The worst thing you can do as a freelancer working with translation agencies is to overcommit yourself.
Your most important personal asset is your reliability.
If you choose freelance translation, you should consider yourself a one-person translation company. Your main concern will be where to find work. The need for freelance translation is greater than anyone can estimate, and is clearly growing at a rapid rate. Worldwide, translation is a multibillion-dollar industry. But finding translation work on your own is easier said than done. The main problem is that translation is hardly ever a steady, ongoing function of any particular work source, such as an embassy, a company, a government agency, or even a publisher. None of those needs translation every day of the year. Each of them may need a great deal of translation all at once (more than any one person can handle within the given timeframe), and then none for a long time. And, if any one of them needs translation on an ongoing basis, chances are a decision will be made to hire an in-house translator rather than farm out the work.
The fact remains, however, that a well-rounded freelancer can earn well over $50,000 a year, and, in the case of highly-specialized technical translators in major languages like Spanish, German. Japanese or Russian, even $100,000 or more. The secret to all of this is establishing for yourself a good clientele. There are two ways of doing this. The first, and by far the hardest, is finding your own clients and working with them directly. You may want to contact embassies, law firms, publishers, government agencies and so on, and solicit work directly from them. If you are fortunate enough to find some good steady clients on your own, you will be doing quite well. But the problem often lies in the word “steady” What seems to be a steady client today may not be so steady tomorrow.
This brings us to the second, and by far the safer option, which is a translation agency. There are hundreds of them in the United States, and they handle huge amounts of translation business every year. Below, we will discuss translation agencies, as well as direct sources of translation available to the freelancer.
Translation Companies
Translation companies, also known as translation agencies, or translation bureaus, are for the most part privately owned commercial establishments ranging in size from one or two employees to ten or more, but hardly ever more than ten. Some are divisions of larger companies, offering translation as a secondary function. Some specialize in one language only, such as Spanish. German, or Japanese. Most offer several languages, and quite a few bill themselves as offering “all languages”. This last type is somewhat pretentious, since there are more languages in the world than any one person can identify. But what they really mean is that they will make the effort to find a translator in almost any language they may be called upon to translate.
As a general rule, translation agencies employ relatively few in-house translators, since the How of work in any given language is usually uneven. Instead, they rely on the services of a network of hundreds of freelancers w ho can handle a great variety of subjects. Those freelancers are located all over the United States and even abroad. The ones who are most reliable and professional get the major share of the work, and some of them earn the above-quoted figures.
As a freelancer, you need to cultivate at least one such agency, preferably two or three. The problem in working with only one is that, with few exceptions, there may not be a steady flow of work coming out of any given agency in any given language, in subjects you are equipped to handle. Two or three will give you better coverage, and assure a better flow. On the other hand, you may find yourself in a situation where all three ask you to do something at the same time, and you may not be able to do it. You need to establish an understanding with your agencies that would make an allowance for such a scenario, so that you don’t spoil your relationship with any one of them.
The worst thing you can do as a freelancer working with translation agencies is to overcommit yourself. Your most important personal asset is your reliability. Once you fail to meet deadlines (keep in mind – the agency stands to lose a client if deadlines are not met), your reliability becomes questionable, and if you do it once too often, you may soon find out that those phone calls from the agency offering you work assignments stop coming.
Reference: “The Translator’s Handbook”, Morry Sofer, Chapter 11, pages 123-124
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