| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | Career change healthcare to translation Thread poster: Emma MacNab
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| Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule | | Best or worst of both worlds? | Jun 22, 2022 |
I just want to reiterate that, to combine the two jobs, you will need to be incredibly flexible about working all hours when you get translation work in, as deadlines tend to be tight and you are competing with people who are available full-time.
I would also say that starting any new business is a full-time job in itself. Getting work isn't easy.
Which might sound negative, but it's important to be realistic.
Good luck!
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 11:25
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| Natural selection. | Jun 22, 2022 |
Dan Lucas wrote:
the industry will continue to change; those who adapt to new requirements and new tools will have the best chance of survival.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.”
A quotation falsely assigned to Darwin, but you get the idea.
| | | | Kaspars Melkis 
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:25
English to Latvian
+ ...
Emma MacNab wrote:
I'm interested in learning from anyone else who has made the transition from the healthcare sector to becoming a language professional. How did you find it? Is it possible to do both - say work 3 days a week in healthcare (NHS is pretty flexible) and 2 days as a freelance translator? Any particular pitfalls I should watch out for?
Unlike some negative opinions from others, I would say that it is not only possible but is in fact inherent feature of freelancing that makes this possible.
All the usual warnings apply: one needs to be able to translate well, understand client's needs, be able to manage time etc. And one needs to be aware that the translation market is not uniform and what works for someone may not work for others.
Nevertheless, I easily freelanced part time while getting my pharmacy degree, then during my full-time pharmacist training and even part time locum pharmacist work.
Non-uniformity of translation market works in your favour. Many clients will give you small immediate jobs or larger jobs with longer deadline. Gradually you will sift through clients to find those who are the best match to your options. They are clients who plan ahead and even for small urgent jobs will ask you a week before if you can be available on specific dates and times. If you are not, then they will often ask if a different day would be better for you.
The main thing is to be prompt with communication regardless if you say no or yes. Don't be worried that saying no too often will make you lose clients. There is a shortage of good medical translators and even if you can be available only part time at unpredictable times, you will get your chances. My last advice is that it is better for your quality of life to be slightly underbooked than overbooked. Again, this is much easier to do as a freelancer, no boss to explain why you don't want to work on a certain day or hours. What's not to love about freelancing (except invoicing)?
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| Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule | | "I’d say thistles, but nobody listens to me, anyway." | Jun 22, 2022 |
I fully accept I’m a naysayer and it’s my natural disposition. I’ve been astride that mighty elephant for 25 years and counting, and let’s just say somewhere along the way I started hearing ever intensifying voices below complaining about all the crap they had to wade through to keep up, and that’s what made me realise that the industry is indeed multifaceted. I do wish you all the best if you decide to take the plunge. It’s just… just… so many times I’ve seen posters despairin... See more I fully accept I’m a naysayer and it’s my natural disposition. I’ve been astride that mighty elephant for 25 years and counting, and let’s just say somewhere along the way I started hearing ever intensifying voices below complaining about all the crap they had to wade through to keep up, and that’s what made me realise that the industry is indeed multifaceted. I do wish you all the best if you decide to take the plunge. It’s just… just… so many times I’ve seen posters despairing that they followed everyone’s advice – the courses, the memberships, the mentors, the wills and ways, the know-your-worths – and it, well, by the looks of it, it broke them. Please simply accept my input as a bit of balance to the “you got this!” Your huge advantage is that you specialise in a field where translators are in short supply, so the chances are there could well be a way. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
| The Pollyanna tendency (or not, as the case may be) | Jun 22, 2022 |
Stuart Hoskins wrote:
so many times I’ve seen posters despairing that they followed everyone’s advice – the courses, the memberships, the mentors, the wills and ways, the know-your-worths – and it, well, by the looks of it, it broke them.
Of course I think you should offer your view, whether you dissent with the noisy minority or not. Intellectual diversity is welcome.
Nevertheless, to be fair on what I shall term the non-Eeyore faction of the forum, I think if Emma had rolled up as a clueless 21-year old, with no professional experience other than three months teaching English in France over the summer, and announced that she was going to be a translator, the response from most of us would have been very different.
Nor do I think we have a tendency to indiscriminately recommend courses and memberships. Such consensus as exists among the non-Eeyores seems to have coalesced around the nitty-gritty concept of specialisation like, well, a pearl accreting around grit. The view is that if you don't have such expertise, then differentiation will be harder and your worth in the market will naturally be lower and that courses and memberships are no substitute for hard-won knowledge.
