Having made it through this corona-ridden year relatively unscathed so far, I have now been staring at an empty inbox for the past two weeks and I’m getting nervous. I tell myself to take a deep breath and turn off the mental PowerPoint presentation with the colorful graphs presenting these past two weeks as a firm projection for the next two years in relation to mounting bills and unexpected major expenses. Like all freelancers I’ve been through this before and new projects inevitably come rolling in again, although the global situation right now is a little more unusual an uncertain than before. All the same, I know what to do. The strategy is simple and can be summarized as follows: do the next thing.

I didn’t come up with that and I first heard about it in the context of grieving. When things are tough and uncertain, just think of one small thing you can do, and do that. Make your bed. Go to the grocery store. Or in business terms: take care of invoices. Sign up for a professional development course. Write a blog post. When you’ve done that, think of the next thing and do that, and so on. Although each activity may seem small and unimportant, collectively they gradually bring about positive internal and external changes. Small actions can make a significant difference over time.

I’ve seen it in my own life. At some point during my early years as a translator, I realized after a conversation with a project manager that the low-paying agencies I was working for were never going to increase their rates, and that I would have to make some changes on my own if I wanted to earn more. So I did the next thing: I got my ATA certification. Followed by the next thing: pay a designer to create a professional website. And the next thing: marketing myself more intentionally. The immediate benefits were that I found better clients who were willing to pay for quality. That was great and as planned. What I did not foresee, though, were the long-term benefits of those actions.

When AB5 (the union-backed travesty that prohibits businesses in California from working with freelancers) took effect on January 1, several of my clients told me they couldn’t work with me anymore unless I incorporated. A ridiculous technicality since there is no change to the actual work or the business relationship, but a lifeline nonetheless, which I grabbed. During the hastily arranged appointment with my accountant to set up my LLC, I had to register the name of my company. Thankfully, I had already settled on Calliope Translations when I got my website so I didn’t have to come up with something on the spot — a good thing because spontaneous creativity is not my forte and the results could have been less than optimal.

Since then, the uproar over AB5 has continued and exemptions have been granted to various professions. Translators and interpreters have been fighting for an exemption as well but as it stands now, the AB 1850 amendment that is up for a vote includes an exemption for certified translators only. There is absolutely no logic to this, because the stated aim of AB5 is to encourage companies to hire freelancers as employees but it’s exactly the uncertified who would be at a disadvantage when competing for those jobs. Freelancing offers much more freedom to find clients and build your business on your own terms. But that’s a whole different issue. The point here is that I’m grateful that the decision I made many years ago to get certified is now instrumental, in an entirely unexpected way, in keeping my business afloat.

So I try to maintain the discipline of finding “the next thing” to do in these uncertain times. Take an online course. Double down on marketing. Judging from other blog posts I’m not alone in this, and several colleagues have been inspirational in this regard. Judy Jenner, for example, is embracing the challenge of working with the interpretation function in Zoom and sharing what she learns with others in recent blog posts. Or Claire Cox, who has been sharing honest accounts of life in quarantine and what she is doing to make the best of circumstances beyond her control. And just today another colleague, Jennifer Goforth Gregory, shared similar experiences on her blog. She also had the great idea of doing a survey to find out how other translators have been doing this year; you can read her post and the first survey results here.

And I try to resist those mental worst-case PowerPoint presentations. Granted, there are times when you have to face the fact that the most unpleasant explanation is the correct one, i.e. your pants are not tight because you put them in the dryer, they are tight because of those donuts you’ve been eating. In my case, the lack of projects these past two weeks 我爱酸酸乳ssr免费节点 be because all my clients have all gone simultaneously bankrupt / decided they don’t want to work with me anymore / have all been bought up by Google in a hostile takeover and Gurgle translation is the only thing they offer now. Or, more likely, work is slowing down due to Covid-19 closures; many courts are closed, for example, so no litigation and no briefs that need to be translated. Not all that great either, but temporary and survivable.

Probably.

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In show business there is something called a “bad laugh”. Legendary movie critic Roger Ebert described it as “the laugh you don’t want to get, because it indicates not amusement but incredulity, nervousness or disapproval.” In the translation business we have our share of bad laughs as well. They’re usually just private giggles, for example when a typo in a dry financial document turns an innocent word into a completely inappropriate one. Unless you don’t catch it, of course, and the PowerPoint document, now on the big screen at a conference, results in a very bad laugh and a fired translator.

