Short Reflection on the Synergy Between Productivity and Comfort (and the Lost Profit)

The relationship between productivity and comfort has doubtless been the subject of much proper  research and analysis, and I'm not going there now. For that we have Google. Instead, I want to focus on some obvious things we miss in everyday freelance life:


(1) Comfort improves productivity, and (2) productivity — the sensation, the experience of being productive, the sense of achievement — also improves comfort. (3) There is thus a mutually stimulating relationship between productivity and comfort. And (4) that is something we can use, because nothing prevents us — no corporate policies, no spending limits, no standardization, no employer branding, no issues of rank, paygrade, status, etc.

We all know we're in charge of the home office. But it somehow fails to fully sink in sometimes, and so we fail to employ the fact usefully and reap the benefits.


I'm not encouraging anyone to overspend and be wasteful just because there's no accounting department to vet and veto the spend. But it's important to fully realize that the typical constraints faced by inhouse employees within an organization and structure don't apply to us.

So get yourself the right chair, the right keyboard, the right monitor(s), move the desk around a bit, adjust, optimize. Your workplace is worth spending some time tweaking before you spend months and years in it.

It's important to note that scale of all things is not an issue. Whatever you buy, you buy it just once. $1000 for a super super comfortable chair is a thousand, because the upgrade doesn't apply to 999 other people in the same paygrade. If you overspend $200 of the amount, you overspend $200 and not $ 200 thousand. The same applies to an easily adjustable desk or a mechanical or ergonomic keyboard, or better monitor, or I don't know, furniture, flowers, whatever.

By getting the right equipment and figuring out the best arrangement for your long-term comfort and productivity, removing distractions and obstacles, your physical comfort will improve, you will tire less and at a slower rate, and your satisfaction levels will improve. You will work faster and need less rest, less often, and will find it easier to maintain focus.

The resulting productivity gain will soon translate into more income, and the investment will pay off before you even realize. Let's say you manage to squeeze one or two medium-sized projects more during the year — that will more than pay back for a proper 24/7 chair or a monitor that protects your eyes, or a keyboard that goes easy on your wrists.

If you don't, chances are you're being frugal to the point of gimping yourself in the thousands just to avoid spending hundreds.

Annoyed They're Asking for a Free Sample? You Should Be Happy! And Let Me Tell You Why.

Before we move on, let's keep in mind a sample is not the same as a test. There is a difference between being sampled and being more or less formally graded, and most translators should be more wary of the latter than they already are.

… Not so with free samples, however.

I understand the annoyance and discomfort of being asked to provide some of your work free of charge, but let me be open with you — you can get over it. Suspend your displeasure and allow me to explain.

What I'm proposing is a pragmatic look. Imagine yourself sitting at the chessboard. You're playing to win the whole, not to find pleasure or comfort, or avoid displeasure or discomfort, in the individual moves. A move is good or bad depending on how it serves your goals. If you come out on top and win the game because of that move, then it was a good move, even if you allowed the opponent to take your queen with short-term impunity.

There's a military saying that no fire hits home better than friendly fire. Doubtless you're familiar with the concept of being caught in one's own snare, poetically speaking; falling into your own trap. This is precisely what can happening to your counterparty in the negotiation if you keep your calm and consider how providing them with that sample can serve your goals in the longer run and advance your position instead of the opposite.

Generally speaking, there is no better marketing than good work and happy clients. There's a reason all those companies are peppering the market with free testers and tasters, satisfaction guarantees and generous cancellation terms. They want the product or service to touch the client!

And when you provide a free sample, your service, the product of your work, touches the client. And that is a very powerful message. If you're good, the client can take a look and see that with his own eyes, hear it, touch it, smell it; it's tangible, it feels more real, it connects better, it hits harder. In a way, this is similar to how having some face time with the client is usually better than mailing, chatting or even calling.

By exposing the client to your work in this way, you're getting so much closer to your goal, which is convincing your client that you're good and better than the alternatives.

This goes down to 'show, not tell'. Feel like explaining to your client, verbally, how your degrees, years of experience and whathaveyou make you (more) qualified and justify paying you (more) serious money?

Instead of have to plead your case like that, where the client turns into a powerful judge and jury and you're like that small-town lawyer dominated by an overbearing judge, you can simply throw your bait and wait to see the results.

If your your work is good, it will speak for itself and make its own case, at least if the client is serious, such as the typical semi-sophisticated buyer in B2B who may not be an expert but has been there, done that and has the scars to show.

In the last decade I've noted how certain companies delay the discussion of your rates to the last, making you jump through all their hoops first, almost asking you to sign the actual contract before filling in the rate.

Obviously, one of the effects of that strategy is escalation of commitment, making it more and more difficult for you psychologically to quit the negotiation after (i) all the declarations of readiness to co-operate that you've already made (which makes you look inconsistent or even unreliable, as in less of a man or woman of your word for turning around) and (ii) so much investment of your time, effort and hopes that you're now unwilling to accept as a total loss and move on, so you look for a compromise solution to cut your losses.

They will exploit that further by boiling the frog, gradually asking small concessions from you until the sum total of them becomes significant and you've moved, in small steps, a huge distance away from where you were and where you wanted to be (but each and every individual concession was too trivial on its own to put up much of a fight, not worth damaging the goodwill, etc., as they may have been amply, and aptly, reminding you along the way).

Depressing, ain't it?

But you can turn the table around on them.

They're asking for bait, so throw it to them. Grant their request, make them think — consistently with objective reality — that they got what they want and are moving on as planned, according to their own game plan.

… Except you've been forewarned about all the potential psychological effects, so you can shrug them off more easily as they come and even plan your time investment in that negotiation in a conscious way, keeping things under control and avoiding uncontrolled escalations (or escalations controlled by the other party).

Now, there's no obligation and no reason for you to in any way let them know that you know their game plan.

So you just give them the sample they requested, which will from now on act as your fishing bait, you put on your psychological kevlar suit, sit back and watch as the bait does its work. And they aren't expecting it!

Something to consider:

If you actually paid for a marketing/advertising campaign, it would probably largely come down to highlighting your good work to date and the promise of more. Also targeted direct marketing would most probably involve having a decision-maker take a look at your existing work, be impressed and give you some projects as a result. And this is exactly what you're going to achieve by giving someone with decisionmaking authority a sample when requested.

The difference comes down to who's asking whom to show or look. Don't allow such meaningless minutiae to distract you from your goal, which is to close the deal by establishing your value — one way or other. Getting your way in the short term and in small details shouldn't distract you from getting your way in the long term and big picture.

And you aren't even sacrificing your queen here. It's a knight or bishop, tops.

What Do I Do if the Client Always Pays Me Late? (Adapt!)

I'll give you a straight answer: adapt.

It's not worth fighting over.

Or stressing over.

Just adapt.

Shrug it off and adapt your business model.

Your business model is far more adaptable than your clients' habits.

You get more and better rewards from adapting your conduct than from trying to adapt your clients' conduct.

Payment leniency is like any other need you can identify in the market — once you identify it, respond to it and profit.

There's really no point insisting on feeling offended/cheated/breached against etc. etc. when you can simply adapt and profit. And with a smile.

Challenges bring opportunities. Outplay life by taking the disadvantages it throws at you and converting them into advantages, coming out on top and profiting.

***

That said, here's some analysis:

What do you stand to gain if you press the matter?

Off the top of my head, I would expect a blend of conflict, guilt, apology and risk avoidance. In effect, probably:

• slightly faster payments but not always on time, and at a great energy/stress cost for the client that could be better spent
• a more strained relationship, with less goodwill capital than you could amass by being 'reasonable' and lenient
• a client less inclined to be forgiving when it's your turn to get late or otherwise slip (anything from stern to vindictive… or actually lenient and forgiving, putting you to shame)

So what if I don't? 

Off the top of my head, things don't change, which can be either good or bad but is more or less the whole point. Old facts, new approach.

Make the choice — given their payment delays, would you drop them or keep them, supposing you can't change the way they act (and possibly they can't either)?

If you choose to part ways, there's no reason to make the split any more hostile or awkward than it has to be.

If you'd rather keep them, it's counterproductive to keep complaining and putting a strain on the relationship. In fact, they could even just start to avoid hiring you and think they're doing you a favour.

So take a new approach. Stop feeling offended, cheated, ignored or whatever is the case. Shrug it off, let it go, stop allowing negative emotions to hold you hostage.

Instead, make it your own policy to extend an unspoken grace period that isn't the client's right but makes your client's life easier, and yours too.

Integrate those delays in your business model. Client payment punctuality is unreliable? Stop relying on clients to pay punctually — as long as they pay at all and don't take too long.

