Like many translators, I didn’t plan to be a freelance translator. I happened to start making money with translation, and over time became confident about making it a profession. As a downside of this unplanned career move, I made some mistakes too.
Here are 10 mistakes that you wouldn’t like to make as a freelance translator:
Mistake 1. Undercharging for Your Translation Services
Low rates can devalue your expertise and make it difficult to sustain a profitable business. This mistake results from not knowing your worth as a translator.
It’s not wise to make low prices your competitive advantage. By pricing your services at a lower rate you attract clients that you don’t want to work with. This can make you suffer with unreasonable deadlines, perhaps impolite communication or lack of communication, lack of supporting resources, delay in payment and so on.
Also an undercharged project will occupy your time so you cannot take probably some of the best clients of yours. Life gets so easier if you price accurately and make the pricing as a filter to weed out less potential clients.
Research industry standards, factor in your experience, and charge fair rates for your services. Set your minimum rate in a way so that you can cover your living expenses. Never negotiate with your minimum rate. Use this as a filter to choose the clients that you can cherish.
Mistake 2. Neglecting Business Aspects of Freelancing
Financial Management is key to your freelance career. Keep accurate records of your income and expenses to ensure financial stability. Also, as a solo business owner you need to promote your services. Consider the marketing and branding aspects as well.
Mistake 3. Underestimating the Importance of Specialization
Specialization increases your productivity within a niche. Also you can price your services higher if you have a specialization. Not focusing on a specific niche such as legal, medical or technical will require you to do more research resulting in lower productivity. Although translating different topics can give you diversity, and is not overly bad for your career. But working more in your specialized area will give you advantages both with higher earning potential as well as increased productivity.
Mistake 4. Not Keeping Regular Backup
Data loss can be devastating for translators who rely heavily on digital files. A sudden system crash, hardware failure, or accidental deletion can result in the loss of your valuable work.
Regularly backup your files to a secure cloud storage service or external hard drive. Cloud storage can be very helpful for remote access and automatic synchronization, ensuring that your files are always safe and accessible. External hard drives can also be a backup option.
Mistake 5. Neglecting Proofreading and Editing
Never feel too confident that you cannot make mistakes. Typos, errors, mistakes can occur. A thorough proofreading can ensure your translation is accurate and free of errors. Running a final proofreading also demonstrates your commitment to quality and professionalism.
Mistake 6. Underestimating Time Management
Time management is key to succeed as a freelancer. You need to meet every deadline, as well as save yourself from overworking. Not meeting deadlines will leave your client unhappy. But you cannot work irregular hours to make that happen. It will lead to burnout and ultimately decrease your productivity. It’s important to master time management and find a healthy work-life balance that works for you.
Mistakes 7. Neglecting Your Mental Health:
It’s important you maintain a healthy balance between your work and life. If you don’t, it can hamper your productivity and quality of work. Take regular breaks, it will boost your energy to finish the project at hand. Take care of yourself, you will be able to take proper care of your projects. And never hesitate to say no to a project if you are not comfortable with the subject, or if the deadline is not workable for you. To establish long lasting relationships you need to say yes to projects that you believe you can commit to.
Mistake 8. Not Having a Collaboration Mindset
Collaboration means supporting each other, sharing knowledge, and building relationships. When working with clients, it is important to have a mindset to support and complement other translators you are working with. For example, a translation agency will have many of your colleagues in your language pair in their linguist pool so that they can ensure quality, workload, and they have coverage for peak times. You may need to work with other translators on the same project, you may need to proofread or edit others work, similarly your work can be edited or proofread by others and you need to implement the feedback. Have a positive mindset about this workflow.
Also, rather than competing with other translators, collaborate with them. Take any chance to work with them, refer to them if you are unable to take a new project. Meet them virtually or in-person so that you know one another and turn to yourselves when you need support.
Mistake 9. Not Researching New Clients
Can you work with any language agency or client that contacts you? No, you need to verify they are legitimate business if you do not know them well personally. Know the name of the company, visit their website. Check out which clients you should not work with.
Mistake 10. Underestimating the Effort Required
It is important you understand and estimate clearly how much effort you need to deliver a project. This is particularly important to manage your time to meet the deadline. This is also important when you set your pricing. Do consider the administrative and non-translation tasks involved when pricing your services.
