Why You Must Acquire Knowledge

Ever since I was young, I've been obsessed with acquiring knowledge.

Basically, I want to know everything!

Back in the pre-Internet mid-80's, when I was in my early teens, a tenacious young salesman visited our home and managed to convince my parents to part with a substantial sum of money for the 30-volume Encyclopedia Britannica.

Apparently, there was a fair bit of buyer's remorse between the signing of the cheque and the delivery of the books.

But that soon faded, because according to them, every day when they came home from work they would find several volumes pulled out and opened up on the carpet, coffee table, etc.

In other words, I was devouring the content!

Of course, I never managed to read the whole thing. I didn't even get close.

Pretty much no one does. After all, it's a reference work.

You just use(d) it when you want(ed) to find something out.

One of the few people to have completed that feat, according to the salesman, was the actor Michael Caine - a trivia buff known for his signature phrase, "Not a lot of people know that."

Albert Einstein said, "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know."

This puts a lot of people off acquiring large amounts of knowledge - freelance translators included.

After all, you could spend all day every day of the rest of your life browsing Wikipedia, and yet on the day you died you would still be ignorant of almost everything known collectively to the human race.

So a lot of freelance translators essentially decide to give up on acquiring knowledge.

Instead, they adopt an attitude of approaching each translation job from scratch as a "project."

Hey, a translation job isn't a project! It's a task. It's the process of changing a document in one language into a document in another language. That's it.

Sending a man to Mars ... now that would be a project!

They think, "I don't need knowledge (read: I'm too lazy and intimidated to bother trying to acquire it), because I'll just research what I need to know as I go."

Well, let me tell you now, this attitude is one of the most DANGEROUS ones you can adopt if you want to be successful, and I mean financially successful, as a freelance translator.

Let's take a look at why. There are two core reasons:

The first reason is that if you don't have knowledge, you can't obtain qualifications, and if you don't obtain qualifications, as the years go by you'll end up with a CV/resume that resembles a white refrigerator that a toddler has randomly covered in those "fridge poetry" magnetic word tiles:

The flowery language you'll use to cover up the white space ain't gonna fool anyone. You'll find it harder to secure new clients, and even harder to find an alternative job if human translation is ever swept away by machine translation.

The second reason is that if you don't have knowledge, you can't translate with speed and accuracy. You might be able to have one, but you can't have both.

Most knowledge-deficient translators will naturally opt for the latter: accuracy without speed.

And in the short term, they'll do OK.

The quality of their work will be of a high enough standard to keep them in the game, and they'll make enough cash to pay the bills and perhaps put a bit away for the future.

This, by the way, is the reason this perilous approach is so prevalent.

It provides a false sense of security.

It's the calm before the storm.

But as the translator ages and their family expands, the expenses begin to creep up.

So they then force themselves to work harder (longer hours) to earn the extra income they need.

This pushes up their income tax and social security premiums.

Which means they have to work even harder.

They're trapped in an endless cycle of misery.

And finally, with retirement looming, they realize they can't actually retire.

They're gonna have to keep punching those keys until they drop dead.

It's a sad fact that are thousands of freelancers around the world right now who are still translating well into their 70s and even 80s.

And not through choice (though pride means that's what they'll tell you!) - but through necessity.

They're like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water that doesn't realize it has a problem, a SERIOUS problem, until it's too late.

And it is too late.

As the old saying goes, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," which means that the older you get, the harder it is to acquire new knowledge and skills. And you can't dodge the bullet by landing a ton of high-paying clients - because they're not going to be impressed with your grey hair and word-salad resume.

So to conclude, you must acquire knowledge!

You must increase your speed to bring your income to a level that's way above what you need right now so that you can invest for the future.

For YOUR future. And for your family's future.

For more tips on succeeding in freelance translation, check out my ebook on Amazon. It's called 88 WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR.

Best of luck on your journey.

Matt