Speaker 1: How do you start your own translation agency as a freelancer? Coming up. Hello and welcome back to the Freelance-Verse. Today we tackle a very interesting topic that I'm also thinking about all the time. It's about how to start your own translation agency as a freelance translator. So how to make this transition to the next level. We have a very special guest on the channel. Many of you will know him. It's Robert Gebhardt from the YouTube channel Freelance Translator Tips, a channel that I've been watching and following for years and it has been a big inspiration for me. We also made a video on his channel. I'm not sure which one goes out first. I think mine is out first and then his the same week. So definitely check out his channel, subscribe if you haven't yet and watch also the other video. Without further ado, let's head into the interview with Robert. So we are joined today by Robert to talk about how to start a translation Agency. Thanks so much, Robert, for taking the time to come on the channel.

Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: A lot of people, of course, know who you are through YouTube. People watch my videos, so they probably have seen yours. But for the other people, could you introduce yourself? Who are you? What is it you do?

Speaker 2: Sure. I'm Robert Gephardt, and I'm a freelance translator turned translation agency owner. I started off as an Italian to English freelance translator and gradually, over time, set up my own agency, Lugano Translations, and that's what I do now full time. And like Adrian mentioned, I also have videos where I talk about the translation world, the freelance translation world more than anything, and just share thoughts, tidbits, tricks, etc, etc.

Speaker 1: Awesome. When is it that you turned your business into an agency? When did that happen?

Speaker 2: So it was a slow, gradual process. It didn't happen overnight or anything like that. And it had been in the back of my mind and I'd been wondering as a freelance translator, I'd been wondering, you know, where can I take this? What can I do with it? Could I, you know, possibly be in a situation where rather than, you know, just translating one language, I have a number of different languages and I can handle all that and, you know, would that be worth it? And so it just gradually happened over time. The thing that pushed me into it was actually one one of my clients. One of my clients needed a translation done and not only my language combination but another language combination. And they asked, you know, they needed something French as well. And so I, and they asked, do you know anyone who can handle that translation? And I said, yes, I do. They're like, look, if we send you everything, can you handle it? And I remember thinking like, okay, this is, you know, this is a sign that I, you know, I should accept this and see if I can actually do it and see how far I can take it. And then, but after that, probably took a number of years I would say before I was a real full-fledged agency and so it was a

Speaker 1: very slow organic process. Okay interesting yeah that was also one of my questions that I had is it that if you only offer projects or jobs in your own language pair or if you are a multilingual agency that would then answer that you you work with many different languages I assume?

Speaker 2: Yes, so we specialize mostly in what are called the FIGS languages, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and the East Asian languages, CJK, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and so we have a number of languages, and this will happen, I assume if people are watching this they might be interested in maybe setting up an agency or doing something along those lines. will likely happen is that you find your niche and whatever your niche might be. It might be your language combination, it might be your specialization, it might be some variation thereof or something like that. But the translation world in terms of agencies is very fragmented and so it's very common for each place to have their own sort of niche that they do and ours is really to go between those languages without using English as an intermediary language which is actually quite rare. Most agencies if you want something translated from say Italian to Chinese they'll translate to English first and then into Chinese. Oh, really? Yeah, we're able to do it directly and that's sort of our niche. But again, it took years to get into that, really.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I guess it becomes much more cost effective, right? If you don't have the step to translate it first into English, it's basically one step you can alleviate then.

Speaker 2: Right, and also you can lose a lot if you have to use English as an intermediary language. you know, depending on the industry and on, you know, the precise translation, etc, etc.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Okay, one thing that is very fascinating about you, I feel like, is that people hear your accent, you sound American, but then you have a business called Lugano Translations, which is close to my heart, of course, from Switzerland. And I know you are in Taiwan, is it, at the moment? Yes, I'm in Taiwan. Yeah, so talk to us a little bit about what's happening in your life and How do you manage to own a business and always move on and find yourself in different locations?

Speaker 2: Right, so okay, yeah. First of all, I grew up in Switzerland, in Lugano, and that's where I'm from. My father's American, that's why I sound like this. So I grew up speaking both Italian and English. We speak Italian in Lugano, where I'm from. We're both from Switzerland, but as you know, Switzerland has a French part, a German part, an Italian part, and I'm from the Italian part and that's sort of how I got into freelance translation as well because I could perform those translations and you know it always came naturally to me and so obviously that's why I went into it. Oh and Taiwan, I live in Taiwan right now and we operate in a lot of Asian languages. It helps that my wife is Taiwanese and so that helped with the move here and uh but I for a long time what I was doing when I was a freelance translator mostly and also setting up the agency was I was doing what's now called being a digital nomad and I was kind of just working from where you know wherever I could and uh just going all over the place and um and so yeah those you know that took me to many different places to Taiwan I lived in Shanghai I lived in Korea I lived in the U.S. in a bunch of places I lived in uh you know in Italy and in Switzerland and so you know I got a flavor of the different places and I really like Taiwan too. So yeah.