Just keep some floating cash. Don't spend or invest everything. Invest in liquidity and thus security. Your comfort and quality of life will increase dramatically as a result. Ridding yourself of liquidity anxiety will make it so much easier for you to project the calm confidence that wins your clients over as a professional. It will also make you friendlier, and a little relaxed and forgiving attitude (or at least reasonable, at a minimum) will not go unnoticed.

… It enhances your reputation, your goodwill. And that is a great asset and a great benefit to you. It may be intangible, but it has a great effect on your life and can make or unmake your success. Or at least have a very tangible effect on your income.

***

It's easier to get yourself a 'pillow' — a month's, then quarter's, then semester's, and then perhaps a year's worth of income retained as a reserve — than to challenge your client's habits. Besides, as a service provider it's generally a good idea to challenge your own habits and expectations before your client's. And that's not just a chore — like I said, it can make or unmake a successful practice.

And be positive. Don't be too hard on yourself. Perhaps you're already making more than some people you know who are less flexible than you are. Make that flexibility your strength and your policy.

… Doesn't mean it has to be your stated policy. In fact, as you've probably guessed by now, the whole point is that it shouldn't be! If you extend the deadlines, a lot of your clients will still be one or two weeks (or months, or days) late whether the deadline is two or four weeks (or months, or days). Give them a deadline, but don't expect them to keep it — and don't tell them you aren't expecting them to keep it. Just base your own internal calculations on official deadline + grace period.

If you choose to provide an official grace period, which may well be a good move in some situations, still provide an unofficial one after that and base your calculations on it rather than on the official one.

There, you solved your liquidity problem! You removed the anxiety and lack of security resulting from late payments from your clients, without even talking to them, much less straining your relationships.

***

Bonus tip: Consider (and I only say consider) a 3% discount for expedited payment, for example 3 days where the deadline is 30. Perhaps also consider a 1% deadline for not exceeding the 30.

The goal of the 3% discount is not to reward your clients for not being late (for not failing to do what they are already obligated to do). And, as you can see, neither is it the effect. The goal is simply to see the money in your account as soon as possible. Once in, it can't be taken out — unlike when it's still in your client's account/reserve/provision for outgoing payments, let alone the client's general account. You have the money, you no longer have to worry, and that's it.

More elaborate theory is that early, as opposed to timely, payment is a legitimate novel benefit for you. Reciprocally, you provide a legitimate benefit, a small financial concession. However named or classified, it's simply a small financial benefit, and getting emotional about the reason or classification makes very little practical sense.

The 1% discount for not exceeding the deadline obviously does reward your client for not breaching, but the reward is smaller, and the benefit is real. And you don't care about all that, remember? What you care about is that the money is already safely in your account, so the risk of non-payment is no longer there.

The 1% discount is reverse-interest. People feel bad about being penalized, or even confronted about doing something wrong, let alone when they see themselves as not being at fault — and agencies will typically not see themselves as being at fault when they haven't been paid by their own clients yet (get used to that, as you can't change it, at least not you alone and not overnight). Applying late interest or some other form of late fees or penalties will be an antagonizing move and will damage the relationship. By contrast, nobody can complain about not receiving a benefit one, through fault or no fault, just simply didn't qualify for. There are no accusations, no implications of wrongdoing, there's just simply a missed benefit.

Don't want to give up 1% or 3% of your current earnings? Up your pre-discount rates, problem solved. Suppose you charge 100. So now it would be 97, and you don't like that, which is fair. So you need to charge 103.09.

Naturally, changing your rates and payment conditions in tandem would be a bit too obvious and defeat the point of applying incentives instead of penalties, so perhaps wait till your next increase and rather than 105 make it 108. Or make it 105 but earlier. Or only with new clients, or new projects for occasional clients. How to give yourself a smooth raise is a whole different topic.

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Recap: As a freelancer, one of your biggest competitive advantages is the adaptability of your small, lean, flexible structure (or even sometimes almost total lack thereof). You can adapt more easily than your clients. And you can also adapt more easily than some of your competitors (including freelancers who don't want to adapt). Use that adaptability and profit. If your clients fail to meet their obligations, try to see beyond the breach and see the need that you can respond to — and profit. This can include the need to adapt your business model to a longer payment cycle. Instead of trying to to turn the tide, you can invest your energy and creativity in using it to your advantage — and there are various ways of doing that. At the end of the day your need is liquidity and security, and that can be achieved in more than one way, and some ways are smarter than others. Be guided by pragmatism, creativity and… empathy. Think outside the box. You're allowed to! You don't have a boss to say you can't. Sometimes you can have your way in the big picture by agreeing to not have your way in small things that are ultimately inconsequential.

The Power of the Next Time

In what could be one of my last posts on this blog, I'd like to talk about something that's very simple and very underappreciated — the positive aspect of the

next time

We tend to associate the 'next time' with empty promises that are cheap currency to exchange for tangible financial concessions on our part. But, the 'next time' can be used as a positive tool just as well.

Few of us freelancers, solos and small entrepreneurs aren't wary about flat out denying our clients. We know the implications. Denying does not necessarily result in client loss, but it's hardly good for the relationship. And at some point we do flat out deny anyway.

So here's suggestion: When you receive an offer you feel you have to accept but you're also conflicted because you should reject it on principle, instead of flat out rejecting or flat out accepting or allowing the situation to degenerate into a haggling or whining session — use the 'next time' way out.

Specifying some conditions for the 'next time' allows you to avoid refusing your client but also allows you to avoid sacrificing your own position or principles. It also shows your client you're someone who is reasonable but at the same time to be taken seriously.

Incidentally, just throw some old-fashioned hard work with good results in the mix, and it probably won't be exaggerating to say the image of the quintessential professional pretty much paints itself. On a basic level, one doesn't need much more.

When the next time comes, however, do be consistent. There is no more next time, because the next time is now. You can still show yourself as a reasonable person capable of compromise, but some things need to change, and that change needs to take things closer to where they should be.

So don't worry, meeting your client halfway is not a defeat. It just shows you're civilized, considerate and patient and have a hard time completely prioritizing your own interests over someone else's. That's the stuff of which good relationships are made. But, continue to expect and demand things to continue to move forward in the right direction.

Don't worry if you meet with resistance. Some people will test you to avoid being the sucker who pays the first quoted price that nobody else's is paying. They'll need some assurance that's not what is happening. And that may take some arguing about your initial quotes, first proposals, etc.


If the client says there's no room to move — 'as much as we'd like to, we just can't' — try to look for a compromise solution, a give-and-take. Better conditions for the client, better conditions for you. Reciprocity. Equivalence. Balance. You may want to read my post about non-financial terms.

If the client gives you a flat no, take it or leave it, you may want to be more proactive in considering that perhaps you should in fact leave it. Which may in fact be another test.

What You Can Do as No Longer a Newbie

Other than my own experience, I have no qualifications to give proper career advice. Actually, I'm looking at this rather through the perspective of character development in a roleplaying game — where you advance in your particular class, sometimes take an advanced class or 'prestige class', depending on the particulars of the system you're using, you pick up additional feats or talents or whatever they are called.

So, imagine you've taken a couple of levels as Translator. Let's say you're a level 3, level 5 or level 7 translator now, no longer a freshly created level 1 character. You're at the stage where back in the middle ages it would be high time to get you knighted (back when it wasn't an accolade for grey-haired professors, businessmen and singers but a right of passage for warriors from 'good' families) or inducted as full member of some sort of guild. Modern translators' associations are still much like guilds, with full membership or associate membership or special membership: senior, expert and so on.

In a roleplaying game, the requirements for each such accolade tend to be easily visible as a tooltip when you hover the mouse cursor over something that's greyed out for now, but you generally have a sense of direction — you know what you can plan for.

Similarly, prerequisites for all sorts of university programmes, certifications, association memberships, official accreditations and so on are usually public knowledge, available to everybody in full detail. This means that here too you can certainly plan for them in advance, long before you actually meet the requirements, but obviously you'll need to do some checking and some planning beforehand.

In some situations in a game you also end up with a bunch of saved-up 'points' that you didn't really know how to spend immediately when you earned them, so rather than spending them randomly you decided to keep playing and worry about this character stuff later. Let's pretend this is more or less the situation you're at now, or perhaps you're just stealing a furtive glance at whatever options are going to become available to you when you've done a little more progress. Or just looking around tentatively before you commit.

A single level-up is, of course, rarely a huge life-changing event for a game character, but characters that have some direction in their development tend to be more efficient. For a single level chances are the difference doesn't matter much, but if you take several of the right feats, skills or talents (or whatever they are called) from the right 'chain', then you can do more damage with your weapon faster or cast better spells faster, more powerfully, compared to the results you get when you just wing it as you go.

