Happy New Year! Are you wondering about mistakes to avoid as a freelance translator in 2025? You've come to the right place!
This past year sure was eventful. I led an online study group for the American Translators Association Spanish-to-English exam for six months. Even after having committed to the study group, I ultimately decided not to pursue certification at this time. However, I was thrilled to see that one of the group’s most active and disciplined participants recently passed the exam! I also attended my very first American Translators Association conference.
I am looking forward to the year to come, which will be RR Language Services’ fourth year in business. How time flies! I have grown both personally and professionally alongside my business during this time. While I would not consider myself an expert translator at this point by any means, I feel I am in a good position to give rookie translators some advice as to how to succeed as a freelance translator.
So, without further ado, here are five mistakes to avoid as a freelance translator in 2025.
As freelancers, we get to choose when we work. This is a double-edged sword. I would recommend having predetermined working hours and refusing to work outside of them (but I would be lying if I told you I adhered to this). As people working from home, it is important to set boundaries between our personal and professional lives so the lines don’t blur.
I had an eye-opening moment this past year reading The E Myth Revisted by Michael E. Gerber, which I would highly recommend to anyone self-employed. The following quote really stood out to me: “Your business is not your life” (Gerber, 1995, p. 97). As obvious as this should be, hustle culture has made us blind to this simple fact. Reading this simple statement has made me reconsider the importance I place in my business as opposed to in myself as a person.
So beware of biting off more than you can chew. Other, more important aspects of your life will undoubtedly suffer as a result. Almost everyone is guilty of this, myself included. But believe me, you don’t want to learn this the hard way. Unfortunately, in our industry, a lot of us take on more work than what is healthy as a direct result of accepting such low rates.
Which brings us to our next mistake…
This one is much easier said than done.
About a year ago, I took a webinar led by Corrine McKay about pricing strategies for freelance translators. This webinar has had a huge impact on the way I approach pricing. Corrine’s strategy (and now mine as well) is to reverse engineer your per-word and per-hour rates based upon your own financial goals so that you can come up with the ideal rates that work for you. You can read all about it here. Highly recommended!
As Corrine and many other industry leaders have pointed out time after time, many of us fall into the trap of accepting rates that are way too low for our own good and for the good of the profession. Unfortunately, it does not look like this trend will be changing any time soon. It is becoming harder and harder to find clients willing to pay a higher price, but they are out there. Know your worth and refuse to work with clients who are not willing to pay you your rates.
As a Spanish translator, there has been no shortage of work in my main areas of specialization: medical and audiovisual. But I remember early on in my career, a mentor of mine suggested, perhaps on a whim, that I look into video game localization. While translating video games may sound like an exciting prospect, this simply didn’t seem like a wise road to go down as a Spanish-to-English translator.
With all due respect to this mentor, I honestly think this suggestion may not have been very well researched. I am unaware of any Spanish-speaking country with a significant presence in this market and thus the need for localization into English. In fact, recent research from J. Clement would suggest that none of the top seven countries for video game development (ranked by amount of developers) are Spanish-speaking (unless we are including the United States).
So, while it perhaps may have made sense to pursue this if I were localizing from English-to-Spanish, I am doubtful of the sustainability of this specialization in Spanish-to-English.
Think of your own language direction and the viability of various translation specializations/niches within the context of it. For example, I have heard that patent translation is a very viable specialization for German-to-English translators.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but with the proliferation of Machine Translation and Artificial Intelligence, relying solely on translation for your income is becoming less realistic every day. Sure, there are certain specializations which will remain unscathed by these technological advancements for the time being. But, because of the lower barrier to entry this technology has facilitated, I would argue that going into translation today is much less lucrative than it was, say, ten years ago.
I recognized this sad-but-true fact from the get go. Which is why multilingual desktop publishing (or multilingual document formatting, in layman's terms) has been a pillar of my services portfolio since the beginning. And a rather robust one at that. I made the decision to invest in courses to educate myself in this area and today I am very confident in my desktop publishing abilities.
In fact, multilingual desktop publishing has been much more lucrative for me than translation. It has been somewhat of a lifeline for me and I would have given up on being a translator long ago had it not been a service I offered. Maybe I am being overly pessimistic, but I think anyone new to the profession expecting to be able to make a decent living off of translation alone is in for a serious shock.
Not marketing yourself is perhaps the biggest mistake one can make as a freelance translator in 2025. There’s no easy way out of it. Marketing takes time for those of us who are unable to outsource it, which I would argue would be the grand majority of us. And of course, for those of us who are able to allocate money to marketing, it is always a significant investment without a guaranteed return on it.
Marketing is such a vital part of every business. In the book I mentioned earlier, The E Myth Revisted by Michael E. Gerber, the author points out how most small businesses ultimately fail because business owners are too busy working in their businesses as opposed to on their businesses. This is a trap that is very easy to fall into: thinking that, as translators, all we have to do is translate. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. We have to make ourselves known to the people who need our services (and are able/willing to pay for them).
Set a marketing goal for yourself each week. Ideally, you should be taking some time to market every day, especially if you find yourself not receiving as much work as you would like. For myself, during periods such as these, I try to apply to at least one new agency a day on weekdays. Do not be ashamed or shy when it comes to marketing your services to people you do not know, especially if you honestly believe they may be in need of them.
In conclusion, this is not an exhaustive list. There are many more mistakes to avoid as a freelance translator in 2025. These are some of the most pertinent ones.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading my blog post! I wish you a prosperous 2025!
References:
Clement, J. (December 12, 2023) Game developer distribution worldwide 2021, by region [Infographic]. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/453785/game-developer-region-distribution-worldwide/
Gerber, Michael E. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. HarperBusiness, 1995.