So I wouldn't say that we throw encouragement around with Pollyanna-ish enthusiasm. If anything, we judge more harshly than the Eeyores because we put the onus on individual responsibility and skillsets, rather than attributing success and failure alike to the vagaries of the market.
It is precisely because Emma appears to have those kind of skills that the response has been upbeat and enthusiastic rather than cautious and muted. Whether she can make something of those in a translation career is a slightly different issue.
Dan
[Edited at 2022-06-22 17:44 GMT]
| | | | Emma MacNab
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:25
French to English
TOPIC STARTER | Thanks all again for your input | Jun 22, 2022 |
Thanks all for taking the time to reply - very helpful to get your views and to get a little bit of a sense of perhaps some of the wider conversations going on in the world of translation.
@Becca - I like that, neon green!
@Lingua B - yes, that's a good point about deadlines, and juggling that with another job.
@Stuart Hoskins - thank you, yes I definitely don't want to plunge into shallow water!
@Fiona - I think this is one of the difficulties... See more Thanks all for taking the time to reply - very helpful to get your views and to get a little bit of a sense of perhaps some of the wider conversations going on in the world of translation.
@Becca - I like that, neon green!
@Lingua B - yes, that's a good point about deadlines, and juggling that with another job.
@Stuart Hoskins - thank you, yes I definitely don't want to plunge into shallow water!
@Fiona - I think this is one of the difficulties being an "outsider" - it is clearly such a heterogenous industry that it is difficult to get a handle on what is do-able/realistic and that in itself might vary hugely. Your suggestion of looking into mentoring is very helpful, thank you.
@Lieven - yes the whole self-employment side of things is new to me, and I don't mind admitting a bit scary! Or at least something to think about carefully.
@Ice Scream - again, like Lieven, this whole starting a new business is something for me to explore properly. I guess the demand for healthcare staff is unlikely to change any time soon, so it wouldn't be impossible to go back to it, if it didn't work out.
@Kasparis - helpful to hear about our experience, and thanks for the advice on managing potential work - again, this real life advice is good to have.
@Dan - thank you! ▲ Collapse
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David GAY
Local time: 11:25
English to French
+ ...
| A few points | Jun 22, 2022 |
Although medical translation has been much in demand lately for obvious reasons, eating disorders are probably not the fastest growing segment in medical translation. Your postgraduate degree is much more interesting than your experience. So if I were you, I would start part time to test the market and see what kind of rates agencies offer you. You must check that demand is high in your fields of expertise, because medical translation is a huge field.
Secondly, you must be aware of the fac... See more Although medical translation has been much in demand lately for obvious reasons, eating disorders are probably not the fastest growing segment in medical translation. Your postgraduate degree is much more interesting than your experience. So if I were you, I would start part time to test the market and see what kind of rates agencies offer you. You must check that demand is high in your fields of expertise, because medical translation is a huge field.
Secondly, you must be aware of the fact that the market is very concentrated especially in this field. Some big agencies you ll have to work for ask their translators to lower their rates on a regular basis. And it s almost impossible to have direct clients in this field.
Thirdly, life in London is very expensive so it s risky to leave your 9 to 5 job. Try to assess your future income during a trial period and compare it with your current income after factoring in a big risk discount. Your salary won t be raised each year as in the public sector.
[Edited at 2022-06-22 21:05 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | At the risk of agreeing with Chris :) but yes, realistic expectations are a must! | Jun 23, 2022 |
You obviously want to do this, hence you will try!
You've also learned through his thread how heterogenous both the field and the market are, so that's something.
We can all convey our experiences but yours will still be a very unique one and perhaps a year or two from now, you can tell us about it!
I've been freelancing since January 2020, so maybe my experience will be of interest to you.
Could I do both a full-time job and this? Oh sure! I c... See more You obviously want to do this, hence you will try!
You've also learned through his thread how heterogenous both the field and the market are, so that's something.
We can all convey our experiences but yours will still be a very unique one and perhaps a year or two from now, you can tell us about it!
I've been freelancing since January 2020, so maybe my experience will be of interest to you.
Could I do both a full-time job and this? Oh sure! I can get as little sleep as possible and, for a time, keep on getting by, at best, at two jobs as good as the next person! Would that be the best use of my time? No, I don't think so!
If you cannot do this 20 hours a day, you are running the risk of ending up with an experience of proz.com that many have had of not being able to land good jobs/find good agencies through proz!
