Speaker 1: how to find translation jobs in 2024 coming up hello and welcome back to the freelancers so much snow here today in belgium's a perfect time to film the video we have perfect lighting exactly three years ago in january 2021 i made my best performing video by far so far it was called how to find translation jobs in 2021 It was then so successful that I changed the title to 2022 and even 2023 because it was still relevant in a way, but now I feel like it's very much high time for an update video. One thing that I said back in 2021 and that is definitely still true, it is very hard, it's supposed to be hard. You will need to be consistent, persistent and very much patient. Without that it's not possible, but with with a more analytical approach and hopefully with information from this video and other sources, by the way, don't focus only on this video, but there are many sources out there online. It's definitely possible. Just to be clear, this is not gonna be one of these videos that tells you how to make money online with Google Translate, how the best AI tools to translate, et cetera. There are plenty of them out there. This here is a bit different. This is for people that take translation seriously as a profession, not just as a gig. This video is structured in three different sections. Number one, agency clients. Number two, business clients. And number three, private clients. So let's get into part one, how to find agency clients. In the first video, three years ago, I started with gig platforms, gig websites, like Fiverr, Upwork, People Per Hour, et cetera. I do not recommend these anymore. I used to endorse them. I used to promote them even with videos, because I thought, you know, what harm does it do? If you're already starting as a translator, might as well sign up with all the platforms possible but I changed a bit my mind in that regard because I do think that they actually have a negative effect on the profession, on price dumping etc. Specifically translation platforms however like prose.com or like translators cafe these are the two big ones they're very similar these are very still very much in use and you should definitely sign up with them as a first step. Many vendor managers from agencies do look on prose for new freelancers so make sure in your tagline on prose is is your language combination and your specialization, because that's how they search for people, the vendor managers, right? They type in their criteria and then they get a big list and you need to stand out somehow, so they reach out to you. Then there are other ways to use prose. Me personally, I never actually go to the job directory and look for jobs. You can do that. I'm always gonna show you some screen recordings during the video. I never actually do that anymore. I used to in the beginning. Now I just have my criteria signed up in prose if someone uploads a job that fits my criteria I get a job notification into my inbox and it regularly happens also that people directly write me through prose to my email. Two additional platforms that I always recommend to people is Smartcat and ZingWord. I found jobs on both of them so just check them out. Another way to find agency clients is of course to find them directly, to reach out to them directly. There are endless possibilities to find agency clients, right, that you can figure out one for yourself. If you are very creative you might be the only person that does this approach and that's the key. In the first video I showed you how I search agencies on Google Maps for example that worked out quite well in my career. I found several agency clients through that. One thing you want to focus on with agencies is you want to find the small niche agencies. You can always work with the big ones, the big language service providers, LSP for short, RWS, Lionbridge, TransPerfect, WeLocalize to just name a few. They are huge and they have huge volumes and huge pools of translators. The problem is that they tend to not pay that well. Some rates are really horrendous sometimes what I see in Facebook groups. So the more niche you go, the more you will earn, the more reward you will have. If you find an agency that is specialized in your language or in your specialization even, that's the chatbot. Now one thing you can easily do today, you can go on LinkedIn, which by the way should be your number one marketing tool as a freelance translator. It's amazing that the free version of LinkedIn is so powerful. It's not only great for visibility, but for us translators also an amazing community building tool. The community of freelance translators on LinkedIn is so supportive and wholesome kind of. It's really cool. We all don't have a team, right? So this is our way of how we build a team around us. Speaking of a team, actually also check out team translator which is a slack channel specifically made for freelance translators amazing way to meet and to network in a very chilled and relaxed form you know if you're not a very outgoing person it's an amazing way to do it so check that out I'm gonna link all down in the description if I don't forget hopefully on LinkedIn you can look for hashtags like XL8 or lead translators for LinkedIn translators and just look around you will find content that's relevant to you and always make sure your LinkedIn profile is on point. I made a video a long time ago on that. You can click here and there are many other videos as well. There are even people offering services for an effective LinkedIn profile and also use the LinkedIn job search. That's very often overlooked for translators. Agencies do publish their jobs there and also direct clients. So just look for translation, freelance translator, German translator, whatever your language is and and see if something is out there. So, but now for this exercise, I want to focus on finding the agencies themselves on LinkedIn. So up here in the search bar, just try typing translation agency, for example. Then you can, up here, you can toggle and choose which one you want. You can go to companies, and then you will get a huge list of 354 results with companies that have translation agency in their name. So that's already an amazing start, right? So you can spend, I don't know, you can spend three days in writing all of these agencies and that's already a start. I told you before, the key is consistency, right? So you're not gonna reach out to 10 companies and then say, oh, nothing works for me. You're gonna reach out to hundreds, 150, 200, 300. And if then still nothing works, then definitely something is wrong. Well, preferably you'll figure out what's wrong before, maybe your marketing material, your CV is not good, et cetera. All of this can happen and that's definitely a different topics. There are videos on all of these topics on my channel. So just search for them and you're on there. Once you're on the LinkedIn profile, you can already look for a website. For