Tuesday, November 26, 2019

THE 4 QUALITIES OF A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR TO DEVELOP HIS BUSINESS

As a freelance translator,working for translation agencies or your direct clients, you need to demonstrate certain skills to successfully lead your professional life. Here are some tips inspired by the success of freelance developers.

1. Basics in Marketing

The freelance translator is above all an entrepreneur. Your talents and knowledge are your product. And to sell his product, a freelancer must know how to sell himself and enhance his CV. Marketing techniques such as personal branding and mastering your online presence will be not negligible assets.
A good online presence almost systematically involves building its own site. It is common for a customer to quickly search by typing your name into Google to check your references.
A blog or a showcase site will allow you to put yourself forward, it will be a very good marketing tool. Your site may be very light and not as complete as an agency's, but it must be clean and return a professional image.

2. Some developer skills

Several ready-made and free solutions exist, the best one currently being Certainly Medium.But if you decide to build your blog yourself, it's worth having basics in HTML and CSS. These programming languages will help you improve the presentation of your pages.
Fortunately improving the free resources to build a professional blog make it very simple to create your own blog. This without touching a line of HTML or CSS code. However, these languages are easy to handle (one day for both) and can be useful to you.
On the other hand, you don't have to learn PHP, Javascript and other Ruby on Rails, unless you decide to give up your career in favor of the (lucrative) freelance developer. Besides speaking of these freelance developers,go visit their blogs. You'll find great examples of how these programmers are putting themselves forward, and they are perfectly profuse in the digital tool.
In fact, they don't go through web agencies. Perhaps translators could follow the example of developers?

3. Translation Agency References

A client who works directly with a freelance translator without going through a translation agency needs reassurance. You are self-employed but you have references. Highlight them on your website and CV or profile on a professional social network.
Beyond the mention of the firm that used your services, indicate the type of translation you have done (word number, technical field...).
If you are just starting out as a translator and have not yet collaborated with an agency, indicate your translation services carried out on a voluntary basis, for example for an association.

4. Autonomy, essential for freelance translators

As an independent, you must be absolutely self-reliant. You need to be able to handle a translation without asking your client any redundant questions. If this client is not a translation agency, keep in mind that he expects you to solve a lot of the problems yourself.
However, he will be grateful if you ask him for confirmation on certain points (always offer him a solution). It is independently that you must decide when to ask a question to the customer or not.