106 - How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator - Corinne McKay

More than a hundred episodes were needed for us to get the confidence (or the cheekiness) to invite this celebrity to our podcast. Yes, our dearest podcast listeners, a big round of applause, please, for Corinne McKay! Corinne McKay is an ATA-certified French-to-English translator and Colorado court-certified French interpreter based in Boulder, Colorado. A full-time freelancer since 2002, she specializes in international development, corporate communications, non-fiction book translation, and court/legal interpreting. Her book "How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator" has sold over 12,000 copies and has become a go-to reference for translation and interpreting professionals. Corinne also served on the board of the American Translators Association for seven years, including serving as ATA president from 2017 to 2019. So, fangirling big time, we asked her how she got inspired to write this book. She tells us that when she began working as a freelancer in 2002, freelancing was much less common than it is today, and to her knowledge there were few resources on how to start and run a freelance translation business. Now, looking back, she feels she wrote the book before she should have, since she had only been freelancing for 3 or 4 years. She is being modest, as Paola said, because the book is awesome and very thorough, and of course she has updated it in newer editions, so, don’t take our word for it (or hers), and check it out yourself! Her favorite anecdote of those first years as a freelancer is the one about a client asking her for an invoice. She had to ask her husband what to put in an invoice, like “pay me 75 dollars?” She laughs at how ridiculous it sounds now, but the truth is that most of us had terrible doubts at the beginning and it’s not always easy to find someone to help us untangle those mysteries. If she struggled with tasks as simple as that, she figured a lot of people might have the same problem. In 2008 she started writing the blog “Thoughts on translation,” which has more than 800 entries nowadays. Over the years, the blog became her main marketing engine for her classes and books, even though that wasn’t the goal when she started blogging. Her advice for those translators and interpreters who might want to do content marketing is that they should be willing to stay for the long run, because it’s a very useful marketing tool but it needs time and effort. Going 100% freelance or transitioning to a 100% freelance business is usually frightening and Corinne is very candid about it. If you want to be a full-time freelance translator or interpreter, Corinne’s advice is that you should save money or have some kind of financial net to hang in there for 1 year, even 2, until you can live off your work. “When you stress about money, you make bad business decisions,” concludes Corinne. Been there, done that… Her most popular blog entry is, in fact, How much do freelance translators earn? Is it enough? Her advice is that, instead of thinking of how much a client would pay for my work, we should figure out how much we need to make in order to reach our financial goals or have the same level of financial security as someone with a traditional job. We should add up all the expenses we need to cover, the hours we want to work per week, and look for the hourly or per word rate we need to charge. We should not only think about the billable hours of work, but also the hours we need to devote to our business that will not be paid, like hours spent on accounting, marketing, training, updating LinkedIn profiles, making budgets, etc.