Penelope Truck over at the Brazen Careerist is one of my favourite bloggers ever, and I’m delighted to have an opportunity to shamelessly hat tip in her direction today.
A recent post on 5 ways to be better at self promotion has useful advice for freelance translators at all levels of expertise. But a comment in point number 2 – Stay the most focused when things look the most difficult – especially caught my eye:
… it’s easy to get frustrated when things are not happening fast enough. So it makes sense that we’d try something new, to see if it might work faster.
I did this a lot while I was trying to be a freelance writer. I can write a wide range of stuff, and it took me a while to figure out the intersection of things I like to write and things I could get paid well to write. I knew a ton of opportunities in both of those categories, but I could think of very few things at the cross section of the two categories.
This is real food for thought for me. Like a lot of translators, I think, I see a definite distinction between the kind of translations I like to do but can’t afford to 5 days a week, and the kind of translation work that pays well. I’ve worked hard to move past the stage of needing to take every job that comes my way and I also feel I am well rewarded for the kind of work I do. So now my books are full, I’m keen to move on the the next stage.
I feel a re-shuffle of some sort is in order to mark this transition, but I hadn’t managed to work out just how I was going to do this. So I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Penelope’s very successful book, and work on trying to find the intersection between these two categories. It’s not an answer just yet, but at least it’s a question.
