16 SAFE WAYS FOR FREELANCERS TO RUIN THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSLATION

AGENCY

By Erik Hansson

1. Try to be unavailable on the phone (landline and mobile) as long as possible. Simply decide
not to answer or inform the one in family who takes the calls (partner, children, smart pets,
e.g. parrots) to tell the client that you are not available.

2. Ignore all urgent text messages from your client. From experience, a reply in a rare language
or dialect can be a way to stop any future annoying text messages from a client.

3. Just check your E-mail inbox once a day, and even then, wait for a couple of hours before
replying. After all, you don't check your physical mailbox for snail mail more often.

4. Never confirm a translation order. Rely on the project manager's skills in telepathy.

5. Take on all jobs you can ever get, even within fields you have never ever heard of. That's an
excellent chance to gain experience, even if the final translation won't be very convincing and
the agency will get into trouble with the end-client. As a rule of thumb, be over-optimistic
about the amount of text you can handle within the timeframe and assume you can work for
16 hours/day for some weeks.

6. Never read the instructions in the purchase order from the agency. Such orders often have
the same type of information, so there is really no need to waste time with this.

7. Change all the formats in the files as a surprise for the project manager at the agency.
Crashing a file template is so easy and so much fun. If possible, change the file extension to
give your client a chance to deal with an exciting time-consuming challenge.

8. If you have any questions on specific terminology in the source text, don't invest any time
with searching on the internet by yourself. Send the project manager a short mail each time
you encounter any trouble, preferably several times a day. Setting up a summary list of all the
questions after you have finished the translation just takes too much time (see also No. 10).

9. Ignore consistent terminology and always use different target terms for the same source
term, even if the meaning is just the same. This makes the translation more exciting. If you
translate into English, spice up the text with both American and British spelling to show that
you are confident in both language variations, even if the translation is supposed for a British
end-client

10. Decide not to send any terminology questions to your client at all. If possible, try to contact
the end-client to clarify any issues, of course without asking the agency for permission. Some
project managers appreciate this kind of proactive freelance translators. If you are still in
doubt, but too afraid to ask, highlight unknown terms and expressions in the text with
different colours and send the translation "as is" without any term suggestions or explanations
about these highlighted parts. Project managers love unfinished products.

11. Ignore agreed deadlines. If you can't keep a deadline, and for once want to inform your
client about this, wait until 30 minutes before the agreed delivery time. You may also decide to
postpone the deadline without telling. Your client might get into trouble because of this, but as
No. 1 and 2 apply, you are not so easily available to clarify this issue.
12. After delivery, ignore the agency's mails about how much you will charge (e.g. if charging
on target text and this wasn't settled before the job). Wait for at least 8 weeks before sending
out your invoice and insist on fast payment because you were late in invoicing due to your bad
office procedures, but now need the money urgently for your rent.

13. If charging per target line (applied e.g. in Germany), insert thousands of unnecessary
spaces in your translation to get a higher number of characters (rather than tabs). Hope that
the client won't notice. 14. Do not issue any invoice at all, and start wondering after 3 months
why the agency hasn't paid. Start telling other colleagues that the agency is a black sheep
because they don't pay for delivered translations.

15. Charge more than agreed without explaining. Hope that the client won't notice, but
prepare some convincing arguments just to be on the safe side. Pretend to be very surprised
when your client asks (this might need some exercise).

16. If you go on vacation, don't tell your client until just before you're leaving. There is really
no reason why they need to know about your plans at an earlier stage. As an alternative, you
can always inform your client about your vacation with a nice postcard from the Bahamas.

Erik Hansson, native Swede with a technical education in electrotechnics, moved to Germany in
1991. Worked as an English trainer for adults in the 1990s, but decided after 8 years to switch
to translations. My focus is on technical translations from German into Swedish, mainly within
engineering, electronics, automation and printing industry. I work for both agencies and direct-
clients throughout the world, but also act as an agency for other language pairs.

www.hansson.de