So, once you've hit level 5 or 7 or 9, you're not yet an epic paladin or Gandalf-level wizard, but it's high time you thought about landing some of those neat advanced options that have opened up in the meantime, as opposed to simply watching your weapon or spell damage grow steadily by something like 0.5-2 points a level.

For starters, you may want to stop being a generic '(dear) linguist' and instead commit to an advanced 'character class' such as specialist translator or conference interpreter. Or project manager or language consultant, if that's where your path leads or what your skillset makes you better-suited for.

This is really similar to how 'champion' has a better ring to it than 'fighter' and 'archmage' just plain sounds better than 'mage'. Some of those are a simple matter of choosing various available paths of progress, others are more situational and reflect whatever you've been doing so far, sometimes by random chance. For example you can't really be a master archer if you've only ever stabbed people with swords. You can't be a 'Keeper of the Grove' if you've never been near a grove. Simple, isn't it?

So, here are a couple of things you can do (and choices you have to make):

• Commit to a narrower specialization (e.g. pharma interpreting, legal proofreading) for good or just gain some advanced qualifications to open new paths, to enable you to do some things you couldn't do before. This is more like branching off into something different but complementary.
• Upgrade your B.A. to M.A. or M.A. to advanced master's or Ph.D. for something more akin to vertical, hierarchical progress, Or add one more bachelor's but this time in your translation subject, not translation itself, to become dually qualified. Or a degree in translation or languages if you came from a different field and want to establish your credentials as a proper linguist as well. In any case, making progress with degrees and other such scalable formal qualifications will solidify your knowledge and also give you more gravitas.
• Get licensed to practice in your subject field, as a variation on the two points above. You won't really be practicing, but it will put you more on level with practitioners. Doing so will open some doors, give you access to some resources and equipment, and more sway in certain circles where you'd like to be listened to.
• Translation-related certifications are similar to the two or three above.
• However, you can also opt for writer-specific rather than translator-specific qualifications. This is especially important in fields and applications that don't call for literal translation, such as marketing marketing, or fields where translation needs to be very faithful and at the same time aesthetically appealing, persuasive, such as law, where most translation needs to be precise and appealing, meaning the skill bar for literal translation is set higher.
• Add an element of strategy or management to make your translation potentially more goal-conscious and more efficient at communication, more adaptable to the needs of the task at hand. This might actually come in handy on the subject side, too, if you're a business translator. Isn't everybody, at least to the extent business is done in whatever field one translates in?
• Similarly, qualifying as a copywriter would primarily improve your marketing translation but also all sorts of business translation, then anything really that needs to be at least somewhat convincing or appealing, and finally your own self-made copy. You might be able to pick pure copywriting jobs on the side and benefit from your translation experience while doing them, if that's what you want, but you'd better be able to make an informed decision about your focus, as pursuing two paths at the same time always comes at a price.
• Adapt to your unique setting. You won't get the year or two — or however much time it takes — of your life back, they may be lost if you fall out with the existing top clients you're doing this for, but within that narrow niche the rewards will be high. For example an 'elf friend' is good with the elves but pretty useless when the elves depart, unless he requalifies as storyteller or sets out on an epic search himself. ;) You'll become the natural go-to guy for trouble, or else the everyday handler of their relevant business, whichever floats your boat and theirs. It's kinda one boat now, which is essentially the whole point.
• Just keep adding more languages or fields. But you'll need to decide between dabbling in all types of melee weapons or schools of magic known to man and becoming good at two or three of them or really, really good at just one. More versatility is not always found in being a jack of all trades and master of none, because sometimes advanced abilities within your own core skillset eventually fill the gaps better. For example it might be cool to have access to a fighter's choice of weapons and armour for your rogue, but the delay in developing your core skills is going to haunt you; you will be perhaps not four or five steps behind but just that one step which sometimes matters, such as that one chest of epic loot you fail to open just barely, or the one final trap that kills you. As mage, you're mostly better off shooting 'fire arrows' from your mage staff expertly than shooting real arrows from a real bow clumsily. As fighter, you may be tempted to gain some of the skills of a rogue with traps and locks, but time taken off your combat training will make you at least a marginally less effective tank or damage dealer where such margins matter. You really need an element of linear progress, not just odds and ends you pick up here or there..
• Learn more tools, buy more CAT and other editing software to expand your reach in so far as it depends on meeting such requirements. Doing so gives you breadth; you can now accept more quests. In some situations it can also help you become more self-sufficient, which gives you depth and independence. See above, though. And remember that spending your money on equipment prevents you from being able to spend it on training, so choose wisely.
• Join associations. They are like guilds. A guild typically has more resources and more pull than a single fighter or mage. That's the point of being in a guild. A guild sometimes hands out quests and rewards you for longevity. Don't count on a dividend, but seniority has its perks. You can also learn management, socialize, give back to the community, chill with your pals, trade loot and stories, and do a couple of other things. And occasionally free beer. What's not to like?

Remember you can't do it all in a single lifetime, and if you try to catch too many birds chances are all will slip. You'll need to make choices — and it helps to know what you're doing. But above all you need a sense of progress and at least a vague idea of what you want to do with your life as you level up.

Can Printed Letters Get You More Clients?

The immediate inspiration came from the title of an e-mail from Jon Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing: Can Handwritten Letters Get You More Clients, referring to a post by Nick Gibson at Six Revisions.

However, a few days ago I'd read a couple of articles about typography for lawyers. There is even a website titled just that, by Matthew Butterick, a font designer turned lawyer, I kid thee not.

Between those two, a realization struck me immediately (well, almost; I was a bit low on caffeine, which I'm remedying right now):

Ekhm, ignore handwriting for now, through I'm positively sure — and without needing to see any tangible proof to boot — that it would get you more clients or 'better' ones.

Rather, before we even look that far, there are still printed letters.

See, on your website and in PDF brochures you're limited by whatever fonts the reader has, not you.

Depending on who you work for, that may be less of a problem — I've once seen a web designer use Caslon of all things, because his readers could mostly be presumed to already have it on their systems anyway (it's an Adobe font that comes with Photoshop). Similarly, most institutional clients probably have MS Office, so most of them would see them if you defined them in the CSS sheet, perhaps with Georgia, Palatino or even Times as a fallback from among the sixteen or so mostly stable set of (relatively) 'web-safe fonts'. (For server-side hosting, embedding fonts in PDFs and other forms of what effectively is font distrubution you'd need a suitable licence from the copyright owner.)

But, on paper, your options are not limited in that way. You have more control. Paper is paper, it doesn't matter what type of hardware or software platform the reader runs. What's best, once printed, it always stays the way it is, for everyone.

Naturally, the visual impression is not the same for everyone, but that's something for you to figure out. The point is, you can do a lot in terms of advanced typography on paper these days, even with the same old MS Office (well, not too old, say: 2013) that everybody else has and to some extent possibly even in Open/Libre Office.

Tracking, leading, kerning, ligatures, widows and orphans and off-black shades, different fonts for headers than for the main body of the document, you name it, it's there. You can also hand-pick just the right paper and envelope and not skimp on the ink or toner since you're probably going to be printing just one or two pages.

You can make it look very, very good, without at the same time making it look over the top — although striking the right balance may, naturally, require some practice and will always be at least a little on the subjective side, just like font pairing (google it).

Of course, use a fountain pen for signatures and any handwritten additions (depending on your demographic, it may be more courteous to write greetings and salutations in hand, and the courtesy might not be lost on the recipient).

Naturally, this is even more important for anyone who does certified translation or anything else that requires hard copy.

What else? Years ago e-mail was exceptional because it was hi-tech. These days, however, paper mail is already exceptional — and thus both special and upscale — in many corporate environments. It's something to put your hands on, to touch, to tear your eyes off of the monitor screen and read like in old times.

Some clients may find it superfluous or pretentious, or both, but others will perceive it as a welcome sign of reliability, seriousness, permanence, stable foundation, a sign that you aren't going to disappear overnight like an e-scammer. Sort of like what still having landline came to mean, at least before the fake kind became popular.

Take Inventory, Check Out the Other Folks

From time to time it's time to take inventory and see where you are at and consider where you want to go and how much distance you've already made.

Of course, you can say it's difficult to be objective, nemo iudex in causa sua and so on, but you don't need to be the epitome of impartiality to just note down your most relevant qualifications, such as degrees, accreditations, years of experience and other such data. Two plus two still makes four, no matter how modest or not you are.

