February 20, 2004

The Freelance Roller Coaster

Workflow when working as a freelance translator can only be compared to a roller coaster. There are periods of climbing when there's not much to do but wait, and there are periods of screaming falls when there is nothing else to do but work. There seems to be very little in between.

Of course, one should always focus on other important things during the uphill climbs, such as business development, marketing and so forth. Sometimes it is very difficult to maintain the focus, however.

I am just entering a new downhill plunge at the moment. I have a lot of work to do on my new website, which I want to launch as soon as possible because it's the first step in all of my new efforts for marketing myself. On top of that, I have a queue of five translation jobs that need to get done, each with its own special little deadline.

Freelance work seems to be a long-term course in learning to enjoy the time that you have and being effective when there's little of it.

Posted by steve at February 20, 2004 05:21 PM
Comments

Oh yes - I can identify with this post. January 1-15 I had NOTHING. Since then, I have been maniacally busy. This is good, in that I am earning some serious money. It is also bad, as I have no social life.

Posted by: Jez at February 22, 2004 05:28 PM

The last sentence of your post is oh so true. However, I don't have the same experience regarding workload. Along with the dead periods and the manic periods, there are a lot of "nicely quiet" periods. By this I mean 4-5 hours of work a day: plenty of free time to do lovely things while still earning enough to live on.

Posted by: céline at February 23, 2004 03:46 AM

Don't worry about it. Being a translator is like being an actor - you go from "gig" to "gig". Even experienced professionals have considerable downtimes, but they make up any such time with long-term projects.

I have this one client, they keep me busy for about 7 to 8 weeks a year or so, but the money I make from this one client constitutes about 70%-80% of my total annual income.

Now, I have just landed another client that will, in all likelihood, keep me very busy ...

Posted by: Werner George Patels at February 23, 2004 11:01 PM