As customers often don’t speak the language you deliver, they can’t tell if you did a good job or not.  You can, of course. But let’s not look into the quality of your translation, for once.

When you look back onto your job or project, you should reflect on the business side of it: “Was this job worth my time?”, “What could I learn from it?”

Was this job worth my time?

You need to compare time to money: how much money do you want to make to how much money you did make and how much time you spent on the job.

When you register how much time you are spending on a job, you can easily make that calculation. If I want to make 250 XXX a day, and I work 2 days on a job, I know I should have been able to invoice 500 XXX.

But there is more: you should also register if you have set the price yourself OR if your customer imposed it to you. If you did not hit your financial goal while you made the quote yourself, you clearly made a mistake somewhere. In that case you really need to have some details on the job. If your customer defined the price, and you accepted it, and you spent less time on it than your financial model predicted you would have, you may have found yourself a very good customer. Of course, it could have been a lucky shot: not every job from a good customer is a good job. But at least you can see the difference between good and less interesting customers.

The only requirement is that you register some metadata on every job you deliver.

(Between brackets: If you spend time quoting, and you don’t get the job OR you decide not to send a quote after all, you can also add this to a spreadsheet: your observations on jobs you did not take or did not get are valuable as well!)

What could I learn from it?

If you store a lot of tags about a job (like the price composition, if you outsourced or not (and to whom), if you did extra work (what and how much), what type of document it is, if a third-party pre-translation was done…) you will learn what job type is high risk and low risk for you.

If you see that jobs with Machine Translation pre-translations always make you fail your financial goal, you know you should increase your post-edit unit price, or not take those jobs.

If you see that every time you use an online-editor, you make a smooth break-even, you should probably try to find customers that are using this editor to outsource their jobs.

One of the things that helped me most to understand my business is simply to count (or to measure) my interactions with my customers. For what I do, this is very meaningful: there’s a high correlation between loss and number of interactions. Maybe that is true for some translators as well.

Success and failure often have a reason. It is your responsibility as a freelancer to reveal that reason, to see the production pattern. All it takes, is 5 minutes to register the project metadata, right after delivery of each project.

Something that might be useful to add is the date you send the invoice and the date you get paid (to learn who are fast and slow payers), a date when you archive the project and where to, the name of the translator who helped you on review… If you store data, you can use it one day. If you don’t, you can’t.

Download

To help Ana Gauz (Newbies and Their Role in the Low Fee Push) I re-made a spreadsheet I used to share with my students and trainees. You can download it from my website. Feel free to use and modify it. If you would find mistakes or you have suggestions, please let me know.

Credit Image: Ales Krivec