The business skills of a successful translator
By: Michaell Stuartt,

Unless you have a pre-existing client base, for instance a former employer who is interested in hiring you as a freelancer, you'll need to be able to market yourself. "Marketing" sounds like a scary and imposing concept at first, but if you've ever applied for a job, you've marketed yourself. Working as a freelancer is just a matter of applying for work over and over again until you build up a group of regular clients. One of the most important elements of marketing yourself as a translator or interpreter is to determine your comfort level with various sales techniques such as cold-contacting, networking, and public speaking.
People do business with people they like, so while you don't want to grovel, it's important to hone your communications skills where your freelance business is concerned. First, you have to actually do the communicating; answer all business-related phone calls and e-mails as soon as possible, always within the same business day and preferably within an hour, and change your voice mail messageor e-mail auto-responder when you'll be out of the office for more than one business day. Be honest about your availability and don't promise miracles that you can't deliver.Second, you need to communicate in a way that is positive and professional. Answer the phone cheerfully; when someone contacts you for work, thank them for thinking of you.When you call a client back and they've already found another linguist, thank them for contacting you and ask them to keep you in mind in the future, rather than getting angry that they didn't wait for your response.
Like marketing, this is a concept that sounds frightening if you've never done it before. Especially if you've always worked as a salaried employee, working as a freelancer will require much more record-keeping than you've done before. However, at its most basic level, accounting for a freelancer consists of keeping records of your income and expenses, something that is definitely within your grasp. As with communicating, the most important aspect of accounting is to do it; record every payment as soon as you receive it and save receipts for every business expense in order to minimize your headaches at tax time.
For translators, the days of pen and paperwork are long gone, and you'll need to know how to use, at a minimum, the Internet, e-mail, and office software such as word processing and spreadsheet programs. Translation memory software can increase your productivity, and depending on your languages and specializations may be necessary to running a viable business, since some clients require it.
As a freelance translator or interpreter, you'll usually be responsible for billing your clients yourself and following up if they can't or won't pay. For most freelancers, a simple system of sending invoices by e-mail is enough, and you can keep track of your invoices either with a spreadsheet or on paper. Billing is the fun part, because your work is completed, and the expectation is that you'll be paid on time. When this doesn't happen, the situation is less sweet. You'll need to learn how to deal with clients who won't pay because of disagreements about issues such as the quality and timeliness of your work, and with clients who can't pay because of their own poor financial situations.
Dealing with highs and lows. While this is more of a psychological skill than a business one, it's one of the most important assets that a freelancer needs. Whether you're translating, interpreting or selling siding, the market goes up,and the market comes down. Unless you're either very lucky, a great planner, or both, you'll have weeks where you want to unplug your phone so that clients will stop calling, and weeks where you feel like you'll never be called by a client again. To make it as a freelancer, you'll need to deal with these peaks and valleys on several fronts. Most practically, you'll need to develop a budgeting strategy that keeps you from spending too much when your checking account is full and going into debt when work is lean. Mentally, it's important to be productive even when you don't have much paying work, for instance by contacting new potential clients, updating your website, or catching up on your accounting.

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