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| [bird's eye view of highway and side road*] |
If you ask most adults over forty how they entered their chosen
profession, especially freelancers, a rather high percentage of them will admit that it was serendipity. Rare are those that knew what they wanted to do at 18
or younger and actually made a career of that ambition. By contrast, today it
is far more common for people at the beginning of their professional life to
immediately strive to open their own business, whether that is being an
attorney, freelance translator or any other form of entrepreneurship. The need to first
work for someone else is no longer assumed.
Thus, there seems to be two ideal types of freelancers active in
translation now: those that “fell” into the profession later in their life and
those that had no doubt that they wanted to be their one boss from day one and
trained for that goal. Each path carries its own strengths and weaknesses and
shapes the learning experience of the freelancer. Of course, individual
tendencies also influence the nature of the professional growth. However,
regardless of the initial approach, circumstances require all business people,
including freelancers, to constantly learn and adapt.
Many older translators began their freelancing life later in life. Due
to technological limitations, in the not-so-distant past, translation, especially
technical translation, was largely in-house or local and thus difficult to
enter. Freelancing often began as a source of second income and capitalized on
years, even decades, of experience and knowledge of a certain industry. Thus,
such accidental entrepreneurs brought with them a rich background of subject
knowledge but often much less of technical knowledge of translation and
business management, especially marketing, which they had to learn on the fly.
By contrast, the last decade has seen a growing number of people at the
start of the professional life choosing the path of freelancing in general and
translation in particular. Consequently, even before earning any significant
money, they seek detailed knowledge and take courses, both free and paid, to
prepare themselves for the challenge. This focus, fueled by ambition and the
need to make a living, gives them a huge advantage in grasping trends and
applying technology. On a technical level, they are off to a flying start. The
issue sometimes is the depth of knowledge of the actual area of technology,
e.g., medicine and law, as compared to their more experienced colleagues. Of
course, both paths are legitimate.
Clearly, personal traits influence how people approach a profession.
Elements such as income, technical success, comparative performance and life style balance have a varying impact on how people run their business. For me, money
beyond a certain amount has never been a great motivator. (Otherwise, I would
have never become a teacher first.) I also have a tendency to not ask
questions and try to figure things out by myself. The reason for this stubborn
insistence is that I enjoy the learning experience as much as the actual result. The charm of working in
translation is the joy of constant learning, whether in regard to content,
business management or marketing. It is the complement of teaching, whose main
variable is the students, not the process. Thus, I, maybe peculiarly, feed off
the process of running a freelance translating business as much as the income.
I freely admit that many freelancers have neither the inclination nor the
luxury of relishing the road and must focus on making a living. Circumstances
and tendences are very individual.
Regardless of the initial approach of freelancers to the business,
incredibly rapid changes in technology, marketing, communication and business
structure, to name a few, render any lesson learned today obsolete in five
years. It is extremely difficult to find anybody whose client body, business
practices and work volume have not
changed radically in the past few years, for good or bad. In practice, all
freelancers, for that matter all businesses, must both plan for an uncertain
future and learn by trial and error. Since nobody can accurately predict the
future beyond the fact that much of life, including business, will be quite
different in a decade, people, including freelancers, are left to the heuristic
approach, ideally striving to learn from the experience of others, if possible,
but mainly from their own experience, including mistakes. No business, small or
large, is protected from constant change.
It turns out that the roads to
Rome, regardless of their classification, today have an amazing resemblance to
the random staircases of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. The most efficient route is
never quite certain. Thus, in my opinion, whether labeled the express route or
service road, the road of a successful freelance translator is filled with surprises, which adds spice to it, at least in my opinion.
* Picture captions allow the blind to fully access the Internet.
