5 Reasons I (Almost) Quit Translation
One freelance translator’s journey away from and back into the translation business.
This is something of an introduction for Julija Savić, who has recently joined Zingword as a Content Creator and Social Media Manager. We’re stoked to welcome Jules to the team.
“I know there are those of us who believe things can change and are willing to work for it.” — Jules
“I’m as mad as hell and I won’t take this anymore!”, my inner Howard Beale roared as I wrote yet another e-mail regarding a late payment. It was November of 2018 and, having had a rough year on both the personal and the professional front, I felt just as desperate as he did.
Although I’ve only been in this business for a couple of years and am in no way a seasoned translator, I was growing increasingly salty. Work was scarce, money was scarcer, tight deadlines and personal issues made time management impossible, my health was poor, my optimism was dwindling. Not only that, but everyone I knew in the industry seemed to have an air of desperation about them. I was on a train going nowhere, and I was not alone.
By December it seemed like there was no point to the stress I was dealing with. Drained, demoralized and depressed, I was convinced I wanted out.
Here are some of the (entirely subjective) reasons why.
1. Uninformed Clients
While I strove to make my work process as transparent as possible in order to avoid my clients getting the wrong idea, some of them just stuck to their own assumptions. Those of the “well, you know the language, so you can just do it off the top of your head” variety. While years of correspondence and discussions with potential and current clients did help me deal, encountering the same thing over and over again was starting to frustrate me. What’s worse, it had some unfortunate consequences for the work itself. The perception of translators’ brains automatically processing the source material and producing the end product seemed to be rampant and led to unrealistic deadlines and demands, as well as criminally low fees. I’m aware that these issues appear in all types of freelance work and that there is some pride to achieving the impossible.
But how do you hold on to that pride if your efforts don’t reap any rewards?
2. Late Payments
Picture the following. At some point during a project, everything seems to be going fine. You’re getting interesting source material, you’ve signed some contracts, you’ve done your work and met the deadline. You’re kicking ass and feeling swell.
But then months pass by and no money’s coming through. Say you’ve managed your finances to the best of your abilities, but do not have a stable network of clients at the moment and were heavily relying on this particular payment. The client doesn’t seem interested in paying you any time soon — contractual obligations be damned. You consult your translator and even lawyer friends, but they tell you there’s little to nothing you can do about it. This scenario was something me and my fellow translators experienced on a fairly regular basis. I’ve uttered and heard the phrase “I don’t think I’ll ever get that money” more times than I care to remember.
And since things were not looking great in the translator community and the industry as a whole, it felt like I was fighting for a lost cause.
3. Cynicism within the Community
Connecting with people in your line of work can be extremely helpful, especially in freelancing. For me, colleague referrals and rant sessions with fellow translators created a sense of camaraderie and common struggle that made it feel like I was not alone in this. But there were some aspects of the community that I found disheartening. I can’t say that the cynicism that apparently comes with this profession was not understandable, or even amusing at times. But it sometimes manifested itself in ways I found problematic. Extreme rivalry, looking down on other fields of work, the disconnect between successful translators and those still finding their way, patronizing attitudes — these things seemed to plague most of my interactions. As a “can’t we all just get along” type of person, this air of hostility bothered me. I found myself thinking I’d never be able to achieve anything in this type of industry.
Which was, for lack of a better term, quite depressing.
4. Mental Health Challenges
Speaking of depressing, there are certainly some mental health challenges in any type of freelancing, and translation is no exception. Staying at home for the better part of your week, dealing with constant sensory input, chasing deadlines through ungodly hours, financial anxiety and instability — these things have their repercussions. I’ve encountered many translators whose working conditions and perceived lack of a career prospect either caused or exacerbated their mental health issues. Apart from anxiety and depression, substance abuse seemed to be a thing in our midst. In my case, coffee for days, but I’ve met people who open files and bottles at the same time and don’t stop till they’ve finished with both.
That couldn’t be healthy, but I can’t say I didn’t understand — after all, the industry was doomed to fail from the minute I set foot in it.
5. Lack of Perspective
The aforementioned cynicism and discontent was not just coming from colleagues with my level of experience. In a way, I was raised with it. The first thing one of my college professors said to us in an introduction-to-translation type of class was that, if we seek a life of contentment, translation is not the way to go. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” is not really something you’d want to hear about the industry you aspire to work in, but it does stick with you. A couple of years later, when I had already started freelancing, another professor dedicated an entire session to mourning the impending death of the profession by the hands of machine translation. MT, however, was not the only cause for alarm: some of the more experienced translators I knew pitied my entire generation for entering the market in its current state. Others blamed us for the rising trend of price dumping. Constantly hearing this from people who are experts in the field was discouraging to say the least. At some point, every single translator I knew was worried, pessimistic, ready to quit or all of the above.
When everyone you know in your line of work seems to live in a state of defeatism, what perspective is there to be had?
So… Did I quit?
To find the answer to my “to quit or not to quit” dilemma, I did what I usually do in desperate times and went back to square one. I entered this line of work for a reason, and there must’ve been some positive sides to it along the way. I looked back on my previous projects and remembered each and every one of them in detail. There were those I wished I could have rejected. But there were also some wonderful, reliable and creative people on my client list and I remembered the ease with which I worked with them. I remembered the most challenging parts of the source material and the rewarding feeling of finding a solution for them. The excitement of plunging into a well-written swirl of sentences or twisting and bending the thoughts of a speaker to fit the time constraints of a subtitle. I remembered what it felt like to work as a translator, as opposed to living as one. And that was a passion I was not ready to give up on. Daily realities were far from ideal, but there had to be a way to improve them. There had to be room for progress.
So I decided to push on. The prospect of the industry still looks grim, or so I hear, and there don’t seem to be a lot of people in my immediate surroundings willing or able to work on its improvement. But I know there are those of us who believe things can change and are willing to work for it. Projects and incentives with the goal of upgrading the standards of the industry are being created as we speak. And I’m definitely not the only stubborn translator in the world, am I? After all, if you’ve ever pushed through miles of text and managed to meet the right side of an impossible deadline, you know what we can achieve when we set are minds to it.
All we need is a little hope, a sprinkle of motivation, and a cup of coffee 🙂
