Legal eagle

Well here it is the end of January already.  I am in a lull with my work from TransPerfect, and it's a perfect time to catch up on administrative and marketing tasks.  I am very pleased that I have been kept busy to more than full capacity with the work from TPT over the past month.  My fears of not getting assignments from them after the holiday rush were quite unfounded.

I have been absolutely LOVING the work that I am getting, and it's all legal translation.  Contracts, bidding guidelines, court proceedings, divorce-related documentations, legal opinions, and financial contracts have constituted the majority of the work that I have been doing.

 I am also proofreading, and it didn't take me long to realize that this obviously means that some of the translators who work for them don't have the same level of skill that I have.  Sigh of satisfaction.  I wasn't sure I wanted to proofread, as I began doing so at a rate of payment that was about 25% of what I could earn translating. However I soon reasoned that the service I provide as a proofreader is almost more essential than the original translation, especially when the latter has been done by someone who is apparently not very skilled or experienced.  As a consequence, I put my price up to where it's worth it for me to be doing this work, and the company didn't bat an eyelash.  I continue to get as much work as I can handle and I am now charging twice the rate I began with.

I FEEL SO BLESSED to have this fantastic opportunity.  While I know my skill level is high, I still have a LOT to learn about the logistics of this business and the broader market, as well as about business skills generally.  It is clear that honing my marketing and presentation is key, and also that I can't do this unless I understand the market, my competition, and how to negotiate.

In all, it's a fantastic adventure, and it's new and fresh every day.  It's freakin' awesome, as my kids would say! And now it's time to run, as I have an interpretation assignment in half an hour.  I have taken up the interpreter's training where we left off in the fall after our instructor fell ill, and I will be fully certified and accredited by the end of February with that.  It has been really useful to me to do the training, not only because I have learned a lot about protocols and professionalism (and some things about the practical side of the task as well, in spite of the fact that I have been doing the job professionally for 4 years already), but in order to obtain translation-related credentials.  I am an accredited translator on the list now at Immigrant Services here in Guelph, and I have actually had a fair bit of work from them in the past month.  When I started this business 6 months ago, I hoped that I would achieve this kind of success, and now I can really see it happening.  I am SO happy and excited about it all!  Onward and Upward!!!!!

Happy New Year!

What a difference a month can make!  My last post was un lamento borricano...not really but a lament still.  In spite of my frustration at my last writing, I came away from the experience of creating another blog post feeling better than when I started.  As I underwent a process of self-questioning as to the effectiveness of the activities I have been engaged in as I nurture my little translation business into being, I came to some important realizations on the concrete front, and gave myself a helpful pep talk on the more intangible side of things.  When I wrote that last post, I had the sense of a buzzing, as of bees, just beyond the reach of my flowers...the work I have been putting into my translation business, it seemed to me, HAD created results, even though as yet they had not resulted in any income.  Well, by the middle of December I received word that I had passed the legal translation test for a large translation agency based in New York City, and on December 19th I started receiving a steady stream of translating and proofreading work from them.  Yay!!  I have been SOOOO happy, excited and thrilled to be finally WORKING!!  In the meantime, I had continued to work on proofreading and editing the very poor translations that were up on the website belonging to the Embassy of Guatemala in Canada, a pro bono project that I took on after going to their website out of curiosity and finding it strewn with egregious translation errors.

It was interesting to say the least to have a sudden flurry of work coincide with the preparations for our Christmas celebrations.  I have been hoping most fervently that I will continue to get steady work from the agency when the holidays are over.  It has occurred to me that it is possible that many of their regular translators are on holiday, and that may account for some of the volume of work I have received. Nevertheless being the QC FANATIC that I am, I am pretty sure that they will be happy with the work I have been doing.  I agonized over every word of that legal test, and they came back saying that I had only TWO small errors on the test:  one of repetition (I repeated "by and between" at the beginning of the mock contract), and the omission of one word in one of the articles.  Within a day of my returning administrative paperwork to them, they had called to discuss rates and CAT tools.  I was QUITE disappointed to realize that they were planning to offer me 5 cents per word less than I had stated to them was my minimum rate.  However I am at the "beggars can't be choosers" stage of my career at this point, as much as I feel I won't be here for long.  In the end, I can still make damned good money at around 40% of the optimal rate I would LIKE to be receiving for my work.  This is in fact heartening, because I expect to be working at 100% of my desired rate within 6 months to one year.

I have hired Marta Stelmaszak of Websites for Translators and the Want Words blog to help me with my marketing strategies.  While I am convinced that there is still plenty for me to learn on the technical and professional side of this business, the marketing part of it is where I feel I need immediate help.  I DAILY bless the miracle of the Internet, with its fantastical ability to cause barriers of time and space to evanesce.  I am super excited about going through the 8 modules that Marta has prepared for me.  So far, these have consisted of a very thorough recounting of my own abilities, training, education, experience, and on-line presence.

David is here beside me as I write my blog post, and he has just shared a tidbit with me from one of his Google Plus contacts:  Productivity tip:  Tim O'Reilly took this from Clay Johnson's book, The Information Diet:  #1 Productivity Tip: Spend 10% of your time consuming and 90% of your time producing. Make more stuff. Watch less. Read less. Do.  (Source: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fd5DAQ4bY3p)


This seems extremely relevant to MY last blog post.  I lamented my own distractibility and tendency to go down virtual rabbit holes on the web...I wasn't quite clear on why a part of me was telling me that I was wasting too much time, but I was very clear on that feeling!!  This productivity tip certainly speaks to that feeling.  Producing should be much more prevalent than consuming, when it comes to being productive!  Simple, obvious, but apparently, something that many of us struggle with.

Either way, I am loving this exciting process.  It is much like the creativity of child-rearing...in some sense it feels to me like almost as great a privilege.  I am so lucky to have had my life experiences and the fabulous education that I have had.  Now, I am blessed to have the impetus, confidence, and support from my family, to forge into the grand adventure of running my own business.  I am absolutely empassioned by the daily learning that I must engage in to move forward in my enterprise. I have the strong sense of being incredibly blessed to be able to do this!  Woohoo.  Onward and Upward!!