Most often, though, bad laughs are the just rewards for cheapskates who use non-translators or machine translations for their very public communications. Save money once, be immortalized in “hilariously bad translation” memes forever.

But then there are those rare, shining occasions where a mistake slips in that actually takes the text to a whole new philosophical level. I was working on a court case the other day in which two big companies were fighting over – what else – huge stacks of money. Now I like to use my CAT tool for legal translations because even though it’s not much help for the body of the text, the translation memory saves a lot of time with the standard phrases and labyrinthian terminology in these types of documents. The case involved one company suing another for not paying the agreed fee upon successful completion of the project. The thing is that the Dutch text used the English term “Success Fee” throughout. And my happy CAT tool, assuming it was encountering a Dutch term, suggested the translation “Success Fairy”. Because “fee” in Dutch is “fairy”.

I was sold immediately. Success Fairy? I’m in! No longer was I toiling to help one megacorp relieve another of hard-earned cash; I was on a quest to liberate the Success Fairy from villains holding her captive in their corporate dungeon. It was the most inspiring court case I’ve ever translated, even if the excitement was all in my own head and I regretfully had to “find & replace” all the fairies with boring fees at the end.

Now I want a Success Fairy too. Don’t we all? Especially in this time of crisis when work has dried up for many due to closures or cancellations, and when hard work is no guarantee of income because invoices don’t get paid. Freelancers here in California are reeling from the double whammy of projects beings cancelled due to Covid-19 and being blacklisted anyway because of AB5, which penalizes companies for hiring California freelancers.

It would be nice if there really was a success fairy who leaves money under your pillow when you lose a job. In the meantime, you do what you can. I can only speak for my particular niche of translators based in California, but here are some things I’m doing to stay afloat while the storms rage.

With regard to AB5: the language of the bill is complex and confusing. In some places it seems to claim that simply being a sole proprietor is enough to be exempt from the law, and I have at least one client who was satisfied with that. If you’re a sole proprietor in California and you’ve lost clients because of this law, it might be worth it to reach out and see if they’d be satisfied with sole proprietorship status as well.

However, many companies will no longer work with California freelancers unless they incorporate. So that’s what I did. It’s a hassle and it’s expensive, but the $800 annual fee has already paid for itself by helping me retain my best client. You can do it yourself online, but I recommend paying a tax advisor to help you through it. Some of the questions are not that easy to answer if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you probably don’t need any additional stress during difficult times.

Now, you might be thinking that you also don’t need an $800 extra expense during difficult times, but the fee is not due until the annual renewal date the first time. Of course, you do owe the fee for the first and second year if you take advantage of this delay, but it does give you some breathing room while you reconnect with old clients and find new ones. I look at the fee as a long-term investment.

Note: use a tax consultant, not a lawyer. The first lawyer I called wanted $1000 and he had no suggestions other than asking what my accountant thought I should do.  The tax consultant I found not only advised me on the best structure (one-member LLC) but completed the process online during our very first appointment. For a fraction of the lawyer’s fee, I might add.

If you’re a California-based translator you may also want to consider joining a translation association in your source country if you haven’t already. Potential clients in other countries couldn’t care less about AB5, but they don’t necessarily know about the ATA and may be more likely to check translator directories in their own country. So I recently started the process of joining the NGTV, the Dutch version of the ATA. There are a lot of hoops to jump through; they require references, documentation, diplomas and transcripts, sealed versions of which have to be ordered, then translated, then evaluated by an international diploma assessment organization, etc. etc. All this by regular mail, back and forth across the ocean. I started the process a few months ago and don’t expect to hear anything before June. But again: long-term investment.

With regard to Covid-19: translation is a great profession to be in, especially right now since most of our work is online. Still, some translation fields have been affected more than others, travel and tourism in particular. My specialty is medical and legal documents, and I’ve seen a drop in legal assignments as many courts are limiting or completely suspending their operations. But medical care is always essential and even more so in times of crisis, so I’ve been busy as ever with medical projects. I know it’s easier said than done, and I’m not advocating taking on projects you’re not qualified for, but see if there are translation fields that have been less affected by the pandemic that you might explore. They are out there.