Try to aggregate the data and preferably end up with something like elevator pitch as a result, minus the pitch. Peel off the marketing. We're taking a somewhat sober assessment in order to see what marketing you could use, so it's better to start from raw data than the marketing soup you've been serving for a while.

Now go find some CVs, bios and profiles from:

• leaders in your language or field, or otherwise already where you hope to one day be
• people more or less at your own stage
• the rookies

See what the leaders or experts are doing and how. Depending on your long-term vs short-term focus for this little exercise, you can choose either the rock stars or people who are one or two steps ahead. There is a chance they are doing it right, if it works them, especially the rock stars. Those who are economically successful are more likely to do it right than people who you just know are good because you are qualified to see the difference and judge the work on your own. Especially those people who are economically successful but not really spectacular translators are probably good at the art of finding and convincing their clients. 

Look for similarities. Look for something which makes them successful and which you also already have, or are slowly getting there.

Find inspiration for immediate changes or scout the road ahead for information to keep in mind as you proceed. It's up to you.

Next check out the folks who are more or less in the same place. Is there anything they are doing better than you? Any smarter (e.g. shorter or more convincing) ways of saying practically the same thing? How about communicating the same information in a more inviting and reassuring way? How are they bringing out assets that are more or less on the same level as your own? (For example, you can learn from a medical translator if you're a legal one and vice versa). Anything they haven't thought about? Anything they missed but the more successful people did not? If they otherwise look very similar to you or to one another, how could you distinguish your message?

Now the the rookies. There's a chance some of them are replicating by-the-book solutions without really understanding them, but some may be quite creative simply because they don't know what exactly they're supposed to do or don't yet know what to copy. You can still learn from someone who does not yet know as much as you do overall. Competition is rough there, so there's a chance that those of the newbies who manage to eke out a nice living already know quite a lot.

Not to encourage elitist attitudes, but if you've been around for a while, you'll need to look for ways to bring out that experience in your copy and turn it into an advantage. I think that looking only within your bracket or ahead would not give you a complete picture. To keep track of progress you sometimes need to go back to how things are on the earlier stages of the road. You don't need to be negative in order to use the rookies' CVs and copy to measure your own progress. It's mostly the matter of demonstrating the benefit of your experience.

Don't get too carried away. It's better to underpromise and overdeliver than the other way round. Your presentation needs to reflect where you are and not where you hope to be in 5 years from now. Finally, pardon me for bringing this up, but if you feel like borrowing from one specific person rather than a pattern you saw in a wider group, remember to respect that someone's intellectual work and creative effort, which is protected by intellectual property. Where in doubt, ask permission or come up with something that's simply not as similar. Play nice.

Translation Is Not A Shameful Secret

One would think that most of such theoretical considerations: 'foreignization' (I maintain it's not a valid word) versus 'domestication', should the translation read like an original or like a translation (no, there is no one and only pre-ordained answer to this), should you cover your tracks as a translator or not — belong to the word of literal translation only.

Heck no. That's not true. Only, they are seen and judged through the perspective of literary translation, which is what probably 90% of practicing translators are not doing.

Maintaining that full-on domestication is the only right way of translating is a hoax, along with the resulting sentiment that it is good to disguise your translation even at the expense of sacrificing accuracy with no corresponding gain in beauty or quality, just to make your text farther removed from the original, less traceable to it. Like that's even a legitimate goal!

(Which it is not, it's hoax.)

The translator's job is to translate, not to validate and promote phobias (including xenophobia) and superstitutions, and a lot of modern translation creed is superstition that has little basis in real science. It just gets repeated over and over and dressed in the trappings of ethical precepts That Must Not Be Questioned. They just get repeated over and over.

This collection of attitudes is harmful to us. It reinforces our clients' beliefs that were shameful, best not mentioned, best swept under the carpet, you know, like in that Bismarck quote:

Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.

Seriously? Why should one willingly allow one's profession, one's calling, one's job, often one's hobby or passion, to be held in that sort of prejudiced regard?

It is also consistent with the business model and business interests of translation agencies. Think about it: To whose benefit is when translators are nameless, invisible, tucked in the shadow, swept under the rug, in short: they supposedly don't exist?

And which kind of client is being wooed when appeasing and actively catering to and feeding xenophobic feelings is the value proposal? — Parochialism would be the most charitable description of that sort of thing.

Just like you don't need to be ashamed of your core service and core value in your value proposal and price justification, you don't need to be shamed of your work in, well, your work.

The Third Way: Increase Awareness

Some minutes ago I read an article from Jim's Marketing Blog from two months ago, linked by Frau Newell somewhere on Facebook. It's worth reading in whole, but without further ado, according to the author's powerful opening statement (sort of):

To get that price / value balance right, we have 2 options:

1. We can pump more value into the product or service.
2. We can lower the price.

In the context of translation, I immediately thought of the third way, probably as a result of thoughts crossing my mind of late, perhaps since April or May:

Increase awareness.

Strictly speaking there is no contradiction here, as the value needs to be in before you can raise awareness about it. But it's worth noting that:

1. Once you put the premium value in, you'll need to communicate it or chances are it won't catch, which the author notes in saying: we are fooling ourselves if we expect prospective clients or customers to pay a premium, for something that’s average or close to average.
2. Chances are the premium value is already in, so you need not to add it but to communicate it, right now. Which is also in the text but requires some reading into it, preferably with an open mind.

My proposition is that translation does not need any more value pumped into it, it needs better communication of its existing value. Any communication of its value would be a good start.

Actually, it would be false to say that no value communication exists, but it rests on the wrong premises:

1. Added services of a kind which is really copy-shop services, or office assistance or entry-level technical assistance, which puts the profile of the profession below what translators' education and credentials would suggest.
   
   A lawyer will naturally end up gophering quite a lot in his initial years at the firm, even brew a couple of cuppas while at it, but no firm ever advertises lawyer-made coffee and lawyer-made copies as the added value that sweatens the deal, let alone its unique sales position. And this even though some lawyers are really conscious about courtesy, hospitality and warm and cosy client care. Plus, if a lawyer drove a truck, it would still be pilled at the same hourly rate as legal advice.
   
   
   
   (Or real consulting but without real qualifications. I recall a European translation agency contract where one of the attachments, an ethical code actually, required translators to check the correctness of source code while localizing software. I also recall a smart client who ordered legal advice 'localized', with a translation price tag and not legal advice price tag. Many translators probably have tales of expectations of typesetting, DTP, graphical editing and all sorts of checks in addition to just translating well.)
   


2. Making translators look like that cleaning person with hidden talents, who is probably inreality a good fairy and who will quietly fix and polish a corporate manager's reports, filings and sales mail while sweeping and mopping his office at night. That, and Captain-Obvious-style consulting, telling clients things any twelve year old should know.
   
3. Silly, unnecessary, outright dumb kinds of forcibly peddled added value such as preserving the intact layout of... incoming mail, down to copying the sender's signatures and logos over to the translation. I would question the soundness of mind of any client who really wanted to have his incoming mail translated like that as opposed to having it inadvertently peddled to himself by a translation agency or even translator anxious to furnish something, anything remunerable.
   
4. Distasteful manifestations of ready obedience, submission and flattery, comparable to falling prostrate before the client and begging for scraps that fall from his table. 'Your wish is my command' is a real translation tag line I've seen, but by far not the only one in the same vein. You don't win respect that way. And you get scraps, bones, not serious compensation for your services.
   

Much of it is probably due to the situation translators and agencies currently live in, having their self-esteem constantly undermined and even sometimes functioning in circumstances in which self-esteem is a luxury some just can't afford.

The one thing is, if you don't have faith in yourself, it's hard to expect that others will. I'm not encouraging you to embrace the vice of pride but rather to take honest inventory of your skills and qualifications, their worth, their value, the path that led you to achieving them, the effort, the emotional reward. See the good things, the valuable, the unique. If translation represents no real value to you, then something is going wrong.

The other thing is that unlike what many (but not all!) marketing writers and speakers currently preach, it's not exclusively about defined benefits, or wants, or exclusively things that pertain to your client's business and not you. And it certainly is not about worshipping the ground the client walks on and wagging your tail hoping he'll throw a bone, which is as poor a strategy for winning clients as it is for winning girlfriends. To get a client hooked — and turning clients into hardcore fans is an idea I first heard from a law blogger — you need to tell story. It always is about a story. There are places in this world where stories are currency and the sum of $1, $10 and $100 is 3 colourful paper trinkets, not 111 dolars.

