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Becca Resnik 
United States
Local time: 09:20
Member
German to English
+ ...
David GAY wrote:
Even though I very much admire Becca for her great achievements, I think that her example is not conclusive. Although she holds an Engineering degree and translates in very sought after and rare language pairs in the field of mechanics, i.e. Japanese and German, she feels the need to pursue another degree because it is simply not enough to maintain a good standard of living. It s a red flag. It just shows how difficult the market is.
Copy/paste from my original post:
"There's been plenty of work for me this whole time, but my impression from what more experienced freelancers have said is that this field does see dry spells to a greater degree than medical."
Your inference is incorrect – I am indeed maintaining a good standard of living. However, less than a year into my freelancing journey (which is when I applied to nursing school), I had read all the warnings that the technical translation sector experiences dry spells, according to translators who have been doing this for a decade or two. I don't want to risk such a dry spell, so I am adding in medical to protect myself. My understanding is that any field can experience dry spells, but it's much less common with medical, and with two main specializations, I think it will be unlikely to see major losses in work/funds for any substantial period.
| | | | David GAY
Local time: 15:20
English to French
+ ...
Becca Resnik wrote: David GAY wrote:
Even though I very much admire Becca for her great achievements, I think that her example is not conclusive. Although she holds an Engineering degree and translates in very sought after and rare language pairs in the field of mechanics, i.e. Japanese and German, she feels the need to pursue another degree because it is simply not enough to maintain a good standard of living. It s a red flag. It just shows how difficult the market is. Copy/paste from my original post: "There's been plenty of work for me this whole time, but my impression from what more experienced freelancers have said is that this field does see dry spells to a greater degree than medical." Your inference is incorrect – I am indeed maintaining a good standard of living. However, less than a year into my freelancing journey (which is when I applied to nursing school), I had read all the warnings that the technical translation sector experiences dry spells, according to translators who have been doing this for a decade or two. I don't want to risk such a dry spell, so I am adding in medical to protect myself. My understanding is that any field can experience dry spells, but it's much less common with medical, and with two main specializations, I think it will be unlikely to see major losses in work/funds for any substantial period.
Good for you. You are very courageous to work almost full time while studying. You have great assets compared to most translators.you are very cautious because I think that with a background in engineering, a diploma in translation and your very sought after and rare pairs, you actually don t need a second specialization right now.
[Edited at 2022-06-23 15:08 GMT]
| | | | | No need to apologise to me! | Jun 23, 2022 |
David GAY wrote: Korana Lasić wrote: David GAY wrote: Korana Lasić wrote:
You obviously want to do this, hence you will try!
You've also learned through his thread how heterogenous both the field and the market are, so that's something.
We can all convey our experiences but yours will still be a very unique one and perhaps a year or two from now, you can tell us about it!
I've been freelancing since January 2020, so maybe my experience will be of interest to you.
Could I do both a full-time job and this? Oh sure! I can get as little sleep as possible and, for a time, keep on getting by, at best, at two jobs as good as the next person! Would that be the best use of my time? No, I don't think so!
If you cannot do this 20 hours a day, you are running the risk of ending up with an experience of proz.com that many have had of not being able to land good jobs/find good agencies through proz!
I work with 10 excellent agencies, so far, and I've found most by quoting for every sensible job on the job message board, replying to every email within an hour, and yes, this means replying at all hours, and then negotiating, learning, reading, watching, figuring out! On top of translation, there's: Correspondence, invoicing, figuring out rates, figuring out actual rates, dealing with an overzealous reviewer, making sure you aren't an overzealous reviewer, taking a 15-minute document job then spending 3 hours over the next two days explaining to the end client that just because they speak the target it doesn't mean they can ask you to replace words you absolutely must use with words that just sound better to them! Not in an actual document translation, at the very least. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone but you do really, if you want to make sure both the PM and the end client understand what they got and that it's exactly correct and right!
Throughout 2020 I didn't get a paid membership and that was a mistake! Things picked up 90% for me the moment I became a paid member!