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As if this world wasn’t Orwellian enough already, with the effects of our 21^st-century versions of the “1984” Ministries of Love, Peace, Plenty and Truth on the news every day, our California legislators have managed to come up with a new one: the Ministry of Opportunity, designed to “protect” freelancers by putting them out of business. I am talking of course about AB5, the new law forcing companies to reclassify freelancers as employees, which went into effect on January 1.

Yes, we get it; the law was designed specifically to make it harder for Uber and Lyft to skirt labor laws by treating their drivers, who are employees in all but name, as freelancers.  This makes sense for freelancers whose work requires them to be physically in California, which means that the company would not be able to simply hire someone who lives in a different state.

But translators (among many other freelance professions that operate on a similar model) and their clients are not bound by geographic location, since projects are assigned and delivered by email. So it’s as easy as “click send” to assign a translation to someone in Texas or the Netherlands who is not hampered by ridiculous laws and won’t expose them to the threat of future legal action.

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The sponsor of the bill, assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), has consistently responded to the firestorm of concern with a few standard phrases that offer empty reassurance, misrepresent the facts and deny the actual consequences experienced by actual people as a result of her meddling:

•  “If you are a true independent proprietor, you can still operate as one.” Reassuring words, but the devil, as usual, is in the details. Note that you have to be a “true” independent proprietor, which, surprise, is subject to a long list of criteria that is so complex and confusing that many translation agencies have stopped working with California-based freelancers out of fear of inadvertently breaking the law and being held liable later.
• Independent contracting jobs or freelance jobs are “not good jobs to begin with.” Really? The median annual income for translators is about $50,000, with those at the top making more than twice that. Yes, I see how forcing companies to hire people at minimum wage would be a much better opportunity for translators with their no-good 6-figure jobs.
• And in response to one particular translator who described her own experience since this law went into effect: “I’m sorry and I feel that she does feel that way. But I don’t think it is true.” No, I’m sure all those cancelled contract notices are entirely imaginary.

Thank you, Ministry of Opportunity, for your great and marvelous works on behalf of us poor saps who thought we were doing just fine on our own terms. We now understand that the old notion of equality of opportunity is unfair, that allowing people to hire whoever they want or to work for whoever they want creates an unacceptable difference in outcome. True equality can only come about when the law stamps out every unfair opportunity. But not for lawmakers themselves, of course. Because some are more equal than others.

AB5. The name could not be more perfect and unintentionally prophetic. In the final bleak chapter of Orwell’s 1984, the government agent holds up four fingers and “corrects” Winston’s thinking until he truly believes he is seeing five. I’m grateful for the many advocacy groups who are taking action by filing lawsuits, pressuring their representatives and challenging this law in other ways. With them, I still see four.

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Reputation is everything in freelancing — and that goes for clients as well. In don’t know how it works in other industries, but the translation world is not that big and word gets around. This is especially true for agencies: there are various online groups, sites and forums for rating agencies and naming & shaming bad players. I’m not aware of any equivalent lists for translators, but I know that many agencies have internal rating systems for the people they work with and I’m sure project managers talk.

Still, lists and recommendations only cover a fraction of everyone out there, so most of us have kissed a few frogs in our search for Prince Charming Client who pays well and on time. After many years and thousands of email interactions with potential and actual clients, like many of you I have developed the gift of “instassessment”: the ability to see at a glance whether an offer is worth my time. It’s a sliding scale, and the classification is as follows:

Just No
Anything that does not address me by name, offers stupid low rates, or uses emoji’s in the subject line

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Pays well but the agency’s translation flow or online system is so burdensome and time-consuming it’s only worth the hassle if nothing better has presented itself. For a while.

If I Can
Well-paid but unenjoyable projects for good clients. Implementing track changes, “small” jobs that consist of multiple individual files, etc.

Yes Absolutely
Pays well, good communication, interesting projects. I have a few clients that fit this bill, and I will do whatever it takes to accommodate them.

Every morning I go through my inbox pretty quickly, ignoring, rejecting or accepting offers without too much deliberation since I know what I’m looking for and what I can handle on any given day.