I work with 10 excellent agencies, so far, and I've found most by quoting for every sensible job on the job message board, replying to every email within an hour, and yes, this means replying at all hours, and then negotiating, learning, reading, watching, figuring out! On top of translation, there's: Correspondence, invoicing, figuring out rates, figuring out actual rates, dealing with an overzealous reviewer, making sure you aren't an overzealous reviewer, taking a 15-minute document job then spending 3 hours over the next two days explaining to the end client that just because they speak the target it doesn't mean they can ask you to replace words you absolutely must use with words that just sound better to them! Not in an actual document translation, at the very least. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone but you do really, if you want to make sure both the PM and the end client understand what they got and that it's exactly correct and right!
Throughout 2020 I didn't get a paid membership and that was a mistake! Things picked up 90% for me the moment I became a paid member!
I'm sure you can juggle both things for a couple of months or a year, but your experience will be skewed by the fact that, like people before me said, you are competing with people available 20 hours a day (at least for correspondence) and able to give better quality per short deadline than you will be able to! Let's not pretend that having two full time jobs will not affect the quality of your work!
Lastly, the more I read other people's experiences on the forum, the more I am convinced that I've chosen the best of the best to work with and that I am in fact doing great! I command very good rates, without being as expensive as to get only 10% of the available work. The PMs I work with value my efforts, make my life and work as easy as possible, payment terms are standard or better, and work is continuous. We mutually try to make as few mistakes as possible but have an adult understanding of the fact that mistakes shall be made.
Without any false modesty, very often I discover a mistranslation that has become so prominent it became generally accepted in a field as serious as pharmaceutical, and/or provide an insight into the poor quality of work done by someone who should not be calling themselves a professional to a PM that does not speak the target language. Often enough I spend two hours on a document I could translate in half an hour because I want to be as thorough as possible. The things I worry about are, have I discovered a mistranslation prevalent in the whole field soon enough!? Have I been as thorough as the clients deserve me to be paying the rate I ask for?
At any given week I can be doing as many as two translations and one reviewing job from two different fields, and it isn't realistic for me to catch everything at once but I must try because each agency and each PM, however excellent they are and I've met some truly professional and wonderful people, only care about what I can do for them! They don't care much about the fact that I am a freelancer and, by definition, must work with many agencies/end clients to make a living! I must always make sure to remind them of that by asking for better deadlines, more reasonable rates, and loads of understanding when I catch something only at the 11th hour, thinking: "Let's do this my way but the other way must be some sort of a synonym too, after all, it's everywhere, including the reference materials sent by the end client"...
And then, luckily for all of us, the PM challenges my insistence on doing it my way and we discover that the usual way this has been translated is a pure, unadulterated mistranslation! I come out of the whole thing thinking, I should have caught this sooner! Note to self, just because the entire Croatian pharma is using a mistranslation this isn't an excuse not to catch it and say stuff like, I'm sure this is a synonym but let's do this my way!
I am trying to relate to you the level of dedication and quality I try to provide, but bear with me there's a bottom line to my borderline vulgar bragging and that bottom line is I still do not make enough for all this to make any sense if I'd chose to live in London. I make more than a living wage by Bosnian standards, having the freedom to work when I want and as much as I want, and, if I don't want to reply to an email I sure don't have to, but the money would be very tight if I had to live on what I make as a freelancer anywhere decent in London. Oh, yes! Did I mention I live in Bosnia?
The thing is, most people you will meet here, we have other sources of income. Some people are indeed retired translators with decent pensions, and some have partners with grownup jobs that nobody enjoys but they pay extremely well, which allows us to play free(dom-fighter-)lancers/digital nomads/we never conformed to our stuffy jobs so we became freelance translators...
Some are highly successful translators in the financial sector and speak native level Japanese too, but these are few and far between and probably invest a lot as well on top of the savings from their old job!
Personally, my partner is a kind and generous genius that gets up at the crack of dawn and works very hard (often 6 days a week), and has set aside a bank account where he puts money intended for me to use, should I need it. I have the luxury to pick and choose only the best agencies! Not to say that people who want me to work for less than I am willing to work for are bad people or greedy, maybe some of them simply cannot sell translation work for a good enough price to be able to pay their vendors better! So, let's say I have the luxury to pick only the most successful agencies to work with!
What is your situation? Have you a partner that can step in financially so you can leave a career that makes you unhappy and pursue this? Because you are at least a few years, and possibly more, away from making enough to financially justify leaving a job as stable as an NHS occupational therapist who at 20 years of experience can make at least 40-45K a year.
Having said all this, if you are going to do it, proz.com is a place to be! With all its downsides and as imperfect as we all are it somehow still works! Good luck! Maybe you can get back to us, this time next year perhaps, and tell us your unique experience of the translation industry, from a point of view of a newbie freelance translator, as well as of proz.com!
