Breaking Into Translation: For Freelancers

Welcome to How to be a Successful Freelance Translator! If you speak more than one language, there is no reason you cannot be earning a living working for yourself online. This course aims to help you achieve this.

When I was studying languages, this wasn't a career path most people were considering. Then again, when I was growing up it wasn't really possible to perform translations over the internet with clients all over the world. 

I now work from home and earn a living from my job as a Freelance Translator, and I realized that A) I made many avoidable mistakes on my journey here, and B) there is NO course out there that helps other people in my same shoes to avoid repeating these mistakes. 

So I decided to set up an online course that deals specifically with THE BUSINESS SIDE (as opposed to the language side) of Freelance translation. This teaches students to use their languages and translation skills to work for themselves, rather than as employees in an agency or as in-house translators for a company. 

This course covers the set-up, first contact with potential clients and agencies, how to attract the client's interest and maximize any chance of being selected, how to retain the client for future jobs, how to deal with payments (and lack thereof), as well as an array of tips and tricks of the trade and websites, programs and other resources they can use for their work and their workflow. 

What the course does NOT cover is linguistics and translation. Obviously, these will be unique for each language, so they are best covered by others. 

This lesson covers your first day of preparation. By the end of the day you will have a Resume, personal photo and a list of services and specializations, which will all be ready for any translation website or agency.

This isn't a very long day, and you can always feel free to cover two days at once, if you wish. The goal is to divide the process into manageable steps you can take one day at a time.

By the end of this lesson you will have your very own personal website, which will act like an online business card where potential clients can always find you. It will also make you easy to find when people are searching for translators in your language combination.

This lesson also covers some extra tips, and what potential clients will be looking for in you as a translator.

This isn't a very long day, and you can always feel free to cover two days at once, if you wish. The goal is to divide the process into manageable steps you can take one day at a time.

This Lesson walks you through the process of registering for all the main freelance websites. You can use all the information you prepared in Section 2, so you should be able to register for quite a few websites relatively quickly.

I also talk about how the various websites works, some good and bad point of each, and which ones I think are worth it or not.

In this lesson we go over the pricing strategy, including what I recommend and some good and bad points for each strategy.

In this lesson I mention Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and the website I use for this is: http://www.onlineocr.net/ (I have no affiliation with this website). It is a paid website, but I find it well worth the money.

In this lesson you will learn about some other starting strategies for getting noticed and chosen by prospective clients. I also featured a sample personalized introduction.

I have also added a downloadable sample application letter, like the one I show in the lesson, which you can personalize and use with your own applications. 

Active Marketing means Marketing that needs to be acted on. This is the most effective type of marketing and you will have to work on this type of marketing throughout your career. But the beginning of your career is when it's most important, since your first clients are what lead to your first track record, your first sample translations, your first references, referrals and ratings. 

Passive Marketing is Marketing you only need to set up once at the beginning. While you can choose to be active with this type of marketing if you wish, it can also be treated as a "Set it and leave it" type of marketing. This means it can help with Marketing your business passively, without you having to worry about it. 

Here are some General Marketing Strategies. More precisely: 'A.I.D.A.' and 'The Chicken and the Egg.' 

I have now added an invoice template based on the one I discuss in the video. The parts in red need to be filled out by you, and you can feel free to tweak or change any other parts in order to personalize it as much as you like, but hopefully this helps. And hopefully the formatting is ok. For some reason Excel seems to look different on every computer. 

Thank you Mario for bringing it up!

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)