THE TRANSLATOR WHO STOPPED TRANSLATING A colleague once confided she'd cut her translation output in half. Same client base. Same niche. Half the words delivered per month. Her income that year went up 35%. So here's what happened. She stopped translating the documents nobody else wanted and started translating the ones nobody else could touch - the ones requiring her specific clinical background, her specific regulatory knowledge, her name on the cognitive debriefing report because the...
3 days ago • 3 min read
THE LAST GENERATION OF GENERALISTS Something is happening to the middle of the translation market - and it's happening much faster than most people care to admit. The bottom tier - high-volume, low-rate, commodity work - has vanished Houdini style. Not disappearing. Gone. AI handles it at a quality threshold that most agency clients deem acceptable, at a cost that no human can match. That should feel like welcome news if you're not at the bottom. It doesn't mean what you think it means....
17 days ago • 4 min read
THE DIRECT CLIENT BUSINESS AUDIT Most translators who say they want direct clients don’t have a pipeline problem. They have a positioning problem they haven’t diagnosed yet. The difference matters. A pipeline problem is fixable with outreach. A positioning problem means the outreach you’re doing won’t work - not because you’re doing it wrong, but because there’s nothing positioned behind it for a direct client to buy into. This audit won’t flatter you. It’s designed to tell you where you...
24 days ago • 5 min read
Ok let me walk you through the maths. A specialist medical translator works 6 billable hours a day, four days a week. She doesn't chase volume. She most certainly doesn't work weekends. She has a short but dedicated client list - seven direct clients, all pharmaceutical or CRO - and a wait list that's been on fire for eighteen months. Her effective hourly rate sits at just over €500. Not per word mind. Per hour. That number probably triggered one of two reactions in you. Either you thought:...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
You got faster. You read more. You took the specialist courses. You built up ten years of domain knowledge - the kind that lets you move through a dense clinical outcomes assessment without stopping to look anything up. And here's what that earned you: less money per project. Not because the market doesn't value expertise. Because you're pricing by the hour. The billable hour has a hidden logic that works against you every time you improve. A junior translator takes six hours to work through...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
You got faster. You read more. You took the specialist courses. You built up ten years of domain knowledge - the kind that lets you move through a dense clinical outcomes assessment without stopping to look anything up. And here's what that earned you: less money per project. Not because the market doesn't value expertise. Because you're pricing by the hour. The billable hour has a hidden logic that works against you every time you improve. A junior translator takes six hours to work through...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
There's a conversation happening before you even open your mouth. Before the scouting call. Before the proposal. Before the first e-mail exchange where you talk about the project, the timeline, the complexity of the terminology. The moment a potential client sees your rate, they draw a conclusion. Not about your price. About you. And here's the uncomfortable part: they're usually right. A low rate doesn't just signal low cost. It signals low stakes. It tells the client that you're not sure...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
There's a conversation happening before you even open your mouth. Before the scouting call. Before the proposal. Before the first e-mail exchange where you talk about the project, the timeline, the complexity of the terminology. The moment a potential client sees your rate, they draw a conclusion. Not about your price. About you. And here's the uncomfortable part: they're usually right. A low rate doesn't just signal low cost. It signals low stakes. It tells the client that you're not sure...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
There's a thing I learnt at med school about scar tissue that stayed with me. It's stronger than the original. When skin heals after a wound, the body doesn't simply repair what was there - it rebuilds with denser collagen fibres, cross-linked in multiple directions. The resulting tissue is tougher than what it replaced. The body doesn't recover to its previous state. It exceeds it. I've been thinking about that in the context of your career. Every translator, interpreter and copyeditor...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read