Translation is just a part of project your clients are working on. If you as a translator would like to gain more number of orders of translation, expanding your services in addition to translation can be an effective strategy. We all are linguistic consultants helping clients make their projects successful. This doesn’t mean however that you always have to take care of everything by yourself besides translation. We have peer networks, and we have colleagues we can count on. You receive a linguistic job request that you don’t provide / don’t feel confident? Wait a moment before you just turn it down and think if you know anyone who’s good at it.
Through networking, I’ve met lots of colleagues from a variety of professions & sectors. I proactively collaborate with them in a variety of ways: translation, proofreading, interpreting, linguistic related arrangement, local guide, DTP incl. printouts, subtitling, voiceover etc. I even share workloads with them if a volume is too large and I can’t manage it alone, of course, as long as clients allow me to do so. Eventually, it brings to me more jobs of translation. Here’s a good example: clients who contact me for interpreting need not only an interpreting service but also a translation service at another occasion. If I just decline, they’ll have to go to another service provider and I’ll end up losing subsequent opportunities.
Of course, coordinating a project consumes time, so if you don’t find it worth, that’s okay. There’s yet lots of other ideas you can incorporate. Coordinating is just one of those. I just enjoy such activities as a part of my linguistic services, and it pays to do it. I’ve had an impression that not a small number of translators out of Japan provide not only translation but also interpreting, while especially Japanese translators tend to limit their capability to translation, which is missing wider opportunities. I often make posts in English first followed by Japanese, but I intentionally wrote this post other way around 😉
Pic: a souvenir received from my Singaporean client🇸🇬