I'm sure you can juggle both things for a couple of months or a year, but your experience will be skewed by the fact that, like people before me said, you are competing with people available 20 hours a day (at least for correspondence) and able to give better quality per short deadline than you will be able to! Let's not pretend that this will not affect the quality of your work!
Lastly, the more I read other people's experiences on the forum, the more I am convinced that I've chosen the best of the best to work with and that I am in fact doing great! I command very good rates, without being as expensive as to get only 10% of available work. The PMs I work with value my effort, make my life and work as easy as possible, payment terms are standard or better, and work is continuous. We mutually try to make as few mistakes as possible but have an adult understanding of the fact that mistakes shall be made.
Without any false modesty, very often I discover a mistranslation that has become so prominent it became generally accepted in a field as serious as pharmaceutical, and/or provide an insight in poor quality of work done by someone who should not be calling themselves a professional to a PM that does not speak the target language. Often enough I spend two hours on a document I could translate in half an hour because I want to be as thorough as possible. The things I worry about are, have I discovered a mistranslation in the whole field soon enough!? Have I been as thorough as the clients deserve me to be paying the rate I ask for?
At any given week I can be doing as many as two translations and one reviewing job from two different fields, and it isn't realistic for me to catch everything at once but I must try because each agency and each PM, however excellent they are and I've met some truly professional and wonderful people, only care about what I can do for them! They don't care much about the fact that I am a freelancer and, by definition, must work with many agencies/end clients to make a living! I must always make sure to remind them of that by asking for better deadlines, more reasonable rates, and loads of understanding when I catch something only at the 11 hour, thinking: "Let's do this my way but the other way must be some sort of a synonym too, after all, it's everywhere, including the reference materials sent by the end client"...
And then, luckily for all of us, the PM challenges my insistence on my way and we discover that the usual way this has been translated is a pure unadulterated mistranslation! I come out of the whole thing thinking, I should have caught this sooner! Note to self, just because the entire Croatian pharma is using a mistranslation this isn't an excuse not to catch it and say stuff like, I'm sure this is a synonym but let's do this my way!
I am trying to relate to you the level of dedication and quality I try to provide, but bear with me there's a bottom line to my borderline vulgar bragging and that bottom line is I still do not make enough for all this do have make any sense if I'd chose to live in London. I make more than a living wage by Bosnian standards, having the freedom to work when I want and as much as I want, and, if I don't want to reply to an email I sure don't have to, but the money would be very tight if I had to live on what I make as a freelancer anywhere decent in London.
The thing is, most people you will meet here, we have other sources of income. Some people are indeed retired translators with decent pensions, and some have partners with grownup jobs that nobody enjoys but they pay extremely well, which allows us to play freedom-fighter- lancers/digital nomads/we never conformed to our stuffy jobs so we became translators...etc
Some are highly successful translators in the financial sector and speak native level Japanese too, but these are few and far between and probably invest a lot as well on top of the savings from their old job!
Personally, my partner is a kind and generous genius that gets up at the crack of dawn works very hard, often 6 days a week, and has set aside a bank account where he puts money intended for me to use if I need it. I have the luxury to pick and choose only the best agencies, and not to say that people who want me to work for less than I am willing to work for are bad people or greedy, maybe some of them simply cannot sell translation work for a good enough price to be able to pay their vendors better!
So what is your situation? Have you a partner that can step in financially so you can leave a career that makes you unhappy and pursue this? Because you are at least a few years, and possibly more, away from making enough to financially justify leaving a job as stable as an NHS occupational therapist who at 20 years of experience can make 40-45K a year.
Having said all this, if you are going to do it, proz.com is a place to be! With all its downsides and as imperfect as we all are it somehow still works! Good luck! Maybe you can get back to us, this time next year perhaps, and tell us your unique experience of the translation industry, from a point of view of a newbie freelance translator, as well as of proz.com!
Get the membership! I mean it! Do not be as daft and silly as I was. I wasted a year on my stubbornness and my "but it looks so very 90s" attitude!
Good luck to you, my darling, may the Gods of freelance translation be ever in your favour!
Edit: I'm sorry for the typos and autocorrect blunders but between proz. com, my home internet acting up, and aggressive Grammarly addon I'm not sure how to turn off, today wasn't the best day for writing long posts but I tried.
