Since when is it expected that translators work on weekends? November 16, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.11 comments
I received the following e-mail on Saturday morning, which I promptly deleted without replying:
Subject: Proofreading
Hello,
I’m looking for a translator to proofread a German to English translation today using Star Transit. If you’re available please let me know what you rate is per word/ per hour?
More information available on request.
I was really tempted to reply with an hourly rate of $100 since it was weekend and rush, but I decided it wasn’t even worth getting upset about. However, it did inspired this blog post, so I’d like to thank the agency publicly for sending me an e-mail at 4:56 a.m. through the ProZ.com directory (Are you really surprised that this came through ProZ? I wasn’t…). I’m just glad I receive my e-mail on a computer in my office and not on my cell phone next to the bed.
The beauty of being a freelancer is that we can choose when we work, but I really resent the assumption of some agencies that we are available 24/7. Sending an e-mail on a Saturday morning or calling on a Sunday really exceed the boundaries of common decency. If I am translating 2,000-3,000 words a day during the week I need some down time on the weekends – or if I choose to work through the weekend I make sure to take a day or two off during the week. A while ago I had gotten so busy that I realized that I had worked for three weeks straight without a day off. At that point I decided that I would no longer work on the weekends, so I really notice the fact that some agencies seem to assume we will work at any and all hours of the day.
I think the problem lies in the fact that many translators are only available on the weekends, because they hold full-time jobs. There aren’t enough full-time freelancers to change public perception. Hopefully that will change as the industry grows and changes. In the meantime, stand your ground to unreasonable requests (5,000 words a day, 3 hour turnarounds, weekend work) and make sure you don’t burn yourself out!
Update: Riccardo at About Translation posted a similar post today (great minds think alike I guess), but his focus was on the phrasing of a quote request to ensure you receive a meaningful reply. The agency should have read this post before sending out the request. I may have been more likely to respond.
eFax.com business practices November 3, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.8 comments
Last month some boneheaded secretary sent a 49-page fax by accident to my free eFax fax number. Free eFax accounts are limited to 20 pages a month. I immediately notified eFax of the mistake and thought the situation was remedied. I was apparently mistaken.
Since I was at the ATA conference I did not receive the notification warning of the suspension of my eFax number. I received that warning and an official suspension of service notice today that my eFax number had been suspended as of November 6. I wrote them explaining the situation, but they are unwilling to let the suspension slide and keep insisting that I should upgrade to a paid plan. I only get 1-2 pages a month – if that. I refuse to pay $16.95 to receive a couple pages a month. Too bad I didn’t get the suspension notice before the conference. I could have changed the fax number on my business cards. Luckily no one ever sends communication by fax any more. No wonder why they are so desperate to have people upgrade. I certainly will no longer be recommended eFax here or in my presentations.
Oh, and the suspension certainly hasn’t stopped them from sending me advertisements…
UPDATE: eFax has since assigned me a new free eFax number. It helps to contact customer service and be persistent.
I could get used to this… October 18, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Random musings.5 comments
Have I told y’all lately how much I love my job? Greetings from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I drove down with a friend who is organizing a conference with the promise that I could have a free room and board and could work from the room. This is the view from my hotel room. I have a couple big jobs that I am working on, so I decided to save my arms and fingers from carpal tunnel and dragged my entire work computer set-up with me – German keyboard, PCU, widescreen monitor, back-up external hard drive, etc. The desk is right next to the sliding door/window – and what a view it is!
All total with bathroom breaks and a lunch and breakfast break we were in the car for 13 hours. We left on Thursday at about 6:45 am and got into the hotel at 8:30 pm. I had a deadline the next day, so I started translating as soon as I got unpacked and got the computer set up. I delivered 6,300 the next day (Friday). I had translated some the day before to ensure I would make it. I ended up subcontracting about 2,300 words to a colleague, because there is no way I would have met the deadline otherwise. I thoroughly checked her work and tweaked it before integrating it with mine.
The second half didn’t come in on Friday as expected, so I was able to enjoy a day off on Saturday. We did some sightseeing and some shopping (and I bought a much-needed sweatshirt). In the meantime, another client sent me some medical reports to translate for delivery early next week, so I translated them today. I also managed to have a leisurely breakfast in the hotel restaurant, take a 2-mile walk along the beach and collect seashells and rescue a monarch butterfly from the surf and carry it to the dunes to let its wings dry, and get a manicure and pedicure. Tonight I attended the opening cocktail hour and dinner for the foundation’s conference. Now I am back in my room to translate the final 330 words to the final medical report.
It’s colder than normal here, and it rained the first day (which was perfect motivation for translating). The sun finally broke through the clouds today for the first time, and it is supposed to get progressively warmer starting tomorrow. I have a facial scheduled and plan to walk along the beach again. I will also be getting two large jobs tomorrow if all goes well. I love the freedom to be able to just relocate and look out the window at the ocean and swimming pools while I work. Life is good…
10 tax tips you can use now to avoid pitfalls later October 8, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.2 comments
Freelance Folder has an excellent post on taxes and how to avoid tax pitfalls. I agree with every single piece of advice and have lectured on these very same tips for years now to my Kent State grad students and beginning translators. I highly recommend clicking the link and following every single tax tip listed there (obviously the tips apply to the U.S., but freelancers in other countries should also take heed of the advice and apply it to their tax preparations in their country of residence). I can also recommend the book Money-Smart Secrets for the Self-Employed by Linda Stern. The book offers valuable information for any type of self-employment situation.
