The True Potential of the Freelance Economy

Illustrazione di Chris Piascik

I’ve been a freelance translator for about 15 years now, and throughout this time I’ve always felt that working through translation agencies was the right way to go. There were various reasons for this. For me personally, it was a way to streamline my workflow by not having to deal with a lot of questions and requests that I couldn’t directly bill for and that would eat into my day-to-day productivity, but I also believed — in theory at least — that it was best for the end client because the agency could more easily arrange for proofreading and general quality control and could help them find the right translator(s) for the job at hand.

But now we’re in the freelance economy or sharing economy or on-demand economy or whatever you want to call it (and yeah, I know, they’re not all exactly the same thing), and all sorts of sites and businesses are claiming they have the solution to cutting out the middleman for freelancers. Trouble is — in my experience in the translation industry at least — nobody is giving too much thought to the actual freelancer. Yeah, they pay lip service to us getting more work, working when and where we want, yada yada yada, but nobody is doing much of anything to really make a freelancer’s life any better than it was before. And in many cases, they’re actually making it worse. Not to mention that, in most cases, they’re not eliminating the middleman; they’re just putting the middleman — or gatekeeper might be more to the point — in the cloud.

One potential diamond in the rough, though, was (the now defunct) Fluently.io, a London-based startup that wanted to “shine a light on the world’s most talented translators”. Unlike any other solution I’m aware of, they wanted to connect rockstar translators directly with the end client in a personal, human relationship that is mutually beneficial for everyone concerned.

(UPDATE: Article updated to reflect the demise of Fluently.io. Another new resource I’m currently rooting for is micro-oiseau.com.)

“Say goodbye to the faceless translation service.” — Fluently.io

The basic idea of Fluenty was that translators would have a place to build attractive profiles for themselves and to work together as a “curated community” of high-quality, professional translators. What the Fluently platform sought to do in all of this was help clients find translators that were actually interested in what the client did and, ideally, were actual users of their products or services, while also facilitating interaction between client and translator and making most of the busy work a whole lot easier.

I was super excited about what they were building. Another problem with the current state of online platforms is that they require translators to build accounts and profiles fragmented all across the internet, and none of them do much of anything to make your profiles things that you’d actually want to show off to your potential customers. This means that you have to build your own, separate landing page if you want something cool that communicates your brand effectively, but — let’s be honest — what are the odds that anyone is going to stumble across your own little desert-island corner of the ‘net on their own?

Fluently was like Medium for translators in a way. You could blog and blog on your own site in a vacuum till your fingers are worn to the nub and never generate much traffic. But if you take that same writing to Medium, you’re sure to have a great audience pretty much right out of the gate. In the same way, if you were to have made Fluently your primary translation workspace, you could have taken care of all of your branding and customer interaction all in one spot and built a business identity that potential customers would have actually seen.

My ideal platform? Clients get that personal touch they need and desire, and freelancers get a whole suite of tools, backed by an awesome community, to truly take our careers to the next level. That’s what the freelance economy should be all about!

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(Full disclosure: I’m not an employee of micro-oiseau.com, but I am an approved translator there and am friends with the creators of the site. Feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to get involved!)