How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator
Corinne McKay
Language: English
Pages: 133
ISBN: 0578170078
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Are you bilingual? Have you ever dreamed of the freedom of working for yourself? Are you already a translator or interpreter, but would like to be earning more money or managing your business more efficiently? If so, then let "Getting Started as a Freelance Translator" show you how to achieve your goals.
Written by a certified translator and drawing on the author's experiences building her own freelance translation business from the ground up, "How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator" will teach you how to find and keep well-paying translation clients, pursue translator certification, set your rates and payment terms, develop translation specializations, and organize your business for success.
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finding your first clients and building up your business, following are some tips that are applicable to almost every freelance translator's startup phase: Be realistic. If you've never worked as a translator or interpreter before, starting out by contacting the United Nations or accepting a 90,000 word document on nuclear power plant safety procedures probably isn't the best way to start. Look for projects that you can do a great job on, and then use those projects to build up your business.
(something the 94 RATES, CONTRACTS AND TERMS OF SERVICE agency will probably be unwilling to do) you can't really know that you're not working for one of them. • Agreeing not to subcontract work to another translator. This is another fairly common and reasonable clause, just make sure you read it before signing, and if you commit to doing all the work yourself, don't share it with someone else. • Agreeing to abide by confidentiality standards. Especially if you work in legal, financial or
areas of the world where foreign languages are more widely studied, most translators work from at least two source languages, and often many more. It's not at all unusual to find Europe-based translators who work, for example, from English, Spanish and French into German, or from Norwegian, Swedish and English into Danish. 1.2 What does it take to become a translator? Being multilingual isn't the only skill a translator needs, but it's certainly the most important. Translators learn their
that as long as you pay yourself a "reasonable wage" (as defined by the IRS), you can pass some of the corporation's income on to your individual tax return, which can avoid you having to pay self-employment tax on it. For example if you have net income of $60,000 and pay yourself wages of $30,000 (which are subject to self-employment INCORPORATING AND PLANNING FOR TAXES 115 tax), you can then pass the additional $30,000 on to your individual tax return as profit, where it is subject only to
of the members of the American Translators Association were self-employed independent contractors. As such, translators need business management skills such as the ability to find and retain clients, work on tight deadlines with little supervision or management, handle increases and decreases in work flow and cash flow and perform tasks such as bookkeeping, tax planning and computer upkeep and maintenance. In fact, most self-employed translators spend 25-50% of their time on non-translation