Speaker 1: Okay, nice. But where is your business set up then now? Is it still in Switzerland?

Speaker 2: So it is originally in Switzerland and originally set up in Switzerland and then we were when we were in the US I set up an office there and now I'm in Taiwan actually the head office This is now in the US with branches in Switzerland and in Taiwan. This is sort of arbitrary. There's no real set business reason for this, but the way things turned out, that's how it is right now.

Speaker 1: Okay. Nice. Interesting. All right. I want to talk or one thing I really want to understand a bit is do you think that building an agency is really the next step as a freelance translator to build your business, to grow your business. Is it a logical step for you to do that? Or do you think one can build a business without becoming an agency?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. So I, like I said, I got very curious about becoming an agency and seeing if I could do it. And like I said, it took a while and there were a lot of fits and starts. it was ups and downs, it was kind of a rollercoaster ride, and I realized there were a lot of issues with it as well. If you can be a freelance translator and you can earn a comfortable living and work with the clients you like and earn enough to make a living, and then some, absolutely, that's great. And like I said, you can then be a digital nomad. Or I know freelance translators, they like it because they have more flexibility, they can spend time with their children or their family or stuff like that. There's no obligation to want to set up an agency really. And because it does add a lot more work, it's very different work as opposed to translation. So you kind of have to change all that. So there is no obligation or feeling that you have to do that. And I think a lot of times people feel like, oh, I should be pushing for that or going toward that. And so I just wanted to mention, don't feel that that's necessarily the case. It doesn't necessarily make your life better by becoming an agency. But yeah, for some other people, yeah, they might be curious. For me, it was curious. I wanted to see how far I could go and see if I would be able to handle it.

Speaker 3: It did take away quite a bit of flexibility. I had to actually, rather than being a digital nomad, I had to actually set up a company and create more of a local network where I was living and work more like a brick and mortar company, if you will.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So in the beginning, you still did your translation business while also trying to start up an agency, but now I assume that you yourself don't offer language services anymore, right? You are now completely in the project distribution and managing side.

Speaker 2: Right, exactly. And that was a conscious effort, because for a while, that was one of the things. I received a request for a time to English translation. I'll be like, I'll just do it myself. That way I can keep 100% of the money and I don't have to worry about project managing someone else. But at a certain point, I was like, no, I need to concentrate on my agency and I need to actually build it up. And the time I spend doing that translation is time that I can't spend on the agency. And so I consciously decided to cut out translations. Now, having said that, I do perform some translations myself, but that's by choice. I have one client that I've started out with and they kind of got grandfathered in. And so once every six months, I do a report for them that, you know, I've been doing now for 12 years probably. And every now and then something that looks interesting will come across my radar and so I'll just want to do it. And I like doing that because it leaves, it gives me one foot still in the trenches, you know? And so I get to still be in the translation world and not lose touch with that world, if you will.

Speaker 1: Okay, nice. Do you have employed translators in your agencies or you work exclusively with freelancers?

Speaker 2: They're all freelancers. Everyone I work with, whether it's translators, whether it's, you know, for marketing purposes, you know, whether it's admin stuff or whatever it might be, it's all, you know, website design, obviously everything, it's all freelancers, yeah.

Speaker 1: Oh, really? Okay, nice. So you don't have any employees?

Speaker 2: No, I don't. And this is, you know, moving place to place was part of it, but also it's, yeah, I just prefer it. It's more flexible. And I've come to now, I've come to be comfortable working with freelance professionals and identifying them and working with them, making sure we can work with each other. And so, yeah, I just prefer it.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Because I was also faced with that recently. I was starting to think about hiring my first person. And then, you know, when you want to hire, especially here in Belgium, can't just hire as a freelancer, you would need to change your legal status, right? But then it gets very complicated, so it's much easier to just, yeah, commission them as a contractor, of course. So, yeah, good to hear that you do that as well. Yeah, and then that's the thing, and what I try