And then one day the shoe was on the other foot. Because of some recent changes we no longer have health insurance through my husband’s job, and here in the US that means we are required to purchase our own insurance or face penalties at tax time. However, like many government programs, universal coverage is great idea in principle and a logistical nightmare in practice. As we found out in short order, Covered California, our state version of the federal program, is so difficult to navigate that you need professional help to do it, except the profit-to-hassle ratio for insurance agents is so unattractive that no one wants to touch it.

So instead of the smiles and friendly service we were used to with our old insurance, all of a sudden I got a lot of “just no’s”. For three weeks I talked to one agent after another who seemed happy to have my business until I dropped the CC-bomb, at which point they all of a sudden they remembered they were “not taking any new clients”. Or, if I had left a message on their machine, they did not return my call at all.

I did have a few “if I can” responses: these were agents I had worked with before and who were willing to help in principle, but when they realized they were in over their heads they either stopped returning my calls or told me good luck but try someone else.

I was getting close to desperate when on day 21, literally hours before the deadline, a miracle happened and I found an agent who told me she could help. Shann met with me right away, powered through the application and got us on a plan that was a third of the cheapest quote I got (for the same plan) when I submitted the form myself. To say I was impressed would be putting it mildly. This business woman has created a niche specialty by working just a little harder than everyone else to figure out a daunting system, and now she’s cleaning up with all those clients no one else can help.

It was a sobering experience to go from “preferred customer” to “undesirable”, just like that. I also realized that it was not the “just no” responses that really bothered me; at least the message was clear and it was nothing personal. I had no particular expectations from any of them anyway; that’s why I sent out so many requests.

It was harder to swallow when an agent I had always had a good relationship with promised me he would be able to help me for sure, but then he disappeared for two weeks before finally sending me a link to some online plans I could have googled myself in 10 seconds. The tone of his email had also changed from super helpful to curt and impersonal. Did he just feel bad he couldn’t deliver? I have no idea. But it felt worse than all the straightforward rejections from everyone else.

Generally, the more you are invested in a relationship, whether business or personal, the stronger the sense (and expectation) of obligation. That’s why I don’t feel bad for ignoring emails from agencies that that keep contacting me with jobs at subpar rates after we have had the “we’re not a good match” conversation. Or the requests for collaboration addressed to “dear linguist”. No relationship, no obligation.

But that’s why this stressful experience also highlights the power of “yes absolutely”. This agent did the hard work to specialize and carve out a niche, and now there are not too many people who can do what she does. I was thrilled when I found her and I have been recommending her to anyone who will listen ever since. That’s how I want my clients to feel about me.  But it takes work. A lot of people have the capability. Not everyone is willing to go that extra mile.

I don’t really buy magazines, except for the “Best and Worst” issues; I’m a sucker for those. Most Awkward Moments of 2017? Worst Dressed at the Oscars? I want to know. And come on now, I know I’m not the only one. Chronicle editors, publish a “Best-Dressed at the ATA Conference” issue and see what happens to your numbers. Same for those tantalizing click-bait posts with catchy lists: 5 Worst Translation Blogs; 10 Guaranteed Ways to Find Direct Clients; 3 Mistakes That Will Torpedo Your Business — they’re the fun-size candy bars of the article world.

What makes these lists so enjoyable? Part of it is simply that they’re harmless fun disguised (very thinly) as informative pieces. They also wrap up the news, or the year, or our culture, in a tidy, manageable package. And that is appealing, because most of the world is not tidy or manageable or fun, for that matter, as we are constantly reminded by the never-ending, 24/7 global news cycle we’re exposed to. And our own lives, although hopefully manageable, are usually not tidy for very long.

Because life is change, and change is hard, and you don’t always see it coming. Or worse, it turns everything upside down forever. Last week, one of my son’s classmates from high school died from an OxyContin overdose. I didn’t know this boy personally, but it hit me hard, partly no doubt because he is the same age as my son and tragedies like this speak to every parent’s worst fear. It’s the sudden, horrific finality of it, and the knowledge that for this mom and dad, life will never, ever be alright again.

I know that this tragedy is not about me, but it still colors my perspective at the start of a new year. What helps me is to remember that most of the changes we will face this year will likely not be tragic but merely challenging, and that “things usually turn out alright and will probably turn out alright again.” This doesn’t sound very philosophical or profound, but I read it somewhere and it stuck with me, and it’s gotten me through some late-night vigils when my college-age sons were out late.