It’s important to diversify October 7, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Marketing ideas.8 comments
All the financial experts talk about the importance of diversifying when it comes to investments, but it is also very important to diversify your client base.
When I first started in the translation industry I witnessed first-hand the importance of not relying on a single client. The agency I worked for back then did a lot of work (80-90%) for Microsoft. They localized all of the Microsoft programs for the German market at that time. Business was booming. The company was flush with cash. Then at some point Microsoft started delaying payment. The agency started delaying payment to their vendors and then to their employees. The owner ended up selling the company, which was then sold again to another big agency and moved to a completely different city. There are probably only one or two people I worked with who are still working for the company.
It is so important to ensure you have a wide and diverse client base. Do not rely on just one or two clients for your income. One valuable piece of advice I received early on is to have at least seven clients. If you have seven clients you can be assured that you will be kept busy on a regular basis. Of course, you can strive to have even more than seven clients. It isn’t a hard and fast rule.
It is also a good idea to have both agency and direct clients. I have noticed many agencies are haggling on price recently (for whatever reason, be it the economy, customer demands or something more insidious), so I am glad that I have several direct clients in my arsenal on whom I can rely. I plan on adding more in the future.
It’s also a nice idea to diversify clients by location. I am so glad I have clients in Germany and other European countries, where the euro is strong. I particularly like it when I transfer the money to my U.S. account, because I get more dollars for my money. I intend to focus on adding more European clients in the future for this very reason.
Even if you have a lot of clients, it is important to keep marketing yourself. Work from my best client (which has been 30% of my income in the past) has dried up recently. It isn’t because they don’t appreciate my work. I consistently receive good feedback for the work I do for them, and they recently featured me in their company newsletter. When I called to ask what had happened they explained to me that their big client had not been sending them German-English work. The client had hired someone in-house to translate their German to save money. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted…
Things can happen that are beyond your (and your client’s) control. Clients can go out of business due to death of the owner or go bankrupt when one or more of their customers go bankrupt. The client’s office could be destroyed due to flooding, fire or a hurricane, etc. It’s important to continually market yourself. I read a recent blog post on The Wealthy Freelancer that advocated spending 10% of your time on marketing, even when you are busy. Corinne also wrote about this in her most recent post, Avoiding feast or famine by marketing consistently.
Do you have any other suggestions on diversifying your client base? Feel free to add them in the comments.
The trouble with translation memory programs October 1, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Tools, Translation.8 comments
Here we go again…
There is a very interesting article in Ezine, Translation Memory Programs Causing Problems For the Translation Industry and Also For End-Users by John Hadfield, that is arguing that the use of translation memories is in fact slowing down translators and driving the price of translation up as a result. He starts off by claiming, “Under this system, the translator often has more work to do as a result of using a TM, but gets paid much less for a particular translation than he or she would have been paid before the introduction of TM’s.” I don’t know about that, but I do know that I have to really pay attention to every segment (because not all matches are true matches) and spend a lot of time figuring out how best to make the translation units flow together and not sound translated (a final run-through after cleaning up the document usually helps tremendously). He also states that many translators dictate their translations. I don’t know if many translators do this, but I do know a couple translators who dictate their work. He makes some very interesting points including:
…The most glaring result of this problem is that all translators have been forced to increase their standard price per word over the last few years in order to survive, so for documents which are almost totally non-repetitive (and where a TM is therefore useless), the translation agency or end-user ends up paying much more for its translations than it would have paid before the introduction of TM’s. However, that same customer still requires the translator to use a TM for its translation, even though it is obvious to all that the document concerned is not likely to show any repetition in any but a few random single or two-word phrases.
I don’t know if my raising my rates has anything to do with the use of translation memory. I have raised my prices to keep up with inflation. Also, as with any profession more experience should always be compensated with a higher salary, bonuses, etc. As freelancers we don’t have that luxury. I charge what the market will bear. I certainly don’t do it to survive because I am faced with discounts for repetitions and matches.
…Apart from the translation of manuals which use a great deal of repetition (such as workshop manuals, job code manuals, etc.) and certain standardized contracts and legal texts, statistical analysis of any large company’s or large translation agency’s translation work over a period of one year would very probably show that the compulsory use of TM’s, combined with the resulting increased prices per word from freelance translators (who perform by far the major portion of translations throughout the world), has finally resulted in the entire operation costing more to the end-user than it would have cost before the use of TM’s became general.
…There is also increasing evidence of a curious attitude prevalent amongst certain end customers and agencies in which the method of translation (i.e. the use of the TM system) seems almost to have become more important than the translation itself.
