Looking for clients

As a freelance translator there is one thing I’m not good at: looking for clients.

It might seem to be easy. After all, everybody has to do it.

But there is a difference with employees: a freelancer does not really have a curriculum vitae.

Well, you have, of course, but it’s not as easy to describe your past jobs. Usually I work for agencies, and those people don’t want me to mention the end clients I have been translating for via them.

Partly, they’re right. A real translation agency doesn’t just give tasks to their freelancers by sending work from their clients directly to the translator, nor does it just collect the translation and send it back to the client without much ado.

A real translation agency puts much work in it. They get the orders from the end clients, take a good look at the texts to decide which translator would be best suited to give the assignment to, but also decide who will be the proofreader or proofreaders.

They also have to decide whether to cut up the assignment into smaller pieces and distribute them amongst different translators. That can be necessary with tight deadlines, but even in such cases it’s sometimes not advisable. And if it is possible, there is some redaction necessary to put it all together.

It sounds easier than it is. It can be very confusing for the editing translator if his colleagues had chosen different translations for the same word. Not only literary translations can end up with different stylistic choices, but even technical translations can have variant solutions. And variation is even less acceptable for technical and business translations than for literary translations, because the users of the former text types shouldn’t get confused. The readers of the latter types, however, might even find it amusing.

In short: translation agencies have some arguments not to want their freelancers to mention the end clients in cv’s or portfolio’s, as the freelancer doesn’t do all the work. The agency is responsible for bringing it all together and making sure that the end result is flawless.

However, a good freelancer will make sure the agency has less to bother about.

But, of course, for the freelancer the trouble is how to let his prospects know that he has translated for important brands or projects.

You could argue: tell them for which agencies you’ve worked. But that poses another problem, as it’s basically telling to prospects who the competitors are.

So, yeah, contacting prospects is not easy when you’re a freelancer.