Regardless of New Year’s resolutions or 5-year plans, we don’t always get to pick our changes and we don’t always see them coming. But we can choose how we respond, and this is true in business as in life.

I’ve been inspired by some of you in this regard. In a recent post of his  Patenttranslator’s Blog Steve Vitek wrote about his response when Japanese patent translations started to dry up. Instead of giving up or passively accepting a drop in income, he changed course and found a different niche. In another post he described escaping from communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s and making his way to America, and I’m sure the resilience this required has served him well in his career.

The profession as a whole is going through some sea-changes as well, but it’s hard to tell if we’re up or down sometimes: depending on the headline, translators are thriving — no wait, we’re dying — no wait we’re fine. According to a report published by the University of California San Diego Extension Center for Research, Interpretation/Translation was the number one emerging career in terms of job growth in 2017. At the same time, there are many who are happy to explain that the era of human translation is drawing to an end and that our only hope is to “repurpose” ourselves as post-editors of machine translation. (I’m getting “Lord of the Rings” chills just writing that). Judging from the low median hourly earnings of $21.90 reported by UCSD, it could very well be that part of this reported growth is, in fact, in the post-editing/bulk market sector. So now what?

The thing about lists and statistics is that they offer only bite-sized bits of a bigger, more complex picture. For example, I’m a medical translator. The pharmaceutical industry is not likely to stop developing new drugs anytime soon, nor are they likely to risk killing people and lose billions of dollars’ worth of investments by cutting corners with machine translation of handwritten doctors’ scribbles. So these macrotrends are worth keeping an eye on, but not necessarily worth losing sleep over.

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Except … when I don’t. That’s when my faith in the overall stability of my life and my business is tested. As a matter of fact, I’m in the middle of one of those odd radio-silence weeks right now, when my inbox remains inexplicably empty. This has happened a few times over the years, so I’m learning. The first time I panicked, the second time I cleaned the garage while panicking, and this time I made myself a nice hot cup of coffee and started writing this post, knowing that this, too, shall pass.

I will face challenges and changes this year. And so will you.
But I think we’ll be okay.

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An example of the mildest form of presumption is the mistakes you make when you’re learning a new language and confidence skips merrily ahead of skill.

When I had been living in the US for about a year, I was introduced by my friend Peter to someone he had told me about a few times. Continue reading →

One of the more awkward moments in my life was dealt to me inadvertently by a close friend many years ago. We had dropped in to admire some handcrafted jewelry in a shop here in California, and she discovered that the owner/artist was Dutch like me. So she called me over excitedly to “speak Dutch” with him, and then left us to it while she stood there, beaming expectantly. The thing is, it was pretty obvious that we both felt put on the spot but we didn’t want to be churlish either, so we performed a forced little conversation about how long have you lived here, where in Holland are you from, do you like it here, can we gracefully wrap this up now.

Why was this so awkward? Continue reading →

In my last post, I expressed my frustration with SDL Trados over unresolved problems with my new Studio software. The cathartic but perhaps somewhat unwise title of my post (see below) immediately unleashed the whirlwind in the form of SDL technician Paul Filkin, who valiantly defended SDL’s honor in the comments to my post, on Twitter, and on the SDL forum. If we ever need another Winston Churchill to fight the enemy on the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields and the streets, I nominate Paul.

We had a lively discussion in the comments, Continue reading →

Dear SDL Trados,

You have created a wonderful product. It makes my life easier, ensures consistency, and increases my translation speed. Sure, there are agencies who try to turn its awesome powers against us translators by using it to lower prices, but that is not your fault and I’m perfectly capable of handling my own rates.

You have also made a lot of money off of this wonderful product; according to the preliminary statement published on your website, revenue for 2016 was 264.7 million, up 10% from 2015. That’s a lot of software. And at its current price of $825 a pop, that comes out to a lot of new users in 2016 alone. Continue reading →

Writer James Fell recently shared a Reddit challenge on his Facebook page to Badly Explain Your Profession. The responses are inventive and hilarious, but they made me think about how we translators explain what we do. Hang around any translation forum or group long enough, and sooner or later the conversation will turn to complaints about the misconceptions people have about our profession, like the notion that any high school kid who’s taken a year of French can be a translator.

But really, whose fault is that? Continue reading →