Get the membership! I mean it! Do not be as daft and silly as I was. I wasted a year on my stubbornness and my "but it looks so very 90s" attitude!
Good luck to you, my darling, may the gods of freelance translation be ever in your favour!
Edit: I'm sorry for first posting a very rough draft with all the typos and autotype blunders but between proz. com, my home internet acting up, and aggressive Grammarly addon I'm not sure how to turn off, today wasn't the best day for writing long posts, but I tried.
Seriously, is there something wrong with proz or is it my software? Perhaps my brain is broken? Freelance translation finally broke my brain! Something to take into account before one dives head in! Just kidding, my brain was broken long before choosing this job!
[Edited at 2022-06-23 12:19 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | David GAY
Local time: 11:25
English to French
+ ...
| different markets, different countries, different language pairs | Jun 23, 2022 |
Korana Lasić wrote:
You obviously want to do this, hence you will try!
You've also learned through his thread how heterogenous both the field and the market are, so that's something.
We can all convey our experiences but yours will still be a very unique one and perhaps a year or two from now, you can tell us about it!
I've been freelancing since January 2020, so maybe my experience will be of interest to you.
Could I do both a full-time job and this? Oh sure! I can get as little sleep as possible and, for a time, keep on getting by, at best, at two jobs as good as the next person! Would that be the best use of my time? No, I don't think so!
If you cannot do this 20 hours a day, you are running the risk of ending up with an experience of proz.com that many have had of not being able to land good jobs/find good agencies through proz!
I work with 10 excellent agencies, so far, and I've found most by quoting for every sensible job on the job message board, replying to every email within an hour, and yes, this means replying at all hours, and then negotiating, learning, reading, watching, figuring out! On top of translation, there's: Correspondence, invoicing, figuring out rates, figuring out actual rates, dealing with an overzealous reviewer, making sure you aren't an overzealous reviewer, taking a 15-minute document job then spending 3 hours over the next two days explaining to the end client that just because they speak the target it doesn't mean they can ask you to replace words you absolutely must use with words that just sound better to them! Not in an actual document translation, at the very least. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone but you do really, if you want to make sure both the PM and the end client understand what they got and that it's exactly correct and right!
Throughout 2020 I didn't get a paid membership and that was a mistake! Things picked up 90% for me the moment I became a paid member!
I'm sure you can juggle both things for a couple of months or a year, but your experience will be skewed by the fact that, like people before me said, you are competing with people available 20 hours a day (at least for correspondence) and able to give better quality per short deadline than you will be able to! Let's not pretend that this will not affect the quality of your work!
Lastly, the more I read other people's experiences on the forum, the more I am convinced that I've chosen the best of the best to work with and that I am in fact doing great! I command very good rates, without being as expensive as to get only 10% of available work. The PMs I work with value my effort, make my life and work as easy as possible, payment terms are standard or better, and work is continuous. We mutually try to make as few mistakes as possible but have an adult understanding of the fact that mistakes shall be made.
Without any false modesty, very often I discover a mistranslation that has become so prominent it became generally accepted in a field as serious as pharmaceutical, and/or provide an insight in poor quality of work done by someone who should not be calling themselves a professional to a PM that does not speak the target language. Often enough I spend two hours on a document I could translate in half an hour because I want to be as thorough as possible. The things I worry about are, have I discovered a mistranslation in the whole field soon enough!? Have I been as thorough as the clients deserve me to be paying the rate I ask for?
At any given week I can be doing as many as two translations and one reviewing job from two different fields, and it isn't realistic for me to catch everything at once but I must try because each agency and each PM, however excellent they are and I've met some truly professional and wonderful people, only care about what I can do for them! They don't care much about the fact that I am a freelancer and, by definition, must work with many agencies/end clients to make a living! I must always make sure to remind them of that by asking for better deadlines, more reasonable rates, and loads of understanding when I catch something only at the 11 hour, thinking: "Let's do this my way but the other way must be some sort of a synonym too, after all, it's everywhere, including the reference materials sent by the end client"...
And then, luckily for all of us, the PM challenges my insistence on my way and we discover that the usual way this has been translated is a pure unadulterated mistranslation! I come out of the whole thing thinking, I should have caught this sooner! Note to self, just because the entire Croatian pharma is using a mistranslation this isn't an excuse not to catch it and say stuff like, I'm sure this is a synonym but let's do this my way!
