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Difficult Direct Client (Follow up to to my last post)
Thread poster: Eric Stone
Preston Decker
Preston Decker  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:39
Chinese to English
RE Feb 20, 2017

Eric S. wrote:

Preston Decker wrote:

Sorry to hear about the experience Eric. In my experience, a problematic client like this one is likely to remain problematic (either because of their own reasons, or because the end client is being unreasonable).


Thanks for the response, then I suppose you also find it unreasonable? Hopefully I can take this as a clue that there's still hope in our market?

[Edited at 2017-02-20 17:14 GMT]


It certainly is unreasonable. The thing about business, however, is that circumstances sometimes dictate that unreasonable client demands be accepted. The right choice for you really depends on how important this client is to your business. If, for example, they represent only 5% of your entire income, and/or you have enough savings to get you through a few lean months, I'd just say goodbye to them now, as you've tried to adopt reasonable measures to improve the relationship, and they don't seem to be capable of moving forward with you (and in my experience, it's unlikely that things will improve as long as the PM and/or client stays the same). On the other hand, if they represent 30 or 40% of your business, and saying goodbye to them would put you in a difficult financial situation, you may need to find a way to move forward carefully (my biggest worry about this sort of client is that they are precisely the sort of client that will write to you in a month asking for a refund for a translation due to "mistakes", thus the emphasis on "carefully") until you can replace half of what they give you. It's a very delicate balancing act--say goodbye to them too early, and you risk financial difficulties; too late, and you've likely missed out on additional opportunities with better clients.

In terms of the CN>EN market, IMHO it's a pretty decent market;I wrote in a different thread last week that I'd put it at just above average if compared to other pairs. I'd say that as long as things stay the way they are now and MT and post-editing don't take over the world, there will be an opportunity to make a living in CN>EN. I do think it's important to target North American and European clients, as they're simply able to pay more than most Chinese clients. Coming back to the US has helped me with this--I'd estimate I've seen a 10-20% increase in business just because I'm more available to North American clients now that I'm in their time zone.

With that said, I should disclose that I very well might be in my last few months as a freelance translator, as I've been accepted into a PHD program, and I'm seriously considering attending. This has more to do with translation in general and my own personal reasons (including, of course, the fact that I've always dreamed about having the opportunity to do this doctorate) than our language pair. There's no getting around the fact that the translation market is not an easy one to make money in--there is money there to be made, but there is also a lot of competition. Add into it the stress of running your own business, the additional self-employment taxes, and the working hours, plus the fact that everyone has different financial goals, and there are certainly plenty of reasons to look for something else. Of course, there are also many, many benefits to translating, which we all know about.

Feel free to PM me if you want a few more thoughts, but I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that I don't think there's any reason to consider moving on from translating because of our language pair (i.e. I remain cautiously hopeful about CN>EN) , but that depending on your own personal circumstances there may be reasons to reconsider translation because of the industry as a whole. (and I realize that you didn't ask about changing careers, so my apologies if I read too much into your last question)


[Edited at 2017-02-20 21:38 GMT]


 
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Difficult Direct Client (Follow up to to my last post)







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