teacher in Girona, and on several occasions I was extremely close to becoming one. But what stopped me from taking the final step was the fear that having another job might slow down and damage my progress as a translator.

Quite often, agencies will come to you out of the blue, several months after you last had any contact with them and ask if you can do an urgent job for them. You may only get one chance to get your foot in the door with them. If you turn them down because you don’t have the availability, there is a good chance they will be gone forever as they eye up the next person on their list. Looking back now, if I had become a part-time English teacher, working either mornings or evenings, there are many translation jobs I would have had to reject due to their urgency and length. Openings with agencies would have been lost so, in my particular case, I am convinced I made the right decision to continue to bite the bullet and concentrate on translation. Living without a wage for such a long time certainly wasn’t pleasant, but if I had taken part-time work in another profession, there is a very good chance my career as a translator would have been over before it began. On the other side of the coin, if I had taken work as a teacher, I would have met new people who may have provided me with job opportunities as a translator. Who knows, life is all about ifs and buts!

Balancing act 9 – investing in your business and outsourcing some of your tasks

In the beginning of your career you are a one man band, strumming your guitar, banging your drum, and blowing your harmonica. This can be a tricky enough task if you know how to play everything, but if you don’t, it can leave you in a bit of a pickle to say the very least. One of the few things I knew I could do when I began my business was how to translate, but that said, I’d never done it professionally so even those skills would need sharpening, especially those related to CAT tools. Anything on the financial side of things left me in a state of fear. In one respect I dreaded the day when I finally did my first bit of work because I knew I would need to write an invoice and I didn’t have a clue how to do it. It also meant that I would have to work out how to pay my taxes and figure out when I would need to declare everything. As I was living in Spain, this was going to be even trickier and, as I was just starting out, I had little money so I had no choice but to do it by myself. It was easily the hardest and most frustrating thing I have ever done and even more complicated than cracking the Enigma Code during the 2^nd World War, I would imagine.

Now I am starting to earn decent money and, as a result, I have finally got round to hiring an accountant. I never did get the hang of the Spanish tax system and the thought of doing my tax returns and sending them to those robbing bastards at the Spanish tax office still sends a shiver down my spine. It is not just a huge weight off my shoulders that I will never have to worry about ever again, but it will also free up more time to do tasks that will make my business money such as doing more translating and content writing or doing additional marketing to find better clients. Once you have the money, there are a whole host of things you may wish to invest in. I spent months building a website from scratch when I started out. It was like pulling teeth and probably not worth the pain. Now that money is starting to come in I would love to get a professional to give it a makeover. Other things you can invest in include CAT tools, computer and office equipment, conferences, association memberships, trade fairs, CPD courses and personal masseuses😀. Of course, in the beginning when you are skint you will invariably have to blow your own harmonica, bang your own drum and strum your own guitar. You might not have a clue how to play them and the sound may be atrocious but you will have to continue until you have somehow taught yourself, or better still, earned enough money to hire professionals to play them instead.

Balancing act 10 – going it alone or getting a mentor

I’ve placed this balancing act last but perhaps it is one of the most important. My MA was hugely beneficial to me but it was mainly about how to translate. There were sections dedicated to how we might find clients but looking back now, I would say there should have been a greater deal of it centred on business skills such as how to market ourselves (finding clients, pricing etc) and how to deal with finances. I entered the world of freelance translation like a blind man entering a room at midnight during a power cut with Stevie Wonder on acid as my guide. I didn’t have a scooby doo what was going on and I didn’t know who to turn to. I was alone and isolated and I have to admit it was a real struggle. However, it needn’t have been that way. I could have enlisted the help of a mentor to hold my hand as I walked the tightrope of doom. Rather than struggling to survive, I could have been thriving, accompanied by someone who has been there and has got the t-shirt. Why make all the mistakes I made when I could have teamed up with someone who could have shown me the correct path from day one?

The trouble was that when I first qualified I only had a small amount of money to sustain me. And after paying for my education I also had many thousands of pounds of debt so the last thing I wanted to do was invest more money on mentoring courses. I was sick of spending money on things for my new business and not earning a penny, it was ridiculous. When would it ever end? But back then rather than seeing it as an investment, I saw it as more debt. I now realise that had I invested in the help of a mentor, I would have hit the ground running rather than stumbling through one false dawn after another. A mentor will encourage you and completely change your mindset. They will teach you everything about pricing, finance, how to market yourself and how to find direct clients: basically all the things that puzzle you when starting out. Perhaps most importantly, you won’t feel alone which is a feeling that regularly accompanied me during my first years. It may seem expensive in the beginning, but once you have been following the expert advice of someone who knows what it takes to succeed in the profession, it can turbo boost your career and pay for itself many times over.

Still trying to get the balance right

In many respects I suppose I am still ‘walking the tightrope’ as I work on perfecting my ‘balancing act’. However, now it is in a different context. My career has moved on from those early days. There were times when I was incredibly close to giving it all up, or at the very least, taking a part-time job doing something else. I often failed in my attempts to correctly decide which areas I should put more weight and, as a consequence, my business suffered. My confidence was low and I lacked the direction and knowledge to make the right decisions that would lead to success. And as I lacked experience, it meant that I couldn’t use it as a bargaining chip to entice clients or hold out for better rates from agencies. With time I began to pick up small jobs here and there from agencies as work slowly became steadier. This led to increased confidence. Enlisting the help of a mentor certainly helped as well, although I wish I’d done it much sooner. My approach changed as I began to look at things in a different light. Today, power is slowly being relinquished from the agencies. I’m no longer their slave and they no longer have me by the short and curlies. My early career mindset dictated that I should begin small before slowly attracting the kind of work and the kind of rates I deserved. After a shift in how I saw myself and the value I could add, I began to approach the market with more of a swagger, building up relationships with direct clients. I think as freelance translators, things do improve for us over time (if we survive that long). We learn and grow. We acquire more knowledge and make better choices. We have better bargaining tools and more power. We will always be involved in balancing acts, but once we have the experience and the know how, we are better equipped to walk the tightrope and follow our dreams without losing our footing and falling flat on our face.

A final word on low rates

One thing that has never changed is my love for what I do. If anything, since I started out in this profession, my love for it has grown. Translation is an art. In fact, in many ways it can also be compared to walking a tightrope: the translator chooses specific words as a balance to portray the correct meanings. The translation industry, on the other hand, is an unregulated farce where new translators are sitting ducks waiting to be preyed on by certain unscrupulous translation agencies who have been hit hard by the perpetual improvements of AI. As a more experienced translator who is now beginning to make progress working my way up the pay-scale, I would like to be able to advise new translators not to work for low rates. However, after having been in that situation myself, I fully understand why it can be so enticing to accept anything when starting out. The pay may be terrible but at least you are earning something and it is giving you some experience. Yes, it is scandalous to be working for such poor rates but there is little option if there is nothing else around. Junior doctors recently went on strike to try and convince the government into giving them a better starting salary. Perhaps in the translation industry, we can start a movement whereby all translators get together and refuse to work for less than say 0.07 or 0.08 a word. If it worked, it would put an end to lower rates, but how you convince every translator round the world, especially those from countries where wages are considerably lower, to get together and agree to this, is another story entirely!