Tell a personal story. There is a reason lawyers use bios on their websites. About 60% of their traffic goes to the bios. Personal does not mean TMI, so skip the laundry of your multilingual home (unless you really are a good writer), but do tell a story about your academic studies and your professional path and the work you do these days. Don't be daft and presume that it would be of no interest to your client, like many people say. How do they know? Besides, I believe I've already covered the nonsense of treating your client like an alcoholic father (who must not be upset in the slightest, not made to listen to even a hint of something that's of no immediate relevance to him and his current situation).

Everybody loves to hear stories, you just need to find a way to tell them without driving people off or putting them to sleep. If you perceive yourself as a 'cultural mediator' (two individuals are also two cultures, on some level), a 'builder of bridges' or whatever else translation propaganda currently bills us as being, it would be a good test of the skills you supposedly rely on for a living.

By way of illustration, I never studied languages or translation myself at a university level because back at the time I'd thought it would teach me nothing new. (Edit: Oh wait, I did for a year in 2010-2011.) However, a couple of months ago, I was mining the faculty website for terminology and buzz words when translating a colleague's transcripts, and I got hooked on the narrative. It sucked me in and wouldn't let me go. Why oh why can't translators put similar narrative on their own websites? If it worked on a cormudgeonly skeptic like yours truly...

In short, believe in the value of what you do. Communicate that belief. Make it contagious. Show, not tell, even using words for the purpose. Give your prospective clients a chance to appreciate the value. They can't if you won't let them.

Axe the Tools! (No, Just Trim Them To Size.)

No, don't literally. I have something else in mind.

I'm reading Luke Spear's The translation sales handbook. A roadmap to higher rates, better clients almost as I'm writing this, so it'll be quick.

Essentially, at some point in the introduction Luke says:

I plainly could not have earned the figures that now offer me a degree of stability without raising my rates and using tools.

And he's not alone. Many people will say the same. You could even say social proof is there.

On the other hand, I look at the phrase and I want something different. Tools are important, but tools don't make a translator. To be sure, they can speed up our work and make it more consistent, more reliable, easier to manage. Imagine life without online dictionaries and other resources (e-books, articles, forums and groups) which allow you to get away with just spending some bucks from your credit card and avoid the trip to a physical library with a paper notepad (which you possibly still do from time to time anyway, just not as often as it would be necessary otherwise).

But I always want to emphasize the translator and deemphasize the tech. There is nothing wrong with the tech, but think where we are positioning ourselves if our core sales/marketing proposition is the fact that we work with a certain CAT tool. Meaning we're available for work with TMs (translation memories) and, more importantly, for fuzzy discounts (reduced rates on the basis of some parts of the text being e.g. 80% similar to a record in the TM or even to some other part of the same text).

CAT logos are a prominent graphical element on many translator websites, you'll see them everywhere (personally, I have a CAT licence, but I refuse to put up such a sticker). CAT trainings are often emphasized as prime CPD (Continued Professional Development). Where does that put us? Right on the assembly line! We're turning into CAT operators. Not being turned, turning. We do it to ourselves.

It is pretty much compulsory to have CATs right now (although there are some translators who don't have any and do fine, even prosper), but there is no compulsion to define ourselves through them.

What about other tools? Does one really need a specific tool to keep track of your billable time? If you do, does it have to be anything else than pen and paper? Does one definitely need a piece of software to save notes? (Cork board! Post-it notes!) Accounting tools... seriously? It's possible to churn invoices fast enough without even having a template (guess how I know). Less convenient but still doable.

(For the record, a law blogger I've read recently gives this kind of advice: if you're a low-tech person befriend a gadgeteer. If you're a gadgeteer, befriend a low-tech person who relies on pen and paper. Either way you can learn useful things. That's good advice.)

Anyway. Draw your authority from your translation and subject-matter education and experience, not from your tech tools. Tools are just tools. They have their uses, but we need to emphasize the translator, not the tools.

So I'm not saying we should totally remove CATs and other tools from our presentation but rather put them in perspective and proportion. Specific feature, concrete benefit. Something to the tune of:

I use [insert CAT name], which helps me keep my translations consistent and charge less for repeating parts.

rather than:

I have [insert CAT name], which validates me as a professional translator.

Okay, so how does this relate to earnings, as per the quotation in the beginning?

The challenge is to position ourselves and present ourselves so that we don't have to rely on tech, as an argument or otherwise, in achieving or justifying decent rates.

A while ago, I read the description of a philological degree course at my old university, where I had studied something else, and I was hooked. If I was hooked, why would a client not be?

Non-Trivial Translation

Twitter and Facebook are currently full of The Translator Approach in Translation Studies
– reflections based on a study of translators’ weblogs by Helle V. Dam of the Department of Business Communication @ Aarhus University.

Between 2008 and 2013, the author studied more translation blogs than I knew existed, and came up with a number of interesting observations. Those can all be summarized in one thought expressed in the beginning (emphasis added):

In the selection of respondents, every effort was made to ensure a sample of translators
with a strong professional profile, thus presumably at the high end of the translatorstatus
continuum. Notwithstanding, the results of the studies consistently indicate that
even these translators have relatively low occupational status.

Yes, even well-know translators don't necessarily make much. I would be surprised to see a celebrity translator claim the hourly rate of a generic accountant or junior lawyer in American terms. Things are more complex on this side of the pond, but the rates hailed as pure gold are paltry if you've been to the legal world. A lawyer or accountant or medical doctor with a recognizable name might not actually make €200 per hour, but he would almost certainly bill much more unless he ran a lean solo practice.

Income, visibility, prestige and appreciation of our comparatively good education were all low.

Also, supposedly, the bloggers invariably stress that there is a large income disparity and that a translator’s earnings depend entirely on his or her skills, expertise and professionalism. Well, let's have some variety. I totally disagree with that notion. Even though it's obviously meant to be a bit of a metaphor and poetic expression, it's still wishful thinking and ignores the laws of economy, as well as a bunch of subjective factors concerning individual translators, which are not skills or expertise, unless it's skill and expertise in business and marketing, which is not the same as expertise and skill in translation (even business and marketing translation).

Later, the author notes that bloggers seemed to divide translator in two fundamental income categories, invariably putting themselves in the higher category, with comfortable or fair or even explicitly high rates. While I believe that's a simplified view of what they say, still, what are they supposed to say? They'll tell you about the good times but not about the bad times. You can't really tell the public when you're struggling.

I think it was highly perceptive of the author to pick up on the more than cliche (like, no. 1 of translation copywriting), of which I'm no big fan. In asserting that his own translation services are more than translation — and therefore for that reason deserving of a semi-decent rate — a translator effectively asserts that normal translation does not deserve a halfway decent rate. Which doesn't really help raise the profile and value of translation in clients' eyes but rather does the opposite.

The same observation I'd submit with regard to other ways in which translators typically try to assert their value. And I'll be very frank in saying this, so please don't take offence: translator's clumsily cling to added value and beat that horse to death. If you assert a ton of added value within standard rates, you're essentially saying that the core value is poor.

And you become not a valued, respected professional on par with a lawyer or doctor or architect but an added-value provider who is useful because he helps fish out typos in the original, fix the bad maths or even straighten out poor bits of legal or medical advice or otherwise does something which someone else — someone paid and respected better — should have done. And preferably with a deep bow, humbly conceding the spotlight to whomever should have done it the way it is after the translator fixed it. Free of charge and for a patronizing pat on the back (or head even, if I'm going to be really figurative here).

Or document management. Because your translator knows where the files you've misplaced are. Seriously?

However, I wanted to focus a bit more on a translation-related example for a change. It was intended as an illustration of the idea that translation is not mindless substitution of words. It didn't — for once! but only seemingly, I think, as I'll show in a minute — concentrate on added value, which, in my book, is a huge plus.

A quick trip to Google reveals that inspiration came from Naked Translations. The post was in French, but the article used an English translation. Let me quote:

I think I can trace back my love of translation to one particular passage [in a novel] […] during a conversation, one of the characters moved from using ‘vous’ to using ‘tu’ to address a troubled young man in need of comforting […]:

‘Mais êtes-vous certain de vouloir nous quitter?’
‘J’ai bien peur de ne pas avoir le choix.’
‘Tu vas me manquer.’

The switch from ‘vous’ to ‘tu’ indicated a shift in the relationship from formal to something more intimate and personal. This is how the English translator dealt with it:

‘But are you sure you want to leave us?’
‘I’m afraid I have no choice.’
‘I’m going to miss you,’ she said, taking his hand in hers.

The increasing closeness, which was expressed through language in the French text, was thus
translated by a physical gesture in English. I remember thinking that this was just wonderful, and
being quite taken by the cleverness of it all” (5, 5).