example, there is an email already. I usually like to go to people and see who actually works there. But now here, Amy, Joanna and Dries, they are all project managers at Atlas apparently. So one approach that you could take would be to connect with them, shoot them a quick message, ask them how it works, who the vendor manager is for them. Another more creative, more innovative way to find agency clients is with generative AI, right? Use ChatGPT, it's available to you. As long as you don't use it for like, you know, security concerns, data breaches, et cetera. If you don't use it for client work, then it's all fine. You should make use of it. I use it as like a Google on steroids because it can give you amazing comprehensive results. Name some niche translation agencies specialized in law and legal texts. And now it just tells me how to find agencies. That's not what I want. Now I need to specialize the prompt a bit. So I would say that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for actual names of boutique translation agencies in the legal sector. Yes, and now we're looking a bit better. It gave me RWS, TransPerfect, Linebridge. I don't want them. But ALM, for example, the GeoGroup Corporation and Morningside Translations, I don't know them. So these would definitely be worth checking out, right? Okay, Morningside Translation does actually offer legal translation services. Okay, I'm not aware of them, but it looks very legit, legal document translation. So that's definitely a way to go. Now on the website of the agency, you can usually look up here somewhere, maybe on the careers in this case, how to reach out to them, how to get in touch with them. This leads now to Questel. So that seems to be the overall company. So this, again, a big LSP. So maybe you want to probe JATJPT a bit further to go more niche and more niche. But yeah, there are 1,500 professionals working together. You can join them if you want. You know, you start very broad and then you become smaller and smaller. It's like a funnel until at the end, you have some kind of leads where you can reach out to a company. So once you have that contact or a contact form of an agency, for example, you can sign up to them, you can reach out to them. I made a video a while ago about how to reach out to agencies. You can click here if you're interested. For agencies, you can always do cold emailing, cold approaching. What cold means is you don't have a previous contact. So you're just reaching out to them cold without knowing them. For agencies, you can do that because the intent is clear, right? It's very transactional. You know what you expect from them. They know what they expect from you. So there it's perfectly fine. For direct clients, for business clients, I cannot say the same though. There, I would always recommend warm prospecting because with cold approach, you will not have high results. Already with warm, it will be small results, but at least better chances. So let's get to topic number two, business clients. By business clients, I mean direct clients that are businesses. For many freelancers out there, these are the optimal clients, the ones to start strive for, because you can charge more, you can cut out the middleman. I often say on my channel that I'm not so convinced that everyone needs to go for direct clients. I like working with agencies and I always said it's fine if you want to work completely with agencies. I'm slowly changing my mind on that simply because looking into the future, I don't, I've said this many times on the channel, I don't really see the agency model functioning in the future. I already see now many agencies struggling. So I think if you want to future-proof your career, direct clients is the way to go. Not completely, you don't need to 100% focus on that, but at least try to make it 40, 60, or 50, 50, if you can. Especially when you're starting out, you most likely start with agencies, that's fine. And then later you can kind of graduate to direct clients. But I need to warn you, I said this in my finding direct clients video, finding direct clients is a different kind of beast. It's brutal, it's really hard. I'm still struggling with it. I'm trying to find creative solutions that kind of stand out from the others. And it works sometimes, and I'm very fortunate and happy about that. but it's definitely much more difficult because you have to negotiate. You have to be a business person, a business developer suddenly, and that's not easy. In a broad sense, there are two ways to approach direct clients. One is an active approach and one is a passive approach. Me personally, I prefer the passive approach. That's why I make this video. That's why I make all the videos. That's why I'm visible online. I make content. I go to conferences, have talks, et cetera. That's the passive approach. So you're basically putting yourself out there, building a name, building a brand, so the companies come to you instead of you going after the companies. It's passive in a way that you're not actively going after the clients, but it's not passive in a way that it's less work. It's probably more work, but if you enjoy this kind of work, it's easier in my opinion. Now for this video, I'm focusing on the active approach because that's something you can do right now. You can start. Also with the passive, you should start right now basically, but in order to reap the benefits of the passive, it takes years of consistent, dedicated content creation and putting yourself out there. So you will not reap the benefits of the passive right away, but you should definitely start with it. Before you actively go after direct clients, you should define your perfect client. What is your ideal client? What does it look like? Really go into detail when you do that exercise. And a quick tip, you probably don't want to define your ideal client as a billion dollar huge company, right? because you simply cannot serve their localization need as a freelancer. They need a supply chain manager. They need an agency to take care of that volume. So your ideal client is probably a smaller company that you can take care of either alone or in a group or in tandem, et cetera. Also important, make sure to define hashtags that your ideal company would use so that later on you can look for these hashtags on social media, on LinkedIn, et cetera. So to me, for example, my idea client would be a small to medium sportswear retailer, sportswear brand, that is active in an English or French speaking country that also sells to Germany and Switzerland. And their hashtags they would use would be stuff like fitness, sportswear, sports business, athleisure, runner's world probably, fit fashion, fitness apparel, outdoor, outdoor sports, et cetera. As you can see, I can just rattle them off because I have done this exercise many times in my career, So especially this year when I really want to focus on the sportswear