These past few years, many people had some extra time on their hands. They were stuck at home and started to think about possibly supplementing their income, brushing up on their past hobbies and interests, or giving themselves a new challenge. A lot of them thought: I am pretty good at my native language, and my English is ok as well. Why not try my hand at freelance translating? How hard can it be? Google Translate or DeepL will do almost all the work for me, and I’ll sit behind the computer all day. Easy money, right? Well, wrong. Let’s review some solid arguments against getting into the freelance translation business.
Comparing apples to oranges
Not everyone possesses translation skills, even if they are fluent in several languages. Being good at a language doesn’t mean that you will be a fantastic translator just like that or that your job will be easy. Language fluency is a complicated concept, and self-assessment of one’s language skills is very subjective. You might think you understand everything perfectly, but are you paying 100% attention to every little detail, hidden meaning, phrase, subtlety, and context? The human brain is incredible, but it can be very deceptive. It fools us into a false sense of perfection, while it actually never stops looking for shortcuts and extrapolates the overall meaning very crudely.
As a translator, you must be a nitpicker, hairsplitter, and your own worst critic. You need to be absolutely meticulous and determined, and you can’t give up before finding correct solutions to the tough nuts you will undoubtedly be cracking. Even if your grasp of target and source language is impeccable, you must also have excellent writing skills and be a stickler for grammar and punctuation.
Uphill battle
Possessing exceptional knowledge of the language you’re translating from (the source language) and the one you’re translating into (the target language) is only the first step. Your path to knowledge has just begun. In translation, you can never stop learning and growing as a professional, and you might even have to specialize in only one or a couple of fields at most. The vernacular of each field or topic is so vast that there is no possible way for one person to have an overview of everything. Literary translation is entirely different from technical translation, and legalese is another can of worms.
It’s a jungle out there, or why would I pay a translator if Google translate can do the job equally well and for free?
Fighting for a fair price is one of the unexpected skills you’ll need to hone as a freelancer. There is a lot of price dumping in translation for various reasons. There are a lot of mediocre services and translators who will use machine translations only to get the job done, and they can charge less since they use less time to complete the project. Your skills will be underappreciated, taken for granted, and easily replaceable. Your services will always be considered expensive and disproportional to the amount of effort, time, and resources your clients think you invest in a project. With the evolution of technology and machine-aided services in almost all fields, people are trying to take advantage of the available technology in every possible way, regardless of the quality of the provided service. But let me let you in on a little secret: No machine will ever be able to fully understand and translate the subtleties of language and be able to successfully translate complex documents to the same level as a human translator. The context is too important and too complex. The human input will always be crucial to a quality translation for anything beyond just getting the gist of it.
You can do it by tomorrow morning, right? It’s just ten pages
Nowadays, people are used to getting everything now, or even yesterday, if possible. They do not understand the nature of the translation process, the research, and the frustration of finding just the right words to convey the message as accurately as possible. As a freelance translator, you are not a master of your own time. You’ll work long hours; you’ll forget about weekends and holidays. Often, you’ll have to complete a project on a very short notice to catch another tight deadline.
Establishing a regular and reliable clientele
When starting out, you’ll need to put a lot of effort, time, and research into marketing your services and getting new clients. If you have no connections to introduce you to potential patrons, building up a regular client base from scratch will take a while. It will be difficult because there’ll always be someone who’ll work faster and cheaper. My advice is: work better, dazzle them with your excellence, and eventually, it will pay off. People who need regular translation will value the quality of your work and will want to cooperate continuously. Do your best to get as many return customers as possible. It just might take a while to get there, but don’t despair and don’t sell yourself short.
All the bells and whistles
Being a translator is not only the activity of the mind. It helps if you’re at least somewhat tech-savvy for all the paraphernalia you’ll need to make your job easier. You’ll need programs, resources, tools, and licenses to work more efficiently. Some are free, but the best ones with full features can be costly, and some might require a lengthy database building, but they will eventually become your best ally in saving time. Ensuring you have the necessary technology to work as a professional translator can be expensive and require updating and renewing regularly.
You also need to know your way around search engines, thesauri, online dictionaries, and synonym directories, so database searching, and information literacy are crucial skills of a good translator.
So, now that you know why not to become a translator, riddle me this: how much time does a translator need to change a light bulb? It depends on the context!
This post was written by Manca Oletič, she has a listing on Fiverr. Read more about translating Work Online as a Translator. Subscribe for more business, sales and investing posts. Have a lovely day.
