Shift Your Focus from "Good" to "Never Bad"

One of the biggest jumps in my success level as a freelance translator came about when I shifted my focus from trying to produce good translations to never producing bad ones.

"One bad apple spoils the bunch" is how the old saying goes, and it's pretty much true in the world of freelance translation.

What drags a lot of freelancers down is their inconsistency.

For example, someone might claim to be a "financial translator," and do fine for a while with basic corporate financial reports or marketing materials for mass-marketed financial products, but then become completely unglued with something more challenging, like an academic paper on quantitative finance or detailed internal risk-management rules for a financial institution.

Their lack of knowledge has led to them throwing a bad apple into the bunch, and their reputation is toast.

With that customer, they're pretty much done.

Their work might have made it past the agent's in-house check (as the checker probably couldn't understand the material, either), but the problems would have been picked up by the end-client - creating a major headache for them and the agent as the whole thing basically needed to be redone.

The translator concerned is now known as "a guy that causes major problems."

Everything that went before it is forgotten now.

This is the definition of a "bad translation," by the way.

A translation that turns into a nightmare for the customer.

As one of my followers pointed out the other day, a bad translation is NOT a good translation with the odd typo, omission, or mistranslation here and there, as such issues can be spotted and fixed with ease by staffers earning a lot less money per hour than you.

One thing that's interesting to me is that many freelance translators perceive the check process performed by agents post-delivery as something akin to the "receiving inspections" carried out by industrial companies when they take delivery of materials and components. They believe that even a few little errors will result in the delivery (and them) being "rejected" as "nonconforming," and while this may have been true to some extent in the past, in 2019 agents' checks are simply part of the multi-step supply chain process that characterizes the language industry today. They're there to pick up and correct minor flaws in translations submitted by competent translators, with perfection neither being expected nor demanded.

Getting back to the main theme of this article, if you can avoid ever delivering a bad translation, your success will skyrocket. You become the risk-free option in the minds of customers - that ONE guy they know they can always count on not to screw up.

If you can do that, you won't actually have a lot of competition, because most of your rivals WILL mess up from time to time.

And this is more true than ever before, as going deep on field-specific knowledge acquisition has become the exception rather than the norm.

The emergence of the Internet triggered awareness among freelance translators of its potential to serve as a tool for landing high-paying direct clients. Articles and books on the subject began to appear, and soon having a website became considered a prerequisite for success. But website administration sucks time away from knowledge acquisition, and pretty soon even that wasn't enough, as the plethora of websites forced translators to study SEO and start writing blogs to boost their search-engine rankings. Then social media blew up, resulting in even more in the way of personal branding and marketing tasks to perform ...

The result has been a "lost decade" of blank resumes from translators stuck on the hamster wheel of constantly feeling that they need to step up their personal promotion game.

But the great thing about a hamster wheel is that you can just get off it at any time.

And that's exactly what I would advise you to do.

Make sure all your translations are good enough, and employ the time you might have spent on repeated proofreads, as well as time you've been hitherto allocating to marketing, to go deep on your field (and I'm using the singular form here for a reason).

Really deep.

So you NEVER produce a bad translation.

Study the most difficult and challenging corners of the field - and grab certifications as you go to attest to the knowledge you're absorbing

For more on-point advice that isn't coming from the herd, be sure to download and read my bestselling Amazon/Kindle ebook, 88 WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR. (If Amazon has a site for your country, you'll need to search for it and purchase it on there - you will get an "unavailable" message if you try to purchase using the above link.)

Here are some of the reviews on Amazon:

"An invaluable tool for anyone who wants to survive this competitive market"

"I personally found that about most of these tips were spot on for my particular situation."

"There are lots of insightful tips in here on seriously improving your productivity and rethinking your approach."

 "It has practical tips that will make a great difference in the life of a freelance translator."

"A rare source of ideas that haven’t been discussed in their entirety among our profession"

Best of luck on your journey.

Matt