sector. If you are not there yet and you're not exactly sure, again, use ChatGPT, use generative AI for exactly these searches, these specific searches. And it makes sense to always start your prompts with pretend to be. So if you tell the AI it should be pretend to be an English to Spanish translator in this sector, then you get much better results, I noticed. So you could easily say, pretend to be an English to Spanish translator specialized in the automotive industry. What kind of hashtags would my ideal client use on social media? Give me 10 hashtags. You get 10 hashtags and that's it. Once you have that down, you can actually look for the clients that come as close as possible to your ideal client and then reach out to them. So you can either do warm prospecting, it's much more work, but you have better results. can do cold prospecting it's much less work but you have less results. So it's a quality quantity question whatever you prefer. Localization is often an afterthought for companies so it's not easy to find a way in for warm prospecting. A good way to do that is go to trade fairs and not with the intent of selling something but with the intent of meeting people, getting business cards, knowing names, taking pictures of brand stands so you can later on go through your pictures and and write emails to them and saying, hey, I talked to you at this conference. It was very inspiring. Do you have need for localization, et cetera? We can come back to LinkedIn for that. We have now the hashtags in place, right? So one thing to do, for example, is just look for hashtag athleisure. Hashtag athleisure, that's a very common hashtag in my industry. And then I go to posts. Where is posts? The first one, I look through it. So now I see, for example, Baltex Clothing, I see RJ Corp Retail, Prince and Boohoo, The Courageous Brand. So you see Evolve Clothing Company, many, many companies you see, and you can just research them and try to find a way in somehow. Of course, this is hard, this takes a lot of time. I would recommend to you, if you are starting out, maybe have one hour a day, either at the beginning of your day or at the end of your day, of doing market research. try to find names, try to find people in these corporations. LinkedIn is great because you can always go on the brand and then go to people and reach out to them directly. You can easily find people on here, ask them, hey, who is in charge of translation for you? Do you sell in Germany? Do you sell in Switzerland? That's a way to get around the blockage that some people have in finding direct clients. Once you have a good contact to reach out to, it's very important that you don't talk to a direct client the same way that you talk to an agency, right? Because if it's an agency, I told you, it's transactional. Everyone knows what their role is, what everything is in play. With direct lines, that's not the case. So you don't talk to them about your per work rate, for example, or your fuzzy matches, or what your term basis, et cetera. They don't care about that. And you don't apply to them as in applying to a job like you would at an agency. You sent them an official email, but first of all, I wouldn't sell anything. I would just start to talk to them, but then you try to sell services and not apply for a job. So instead of attaching a CV, you would never do that with a direct client. You would attach your flyer, your marketing material, et cetera. I'm gonna add a playlist here with all the videos I made about finding direct clients, reaching out to them. There's a lot of information out there that you can watch if you want more. And last but not least, let's look at private clients. That's a very different story completely that requires very different approaches. Me personally, I don't work with private clients. I used to when I worked in an agency in Zurich, I dealt a lot with private clients because they just usually call an agency and they say, hey, I have a certificate, can you help me with that? So if you are a translator that wants to work with private clients, it's most easy to go through agencies that specialize in certificates, in diplomas, et cetera. But if you want to work directly with them, you need to make yourself visible. I would definitely suggest to join professional associations if you want to work with private clients. I would become a certified translator so you can actually work on these diplomas and register documents, certifications, et cetera. And then you need to build a big portfolio. You need to build an amazing website. You should work with an SEO specialist that can make your website rank higher. Use all the platforms. Think of a private person looking for a translator, because then it's a very different approach suddenly. How would you go about if you need your diploma translated? That's in these spaces where the people search is where you want to be. So for me, for example, if I look it up in Belgium, if I need like a, I don't know, a birth certificate for a wedding, it always goes to the same page with all the registered certified translators in Belgium for different languages. So I would know, okay, I need to be somehow on this website. So then that's your primary goal. How do you get there? Of course, it's all different information in your country, so you should definitely reach out to someone that already does what you want to do. So if you go on a certified website with certified translators in Belgium or in, I don't know, Germany, wherever you're watching from, US, look up a person, reach out to them, and say, hey, how did you manage? How does this work? How can I be certified? That's key if you want to work with private clients. They tend to be not the most profitable clients because they usually come for one job and then they are gone. So I would suggest a mix. If you can and want to work with private clients, that's very nice. I think it's a beautiful interaction because you can help people get administrative stuff done without them using the middleman. So you save money by being able to charge more and they probably save money because the agencies don't overcharge them. I don't have experience in that, so I can't tell more on this specific topic, but I hope this kind of makes sense that it's a very different approach to take for private clients. I don't know if I can cut this down into a manageable size. I think it became longer than I thought, but I love sharing these tips with you. I'm always learning more, thinking more about the profession, and then trying to put them into a max 20 minute video for you guys to enjoy and to learn as well. Let me know in the comments where you are in your journey. If you are just starting out, if you're looking for your first client, if my first video three years ago has helped you, I hope this one helps you as well going further. Thank you very much for being here. Have a nice year ahead and I see you next Monday. Bye bye.