SETTING YOUR TRANSLATION PRICES (Q&A for Freelancers #4)

[@Freelanceverse]

THANKS SO MUCH FOR 2.000 SUBSCRIBERS! :)

[@agusbenitezbrancich]

Hi, Adrian! I'm a technical translator and I'm studying to become a certified translator. Lately, I've been mainly focused on finishing my studies, but now I'm trying to get a job as a translator. The thing is that the only experience I have is the one I've got in class (translation projects I had to do as homework) and I was wondering how I can put that 'experience' on my CV. It's kind of difficult to get a job because many agencies or contractors ask for translators to have several years of experience -- and many people like me do not have the experience they request. Also, when you have little experience, it's quite confusing to determine the area of expertise you want to specialize in. Thanks for reading me and congrats on the 2k subscribers! Greetings from Salta, Argentina!

[@Freelanceverse]

Hi Agustin, thanks so much for your comment. Oh I love Argentina! :) yes, it's definitely super tough in the beginning without experience. One thing you can do is a bunch volunteer work. That's always usable as experience. The school projects however, I don't think you can use them as professional experience. That's just part of your education, which you also need. One thing you could do is get a job maybe part time or so. This way, you dont have the pressure of succeeding right away as a translator. And of course in the beginning you need to exagerate a bit. Every experience needs to get blown up a bit you know. Try to reach out to friends and acquaintances to do translations for them, practice a lot in your freetime with translating the subtitles of youtube videos etc. All this you can easily use as experience. Takes a lot of work but if you work on it for 6 months or so intensely, then you can easily add this to your resume as a year in the market.

[@lauracatalini1879]

Hello Adrian! You have a new fan here! Thank for this video.

[@Freelanceverse]

Thank you so much, Laura! :)

[@ryanowens1544]

Congratulations on two thousand subs! I am very glad to have found this channel as it fills a große Lücke, so to speak, for those of us interested in this. My question concerns specialization. Though I have no formal translation degree (yet), I have experience in and a fine eye for Kurrentschrift/Sütterlin and working with older letters written to individuals’ family members in the US. In the US, I would consider this to be a niche area of translation, but not one easily accessible outside of word-of-mouth. Would it be worthwhile to pursue this line of transcription/translation or perhaps bundle it up with genealogical research (another interest)? I do have experience translating old published letters of a scientific and academic nature, but how I might then branch out with this background remains somewhat difficult. Thanks so much again!

[@Freelanceverse]

Hi Ryan, thanks so much for reaching out. What an interesting niche topic! :) I have no idea about and no experience with Sütterlin. So I can't really tell you whether there's a demand for that. My gut reaction would be that you'd probably need to supplement it with another - more common - specialization. But it's certainly cool when you can be one of the only ones and therefore one of the best in something. Bundling it up with genealogical research seems like a great idea, yes!

[@angrybird693]

Adrian I just moved to the US. I’ve worked as a part-time translator for about 10 years. But I’ve never taken any work outside my own country before. Now I want to become a freelancer. How do I set up my price? Should I start with the minimum pay or go for a slightly higher rate?

[@Freelanceverse]

Hi there, definitely don't go for the minimum pay, why would you want to do that with 10 years of experience :) go as high as you can, you seem to be a subject expert. I have a video called Let's talk money. I suggest you watching this one!

[@Freelanceverse]

Make sure to ask your questions for Q&A5 under here

[@lukemartin5991]

Hey Adrian. Love the channel and congrats on the 2000 subs! I have a question for the next Q&A... Would you advise getting some form of professional indemnity insurance as a freelancer, or do you think this is overkill, especially if your main client base is LSPs/agencies? Thanks for all the help you're providing 🎉

[@Freelanceverse]

@@lukemartin5991 Hi Luke, thanks so much for the support! :) great question. That's a bit of an overkill in my opinion. I asked this question also to the legal translators in my video about the legal specialization and even there they said that it would be very difficult to pin some kind of liability on a translator. Especially when working mainly with LSPs, I don't think it's necessary. I don't have any at least :)

[@lukemartin5991]

@@Freelanceverse Hey Adrian, that's great, thank you so much for getting back to me! Really useful to know that even legal specialists don't think it's necessary either 😄

[@danlanguaging]

Nice video! I also work as a translator online. Really useful and informative videos! :)

[@Freelanceverse]

Thanks a lot, Dan! :)

[@heysselm4279]

I would like to know how you charge at the end of a job or half and half?

[@Freelanceverse]

I always charge at the end of each month. I send my invoices once a month. That being said, I can fully trust all my clients. If you work with new clients that you don't trust yet, you can also charge beforehand.