I’ll give him that. A common complaint I hear on all my translation forums is that many TMs contains mistranslations, sloppy work and out-and-out errors, which are then perpetuated in the company’s documentation for all eternity. Since we are not paid to correct the TMs and agencies are told by their end clients to not touch the 100% matches, these mistakes are usually not pointed out and the end client is usually blissfully unaware of the problem.
The author is proposing to require the agency’s translators to offer a reduced price per word for translations which do not require the use of a TM, and perhaps abandoning the use of TMs altogether. That is a very interesting suggestion, but I think I’ll stick with my word rates and my TEnT for now. It does save me time in texts that are repetitious, and I generally work with agencies that do not demand discounts for repetitions. I bought my TEnT to save me time and ensure greater consistency. And every once in a while I do get a plum job that is already in my TM, which saves me time and frees me up to take another job.
Translation memory is not a burden to be vilified, but I do think translation agencies and some TEnT developers should think long and hard about their practices. We pay for our tools – not the agency. Why should we be paid less to use them? That just doesn’t make sense. And don’t even get me started on selling certification classes to use the tools. Those certified users are now out in the cold and out several hundred dollars because the latest version is totally different from the one they were trained on.
I’m curious to hear what you all think. Does using a TEnT take you more time or less?
Scam alert: Parkstone Press / Sirrocco Publishing September 30, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Scam alert.67 comments
One of my former students was just scammed by Parkstone Press / Sirrocco Publishing. She thought they were legit because they sent her a contract. After not receiving timely payment and having her e-mails ignored, she attempted to contact them by phone. Unfortunately she then learned that the New York and U.K. office phone numbers listed in the contract were fake. Upon further research on Payment Practices and Proz.com, she found out that they have done the same thing to countless translators in the past. All 3 company listings on Payment Practices (searching for “Parkstone”) have a PP Reliability Score (PPR Score™) of 0 and a Translator Approval (TA Score™) (would you work for them again?) of 1, which are as bad as it gets. I cannot stress this enough. You should always research potential new clients on the various payment practice groups that are available to translators or at a minimum do a Google search before agreeing to accept a translation job. Hopefully this post will serve as a warning to potential translators in the future.
Registration deadline for ATA conference is fast approaching September 23, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.4 comments
I just wanted to remind you that if you are planning on attending the ATA conference it is time to get your registration in before the Early Bird deadline this Friday. The registration fee is $325 until Friday, when it rockets to $390. Still a bargain compared to most other professional development and conference fees for other professions, but all the same why spend more when you can save some cash by being on the ball… I just registered this morning, after spending the last few weeks hemming and hawing about when I wanted to arrive and whether I wanted to attend a preconference seminar. I decided to bite the bullet and just arrive early for the preconference seminar on SAP. One of my specializations is computers and IT, and since SAP is a language unto itself I decided to take the plunge.
My hotel room has been booked to accommodate the preconference seminar for several months now. If you haven’t booked a room yet, the conference hotel has long been booked out, but there might be a cancellation. It doesn’t hurt to call and ask. Also, be sure to check out the other hotels that ATA has negotiated lower group rates. The Paramount Hotel is across the street and has rooms starting at $239. The Westin is three blocks from the conference hotel and has rooms starting at $259. And the Muse Hotel is a block from the conference hotel and has rooms for $239. Plus New York does have lots of bargain hotels and hostels as well. If you are looking to save money, I highly recommend rooming with a fellow conference attendee. You can find a suitable roommate using ATA’s Roommate Referral blog. I hope to see some of you there!
Do you work with distractions? September 17, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.20 comments
One of my friends tweeted a link to this “work chair.” I put it in quotes because it is a couch. OK, it’s a couch that has an integrated multimedia PC and an LCD in the arm rest, but it’s a couch all the same. He starts his post by saying, “Anyone that is working from home has the TV on and probably curls up for a nap every day.” Not me, buddy. I have a separate office on the other side of my apartment from my TV. I work best with no distractions. I occasionally listen to music, but when I need to concentrate I need total silence around me. I certainly don’t have the TV on when I’m working. That said, I know everyone is different. So how do you prefer to work? Do you have the TV on in the background and would love a “work couch”? Inquiring minds want to know.
What to say to your low-balling client September 3, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.3 comments
Freelance Folder has a great article on What to Say to Your Low-Balling Client. As translators we all have deal with clients who “low-ball” us on projects. As the article explains, “If you are new to freelancing or unfamiliar with the term, “low-balling,” refers to the practice of trying to get the lowest possible price for a project. Usually a low-balled price is well below the average market rate for a particular type of work.” We have all experienced this at one point – and in some cases every single time we deal with certain translation agencies. This blog post offers four different approaches on how to deal with the client in that situation. It also lists “three scams to watch out for: the big $$$ project, the “free” sample, and the open-ended project.” If you’ve been in the business for any length of time I would hazard a guess that you have been approached by a client with one if not all of these scenarios. I know I have (numerous times). Needless to say I think it is a must-read for new and seasoned translators alike.
Musings from an overworked translator 