Caroline
Job Title
Freelance Translator (previously employed as bilingual secretary)
Company and location
Quite mobile – sometimes in Hampshire – sometimes on our farm in Derbyshire
Industry sector
Specialist Language Services
Background:
Two-year bilingual secretarial diploma run by the French Institute, in Kensington, and then Paris for various companies/barristers. PA/Secretary to one of the Vice Presidents of Otis Elevators International.
What does your job involve?
I specialise in legal and admininstration translation work (contracts, court documents, agreements of all kinds, articles of association, minutes of shareholders’ meetings, board meetings, etc.). I receive translation assignments over the Internet; read around the subject matter, make much use of Internet for research purposes. Then I translate the work into the format desired by the client (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc). I am just embarking on getting to grips with CAT Trados/SDLX – machine translation programmes. I also handle telephone calls and enquiries (in foreign language and mother tongue) relating to my availability for work.
What hours do you work?
All depends on workload – but I can put in a good 6-8 hours a day – because I work from home with a laptop computer that can follow me anywhere, I can start when I want, where I want. I have a mobile phone so be can reached at any time – even when working on the farm sheep-handling (makes for interesting phone calls at lambing time if I am on duty in the lambing shed).
What skills and qualities are required for your job?
Apart from the obvious language and keyboard skills you need a good dose of the following: Patience. Humour. A good telephone manner. Organisational abilities for scheduling workload to ensure it gets back on or before deadline. The ability to say ‘No, I’m too busy!’. The nerve to put the price up when one has too much work. The confidence to turn work away if it is not within one’s area of specialism.
What do you like most about your job?
The sense of achievement in being able to promote understanding between different people/cultures. Independence - not having to commute to work. I love the learning experience too as I have had to read up on all sorts of subjects that I had not even heard about. I enjoy researching the Internet and reading around the topic on which my translation assignment is based.
Do you have any advice for people entering a similar career to yours?
Get good professional qualifications before embarking on any career. Master the computer and the telephone since as a freelancer these are your most important means of communicating to and with potential clients; learn about CAT (machine translation) tools – personally I don’t believe they will ever oust the human in translation, but they certainly make certain tedious jobs quicker! Join a professional organisation (like IoL) to get some letters after your name.
Find an area of life in which you are really interested. Once you have found the subject/topic that you feel at home with, then become a specialist in that area and promote yourself madly.
Get help when you need it: there are a lot of “communities” on the Internet that offer a virtual shoulder when you just can’t find the right words any more and there are also “billboards” where you can advertise your availability.
It is not easy to begin with – I started as a freelance translator by writing to all the big agencies in the countries that spoke my “foreign” (thus “source”) language namely France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Belgium etc. and sent out some 30 to 40 letters offering to do an assignment free of charge so they could judge my skills for themselves. I followed up with a phone call ten days down the line to remind them of my offer, and from those initial contacts, I secured 3 very good sources of work which kept me going for several years.
I now have 6 regular clients (agencies) in Paris, Glasgow and London. The Paris-based agencies send me the most work. I also get contacted out of the blue by agencies using the IoL’s Find-a-Linguist service.