Living in a sleepy Okinawan town, and dealing with clients 1,000 miles or more away, it's hard for me to get a gut-level sense of what this recession will mean for my Japanese-to-English translation business, and for the J2E translation industry as a whole.
So far, I haven't felt any ill effects from the recession. I'm [...]
One question that often comes up among freelance translators is whether we should give volume discounts. I'm not against giving them in principle, but I think that we need to weigh the pros and cons of doing so.
Crossed purposes
Often agencies will ask for rather large volume discounts — larger than translators are willing to give. [...]
When you're first starting out as a freelancer, it can be tough to figure out what rates to charge. This is especially true because once you settle on rates with a client, it's generally very hard to move them upward. The conventional wisdom is that if you want higher rates, you need to find different [...]
Often using Windows, you'll need to get the names of special folders, like "App Data," "Local App Data," "My Documents," and "My Pictures." This is especially true in Vista, where the recommended practice of writing app-specific data to the (Local) App Data directory is being enforced.
You can do this using the win32com.shell.shell module in the [...]
Lately I've seen a lot of blog posts about how tough it is to be a freelancer. I've been guilty of it myself.
But I remain a freelance translator because I love this career and lifestyle. In this post, I want to list seven reasons why.
1. Good income
Some people complain about low income in the freelance [...]
According to the 2007 Summary of ATA’s Translation and Interpreting Compensation Survey, the average US-based full-time freelancer earns $60,423 per year ($56,672 for non US-based translators).
Meanwhile, this post to the Honyaku mailing list for J-E translators reports the results of a survey given to Japanese to English translators in 2001. Here are the results for [...]
I'm a freshman in college, and I'd like to know what I should study in order to become a freelance translator.
Every once in a while, I see questions like this posed on mailing lists for translators. Sometimes people will find my blog and contact me directly with similar questions.
I think that freshman year of college [...]
As a freelance independent translator, I often have a hard time saying no to my clients. This is a pretty common problem with translators.
There are a lot of reasons why translators have trouble saying no to clients. One is that translators are generally on the introverted side. You kind of have to be introverted if [...]
Comments(4)