[Edited at 2022-06-23 11:10 GMT] As other posters in this thread have pointed out, your situation is not comparable. You re based in Serbia where a wage of 800 euros per month is considered a very good salary, and MT translation in your target language is not yet possible whereas the French English pair is very common. So I m afraid it can t be compared. I've already pointed out as much! Certainly no harm in you doing it all over again, yourself! It's just the way you did it that implies either strawmanning or to the fact that you didn't even read what I actually wrote! Greetings to you and everyone in *ahem* Hungaria, from BiH!  Edit: Kidding! Not that it matters for what you wanted to point out and I know Serbia and Bosnia are (on more than a purely linguistic level) a case of a "tuh-may-tow/tuh-maa-tow"! Still, I do live in Bosnia and not Serbia, at least for now! [Edited at 2022-06-23 13:49 GMT] I ve just read the very beginning and it put me off. I didn t have the patience to read it entirely. You know, according to a study, in these modern times, only 20 percent of online articles is actually read by internauts. Apologies [Edited at 2022-06-23 13:58 GMT]
BTW, not that it matters but 800 EUR (whilst it might be a great assembly line) wage isn't a good professional salary in Serbia, or Bosnia for that matter!
Understanding a living wage and median salary in the region is further complicated by the fact that the median salary is reported lower than it actually is! Very high taxes push employers, including government employers, towards avoiding having to pay even more taxes by increasing something that can be loosely translated as a "one meal allowance"
This means that whilst the official salary stagnates, actual salary people earn does increase over time. One meal allowance was historically non-taxable and considered a lunch allowance. Some companies have transferred so much of their workers' wages to the one meal allowance that since late last year, I believe, the government (Bosnia) has changed the laws and made it taxable. Many employers also report half of their workers salaries and give them the other half in cash.
I still do have to make a decent amount of money to compete with Bosnian professionals. Despite what many people on the forum might think, people here will not dance if you hand them a few chapatis, mostly! Lol Not to mention that some of us here eat gluten and casein free!
| | | | David GAY
Local time: 15:20
English to French
+ ...
| I have lived in Belgrade | Jun 23, 2022 |
Korana Lasić wrote: David GAY wrote: Korana Lasić wrote: David GAY wrote: Korana Lasić wrote:
You obviously want to do this, hence you will try!
You've also learned through his thread how heterogenous both the field and the market are, so that's something.
We can all convey our experiences but yours will still be a very unique one and perhaps a year or two from now, you can tell us about it!
I've been freelancing since January 2020, so maybe my experience will be of interest to you.
Could I do both a full-time job and this? Oh sure! I can get as little sleep as possible and, for a time, keep on getting by, at best, at two jobs as good as the next person! Would that be the best use of my time? No, I don't think so!
If you cannot do this 20 hours a day, you are running the risk of ending up with an experience of proz.com that many have had of not being able to land good jobs/find good agencies through proz!
I work with 10 excellent agencies, so far, and I've found most by quoting for every sensible job on the job message board, replying to every email within an hour, and yes, this means replying at all hours, and then negotiating, learning, reading, watching, figuring out! On top of translation, there's: Correspondence, invoicing, figuring out rates, figuring out actual rates, dealing with an overzealous reviewer, making sure you aren't an overzealous reviewer, taking a 15-minute document job then spending 3 hours over the next two days explaining to the end client that just because they speak the target it doesn't mean they can ask you to replace words you absolutely must use with words that just sound better to them! Not in an actual document translation, at the very least. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone but you do really, if you want to make sure both the PM and the end client understand what they got and that it's exactly correct and right!
Throughout 2020 I didn't get a paid membership and that was a mistake! Things picked up 90% for me the moment I became a paid member!
I'm sure you can juggle both things for a couple of months or a year, but your experience will be skewed by the fact that, like people before me said, you are competing with people available 20 hours a day (at least for correspondence) and able to give better quality per short deadline than you will be able to! Let's not pretend that this will not affect the quality of your work!