I am trying to relate to you the level of dedication and quality I try to provide, but bear with me there's a bottom line to my borderline vulgar bragging and that bottom line is I still do not make enough for all this do have make any sense if I'd chose to live in London. I make more than a living wage by Bosnian standards, having the freedom to work when I want and as much as I want, and, if I don't want to reply to an email I sure don't have to, but the money would be very tight if I had to live on what I make as a freelancer anywhere decent in London.
The thing is, most people you will meet here, we have other sources of income. Some people are indeed retired translators with decent pensions, and some have partners with grownup jobs that nobody enjoys but they pay extremely well, which allows us to play freedom-fighter- lancers/digital nomads/we never conformed to our stuffy jobs so we became translators...etc
Some are highly successful translators in the financial sector and speak native level Japanese too, but these are few and far between and probably invest a lot as well on top of the savings from their old job!
Personally, my partner is a kind and generous genius that gets up at the crack of dawn works very hard, often 6 days a week, and has set aside a bank account where he puts money intended for me to use if I need it. I have the luxury to pick and choose only the best agencies, and not to say that people who want me to work for less than I am willing to work for are bad people or greedy, maybe some of them simply cannot sell translation work for a good enough price to be able to pay their vendors better!
So what is your situation? Have you a partner that can step in financially so you can leave a career that makes you unhappy and pursue this? Because you are at least a few years, and possibly more, away from making enough to financially justify leaving a job as stable as an NHS occupational therapist who at 20 years of experience can make 40-45K a year.
Having said all this, if you are going to do it, proz.com is a place to be! With all its downsides and as imperfect as we all are it somehow still works! Good luck! Maybe you can get back to us, this time next year perhaps, and tell us your unique experience of the translation industry, from a point of view of a newbie freelance translator, as well as of proz.com!
Get the membership! I mean it! Do not be as daft and silly as I was. I wasted a year on my stubbornness and my "but it looks so very 90s" attitude!
Good luck to you, my darling, may the Gods of freelance translation be ever in your favour!
Edit: I'm sorry for the typos and autocorrect blunders but between proz. com, my home internet acting up, and aggressive Grammarly addon I'm not sure how to turn off, today wasn't the best day for writing long posts but I tried.
[Edited at 2022-06-23 11:10 GMT]
As other posters in this thread have pointed out, your situation is not comparable. You re based in Serbia where a wage of 800 euros per month is considered a very good salary, and MT translation in your target language is not yet possible whereas the French English pair is very common. So I m afraid it can t be compared.
| | | | David GAY
Local time: 11:25
English to French
+ ...
| not conclusive | Jun 23, 2022 |
Dan Lucas wrote: Becca Resnik wrote:
It's only about what I can handle. And I can, and indeed happily, so why not? Emma, if you haven't already noticed you should know that these forums contains thousands of posts by people bewailing their own lack of success in translation and concluding that the industry is therefore a terrible place to work. They are partially right: because there are no barriers to entry anybody can set up a translation agency, and many of these are terrible companies to work with. They are not the whole industry. Becca's experience is important because it suggests that you can still make a decent income, today, as a new entrant to the translation industry, provided that you have something to offer clients. Typically this "something" is highly specialized knowledge of a particular industry or field. Again, lots of posts about that. On the other hand, while I love to hear success stories like hers, I would point out that - as she happily admits - this is very much her own approach and that your own path to success does not necessarily have to involve crazy hours. For one thing, you have already accumulated in organic fashion the specialist knowledge she is working to acquire. Personally, I had a bit of an overlap with my other work before I shifted to full-time translation in 2015, but I was in effect self-employed so I had the flexibility to take on translation and build it up slowly. I do have family working shifts in the NHS and like Fiona I suspect that you'd struggle to do anything other than sleep if you're on nights, for example. But if you work 9 to 5 or thereabouts on the medical side then I'd say you have a good chance of building up your translation business. Regards, Dan
Even though I very much admire Becca for her great achievements, I think that her example is not conclusive. Although she holds an Engineering degree and translates in very sought after and rare language pairs in the field of mechanics, i.e. Japanese and German, she feels the need to pursue another degree because it is simply not enough to maintain a good standard of living. It s a red flag. It just shows how difficult the market is.
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| You didn't even read my post, did you? | Jun 23, 2022 |
David GAY wrote: Korana Lasić wrote:
You obviously want to do this, hence you will try!
You've also learned through his thread how heterogenous both the field and the market are, so that's something.
We can all convey our experiences but yours will still be a very unique one and perhaps a year or two from now, you can tell us about it!
