Dear Lisa,

Great pleasure to meet translator women around cuz this papery work area has always been so crammed with male translators!

Nice to have you around!

Mateus
Brazilian EN<>BRPT Translator, in Brazil.

You are most welcome

Am still learning to navigate my way around on here. Nice to meet you all!

Am looking for some tips on how best to get freelance translation work off here and how much folk normally get per month? How does it all work? Do you get regular clients coming back for more? What is the bets rate to offer which is fair? cheers for all the tips...

Originally written by martine barnes on February 24, 2009 8:41 AM   Am still learning to navigate my way around on here. Nice to meet you all! Am looking for some tips on how best to get freelance translation work off here and how much folk normally get per month? How does it all work? Do you get regular clients coming back for more? What is the bets rate to offer which is fair? cheers for all the tips...

Welcome Vassily, Mateus, Ibrahim and Martine

@Martine, to answer some of your questions or at least to make an effort   Please take your time, as much as you have, read the articles (how-to-library), follow the forum threads you are interested in, have a look at the statistics ...

There is no "normally per month" income, it all depends on how much time you invest to get clients, they don*t come into your house ... furthermore of course it depends on your rates and first of all perhaps on the quality of your work. There are many factors. Take a look around, go to the jobboard, answer the offers and contact agencies as well as companies near you. Participate in the forums and you will learn a lot. And don't hesitate to come back with remaining questions

Daniela

Hi Martine,

Here are a few tips to make your freelance endeavours a success, excpet quality issues for which one can't help you:

1/ when you don't have work, spend your time looking for clients: direct mails, website registration, etc.

2/ never deliver late. If so it going to be the case, let your client know asap. Clients often provide for a security margin. When you feel the deadline is tight, always try and negotiate beforehand, you'll find out that there often is some flexiblity, even though agencies process as many translation possible in the shortest time possible

3/ Once you finished your work, always review (target against source), then edit the target language to make it translation free: check that terms have always been translated the same, that the formatting is the same, no spelling mistakes.

4/ During the project, always ask questions when needed, though you may not get an answer because the PM does not know and clients think the agency should sort everything out alone, sometimes it helps.

5/ Get to know the most commonly used tool: Trados, SDLX and Wordfast

6/ buy decent dictionaries and get to know GDT and many other sources on the net. Bookmark them for future use.

7/ If you don't feel comfortable with a text, always refuse it. You must preserve yourself, clients are more easily lost than found...

8/ Try and specialise in some fields

9/ Don't hesitate to take tests, especially for those big agencies, though they will not pay interest if you don't have a translation degree.

10/ Build your network: agencies, particulars, freelancers (a lot of outsourcing between freelancers), etc.

Jonathan

Good to see some life out there, seemed to have been "Lost in Translation" these past eight years. Too busy to communicate with fellow translators. But I'm here to give it a try. 

Welcome to the Forums, Paul. I find this to be an excellent idea. I know that TC members do meet in real world, but usually not until they have interacted a bit in cyberspace. (I wouldn't count on the US "strong horse" perhaps because they must be scared to death these days...)

Anyway, let's keep your Translator house swaps open.

Jacek

Some very sound advice particularly no. 7.

Although if you are an inexperienced translator all texts are difficult to begin with you just need to dedicate a lot of time to them.

I would say that being a good reasearcher is a particularly useful skill to have as a translator and can get you out of some tight spots when you have taken on something a little outside your expertise!

Paul