Lastly, the more I read other people's experiences on the forum, the more I am convinced that I've chosen the best of the best to work with and that I am in fact doing great! I command very good rates, without being as expensive as to get only 10% of available work. The PMs I work with value my effort, make my life and work as easy as possible, payment terms are standard or better, and work is continuous. We mutually try to make as few mistakes as possible but have an adult understanding of the fact that mistakes shall be made.
Without any false modesty, very often I discover a mistranslation that has become so prominent it became generally accepted in a field as serious as pharmaceutical, and/or provide an insight in poor quality of work done by someone who should not be calling themselves a professional to a PM that does not speak the target language. Often enough I spend two hours on a document I could translate in half an hour because I want to be as thorough as possible. The things I worry about are, have I discovered a mistranslation in the whole field soon enough!? Have I been as thorough as the clients deserve me to be paying the rate I ask for?
At any given week I can be doing as many as two translations and one reviewing job from two different fields, and it isn't realistic for me to catch everything at once but I must try because each agency and each PM, however excellent they are and I've met some truly professional and wonderful people, only care about what I can do for them! They don't care much about the fact that I am a freelancer and, by definition, must work with many agencies/end clients to make a living! I must always make sure to remind them of that by asking for better deadlines, more reasonable rates, and loads of understanding when I catch something only at the 11 hour, thinking: "Let's do this my way but the other way must be some sort of a synonym too, after all, it's everywhere, including the reference materials sent by the end client"...
And then, luckily for all of us, the PM challenges my insistence on my way and we discover that the usual way this has been translated is a pure unadulterated mistranslation! I come out of the whole thing thinking, I should have caught this sooner! Note to self, just because the entire Croatian pharma is using a mistranslation this isn't an excuse not to catch it and say stuff like, I'm sure this is a synonym but let's do this my way!
I am trying to relate to you the level of dedication and quality I try to provide, but bear with me there's a bottom line to my borderline vulgar bragging and that bottom line is I still do not make enough for all this do have make any sense if I'd chose to live in London. I make more than a living wage by Bosnian standards, having the freedom to work when I want and as much as I want, and, if I don't want to reply to an email I sure don't have to, but the money would be very tight if I had to live on what I make as a freelancer anywhere decent in London.
The thing is, most people you will meet here, we have other sources of income. Some people are indeed retired translators with decent pensions, and some have partners with grownup jobs that nobody enjoys but they pay extremely well, which allows us to play freedom-fighter- lancers/digital nomads/we never conformed to our stuffy jobs so we became translators...etc
Some are highly successful translators in the financial sector and speak native level Japanese too, but these are few and far between and probably invest a lot as well on top of the savings from their old job!
Personally, my partner is a kind and generous genius that gets up at the crack of dawn works very hard, often 6 days a week, and has set aside a bank account where he puts money intended for me to use if I need it. I have the luxury to pick and choose only the best agencies, and not to say that people who want me to work for less than I am willing to work for are bad people or greedy, maybe some of them simply cannot sell translation work for a good enough price to be able to pay their vendors better!
So what is your situation? Have you a partner that can step in financially so you can leave a career that makes you unhappy and pursue this? Because you are at least a few years, and possibly more, away from making enough to financially justify leaving a job as stable as an NHS occupational therapist who at 20 years of experience can make 40-45K a year.
Having said all this, if you are going to do it, proz.com is a place to be! With all its downsides and as imperfect as we all are it somehow still works! Good luck! Maybe you can get back to us, this time next year perhaps, and tell us your unique experience of the translation industry, from a point of view of a newbie freelance translator, as well as of proz.com!
Get the membership! I mean it! Do not be as daft and silly as I was. I wasted a year on my stubbornness and my "but it looks so very 90s" attitude!
Good luck to you, my darling, may the Gods of freelance translation be ever in your favour!
Edit: I'm sorry for the typos and autocorrect blunders but between proz. com, my home internet acting up, and aggressive Grammarly addon I'm not sure how to turn off, today wasn't the best day for writing long posts but I tried.