I've been freelancing since January 2020, so maybe my experience will be of interest to you.
Could I do both a full-time job and this? Oh sure! I can get as little sleep as possible and, for a time, keep on getting by, at best, at two jobs as good as the next person! Would that be the best use of my time? No, I don't think so!
If you cannot do this 20 hours a day, you are running the risk of ending up with an experience of proz.com that many have had of not being able to land good jobs/find good agencies through proz!
I work with 10 excellent agencies, so far, and I've found most by quoting for every sensible job on the job message board, replying to every email within an hour, and yes, this means replying at all hours, and then negotiating, learning, reading, watching, figuring out! On top of translation, there's: Correspondence, invoicing, figuring out rates, figuring out actual rates, dealing with an overzealous reviewer, making sure you aren't an overzealous reviewer, taking a 15-minute document job then spending 3 hours over the next two days explaining to the end client that just because they speak the target it doesn't mean they can ask you to replace words you absolutely must use with words that just sound better to them! Not in an actual document translation, at the very least. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone but you do really, if you want to make sure both the PM and the end client understand what they got and that it's exactly correct and right!
Throughout 2020 I didn't get a paid membership and that was a mistake! Things picked up 90% for me the moment I became a paid member!
I'm sure you can juggle both things for a couple of months or a year, but your experience will be skewed by the fact that, like people before me said, you are competing with people available 20 hours a day (at least for correspondence) and able to give better quality per short deadline than you will be able to! Let's not pretend that this will not affect the quality of your work!
Lastly, the more I read other people's experiences on the forum, the more I am convinced that I've chosen the best of the best to work with and that I am in fact doing great! I command very good rates, without being as expensive as to get only 10% of available work. The PMs I work with value my effort, make my life and work as easy as possible, payment terms are standard or better, and work is continuous. We mutually try to make as few mistakes as possible but have an adult understanding of the fact that mistakes shall be made.
Without any false modesty, very often I discover a mistranslation that has become so prominent it became generally accepted in a field as serious as pharmaceutical, and/or provide an insight in poor quality of work done by someone who should not be calling themselves a professional to a PM that does not speak the target language. Often enough I spend two hours on a document I could translate in half an hour because I want to be as thorough as possible. The things I worry about are, have I discovered a mistranslation in the whole field soon enough!? Have I been as thorough as the clients deserve me to be paying the rate I ask for?
At any given week I can be doing as many as two translations and one reviewing job from two different fields, and it isn't realistic for me to catch everything at once but I must try because each agency and each PM, however excellent they are and I've met some truly professional and wonderful people, only care about what I can do for them! They don't care much about the fact that I am a freelancer and, by definition, must work with many agencies/end clients to make a living! I must always make sure to remind them of that by asking for better deadlines, more reasonable rates, and loads of understanding when I catch something only at the 11 hour, thinking: "Let's do this my way but the other way must be some sort of a synonym too, after all, it's everywhere, including the reference materials sent by the end client"...
And then, luckily for all of us, the PM challenges my insistence on my way and we discover that the usual way this has been translated is a pure unadulterated mistranslation! I come out of the whole thing thinking, I should have caught this sooner! Note to self, just because the entire Croatian pharma is using a mistranslation this isn't an excuse not to catch it and say stuff like, I'm sure this is a synonym but let's do this my way!
I am trying to relate to you the level of dedication and quality I try to provide, but bear with me there's a bottom line to my borderline vulgar bragging and that bottom line is I still do not make enough for all this do have make any sense if I'd chose to live in London. I make more than a living wage by Bosnian standards, having the freedom to work when I want and as much as I want, and, if I don't want to reply to an email I sure don't have to, but the money would be very tight if I had to live on what I make as a freelancer anywhere decent in London.
The thing is, most people you will meet here, we have other sources of income. Some people are indeed retired translators with decent pensions, and some have partners with grownup jobs that nobody enjoys but they pay extremely well, which allows us to play freedom-fighter- lancers/digital nomads/we never conformed to our stuffy jobs so we became translators...etc
Some are highly successful translators in the financial sector and speak native level Japanese too, but these are few and far between and probably invest a lot as well on top of the savings from their old job!
Personally, my partner is a kind and generous genius that gets up at the crack of dawn works very hard, often 6 days a week, and has set aside a bank account where he puts money intended for me to use if I need it. I have the luxury to pick and choose only the best agencies, and not to say that people who want me to work for less than I am willing to work for are bad people or greedy, maybe some of them simply cannot sell translation work for a good enough price to be able to pay their vendors better!
