A Case Study

People starting out often have the incorrect assumption that they are competing against thousands and thousands of other freelancers. Although such an assumption is logical as the financial barriers to entry appear low, this is not true. There are actually very few qualified translators available for a given job at a given moment. Let’s perform some arithmetic regarding one of the most supposedly flooded pairs, English>Spanish.

The first large category of potential competitors obviously includes all bilingual people. A large percentage of the world’s population is bilingual. However, very few of them are fluent enough in a source language to begin to consider translating from it.

385,000,000 Spanish Speakers

According to Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE), only 5% of adults know English at the advanced level, the minimum presequite for translating anything. Let’s apply that 5% figure to the Spanish speaking world. If there are 358,000,000 people who speak Spanish as a native language, then there are only 17.9 million people who read English fluently and speak Spanish as a native language, at most.

5 Million Bilingual & Literate Spanish Speakers

Fluency in a source (foreign) language is just the beginning. Fluency in the target language is also a must, though many people miss this fact. A translator must be able to write extremely well in his or her native language. We won’t assume anything here, and give bilingual Spanish speakers the benefit of the doubt that they write well in their mother tongue (so we still have the figure of 17.9 million, although realistically probably 5 million max).

1,745 with Experience

Next, a translator should have experience, the more the better. Ways of gaining experience are not within the scope of this post. The experience factor whittles down the pool even more. There are only 1,745 English to Spanish translators on the most popular online translators portal who have real verifiable experience reported for them.

950 open for business

Fourth, in order to compete for jobs, a translator must be open for business. People working full-time jobs or weighed down with other obligations are not going to be able to devote 10 hours per day of sustained effort to a text for very long. People looking for a quick buck would be out of luck, as translation is hard and time-consuming work. The stereotypical moonlighting student would hardly have the time to work on your text, he or she’s either studying or attending classes most of the time.

It should be noted here that most of the profiles on translation portals have been abandoned long ago, after having been put up one weekend and then neglected forever after. Only 950 English to Spanish translators with reported experience updated their profiles in the last 6 months (most translators “in the market” update their profiles every 2 months or so).

70 Available

Fifth, besides meeting all of the above criteria, a translator has to be available to take your order. Most professional translators do their utmost to keep their schedules as full as possible, further decreasing the competition pool. Only 70 English to Spanish translators meeting the above criteria have indicated that they are “available” as of today. Of them, only 3 of them (yes 3) have indicated that they would like to be contacted directly by e-mail regarding jobs.

Sixth, a qualified, open-for-business, and available translator has to see it worthwhile to bid on a job. Most translators in this category don’t bid for jobs as their repeat clients keep them busy for at least 40 hours a week.

And so, in actual reality the number of qualified translators available on the market at a given time and actually bidding is quite low. Most jobs get about 10 bids, of which three (max 4) are serious. You can prove this for yourself by trying to “outsource” one of your jobs and counting the number of “viable” offers that you get.

15 Bidding

The most recent English to Spanish translation job on the most popular translation portal received only 15 bids (yes, only 15 of 17.9 million “bilinguals” bothered to bid). Another one which required an annual $120 membership fee attracted only 9 offers. Nine.

And this in what is supposedly one of the most flooded pairs, English to Spanish.

Count the Competition on One Hand

This talk of the market being flooded is nonsense. Translators compete, at most, against 1-2 dozen of their peers worldwide at any given time in the most competitive pairs, of whom maybe a third are “serious”.

What are your opinions?

Just fired up a twitter account today, only to realise that none of my tweets were showing up in search. Stumped, I gave it a couple of hours. Still neither my tweet, nor my username, were showing up in twitter search. The account was fresh and nothing had been done with it, so it couldn’t have been anything I did.

So, I figured that maybe something was wrong with the tweet itself. Granted, it used one hashtag (of course #xl8) and one key word (Google Reader). To test that theory, I tweeted a short message without hashtags that my blog was online. After doing this, my username could now be found in twitter search. The short message without hashtags or keywords showed up. Meanwhile, the first message with hashtags was still blocked or “filtered out”.

The moral of the story is that twitter is using some kind of spam filter, some kind of automated spam filter. New accounts that are trip off the spam filter are placed into a “sandbox”. The way out of the sandbox is to tweet a message that doesn’t trip off the filter. It may be worth calibrating your tweets to make sure that you aren’t caught in the filter-induced sandbox.

If you’re here for the RSS package, here is the Google Reader bundle of the best translation blogs.

This is my first post, where I would like to share news and ask for advice.

Like in any industry, we have to keep up with the news. One of the downsides of freelancing is that it can be a lonely profession. Most freelancers work alone in an industry that most of their local friends have little knowledge about. This makes it difficult to relate with others in the field and feel a sense of community.

With the advent of blogging, this is changing. Other freelancers are sharing their experiences online. A sense of community is developing and forming.

I used to start my day by reading endless news stories in the New York Times and BBC, most of those stories had nothing at all to do with my professional life. Google Reader has changed all this for me. I now start the day reading posts from the best minds in the industry, posts that keep me informed and contain valuable wisdom.

You can use Google Reader to keep up with the news in the industry. First, you’ll need a google account. Sign up for Google Reader. Then, click the “add a subscription” at the top of the page. Type in the names of your favorite translation blogs. It should automatically find the RSS feed and update it everyday for you!

You can get a step ahead by using my list of the best translation blogs I’ve found so far, just click the link at the end of this paragraph to get set up with XL8N4U’s bundle of the best translation blogs

I am so happy to have found these great resources of information online. Please share your experiences by placing a comment.

My main question is, do other people have lists of blogs they read in the morning that they share? If so, how can I also read the blogs on their list without adding each blog individually? Thanks for your help.

Questions for Discussion:
1. How can I find other people’s lists of translation blogs to read in the morning?
2. Is Google Reader the best way to keep up with information of interest to freelance translators?
3. What are other ways to keep up with the news that you would recommend?