Top 10 Sure Signs Your Freelance Translation Business Is Doing Really Well

Sure Sign No. 10

When you receive an e-mail from a law firm which says “This e-mail is being sent to several translators due to the short deadline and the documents will be allocated on a first come, first served and best rate basis”, and your response is a terse: “I’m afraid I can’t accommodate you on such a short notice”.

Sure Sign No. 9

When you can’t quite get back to your extremely urgent translation project because you need to finish an interesting mystery novel (krimi, roman policier, detektivka) first since it’s only a few hundred pages and you have a pretty good idea who dun it.

Sure Sign No. 8

When you can’t quite get back to your extremely urgent translation project because you just bought a new cool computer (laptop, iPhone, iPad) and you have to first watch a few movies on your new toy because the crisp screen resolution simply blows you away.

Sure Sign No. 7

When you can’t quite get back to your extremely urgent translation project because you have an insanely great idea for a blog post that will put you on the map and cause a global laughing fit among diverse communities of far-flung translators on 4 or 5 continents, and then even after you have posted it, you still can’t start working on that extremely urgent translation project because you need to keep checking how many views that blog post got already.

Sure Sign No. 6

When you can’t quite back to your extremely urgent translation project because somebody said something really dumb on a blog and you had to make him/her see the error of his/her ways first, and then a bunch of people start agreeing and/or disagreeing with you and you have to express your support and appreciation for those who wisely agreed with your opinion and became your dedicated followers, and also bring down a notch or two the fools who dared to disagree with you.

Sure Sign No. 5

When you don’t feel like getting back to your extremely urgent translation project because you already made in 1 week what you normally make in about a month.

So what the hell, you might as well get back to your extremely urgent translation project after you have finished reading your book or watching your movie, or once you are done writing a new blog post about the pernicious and prolonged effects of the global economic crisis on the freelance translation business.

Sure Sign No. 4

When you don’t feel like getting back to your extremely urgent translation project because other translators, also referred to as subcontractors (your “subs”), already made for you in 1 week what you normally make in a month. It’s not like you don’t deserve the money, you had to proofread all those jobs first and it took you almost a whole day to do that.

So what the hell, you might as well start working on that extremely urgent translation project tomorrow, or the day after that.

Sure Sign No. 3

When you turn down a major translation project because you are going on vacation to Hawaii/Europe/China, etc., although you don’t really have a whole lot of money to spend because it has been kind of slow lately for quite a while.

Oh, what the hell, you will pay off the credit card bill from the next big job that will come down the pike when you return from your well deserved vacation abroad.

Sure Sign No. 2

When you are stuck with a big tax bill on April 15th (the day when taxes for last year are due in US), although you made all of your scheduled quarterly payments on time last year, but since you made so much more than in the previous year, you still owe money to the government, the state, and the city and county.

Did you really fall for that line that United States is a low tax country? Well, it is a low tax country, but not for people like you who have to work for living. Taxes are paid on the backs of the middle class, or what’s left of it, because otherwise the rich would have to pay their share, and that would be simply un-American.

Sure Sign No. 1 – The One That Completes The Circle

At the end of this exhausting cycle of success, you at long last do get back to that extremely urgent translation project because you are now finally bored by all the other stupid things that you were doing up until this point, when you knew perfectly well that what you should have been doing all along was trying to finish that urgent translation project so that you could pay off some of the credit card bills, and taxes that are again past due by now.

Because, let’s face it, to have work that you enjoy doing and that pays your bills is the only real evidence that your translation business is doing really well.