[Edited at 2022-06-23 11:10 GMT] As other posters in this thread have pointed out, your situation is not comparable. You re based in Serbia where a wage of 800 euros per month is considered a very good salary, and MT translation in your target language is not yet possible whereas the French English pair is very common. So I m afraid it can t be compared. I've already pointed out as much! Certainly no harm in you doing it all over again, yourself! It's just the way you did it that implies either strawmanning or to the fact that you didn't even read what I actually wrote! Greetings to you and everyone in *ahem* Hungaria, from BiH! Edit: Kidding! Not that it matters for what you wanted to point out and I know Serbia and Bosnia are (on more than a purely linguistic level) a case of a "tuh-may-tow/tuh-maa-tow"! Still, I do live in Bosnia and not Serbia, at least for now! [Edited at 2022-06-23 13:49 GMT] I ve just read the very beginning and it put me off. I didn t have the patience to read it entirely. You know, according to a study, in these modern times, only 20 percent of online articles is actually read by internauts. Apologies [Edited at 2022-06-23 13:58 GMT] However, you might want to think about how you are representing yourself on the forum. Unless, of course, your intention *is* trolling! New user with virtually no profile who seems to be very familiar with proz forum jargon and humour! *wink* BTW, not that it matters but 800 EUR (whilst it might be a great assembly line) wage isn't a good professional salary in Serbia, or Bosnia for that matter! Understanding a living wage and median salary in the region is further complicated by the fact that the median salary is reported lower than it actually is! Very high taxes push employers, including government employers, towards avoiding having to pay even more taxes by increasing something that can be loosely translated as a "one meal allowance" This means that whilst the official salary stagnates, actual salary people earn does increase over time. One meal allowance was historically non-taxable and considered a lunch allowance. Some companies have transferred so much of their workers' wages to the one meal allowance that since late last year, I believe, the government (Bosnia) has changed the laws and made it taxable. Many employers also report half of their workers salaries and give them the other half in cash. I still do have to make a decent amount of money to compete with Bosnian professionals. Despite what many people on the forum might think, people here will not dance if you hand them a few chapatis, mostly! Lol Not to mention that some of us here eat gluten and casein free!
7 years ago, I have spent 2 years in Belgrade. I ve enjoyed the city and the cost of living. At the time, 800 EUR was considered a very good salary.
My goal was certainly not to be a troll but I know for sure that London is a very expensive city to live in and that rents most of the time cost much more than 1000 EUR . So it s very risky to leave one s 9 to 5 job. Personally, I would never give up my job to freelance in London.
[Edited at 2022-06-23 17:48 GMT]
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expressisverbis
Portugal
Local time: 14:20
Member (2015)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
| A different experience: working alongside studies | Jun 24, 2022 |
Working while studying was a challenge to me, but here I am. Balancing work life and studies can be quite hard. I know it, because I worked full-time and part-time.
We go to work, rush back home so we can study, we sleep late and wake up early and when the weekend comes, we're exhausted.
Every day was an odyssey to get to the University on time... and I heard a few times from other people, including a teacher, that Universities were not made for student workers and some other nasty c... See more Working while studying was a challenge to me, but here I am. Balancing work life and studies can be quite hard. I know it, because I worked full-time and part-time.
We go to work, rush back home so we can study, we sleep late and wake up early and when the weekend comes, we're exhausted.
Every day was an odyssey to get to the University on time... and I heard a few times from other people, including a teacher, that Universities were not made for student workers and some other nasty comments.
I was working in another city outside my hometown. I often felt sad and thought I couldn't make it.
In my first year of University, I was "forced" to learn a dead language (Latin) in an advanced stage, that I had never learned before... nonetheless, Latin is all around us.
It was hard, but I made it, and where there is a will, there is a way!
As we use to say "no pain, no gain", it was hard, but I don't regret a single day.
Working while studying is a great opportunity to gain work experience and useful skills. It can be personally and professionally very beneficial.
So, my advice is to "never give up, today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine". Give it a try, but have both feet firmly on the ground! ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule | | Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule | | Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator: You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request » Career change healthcare to translation | Protemos translation business management system | Create your account in minutes, and start working! 3-month trial for agencies, and free for freelancers!
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