For comparison's sake, Google Translate returns (which I confess I think I actually like better):

'But are you sure you want to leave us?'
'I'm afraid I do not have a choice.'
'I'll miss you.'

So, basically, another example which ultimately comes down to added value: the translator's value consists in adding substantive content. In literary translation, that's a bit like throwing in a tip of your own when translating a how-to guide in business translation. It's not wrong (although I'd personally just contented myself with, 'I'll be missing you,' both to mark informality through the use of the continuous form and to make it closer in meaning and form to the original), but it's not quite translation. It goes beyond translation, and it shouldn't really be done without talking it over with the author first, which I don't know but just suspect was probably done (in which case it would make sense to inquire as to the extent of the author's contribution, such as by describing the scene in more detail, which would essentially be a supplementation of the original). Because it's certainly up to the author to make the decision on any novel PDA in a novel. ;)

How about we, instead, come up with some ways of making ourselves look useful other than fixing the original or expanding on it? Our job is rendering, not fixing or expanding.

Sometimes you have to ditch the form to render the content, and sometimes you even have to ditch the content if the form's what's important (for example in certain word plays). Sometimes you translate by addition (for example English into Polish will sound awkward if you don't throw in a bunch of past participles for padding), sometimes you translate by omission (and not only of the padding), in some other instances you need to substitute a functional equivalent that sounds nothing like the original. Well, sure. But the job is normally about finding equivalence and reconciling fidelity and style.

So let's demonstrate our competence in translating, not in providing added value.

Oh, and one more thing: our clients usually don't need to see us in pyjamas, jumpsuits and beach gear and hear about our authority problems and dislike of structure. (Not that all of us fit this image.) A marked lack of professional decorum is one of the reasons our status is often low.

Lesson from Zegna

First look at Zegna's Su Misura website. Su misura means 'to measure', which is another expression for bespoke suits. Any associations already? 'Bespoke' is not a word unknown in the translation sector, but we've probably all heard 'tailored' one million times too many. So this is a tailor's website. Tailored to the tailor. And it's also a (brilliant) showcase of modern web design.

The entire design looks more like an exclusive magazine than a website. This is in line with the modern trend, now that real design professionals have taken the job and the bandwidth allows for large pictures with huge file sizes.

The guiding thought seems to be show, don't tell, but words, of course, are used. Just sparingly. And they write on the picture instead of under it. (Make no mistake, the words are important, what they are not is many.)

The home page is not cluttered. There is a fair deal of text, possibly a bit too much and a bit too pitchy, but with plenty of breathing space for the reader.

And there is no freaking action button. No huge red button with GET YOUR FREE QUOTE written on top of it. There is only a small icon, in the same white colour as the rest of the text, and it says request an appointment. Right? Request. Not get. Or demand. You can request it. You'll probably get it, but you too need to be polite and realise that even though you're the paying customer who's going to be catered to on a very personal level (down to making your lapels reflect your personality), you can't be throwing your weight around, thumping your fist on the table and dictating terms. You request. And what you request is an appointment.

In short, there is no in-your-face sales-guided actioning.

Also, the guy sitting on the sofa is a customer. Or a potential customer — someone who needs a suit or, more probably, wants a Zegna suit. Got it? Let's say your name is John Smith, Spanish translator. And someone on the Internet wants a Smith translation. Do you jump at it and say, 'Hi, that's great, let me give you a discount for signing up and another one for volume (...),' or would you rather convince the client that he's in good hands and will get a good translation just as the name (or brand) seems to be promising?

In short, your client wants a tailored translation. A tailor (no -ed) translation even, as there's not even necessarily going to be much tailoring in a good number of cases. So will you get out of your skin to make it look like a rack one? Will you price it like a rack one? While working your hands off to provide tailored and tailor-level service? As opposed to Machine Tailoring?

The other thing is that the shot makes the client look like the star and the main hero of the copy. So it's all about the client — but please notice how Zegna managed to do this without falling flat on its face before the customer.

Let's move on now to Personalization, which is the second tab.

You may have heard that clients don't want to hear about translation, that they don't care, nor should they. What rubbish. It only works for goods which are not supposed to be appreciated or cherished.

Details of the work are not forced on the visitor. No more than one new picture and several lines of text appear each time the visitor, interested, himself presses the small and unintrusive arrow button. Personalisation. Fabrics. Buttons. Cufflinks. All the information about the details is there, available to you, if you want it. If you keep pressing the arrow button, there will always be something new. But it isn't forced on you. Well, almost always. There are about eight slides.

(And they mention exclusive cashmere sweaters after gaining your attention with designer suits. Cross-selling and complementary offer.)

And I really want you to notice the unabashed references to the production process. Or, in more humane language, pictures straight from the work. Don't listen to people who say it's bad to include those, they're wrong. Unless they want you to sell easy translation solutions at discount prices. Making your work look easy sounds like just the right branding solution for that! (Because it's not even marketing, it's branding, it's more intimate to your brand, which basically means your reputation and image.)

The you can move on to The Suit. Yes, simply The Suit. How about The Translation?

Surprisingly, The Suit shows the suit. What does this mean? It does exactly what it says on the tin. Does exactly what it says on the tin is not a failure to come up with sophisticated advertising. It actually is a real, 'sophisticated' advertising slogan. It also relates to another principle: KISS. Keep it Simple, Stupid. According to Wiki, the KISS principle was noted by the U.S. Navy, favouring operable simplicity to overcomplicated gadgetry.

Below the text — and I assure you the incredibly posh typography is very simple to do on a technical level; plain text and no PhotoShop — you can see two icons now. And the incredibly elegant white icons are also simple. If you're a Windows user, go Start > Run > charmap.exe (this link may work) and select Webdings or Windings. See?

Also, like I said, the icons are two: apart from requesting an appointment you can discover the gallery. The gallery has a grand total of five suits in it, which is a very concise portfolio. To wit, a short, concise portfolio the prospective client can take a look at just before requesting his appointment, i.e. contacting you. (Because you aren't pushing for a sale, you're enabling contact with you.)

The text itself is quite inspirational. I won't quote it. Read it where it is to see hands on how it works. (I want you to see the result.)

When you move on to The Jacket, you can read about sartorial tradition that has been elevated to a fine art by our craftsmen. The opposite is currently happening in translation — because it's in the interest of huge 'language service providers', often technological companies, to make it look like we don't exist, like translators are replaceable, machine translation is the new big thing and so on. On the other hand, translation has traditionally been regarded as at least somewhat creative or even if not properly creative than at least associated with that. And there is also an analytical and even scientific flavour to some types of it.

What does it say on your diploma? In most cases it probably is: Master of Arts. You're a master, and your trade is an art. Even if it's Bachelor, bachelor still means teacher. Someone who may not be an official master yet but is qualified to teach others. Professional Translator isn't that bad. But how about Master Translator?

Additionally, [a]s a final detail, an exclusive personalized label that bears the customer’s name is sewn on each sleeeve unit. A text being translated naturally bears the author's name — or the name of the client, who is the author's employer or client. (And this is something largely lost when going through a chain of multiple agencies.) Perhaps the tag is not there, but it's obvious someone wrote the thing and gave it its individual character.

Let's take a look at Platinum & Premium Collection now. Only request an appointment, no huge rate sheet or service plan.

I'd like you to take a look at one thing in the text, though:

Symbol of prestige and very exclusive in facts, the Platinum Collection expresses an unconditional pursuit of sartorial excellence.

What's the unconditional pursuit of translation excellence — or even writing excellence, when you 'transcreate' poor source copy into perfect target copy under the excuse of converting into a different language — doing in your gives-us-your-best-rates budget service plan? Or even your run-of-the-mill work for run-of-the-mill prices?

Finally, the request an appointment page. There is actually an action button at this time, but note how it's beige, not red or even orange or even yellow. It comes in the same colour as parts of the text (asterisks, links, 'required fields', borders), not different.

The text says that the appointment will enable you to choose (not design and brand*, the client is not Zegna!) your very personal Su Misura suit, starting from the selection of the fabric right down to defining all the details that will make it truly unique. Yes, defining the details. And while they sell sweaters too and will probably give you a coffee, there isn't really a lunch with that or a car ride or logging into the client's online system, or invoicing on the client's template. And the client surely doesn't get to define the price tag. The designer tag is Zegna's, and the price tag is also Zegna's. A client who owns a shop with suits off the rack or manages a network of small-time tailor workshops will not get to slap the name of his network on the suit and even define the price to boot. (And if the client resells the suit, it will be sold as a Zegna-made suit.)