[@heysselm4279]

@@Freelanceverse tyvm for your response

[@19sleepyvibes90]

Hi, Adrian! I'm internal medicine physician with literally zero translation experience in terms of final products of translation/target text delivering to someone except myself/any customer. For clear reason I feel myself quite comfortable while read/translate clinical cases, studies and other medical texts in english for my own needs. Considering to start dealing with translation from the point of the customer service and wondering (of course) about the rates to start with I repeatedly found a formula including per hour word count which I able to translate. I wrote the translation of some clinical study which I previously wasn't familiar with down and received the result of 650 words per hour. While writing, some degree of uncertainty in terms of the stylistically "raw looking" target text came to mind as well as the question: "If it is at this stage eligible for per hour word count estimation at all"? In other words, should I do some ... I'm not sure in terms... editing?... revision?.... before starting to count the words? Thanks in advance!

[@danlanguaging]

Hello, I'm new here. So I ask you a question and you may answer it on an upcoming video? Anyway... I'd like to know an average amount of words you deem to be fine for a single day and how long you think it's fine for it to take, so to have a healthy workday. Thanks.

[@Freelanceverse]

hi Dan, thanks a lot for the question. It's really hard to say, depends a lot on the person and the texts. Plus, on a usual day you wouldn't only do translations all the time. But just for a thought exercise: I can do roughly 500 words per hour. And can probably be productive around 5h per day. So I would say 2500 words per day would be reasonable and would be a productive day for sure. For proofreading, you can roughly double this rate.

[@shawngrandval]

I don't have any formal education, in translation, but I'm fluent in two languages. Which are the shortest ways to become credentialed?

[@Freelanceverse]

Hi Shawn, the quickest way would probably be some kind of translation certificate programme. This allows you to get a degree without all the time commitment that comes with a uni degree (plus it's way cheaper depending where you're from). Just keep in mind that this ill not be regarded the same way as a uni degree, i.e. you can't join professional associations with this, agencies might require a uni degree instead etc. There are also rather quick MA degrees. If you already have a BA, it might be worth to look into a 1-year MA or something. On the other hand, you can also make it work without any degree, depending on your previous work experience and how proficient you are in 'selling' yourself :)

[@SevaKavalenka]

Hi Adrian! Thanks for the video! I am an English-Russian translator specializing in Arts & Culture. Could you tell me please, what is your favourite way to find new clients online: to search for them, contact them, and send them you CV/portfolio brochure or to make it easier for them to find you in the internet (via LinkedIn, your website, Proz, paid ads, etc.)? Which way has brought you more clients? Thanks!

[@Freelanceverse]

Hi Seva, thanks for asking! At this point in my career, I really only get in touch with new prospects through recommendations. And this is definitely my favourite approach, because you can eliminate the disappointments since there is already a common ground through the person that recommended you. So it's most like something legit to consider. But of course, it takes time and experience to get to this point, in the first few years it definitely doesn't work that way. But still, I got most of my clients through earlier connections either from my studies or even before. My biggest client currently I found through LinkedIn. They posted something on their page and I sent a DM and it went from there. My very first client I found on proZ. They contacted me in fact. As you can see, there are a bunch of creative ways to approach and find clients. My favourite ones are the most creative ones like looking for hashtags for example and then contacting them with a witty personable DM.

[@SevaKavalenka]

@@Freelanceverse Thank you so much for your advices!

[@pietro4321]

Thanks for featuring my question in your video and thanks for the informative answer! My question for this Q&A is the following: do you use any speech recognition softwares to dictate your translations instead of typing them? And if you do, what is your workflow? I've found that dictacting increases my translation speed by quite a bit if the text does not contain too many obscure terms and/or tags.

[@Freelanceverse]

Hi Valdast, really great question again :) I've never tried out translating with speech-to-text. I know that many of my colleagues swear by it, it just never seemed like something I would enjoy for some reason. But fair play if it works out for you! What tool are you using? Dragon?

[@pietro4321]

@@Freelanceverse Yes, I'm using Dragon. It is true that there is quite a learning curve (and it's a resource hog, so I'm looking forward to buying a better pc to really get the most out of it), but in general I've found that the more I use it, the faster and better I translate. You have to be extra careful about homonymy, though!

[@Freelanceverse]

Super interesting, thanks for sharing! We used Dragon in my studies for Respeaking practice. It was fun, but I wasn't the most skilled user let's say :D but as you say, it takes practice and the algorithm needs to be trained with your voice of course.