| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Poll: Which do you think is the secret to success as a translator/interpreter at international level ? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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Kay Denney 
France
Local time: 09:17
French to English
Samuel Murray wrote:
Also: missing capitalization... and is it a Gen Z thing to add a space before a question mark in English?
Not a generation thing, a French thing. First thing I do when translating is get rid of all spaces before punctuation.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 08:17
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
| Limits may be negotiable | Dec 24, 2023 |
To an extent. But the super-efficient 60-hour workaholic has the exact same limitations as the 20-hour hobbyist once they approach full capacity.
To what extent capacity can be flexed, given that it often comes down to how many hours one is prepared to work or physically can work, is an interesting issue, and I take your point about being at "full capacity".
Still, a client is going to see quite clearly which of their portfolio of freelancers consistently has the most capacity, and "more" must have value in and of itself.
The right level of busyness is a tightrope you just can’t hope to stay on whatever your approach.
I think one gets more adept at this balancing act with time. One becomes more efficient, and one acquires a better understanding of how one works, and one hopefully develops better tools. Today I can comfortably translate about 3x the amount per day than when first I started out.
Sometimes you fall off the tightrope, yes, but that hasn't happened to me for a long time, and never to the point that it has damaged my relationship with a client. Self-knowledge is key.
Personally I think it does customers good to know you aren’t always available.
I think that's the default assumption with agencies, given that is is their job to maintain a portfolio of translators.
They then start to book things in advance.
To be fair, my agencies do keep me informed - on Friday one approached me about a job for August 2024 (!) - but end clients have their own issues that result in delays or rescheduling.
For example, it may be that their materials incorporate information from overseas subsidiaries (increasingly an issue as Japanese firms expand overseas) that they struggle to obtain. Perhaps the CFO decides to rewrite her presentation a few days before the meeting. The company might unexpectedly find that somebody has been falsifying data and conclude that it needs to re-do all its figures AND write a press release explaining to shareholders what the hell has gone wrong.
Such things happen, and the agency has to deal with the fallout, and that's when you get the frantic emails asking how many characters you could translate by such-and-such a date.
Then again, these days I am mostly my customers’ only translator, which puts me in a stronger position.
You see, I wouldn't want that level of stress! I try hard to accommodate client requests for changes in volume and schedule. Ultimately, however, when I accept a booking I agree to do a certain number of characters by a certain date, and they cannot (and do not) hold me to more than that. I'm a freelancer, not an employee, and the buck stops with the agency.
If I were the only translator for an end client, the buck would stop with me and me alone. I wouldn't like that. (I also feel it would be irresponsible for the client to allow the system to be at the mercy of a single point of failure. That's not good management, at least in the private sector.)
I guess it depends on the predictability of flows. If you have regular documents for a fairly sleepy organisation that don't change a great deal, and are not particularly time-sensitive, then maybe it can be done without incurring stress?
To come back to where we started, I think that "availability" (tentatively defined as the perception that a freelancer can and will take on larger volumes of work than their peers) is an important factor in success for some translators.
We have very different client bases and I suspect that's mainly why our experiences and attitudes differ. Kay has just posted in the thread, I see, and I think her work has little in common with mine, so again the determinants of her success will have been different.
Dan
| | | | kd42
Estonia
Local time: 10:17
English to Russian
| A mindless poll | Dec 24, 2023 |
The poll creators (s)mashed two professional tasks into one.
I do written translations for people in Japan, Oz, Malaysia, China, Middle East, Europe, Scandinavia, UK, the Americas, most of them are returning clients, presently across decades.
I do little interpreting now, but when I did, my geographical range was limited by 2-3 hours of flight time max, I never traveled to Chile or Nepal for an interpreting job, I hope it is easy to understand why.
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Lieven Malaise wrote: Samuel Murray wrote:
Also: missing capitalization... and is it a Gen Z thing to add a space before a question mark in English? Almost every (if not every) source text in English I get contains spaces before a question mark, colon or exclamation mark.
If you are in a French-speaking environment, people who haven't configured their spellcheck to English in Word will have it done automatically. Living close to Paris, I need to be careful of that as well.
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 09:17
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Christopher Schröder wrote:
I’m not sure how you achieve that.
The most available translators are the ones with the least work.
No, it's about availability from the client's perspective. If you are able to process 6000 words a day, for example, you are very available to your customers since they can offer you 6000 words a day, compared to translators who only process 2000 words a day, which would force your client to look for 3 different translators for the same amount of work.
| | | | kd42
Estonia
Local time: 10:17
English to Russian
Lieven Malaise wrote:If you are able to process 6000 words a day, for example or is this just a theoretical example?
| | | | Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 10:17
Member
English to Turkish
Lieven Malaise wrote:
No, it's about availability from the client's perspective. If you are able to process 6000 words a day, for example, you are very available to your customers since they can offer you 6000 words a day, compared to translators who only process 2000 words a day, which would force your client to look for 3 different translators for the same amount of work.
If only there were that amount of work... maybe you have in Dutch (which makes you wonder though, only 25 million people in the world speak that language, yet there seems to be more Dutch translators than there are Turkish translators. Shows you your place in the world I guess), but in my language pair I consider it a good week if I catch 5000 words in total.
Not faulting your logic though, it's just that the circumstances around my language pair has forced me into lethargy. Of course, I'd be processing shit loads of words on a daily basis if I worked in the local market for 0.005 cents per word.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 09:17
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Baran Keki wrote:
If only there were that amount of work... maybe you have in Dutch
It was an example to explain the principle. I'm able to translate 6000 words a day, but I don't translate 6000 words a day on average. It would be too exhausting to do it every day and I probably wouldn't receive enough work to reach that average. In 2022 I had a an average of about 3600 conventional translation words(*) per day, from Monday to Friday, holidays included.
Baran Keki wrote: (which makes you wonder though, only 25 million people in the world speak that language, yet there seems to be more Dutch translators than there are Turkish translators. Shows you your place in the world I guess)
Belgium is a country with 3 official languages, meaning that every official document needs to be trilingual. It goes without saying that this alone generates an awful lot of work to be done. I'm not sure it has something to do with our place in the world, since Dutch documents can only be intended for the very limited space of Flanders (North Belgium) and the Netherlands.
(*)Meaning that all MTPE, normal editing and proofreading words are converted to conventional translation words. The raw amount of words would be much higher.
[Bijgewerkt op 2023-12-27 10:11 GMT]
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 09:17
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Baran Keki wrote:
but in my language pair I consider it a good week if I catch 5000 words in total.
I can't say much about this. Apparently you can make a living out of it ? It probably has to do with te cost of living. In my case 5000 words a week wouldn't even be enough to pay my mortgage.
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Lieven Malaise wrote:
No, it's about availability from the client's perspective. If you are able to process 6000 words a day, for example, you are very available to your customers since they can offer you 6000 words a day, compared to translators who only process 2000 words a day, which would force your client to look for 3 different translators for the same amount of work.
But you can still already be busy with work for that client or another client that day. Nobody can always be available.
Availability and capacity and flexibility can be useful competitive strengths when you first start out, but I would have hated to work like that in the long term.
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