So what is your situation? Have you a partner that can step in financially so you can leave a career that makes you unhappy and pursue this? Because you are at least a few years, and possibly more, away from making enough to financially justify leaving a job as stable as an NHS occupational therapist who at 20 years of experience can make 40-45K a year.
Having said all this, if you are going to do it, proz.com is a place to be! With all its downsides and as imperfect as we all are it somehow still works! Good luck! Maybe you can get back to us, this time next year perhaps, and tell us your unique experience of the translation industry, from a point of view of a newbie freelance translator, as well as of proz.com!
Get the membership! I mean it! Do not be as daft and silly as I was. I wasted a year on my stubbornness and my "but it looks so very 90s" attitude!
Good luck to you, my darling, may the Gods of freelance translation be ever in your favour!
Edit: I'm sorry for the typos and autocorrect blunders but between proz. com, my home internet acting up, and aggressive Grammarly addon I'm not sure how to turn off, today wasn't the best day for writing long posts but I tried.
[Edited at 2022-06-23 11:10 GMT] As other posters in this thread have pointed out, your situation is not comparable. You re based in Serbia where a wage of 800 euros per month is considered a very good salary, and MT translation in your target language is not yet possible whereas the French English pair is very common. So I m afraid it can t be compared.
I've already pointed out as much! Certainly no harm in you doing it all over again, yourself! It's just the way you did it that implies either strawmanning or to the fact that you didn't even read what I actually wrote!
Greetings to you and everyone in *ahem* Hungaria, from BiH!
Edit: Kidding! Not that it matters for what you wanted to point out and I know Serbia and Bosnia are (on more than a purely linguistic level) a case of a "tuh-may-tow/tuh-maa-tow"! Still, I do live in Bosnia and not Serbia, at least for now!
[Edited at 2022-06-23 13:49 GMT]
| | | | David GAY
Local time: 11:25
English to French
+ ...
Korana Lasić wrote: David GAY wrote: Korana Lasić wrote:
You obviously want to do this, hence you will try!
You've also learned through his thread how heterogenous both the field and the market are, so that's something.
We can all convey our experiences but yours will still be a very unique one and perhaps a year or two from now, you can tell us about it!
I've been freelancing since January 2020, so maybe my experience will be of interest to you.
Could I do both a full-time job and this? Oh sure! I can get as little sleep as possible and, for a time, keep on getting by, at best, at two jobs as good as the next person! Would that be the best use of my time? No, I don't think so!
If you cannot do this 20 hours a day, you are running the risk of ending up with an experience of proz.com that many have had of not being able to land good jobs/find good agencies through proz!
I work with 10 excellent agencies, so far, and I've found most by quoting for every sensible job on the job message board, replying to every email within an hour, and yes, this means replying at all hours, and then negotiating, learning, reading, watching, figuring out! On top of translation, there's: Correspondence, invoicing, figuring out rates, figuring out actual rates, dealing with an overzealous reviewer, making sure you aren't an overzealous reviewer, taking a 15-minute document job then spending 3 hours over the next two days explaining to the end client that just because they speak the target it doesn't mean they can ask you to replace words you absolutely must use with words that just sound better to them! Not in an actual document translation, at the very least. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone but you do really, if you want to make sure both the PM and the end client understand what they got and that it's exactly correct and right!
Throughout 2020 I didn't get a paid membership and that was a mistake! Things picked up 90% for me the moment I became a paid member!
I'm sure you can juggle both things for a couple of months or a year, but your experience will be skewed by the fact that, like people before me said, you are competing with people available 20 hours a day (at least for correspondence) and able to give better quality per short deadline than you will be able to! Let's not pretend that this will not affect the quality of your work!
Lastly, the more I read other people's experiences on the forum, the more I am convinced that I've chosen the best of the best to work with and that I am in fact doing great! I command very good rates, without being as expensive as to get only 10% of available work. The PMs I work with value my effort, make my life and work as easy as possible, payment terms are standard or better, and work is continuous. We mutually try to make as few mistakes as possible but have an adult understanding of the fact that mistakes shall be made.
Without any false modesty, very often I discover a mistranslation that has become so prominent it became generally accepted in a field as serious as pharmaceutical, and/or provide an insight in poor quality of work done by someone who should not be calling themselves a professional to a PM that does not speak the target language. Often enough I spend two hours on a document I could translate in half an hour because I want to be as thorough as possible. The things I worry about are, have I discovered a mistranslation in the whole field soon enough!? Have I been as thorough as the clients deserve me to be paying the rate I ask for?
