Novice translators often get advice on
how to get work and how to successfully conduct their freelance business.
Several leading translators, in fact, have published books aimed at less
experienced colleagues (among these books, I especially recommend those by
Corinne McKay, the Jenner twins and Chris Durban).
However,
what if you feel lazy, don’t really want to receive work, but, for some reason,
you have to make a show of looking for it? Maybe your significant other has
been nagging you to send your résumé to your prospects, and when you temporized
by saying “I need to research them first”, she answered by providing you with a
list of 7,600 translation agencies and a paid subscription to Payment
Practices.
What
then: Are you doomed to the drudgery of toil? Not to worry: Here you’ll find a
10-point proven strategy to make sure no translation company in their right
mind will ever send projects your way (and it works for direct customers, too):
1. Be
full of it: Write a bombastic cover message for your résumé. Feel free to add
implausible claims (“...I am a Vogon native speaker, but can also easily
translate into Klingon, as I spent two weeks on vacation there once, and I
specialize in all subjects...”). A patronizing and condescending tone is also
very helpful in turning prospects away (“...as you should know, language
translation is a profession only a selected few can undertake...”).
2. Deliberately
misspell your cover message, and add some egregious error of grammar, syntax,
punctuation and usage (very effective, for instance, is to claim “I have
challenges to provide high-quality service and meeting deadlines,” as in an
application I received some time ago).
2.1 Bonus
material: If you don’t know how to write a thoroughly off-putting cover
message, take heart: Here is a real masterpiece I received (with a few details
changed to protect the sender) that you can use as a template:
“Good morning!
I hereby request the following question, I saw this email and you were
recruiting freelance translators, I wonder if that offer is still open?
I am a young
Portuguese who have a graduation in Portuguese and Dutch by the faculty of
letters of Coimbra. And for three years I teached English in Portugal. Over
these three years, at home, I did a translation of various texts, literary and
non-literary, for example: user guides , how to apply a product; how to put a
machine to work in a factory; the warning letters and simple letters; poems;
short stories; emails with requests; cookery recipes; medical prescription;
college and University diplomas and etc.
I´m available and
able to make in these three languages translation. I can also translate from
Italian to Portuguese and Spanish to Portuguese, because I had a year of
Italian and Spanish in University.
I am currently
living in Burma.
My work as a
translator will be done at home in the computer and then I send my translations
through my email for your company.
If you are
interested in my services as a freelance translator, could you tell me what
email can I send my CV?
Please contact me at
(address) for any further information.
Best regards,
Jane A. Translator”
3. Don’t
mention your language pair in the title of your message. Let your prospects
guess.
4. Don’t
mention your language pair in the header of your résumé, either. If you really
feel compelled to add it, the bottom of page three (possibly under “other
information and personal interests”) should do nicely. If they finally get
there, your prospects will be happy to discover you don’t translate in a
language they are interested in.
5. If
you have worked as a translator in the past, do include every detail of all
projects you ever did (in fact, list all language assignments you did since
middle school, for good measure). Remember: Your goal is to bore your prospect,
and a seven-page single-spaced résumé should easily do the trick.
6. Wide
margins and a legible layout are for chumps. Use the narrowest margins your
word processor lets you get away with, don’t indent between paragraphs, and don’t
use any font other than Arial Narrow (8 points maximum). If your prospects
cannot read your résumé, they will not be tempted to hire you.
7. If
(as you should) you are writing your résumé in a language which is not your
own, make sure not to have it revised by a native speaker: She could
accidentally correct all the errors you have worked so hard to add.
8. In
the unfortunate case that a prospect, despite your efforts, answers your
message and asks you to take a short translation test, be original: don’t just
say you don’t do free tests (they might respect you for that), and certainly
don’t accept to translate the test and do your best on it. Instead, accept the
test, use Gurgle Translate, don’t spell-check, and send the test late (if they
gave you a deadline), or not at all (if they didn’t).
9. If
you decide to take a test, ignore any instructions that come with it: following
them would waste your time, and you might unfortunately find in them some suggestion
of how your prospect would like you to proceed. You want to show you are an
independent spirit, not someone who meekly accepts to do what he is tasked to
do.
10. And
finally: Now that we live in a Web 2.0 world, with plenty of social media
available to show what you really think to all and sundry, let your personality
shine under your real name. Badmouth translation companies and belittle other
translators on AmateurZ and BabbleBook. Suggest plenty of erroneous terms in
online translation fora (in fact, suggest them in at least three different
languages you don’t know). Display a righteous attitude (better yet, a paranoid
one), and let everybody know that all translation companies (and all direct
customers, for that matter), are out to get you to work for free, that all
other translators are infinitely worse than you, that of course translators can
and should translate from their second language into their third one, and that
the sole reason for university translation departments the whole word over is
to churn out plenty of lemmings ready to jump off a cliff and take all the work
away from you.
P.S. This will be the subject for
another article, but learn to be very rude on the phone, especially if some
project manager calls you.
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NOTE: This article, together with many others from several prominent translators, was written for Mox II: What they don't tell you about translation, the new collection of Mox cartoons by Alejandro Moreno-Ramos. Mox II was published today: go and order it - it is the perfect gift for any translator.
