5 Misconceptions About Freelance Translation

Just to introduce

Working from everywhere, except your office is something tempting right? You could be working from home while carrying out your duties as mother or father or be working from a cafe or any other place with an Internet access.

All of this is possible nowadays by signing in all kind of websites which can provide you a job from home. There are a lot of websites depending on what you are looking for, your qualities and your skills. This article makes a list of the 25 best sites to find a remote work:https://skillcrush.com/2014/10/10/sites-finding-remote-work/

So, do you think you are ready to become a translator from home and make plenty of money out of it? Well here are the 5 most common Misconceptions about Freelance Translation.

1)  A Freelance Translator Earns a Lot

According to a survey by Payscale.com, a full time freelance translator could earn $20 per hour which is equivalent to $3,000 per month… Wrong. If it was the case, we would be aware of it. This is not an official estimate and it is important to notice that this income depend on many factors. So each freelancer around the world do not earn $3,000 per month… Sorry guys.

However, according to Daphny Obregon, freelance translation is a perfect work to do from home, especially for mothers or fathers who have responsibilities. It could allow them to work 15 days a month and earn some money while raising their child in the meantime.

2) A Manage of Two Languages is More Than Enough to Become a Freelance Translator

Being a translator is not just a status that you acquire when you create an account in any freelancer website. Translator is a hard profession which require specific studies in university, schools and so on, during years. These, to be able to read, understand a text in its entirety with all its specificities such as stylistic devices, implicit meanings etc. and then transpose it in another language avoiding any misinterpretation and recreating the exact same tone than the original text.

So just the fact to understand, read, speak and write two languages does not make you a translator

3)  A Translation Tool or Software is All you Need to Become a Translator

Again… wrong. After what is said in the second point, no need explain that translation tools only translate words or could give you an idea of what a text is talking about. Unfortunately, to be able to convey not only words but senses in another language, the human mind is what you need. And preferably the mind of someone who as the adequate background to undertake a translation.

4)  A Translation Made by a Freelancer is Certified

If you are not working for a certified company, your translation is not worth a bean!

Moreover, as lot of websites allows anyone who can manage two languages to be a freelancer, we can ask ourselves if the services provided are optimum. Translation from freelancers could be incorrect. This is why remote work for the translation industry has to be used with caution, for example alongside with a certified translation company which can proofread each document translated by the freelancers.

5)    Freelance Translation is Just a Matter of Speed

This is a tricky one. Indeed, the more quickly you translate a document, the more you will earn because you will be able to translate more documents.

However, translation is not just a matter of quantity but of quality. If you translate a huge quantity of document, you will be paid in consequence that is for sure, but if the quality of your work is poor, nobody will want you to translate anything.

Now, just to give you an idea, a professional translator is able to translate on average 250 to 350 words per hour so… definitely not just a matter of speed.

Just to Conclude

To sum up we could say that freelance translation is a good solution for people such as parents with responsibilities to continue working at the same time than raising their children. However, in terms of translation, using non-professional freelancers could threaten a large number of graduated translators as well as the entire translation industry.

So, if you still want to be a freelancer, be aware of this list and welcome to the translation industry!

Author: Quentin Mosnier

Article source: https://translit.ie/blog/5-misconceptions-freelance-translation/