* The client does actually get to brand the suit, but it's an owner's brand not designer's brand. An owner's brand is perhaps as intimate as the designer's or maker's, but different. The owner, if the suit was tailored for him, owns the measure and specs, but does not ultimately own the design and making of the suit. Again, the client — or owner — does not replace Zegna.

For the record, however, Zegna could be compared to an agency (or so called translation company), not a freelancer, despite its origins. If you're a tailor working for Zegna, it won't be your name and surname on the tag. Who owns the sale, the process, the transaction, owns the tag, the brand. If you take your place in the shadows, the agency is Zegna, not you. This is fine if you don't want the spotlight and if you execute instructions, processes and routines designed by someone else, whose design makes it so unique and good.

... But no matter how agencies would like to think that's the case with them, it's not. The agency production and QA process is pretty much the same everywhere, and client service is either better or worse but still generic. The motors of uniqueness are mostly two: the client and you. Good, high-quality agencies have editors and choose the translator mix and the client mix, but even that can't compare to the uniqueness of clients and their needs and translators and their profiles, biographies, skills, personalities.

So try to work on your tag.

One more thing. The entire site has fewer than 1200 words. Possibly even fewer 'effective words'. What would it feel like to think about translating it for €120 if you got a good deal — and then finding it in Google, watching it like this? Are you sure the translation agency would charge in the hundreds? Or the ad agency?

Or would a major global brand for high-quality personalised products (works of art, as it rightly sees them) be thrilled to hear that the job took 1-3 hours of time from an anonymous low bidder? Food for thought.

Don't Sell a Company by the Stock (Moving Beyond the Word Count and the Minimum Charge)

I'm not a fan of word rates. As much as I'd prefer to remain objective and pragmatic, I probably am biased against them. They introduce a small, cheap unit which makes the billing look petty. They mentally associate our work with word-by-word conversion, which we know is not the case even in literal translation. They produce nonsense high numbers like 45,000 words. And they invite contention: What exactly counts as a word? (There can be a 15% difference between analyses from two different CAT tools.)

Per-word billing surely has its advantages. I discussed them a while ago along with the disadvantages. I actually concluded they possibly outweighed the disadvantages, at least in the context of time-based rates and pure flat rates (i.e. flat rates with no underlying figures provided to the client). Yet, I still find it difficult to like it. Perhaps as a Pole used to per-page billing — which is one heckuva bother to work with, by the way — I might just simply be biased against the smaller unit, but who knows, perhaps there's more to it.

Pages are better, to my mind, because they are not so ridiculously micro-scale. They rely on a character count, though, and that's subjective too, in the why-didn't-you-choose-a-shorter-word-when-one-was-available sense, and obviously characters are smaller than words. And 'standard' pages are hopeless in comparison to real-life pages. Because the A4 pages, not the 'standard' pages, are the real thing, and the clients actually get that right.

Speaking of which, and we're now getting closer to what I really want to talk about, clients are frustrated with translation billing systems. If they had a chance to avoid them, they'd probably jump at it. So why not give it to them, especially if we aren't exactly thrilled with them ourselves to begin with?

Sometimes clients asking for a quotation will describe the text in some detail but not actually offer much more than a ballpark estimate in terms of volume. A hint, yeah, but that's it. To them, the volume is relevant but not all-controlling.

And they got that right too. Their attitude is healthier than our own, even though we are the professionals. Word counts are often useless with short texts. I've done 2500 words in an hour, and I've done 120. And we use different rates for different kids of texts anyway, or surcharges. Mileage may vary, but probably every translator has some experience with this.

You may even have noticed that per-word rates don't rise hand-in-hand with time required to complete the task. Something which takes 80% more time may command a 20% premium (for a 33% effective pay cut), but I wouldn't count on more. On the other hand, simpler jobs capped 20% below your rates may save you 80% work time (for a 300% raise).

One thing that frustrates me is how often translation requires equal or greater knowledge and skill than the writing of the original text did, and yet translation fees may still be so unimpressive compared to whatever the text must have cost. Such as dozens versus hundreds, or hundreds versus thousands. Or so we think. There are many hungry writers, actually, and copywriters aren't necessarily any richer than translators.

On 1 May, I took a look at six-figure copywriter Ed Gandia's pricing guide, which is the equivalent of a menu card and which he shared as training material for other freelancers in line with his passion for teach. The document actually mentions word counts for most of the items, but it first and foremost pairs typical deliverables with their corresponding prices, or even quite vast price ranges such as $1000–$2000, usually including a very short specification of input (hours) or output (words) unless the task is straightforward enough to be self-evident.

So just why can't translators say: e-mail, short: this many bucks; e-mail, long: that many bucks? Website this, article that?

Especially considering that many of those things fall under the flat, all-across-the-board minimum charge many of demand for the shortest jobs?

The per-word pricing of projects which are very demanding but small in size, based on rates appropriate for long blocks of texts, is quite the nuisance and scourge of today's translation 'industry', where people come in with tightly packed copy where every word has been optimised, they unload on you style guides and instructions which are pretty much a campaign brief, and reference materials, all of which takes hundreds of times longer to read than that copy, and and they expect to pay pennies for it because that's how your pricing system works. And obviously that's cheaper than hiring a new advertising agency native to the target language, and there just might be a chance of effectively unloading a copywriter's brief on a translator. Something's gotta change in that system.

With larger orders, on the other hand, apart from the most obvious volume discount, sometimes we notice that clients don't even know how many zeroes to expect, hance they have those ideas of translating entire books for a couple hundred bucks. And that's also something which must change, and again, it doesn't require Swiss precision, just a ballpark range, even $10,000-$20,000.

If every translator's or agency's website said that translating a book cost several dozen thousand, people wouldn't be asking to have it translated for several hundred, and there'd be pressure to meet such a demand. Or a temptation to find a freelance contractor who would.

If you wonder about the hundreds, they are probably what a consumer can intuitively come up with as the value of removing the language barrier from a book the consumer wants to read, effectively unlocking it, in a way, just like he or she completes a micro transaction with an online bookshop on a smart phone with Internet connection.

In that light, a price in the hundreds is a generous offer since the book probably costs in the dozens! The consumer thinks about his or her own costs or value, not about production costs, economy of scale and so on. After tall, it is several times what the book costs, so doesn't it contain a healthy premium for meeting a custom demand? — Even though it grotesquely fails to reflect production costs (which are almost all labour), of which the consumer is unaware.

A debuting author may also lack a better idea. And the 'industry' has this unhealthy drive to please and to enable, which probably makes such transactions happen at least from time to time. You'd think about 'enabling' intercultural bridges and dialogues and even sales, sure, but they'd also think about enabling translation of however much text the client needs translated for however little money the client has to pay. Because that's enabling to business types, who are not quite our agents and don't work for our benefit.

Clearer now? I hope so.

Per-project approach is not a nonexistent concept in translation. You may already have used it, except not for pricing but in your CV or portfolio or some form of experience profile. Whatever you may want to say about 'online marketplaces', Proz.com's user profiles have a project tab where the volume in words or pages (or a couple of other units) is just one of the many variables you can enter and by far not the most important one. Last time I checked, volume was close to the bottom and rate wasn't even there — pun intended.

Got it?

Project. Project role. Project description. Language. Field. Finally volume. Per day if you feel like it that way.

You've probably been asked a couple of times by a client or agency to provide or at least approve and agree to freeze a certain specific lump sum of money to be your set-in-stone fee for the project. That's a per-project fee.

You can't make as much money selling words as you probably could make selling projects. Words are meaningless, projects are defined and have meaning.

Besides, they all tell you that you need to be unique, or brand yourself so, if you want to succeed as a freelance translator (or any sort of freelance professional), or just plain sell so you can make an income. But it really is about the client — which is why business websites talk about 'you' so much, for example — so why don't we make the client feel unique? Projects are unique, words are not.

Let's do some stock trading.

As a translator perhaps sometimes you fancy yourself a mediator between cultures (or markets — look at what Marta does) or facilitator or even enabler of opportunities (again, look at how Marta does it). Effectively, if your client is a business client, you're selling that client business. For example if your client is a realtor, you sell him a chance to sell homes to more people, and if your client is a cat lady with a knack for breeding the furballs for sale, then you're selling her the opportunity to exchange purrs and meows for dollars, euros etc. with people who don't speak her language.

So imagine you're a professional business salesperson now. Meaning you sell companies for a living (something which Marta would be terrific at). How do you do it?

Are you selling and pricing them by the stock? Puh-lease!