Speaker 2: to do, you know, just to get a bit more into it, is like, I try to have the benefits of the freelance world but you know there are also some drawbacks and the drawbacks are that you know people aren't there for you all the time you know they kind of work on their own thing and also you know they don't feel maybe as loyal to you and as part of the team but rather you know just on a case by case basis and so for a while this is pre-COVID I just started doing this and then COVID hit I would actually visit my main regular freelance translators that I worked with on the regular jobs, I try to visit them face to face at least once a year, wherever they are in the world, at least for a coffee, something like that. Which, you know, my reasoning was that's still cheaper than hiring them, but at least it maintains that rapport and, you know, and that way I can talk to them and get a feel for if they're satisfied or not, etc. But, and I should start

Speaker 1: doing that again soon, but yeah. Yeah, that's really important, yeah, when you can put the face to it and a personality rather than just an email address, right? That helps a lot for sure. And yeah, I mean, if you hire someone as a freelancer, then you are effectively their client rather than their employer, right? So there is a different relationship. So it's important that you keep this connection with them, definitely. Okay, so how do you go about finding these freelancers that work for you? I was wondering whether you would have now just an unlimited capacity then, right? If you just find a new big job, you just go out and find new freelancers. So there is never, like, your basket is never full in that sense, right? Is that true?

Speaker 2: Well, yes and no. So there are a couple of things. First of all, the way I feel now when I find a good translator, they're worth their weight in gold. And so, you know, I try to keep them happy, you know, which falls along the lines of yeah, keeping in touch with them. But even now, if I can't meet them face to face, I like to keep touch and, you know, just in general on whatever it might be in life in general, and just to maintain that poor. And so I do have sort of a database, a Rolodex of good translators, you know, in my languages that I have access to. So if I get a new job tomorrow that requires whatever I require, I can always talk to these and hopefully, you know, work something out with my current translators. If I need a new translator for a new job for whatever reason, then yeah, you know, then I I have to go find a new translator, which is a process that I think I've become rather good at. When I say it's been a process building up this agency, that's actually something that I've had to do time and time again. And I think that has become one of my strong points now, that I can identify good freelancers, good freelance translators, and work with them well, and become a good partner with them. and their various places, most of the time I'll be using LinkedIn or pros.com to do that.

Speaker 1: Do you have any tips for people? How do you look for people on pros and on LinkedIn? Is there something they should have in their tagline so you can find them?

Speaker 2: Well, yes, absolutely, in fact. So yeah, here's a quick thing. If you're a freelance translator and you're on LinkedIn, get rid of the abbreviation of your languages. If you're Italian to English, don't put IT-EN because when people search for stuff, they don't search for IT-EN. Most end clients don't even know what those are and so put Italian to English translator and that way you're easily searchable on LinkedIn and yeah, that's what I recommend. I see a lot of translators putting the two-letter abbreviation of their language and yeah, I think that's a a mistake because people especially end clients who don't even know the lingo they won't be searching for that and that means they won't find you. So yeah and but otherwise just be everywhere because you never know where people are going to find you. I do think the best places are still pros.com and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has become a lot better since COVID hit but I think those are the best places so definitely make sure that your profiles on those places are up to date

Speaker 1: Okay, interesting. And then let's say you're looking for an English to Chinese translator and there are like maybe, I don't know, 50 to 100 come up on Prose. I don't know how many. What's the process there? How do you decide where you want to go? Do you test people as well, several people?

Speaker 2: So I do tests every now and then. And so yeah, let's say I'm searching for someone English to Chinese and whatever specialization or whatever it might be, I'll go to pros.com. Now pros.com will list them based on kudos points, which I'm not sure why they do that, but they do. So keep that in mind as well. If you want to be seen on pros.com, that the more kudos points you have, the higher you're going to rank. And sometimes it can be just based on your specialization. So even if it seems like you can't get that many kudos points in general, check your specialization and it might be a bit more accessible. But anyway, it'll rank them by that, and then I'll go through and the main thing I look for is their ratings. You know, how many ratings they have if they do have ratings. So this for both, I should say, because like I said, I've been using LinkedIn more lately, and I will look on LinkedIn as well, because there you can get the referrals and all that. But pros.com makes it very easy to give ratings, and so I check the ratings there, and yeah, and then I go through their profile. I'll pick a number of them and I'll email them. And I'll send them a message through prose. And then the way they respond usually will give me quite some clues. Like one thing I'll say, I'll give a simple instruction like say, write, and I put in quotes, Chinese to English translation in your subject or in the email body. Just something simple like that. automatically at least 50% of the people don't do that. And so I'm like, okay, we weren't paying attention. And so, yeah, it's just little things like that. And then usually I can whittle that down to say two or three people. And then the last two or three, I might give them a test and it'll be paid. It'll be a short test based on the text that I need to translate. So either exactly from the text taking out, obviously any identifying data or anything like that. And I'll base it off that.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Do you also look at their CAD tools? Do you have any prerequisites in your agency that people need to have?

