What Is the Least Busy Time of the Year for Translators?

After more than 26 years as a freelance translator, I still have no idea.

And I would like to know if there is such a thing because that would be the best time to take vacation when you are a freelance translator.

I used to think that the end of September was a good time to hop on a plane to good old Europe (when I say go on vacation, I invariably mean visiting my old haunts in Prague and Bohemia). But in fact I chose end of September because I had read in a Lonely Planet guidebook when I was planning a trip to Japan that at that point, hotels are no longer booked up as there are not that many tourists needing a place to stay. This is true, and it is probably applicable to any country. And the weather is often perfect in Central Europe in September – not too cold and not too hot, kind of like San Francisco without the fog.

So I used to go on vacation around the end of September for many years.

But then I had to switch to summer months for a while because that was the only time when I could take vacation together with my sons. Summer should logically be the best time because most people go on vacation in summer, which means that there should be less work for translators in summer.

But Lonely Planet was right, there are definitely too many tourists everywhere in July and August.

A long time ago I went to Yosemite in August and there were almost as many people around me as there are now on Charles Bridge in Prague in August (watch out for gangs of pickpockets on the bridge, mostly Gypsies as I found from an old friend of mine who used to work as a tour guide). Yosemite and Charles Bridge are just like two huge human anthills in summer, one overseen by a granite monolith called El Capitan, the other one kept under a constant watchful gaze of the statute of St. John of Nepomuk who was tortured and then thrown into the Vltava River by order of the King Wenceslas IV six centuries ago (and that was one of the better Czech kings).

The fact is that summer is just as unpredictable as far as supply of work is concerned as any other season of the year. Some summer months I have relatively little to do, and some summers I work like a slave, air conditioning at full blast, which is the only way to stay sane and productive in the hot and humid summers here in Chesapeake.

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How busy or idle I am each month probably does not depend on the time of year very much. It just so happens that some months I am dealing with a number of long patents, each taking about a week to translate, and some months I have only a few short patents or articles to translate, in addition to relatively small translation projects for myself and for other translators, which come regularly every month. These are small projects that I could probably safely postpone by a couple of weeks, or in a pinch do them from a hotel room if I have my laptop with me. With access to Internet, there is no need to carry heavy dictionaries  anymore.

Even while on vacation abroad, I used to check my e-mail and respond to requests for price quotes every day in an Internet Cafés to make sure that I don’t lose too much business. Last year I was able to do that from my iPhone – at no additional charge to my usual phone bill.

Maybe  there is a formula, a neat algorithm for figuring out when is it most likely that there will be a couple weeks in a given month without much need for our expert services. But when I tried to find out what is the least busy month of the year for me by comparing how busy I was every month over a period of several years, nothing jumped at me.

It’s different months every year.

In theory, freelancers can go on vacation any time they want to …. but only in theory. Reality is very different.

I hope you can let me know your formula for figuring out the perfect time to go on vacation, if you have one.