Would you be able to drive to your destination if your car had no steering wheel? You have it all: a strong engine, enough fuel, comfortable chairs, but for a steering wheel. How far would you go? Would you even start? When would you crash? It’s the same with our careers in translation. If we don’t have a steering wheel, we’ll never reach our goals. Here comes a list of essentials to do to be in charge of your own professional development.
1. Maintain an up-to-date CV/website
Your CV, or as some argue your website, is very often a first point of contact with potential clients. A CV is a marketing document, and you’d better start treating it like that! It is essential that all particulars of your development and experience are always in there. Plan regular updates, depending on how fast your career develops. I update my CV every three months.
2. Become a member of your professional association
In freelance professions, such as translation, belonging to a professional association means having an umbrella body with years long reputation. As a freelancer, you can’t shine with your past employment, but you can impress with your memberships. Not to mention how much you’ll learn from them…
3. Scan the market
Not doing your research can cost you priceless years of your career. Don’t even start writing up your CV or adding content to your website before identifying major agencies or clients in your specialist area. Don’t try to guess your rates – research your competition (some translators even call their competitors pretending to be potential clients to spy on rates – what do you think about that?). Stay on top of news in your area of interest. As I told some students yesterday, following the information on economy and development of your language pair countries is essential to know which way to go. Try checking out public procurement or tenders websites – they are usually full of foreign companies competing for your home market. Also, look for networking events around.
4. Hone your skills
I am discovering the importance of CPD more and more every day. Translation is not like riding a bike (and even that need constant practice and hardware upgrades) or reading skills. If you ever stop in your CPD, your career will stop as well.
5. Look out and plan learning opportunities
New Year is a perfect occasion to go through all learning opportunities around you and to decide which of them you’re going to take up. Learning makes sense only with a strong curriculum. We’re not at school anymore, so we have to develop our own plans.
6. Record your CPD
Most of the translation organisations make us do that anyway in our CPD files, but if you don’t have one, you’d better start straight away. Even a simple document with all the events that helped you in developing your skills can do. Having a written history of your learning and experience is very rewarding and motivating.
7. Develop relationships
Not only with your clients. Translators need to have meaningful relationships with their peers. I would be a very poor and miserable translator but for my long-term relationships with others in my language pair. It brings intellectual stimulation, rewarding discussions, and healthy motivation. Don’t forget about your relationships with others who influence your business: accountants, IT, coaches.
8. Prioritise
We need, or is it only me?, to understand that we can’t get it all at once. Career is a process and we have to understand how to organise it and prioritise these actions that will be most profitable for us in this particular moment. I’m struggling with putting off some ideas, because they seem to be so great. And here they are, written down on a piece of paper and stuck in my “Thinking Box”.
9. Invest in yourself
Plan how much time and money you need to spend to get to your goals and get over it. You are a company and you can’t just accept your status quo in anything. If you had a restaurant, would you dare not to buy new plates, cutlery, or table linens? We don’t own restaurants, but we have to invest to maintain a desirable level of our services. And it’s not particular to translators. It’s what developing career is about.
Marta Stelmaszak
Marta Stelmaszak is a translator between Polish and English, combining language skills with a thorough understanding of economics and business to help SMEs make as big an international impact as possible, providing translation and interpreting services for the legal, business and marketing sectors.
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2 Comments
Translation is a business and like any business the most important thing is relationships.
You can be a member of a professional association, you can have all possible skills and talents, you can spend hours of your time developing an effective online presence, you can have good knowledge about market trends etc., but if you don’t communicate, nothing works out!!!
Thanks for this post! As a translator preparing for the shift from full-time employee to self-employed “boss,” it helps to have notes like these reminding me that such a life is not going to be all about translation. The bullet points here make that idea so much more manageable!