Speaker 2: I do not. And that's mainly because my clients don't. And so I let them, you know, if they do have a preferred CAD tool, that's absolutely fine. But I don't I don't have any prerequisite.

Speaker 1: So obviously, translation is not the only service that many of us offer. How is it with your agency? Do you also offer, you know, proofreadings, language consultancy,

Speaker 2: subtitling etc or what are your services? Yes, so we offer, no, in terms of translation we only offer translations. All our translations are TEP and we, that's translation editing, proofreading, but we don't offer subtitling, we don't offer interpreting, we don't offer things like that. What we do offer is some ancillary stuff and so if you look like on the website and you know it'll, I think at the bottom or something it says you know that it's partnered up with Selva Consulting and if you go to selvaconsulting.com that's also my company but it so that's on a case-by-case basis and this is because a lot of times the people I work with they'll need translation because they're expanding abroad or because you know they're doing business with with someone who's in another country or something like that so they'll need something along with that like like market research or, you know, some sort of information about export import or stuff like that. And so that's actually a service I offer on a case-by-case basis, it depends, via, yeah, this consulting company. And what it is in the end is stuff like, I used to work for a market research firm. And so, you know, if they need market research, I have friends in the market research world, you know, people I know. And so I can kind of find people to research whatever they need or, you know, so that's why it's very much on a case by case basis. It's nothing regular, but every now and then they do need something. And so I'll offer these additional consulting services that are analogous to a translation. And that's just another way to kind of niche myself. The translation world in terms of agencies is extremely fragmented. I think more than pretty much any other industry. And so most agencies out there tend to be quite niche into something. And like I said, we have our, you know, the specific languages that my agency works on, and then we also have these additional things we add, you know, depending from client to client. Um, and, uh, and I think you find a lot of that in the industry.

Speaker 1: Okay. Very interesting. Okay. We, we already coming to an end. This has been very fruitful and I would like you to, uh, I would like to ask you for like a last word of advice for people? Let's say they are, they have been building their freelance business for like four to five years, every year more revenue, more revenue. And now for a few years, it has been stagnating, right? I've been talking to many people that this happened and now the logical step in their mind would be, I want to expand, I want to build an agency. What would be your word of advice for someone like this?

Speaker 2: So first of all, well, first of all, I haven't mentioned this yet, But I do have a course out called How to Set Up a Translation Agency where I talk about precisely this. And this is for people who are freelance translators who then want to set up their own agency and take that next step. And so it does go exactly through this and it goes more into the nitty gritty and into the details about how to do it and how to set up, how to find the clients, how to find and how to basically project manage, you know, the whole process basically, and how to go through it all. So be sure to check that out. But yeah, as a first-

Speaker 1: I'll put it in the description, people can click it there for sure.

Speaker 2: Perfect. And then, but the first step I would say is, if you are thinking about this, absolutely. And what you can do is, you can do it sort of gradually like I did. And what I know several people have done in the past is kind of have a group of translators working together. And so what they'll do is, you know, say if you do English to German translations and someone else does English to French and, you know, someone else who does English to Spanish, well, you know, then you can tell your clients, you can say, oh, by the way, if you're translating this to German, you might need it into French as well or stuff like, you can start offering more and then kind of just working amongst you guys and see how that goes for a bit before taking that next step. This is an intermediary step that can get you sort of comfortable with, you know, sort of project managing. Even if it's someone who's your friend or you've worked with before, you kind of can get a feel for it because you're always going to be responsible to the client for whatever your friend does and that sort of changes your perspective and at least you get a bit more used to it before you take the final plunge. And so absolutely, you know, feel free to do that and feel free to check with, you know, friends if you want to set something up and you know set up your own agency and just amongst a couple friends and see how that goes and I think that that can be an interesting preliminary step before you know before setting up your own thing absolutely thank you so much this

Speaker 1: was very interesting we also filmed the video on Robert's channel freelance translator tips I don't know which one goes out first just check in the description if it's there it's there. Otherwise, it will come in a few days. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thanks so much for watching. Make sure to subscribe to the channel. The goal is 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year. Let's make that happen. I see you next Monday with the next one. Bye bye.