At any given week I can be doing as many as two translations and one reviewing job from two different fields, and it isn't realistic for me to catch everything at once but I must try because each agency and each PM, however excellent they are and I've met some truly professional and wonderful people, only care about what I can do for them! They don't care much about the fact that I am a freelancer and, by definition, must work with many agencies/end clients to make a living! I must always make sure to remind them of that by asking for better deadlines, more reasonable rates, and loads of understanding when I catch something only at the 11 hour, thinking: "Let's do this my way but the other way must be some sort of a synonym too, after all, it's everywhere, including the reference materials sent by the end client"...
And then, luckily for all of us, the PM challenges my insistence on my way and we discover that the usual way this has been translated is a pure unadulterated mistranslation! I come out of the whole thing thinking, I should have caught this sooner! Note to self, just because the entire Croatian pharma is using a mistranslation this isn't an excuse not to catch it and say stuff like, I'm sure this is a synonym but let's do this my way!
I am trying to relate to you the level of dedication and quality I try to provide, but bear with me there's a bottom line to my borderline vulgar bragging and that bottom line is I still do not make enough for all this do have make any sense if I'd chose to live in London. I make more than a living wage by Bosnian standards, having the freedom to work when I want and as much as I want, and, if I don't want to reply to an email I sure don't have to, but the money would be very tight if I had to live on what I make as a freelancer anywhere decent in London.
The thing is, most people you will meet here, we have other sources of income. Some people are indeed retired translators with decent pensions, and some have partners with grownup jobs that nobody enjoys but they pay extremely well, which allows us to play freedom-fighter- lancers/digital nomads/we never conformed to our stuffy jobs so we became translators...etc
Some are highly successful translators in the financial sector and speak native level Japanese too, but these are few and far between and probably invest a lot as well on top of the savings from their old job!
Personally, my partner is a kind and generous genius that gets up at the crack of dawn works very hard, often 6 days a week, and has set aside a bank account where he puts money intended for me to use if I need it. I have the luxury to pick and choose only the best agencies, and not to say that people who want me to work for less than I am willing to work for are bad people or greedy, maybe some of them simply cannot sell translation work for a good enough price to be able to pay their vendors better!
So what is your situation? Have you a partner that can step in financially so you can leave a career that makes you unhappy and pursue this? Because you are at least a few years, and possibly more, away from making enough to financially justify leaving a job as stable as an NHS occupational therapist who at 20 years of experience can make 40-45K a year.
Having said all this, if you are going to do it, proz.com is a place to be! With all its downsides and as imperfect as we all are it somehow still works! Good luck! Maybe you can get back to us, this time next year perhaps, and tell us your unique experience of the translation industry, from a point of view of a newbie freelance translator, as well as of proz.com!
Get the membership! I mean it! Do not be as daft and silly as I was. I wasted a year on my stubbornness and my "but it looks so very 90s" attitude!
Good luck to you, my darling, may the Gods of freelance translation be ever in your favour!
Edit: I'm sorry for the typos and autocorrect blunders but between proz. com, my home internet acting up, and aggressive Grammarly addon I'm not sure how to turn off, today wasn't the best day for writing long posts but I tried.
[Edited at 2022-06-23 11:10 GMT] As other posters in this thread have pointed out, your situation is not comparable. You re based in Serbia where a wage of 800 euros per month is considered a very good salary, and MT translation in your target language is not yet possible whereas the French English pair is very common. So I m afraid it can t be compared. I've already pointed out as much! Certainly no harm in you doing it all over again, yourself! It's just the way you did it that implies either strawmanning or to the fact that you didn't even read what I actually wrote! Greetings to you and everyone in *ahem* Hungaria, from BiH! Edit: Kidding! Not that it matters for what you wanted to point out and I know Serbia and Bosnia are (on more than a purely linguistic level) a case of a "tuh-may-tow/tuh-maa-tow"! Still, I do live in Bosnia and not Serbia, at least for now! [Edited at 2022-06-23 13:49 GMT]
I ve just read the very beginning and it put me off. I didn t have the patience to read it entirely. You know, according to a study, in these modern times, only 20 percent of online articles is actually read by internauts. Apologies
[Edited at 2022-06-23 13:58 GMT]
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 11:25
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| Scary is normal. | Jun 23, 2022 |
Emma MacNab wrote:
@Lieven - yes the whole self-employment side of things is new to me, and I don't mind admitting a bit scary! Or at least something to think about carefully.
Being somewhat scared in the beginning is perfectly normal and even not necessarily bad: it keeps you from doing stupid things.
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