And words are just like stocks. There can be common stocks, preference shocks, voting stocks, non-voting stocks, treasury stocks. They can be restricted, or there can be a rights issue or not. There are typically thousands of them (possibly millions), and they typically have par value, basically face value, which typically means zilch because it's only vaguely connected with anything in real life where it originally came from, nobody remembers when. Sound familiar?

There's more to a company than the sum total of its stocks.

You'll try to see if the name sells, if there's a brand value to cash in on. You'll see and talk about what the company does or can do — or it won't be of any value to a lazy investor if its a niche thing nobody in the general market has heard about, or perhaps a crafty investor will pretend he doesn't see the value and look what profit he makes after getting it cheap off you. You may try and leverage some sort of a legendary founder or manager's personally, which basically means selling a personal story. Or you could lay the claim that its people are the company's most important asset and focus on the immaterial value created by the team and its synergies and everything the workers do together. You could also emphasise any synergies with whatever the buyer's business might be doing or the company's potential for reselling, preferably with a premium after restructuring the thing, paying off the creditors and breathing in some fresh air. Anything but the 48,531 common stocks and 20,387 preference stocks at the going stock-market price.

(Village stocks at Chapeltown, England. Photo: Austen Redman, Wiki Commons.)

Alternatively, perhaps think about your classmate who is now a realtor or works for one, or has in the past, or just knows one. Ask how the realtor feels about selling properties and buildings and apartments by the square metre or square yard. What about the square foot? Or how about square inch for that matter? (There going to be thousands of such inches even in a small apartment, check in Google.)

Even where it's same old flat for one working class family as for thousands of others (which can make it easier to miss that it's supposed to become someone's home and possibly a life-time investment), the realtor would probably still rather be talking about the nice architecture of the building (better still if the architect actually had an identifiable name) and the snazzy modern or quaint old finish of its exterior, the warm and inviting or cool and intriguing colours, the river front and the park, and the underground station nearby or at least the bus, and preferably health care at hand and supermarket nearby, you get the point. Might even want to talk to you about how cosy the house or apartment feels inside. Better still, how cosy you can make it feel and experience it, and so on. Something along these lines. Anything but casual vending by the metre — the square metre still being the omnipresent and never fully escapable parametr in their industry anyway, just like the word or page is in our own.

As a translator you almost certainly know that words are just a billing unit, a convention, a pars pro toto, something which simply makes it easier to calculate the price of a project. There are normally different prices for the same units depending on different circumstances, except that nowadays translation agencies have forced on us one flat rate for everything — claiming that they need this or they won't know how much to budget — no matter what sorts of different rates and surcharges they may be getting from the client on account of various variables describing the text or the job.

So don't allow the word to become the main thing — or rather try to dislodge it from its current role as the main thing — and see that there is value in completeness, in wholeness.

A complete thing is worth more than the sum total of its isolated constituent parts. Which is, among other things, why building your computer was something the computer shop charged you for, or advertised it as a freebie (markup being distributed among the parts' prices), or you had to do it yourself. Same with words. And sentences. And pages.

Back to minimum fees now. Let's think pragmatically. If you have a minimum charge which is the same as the price of, say, a thousand (1000) words, that's already longer than many a type of document or text will be.

What could prevent you from just simply listing those types of documents on a page, from top to bottom, with the same price repeated all over?

(And the typical number of words in brackets, because that's where I'm driving at.)

Projects sell. Words don't.

Then you could go up from there. Double the word count and see what fits in it. There's quite a lot of stuff in the 1500-2000 range. And that's a size you can easily grasp in your imagination! No complex thought devices like when you try to imagine 60,000 words, which is just a book of about 200 pages, but did you even know before I told you? (And I barely avoided needing to use a calculator for this figure just because I took easy numbers.) You can probably just see or feel, in your mind, the five or six pages that is, depending on how many and how large pictures. So you can basically stay on top of the size, mentally, and do some other operations like imagining how the complexity of the text or the need for research affects your workload and time investment and any monetary investment. Or the value your client receives.

(And how about entertaining the idea that a short description under a concept picture, which together takes a whole page, might perhaps be worth as much as a page-long block of text? I'm not saying it is, but it just might. And it might because there's a whole formula for that, which everybody uses for everything, and which was created by the David Ogilvy, the Father of Advertising. Yes, websites look like that too, millions of them (and websites are currently taking after printed media because modern Internet bandwidth can afford full-screen or half-screen JPG and PNG file sizes). And it's not like you don't have to look at the picture when you translate, or like those witty things take you only as little time as a paragraph of normal text in some sales report or balance sheet.)

Notably, if you're a legal translator — contracts typically stay under 2500-3500 words, and 10,000 is a separate genre. Website copy for a lawyer, or his client-getting letter, almost invariably takes between 5.5 and 6.5 standard pages (10,000–12,000 characters or ~1400-1600 words), and lawyers aren't even unique in this regard. Correspondence often has standard lengths, largely related to physical page count. Forms are by definition standardised, and the space in the blanks isn't unlimited. Nor is the court's patience, so some courts have a rule in place like no more than 50 pages with a specific font size, line space and margin size.

Pragmatic hint: Talk to colleagues, exchange experience, put together a list.

So create a list, a table with ballpark figures. Add descriptions. You can even put in a disclaimer about non-standard lengths, so you won't have to translate a 5000-word brochure for $200. For added value, you will impress your clients with your knowledge and organisation, something freelancers don't always have a good reputation for. And if you have a PDF sheet or online price list, a figure listed in there will sound more credible than anything you've only just come up with. And it will make life easier for your clients. And easier for you.

You also have a chance to let clients know how much work those documents tend to take. You can't blame your clients for not knowing if nobody has told them, or corrected them when they guessed wrong. If the 1000 words take 1-2 hours of research, say that. If applying a 50-page style guide to a 2-page translation takes 5 hours, again, say that. You can mention editing and proofing separately. Just state the workload if you have the nagging feeling that clients have no faint idea. Give them a chance.

And give yourself a chance to do work you'd enjoy if it weren't for its dollar-to-hour ratio.

Be a Writer Worth Paying for!

Rose Newell, with whom we chatted about zombie contracts in January, has it spot on when she says:

'Translators are interchangeable.' But good writers aren’t.

One of our core problems as translators is a lack of ability or opportunity (or drive, or skill) to differentiate (which is crucial to leaving auctions behind). The global village not only makes it easier to communicate, it also makes it painfully obvious there are millions of people to communicate with.

In the world of glorified translation memories, termbases, style guides and quality assurance dominated by tag verification, a: 'belief that translators are “interchangeable”, provided they have “a good TM and glossary”,' is easy to form, if not guaranteed.

Not that the claim is altogether false — there are many practising translators without strong writing skills, or don't use them. You don't need to be one of them. And if you aren't, then you don't need to wear the livery.

Time for a war story. Imagine you're a wounded legal nestling looking for a ledge to perch on and nurse the bleeding wings. You need to finance an unpaying but hopeful scholarly career at the same as a grassroots mass litigation campaign, which you also need to manage. Normal solo practice is out of the question, as are 100-hour weeks, and BigLaw's turtling up and shutting off anyway because it's 2009 and the peak of the crisis. It's time to do something drastic.

That's where I was five years back. The subjects of my first one or two translations were surely legal, but it didn't take long before clients started coming with a brochure about beauty products for women, a milk ad, underground and underwater photographic equipment directory, memories from a tour around the world, a website about lifestyle services, and all sorts of things. At some point I ended up translating high-grade anniversary prose for a sports car manufacturer, but by that time there were many other things I had done, including materials to sell computer games. I didn't have a shred of a formal qualification in marketing or copywriting. Heck, I don't even now.

Bragging much? Nope. Encouraging? Yes. And hopefully getting some audience for Rose.

The bottom line is: writing skills matter.

They allow to write your own legend. They allow you to be a protagonist and not an NPC. Unfold the storyline!

Back to Rose, though. Don't miss her Writers worth paying for scheduled for 2 May at Budapest if you can help it. If you're there in person, tell her I said hi (actually, please do — but don't tell her I said she actually gets better rates for her translations than many copywriters can hope for). Otherwise you'll have to keeping hoping with me that they'll share a recording.

Also take a look at Ed Gandia's podcast about a similar subject for… writers, actually. It will prepare you for what Rose is going to be talking about, as will Marta's leads.

If you have an inquisitive mind looking for an excuse, pay a Tweet for Alastaire Allday's free Think Like a Copywriter, which has seen classroom use.

A couple of days ago, I joked that translators already are copywriters — the similarities are striking if you get into it. The inspiration came from and post at Alastaire's blog, where he quipped the opposite — that copywriters were translators. Now, if a copywriter says that, why don't you capitalise on it? As a translator you have an edge! Now make it keen.