Working as a Travelling Freelance Translator in Asia Personal Eight-Month Long Experience of a Russian Travelling Translator in Asia




Greater than 6 minutes, my friend!

Hi fellow translators!

Recently I returned to Russia after eight months of continuous travelling in Asia, where the only income for me were English<>Russian translations. When people find out that I spent so much time away from home, the first question they usually ask is “where did this guy get so much money?” Maybe he rents out an apartment in Moscow? Or maybe his father is a parliament member? I hasten to dispel the doubts – I did not take a penny from my parents. Moreover, through the 8 months of my travels I had to send home half the cost of renting an apartment in Moscow, because my mom was living there. Ok, now this story sounds absolutely impossible, huh? But I assure you that in this article I will reveal all my cards and tell you how I managed to organize my life so that I lived happily away from the winter cold, eternal traffic jams and stuffy offices in hospitable Asia for eight wonderful months as a travelling freelancer.

I started with applying for a 3-month Thai visa in Moscow. I haven’t been to Asia before, so I went in the uncertainty – new language, new traditions, quite unusual climate, people, and lifestyle. I organized my travel completely independently, that is, it did not take a return ticket, didn’t book hotels and didn’t plan anything at all. The only thing I knew was that first of all I wanted to get to an island, since it seemed to be the picture-perfect life away from home for me – lying under a palm tree on the beach and drinking coconut juice from a coconut 🙂 As I understood later, having no plan was the best way to travel, as in this case you communicate with a lot of locals and travelers like you, and learn from them, where you should go, and where the advertising in guidebooks drives you only to rip you off. Moreover, if nothing is booked, your travel becomes a hundred times more exciting, since you can always hit the road in case for some reason you feel that you stayed for too long in one place or you just feel like going somewhere else.

As I said, I traveled continuously for eight months, and managed to visit three countries – Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. I tried to cover my travels in detail in the social media (vk.com/dimzoner and fb.com/dimzoner), uploading photos and writing some travelling freelancer stories. However, since this article is about the organization of remote translation work from Asia, let me skip the picturesque stories about how incredibly cool it was to travel around these beautiful countries, and move on to describe the main components of remote work and my solutions on its organization.

  1. Reliable access to broadband Internet. Looking from the outside, Asia looks like a part of the third world covered with dense jungle, populated with uneducated poor natives with machetes, and stuffed with scary snakes and spiders. In fact, it turned out that Thailand, Laos and Cambodia all have excellent Internet access and in most cases it’s free. Coming to most hotels, hostels or cafes you get free access to WiFi (except for those with the “talk to each other, not your phones” policy). Personally, I bought SIM cards of local mobile operators in all three countries I traveled to, which provided me with very cheap, fast and reliable mobile Internet. And by the way, one minute of voice call in Thailand is $0.03. Good deal, isn’t it? 🙂
  2. Accommodations. Many tourists consider themselves very advanced, renting a house in Thailand for 3 months in winter, and pretending that they became steep travelers because of that. If you like this way of life – home rentals will cost roughly $260 to $1,300 per month. However, as a travelling freelancer I wanted as much as possible to explore new places and communicate with guys and girls from around the world, and to always have an option to go travelling somewhere far away if I just felt like it. That’s why I lived in hostels, and discovered them to be a great place to meet other active travelers (both young and mature). If you live in hostels, your rental costs go all the way down to five dollars per day ($90 – $150 per month), whereas the quality of living can be even better than in hotels.
  3. Self-organization. This perhaps is the most difficult part, because most of us are used to translating comfortably in warm apartments knowing that it’s very cold outside in winter. It’s the whole different story when the sun is shining bright, you hear the sea waves, the birds are singing and the spirit of adventures is in the air! I learned the hard way how challenging it is to get yourself to work when your new travelling friends ask you to go with them to the mountains or waterfalls. You know that such an adventure will take you a whole day, which will forever remain with you in vivid memories, but the reality has no mercy: you have to finish your translation project instead. My solution was to take projects, setting deadlines in the way that I had twice as much time as I really needed to finish the job. In this case, even with a very busy schedule of travels I sometimes wanted to just sit at home and relax. Of course, earning some money while having a rest from traveling adventures was a double pleasure.
  4. Food. Every person who asks me about my life in Asia has an opinion that it’s hard to find good food in Asia, because they use a lot of spices, and the unsanitary is everywhere, so you’re at constant risk of having digestion problems. Speaking of my experience, I did not eat in fancy restaurants, but on the contrary I was living in remote and absolutely non-touristic areas, and ate in local cafes with local people. Sometimes these cafes were deep in backwoods (especially in Cambodia), but I was eager to try integrating myself into the local life, and feeling what they feel. So the myth can be considered busted, since I had no digestion problems whatsoever during the whole eight months of my travels. Eating out, you can always ask to make your food “not spicy”, and it will taste quite European. The food is very cheap in Asia – starting from $0.6 per serving. Another great thing in Asia is the all-year-round availability of fresh fruit, which is very refreshing and suitable at any time of the day.
  5. Visa. You can come to Thailand for 30 days with no visa. If you plan for a longer stay – get a visa from a Thai embassy. It’s cheap and you will be able to live there for three to six months. Cambodian visa costs $35 per month, and it’s totally worth it. Laos visa was free for me as a Russian resident, but they have different visa terms for travelling freelancers from other countries.

Let’s now have a rough calculation of monthly expenses in Asia:

Comfortable plan – a good house, eating in restaurants, mobile and cable Internet: $500 + $210 + $30 = 740 USD per month.

Minimum plan – a good hostel, local food, mobile internet (since free WIFI is available everywhere): $150 + $120 + $12 = $282.

My absolute minimum daily expenses were at 6.5 USD. You probably think that I lived in harsh Spartan conditions, but that’s actually far from truth. It was one of the most exciting periods of my life in Asia, and some of the best living conditions there. Six and a half US dollars included accommodation, bike rental, gasoline and three tasty meals per day. It’s worth mentioning that I lived in the nature, washed with water that ran through the pipes from a pure mountain stream, ate fresh fruit from local orchards, swam in a warm river every day, and went on a motorcycle to waterfalls, mountains and caves whenever I felt like it. In addition, locals invited me to their holiday celebrations, took me with them on the river rafting, taught me Thai language, and much more!

I wrote this article to answer the most common questions that everyone asks when they learn that I spent so much time in Asia. I bet you have even more questions about this travelling freelancer lifestyle, so please feel free to ask them in comments or via personal messages. Warm hugs to all fellow translators and interpreters out there! Let’s keep in touch:
fb.com/dimzoner
vk.com/dimzoner

Dmitry Brovkin

About Dmitry Brovkin

Experienced, comprehensive Russian/English interpretation and translation services since 1999

4 thoughts on “Working as a Travelling Freelance Translator in Asia Personal Eight-Month Long Experience of a Russian Travelling Translator in Asia

  1. Dmitry, thank you for such an inspiring blog post! My dream is to become a digital nomad. However, now my freelance freedom is limited to the home office 🙂 (frankly speaking, I’m a little bit scared about traveling abroad). I hope that I will overcome my fears, buy two one-way tickets (for me and my wife) and travel to some exotic country this summer!

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    1. Thank you for this message, Simon! I’d say summer is too hot in tropical countries and also you can run into the rainy season, which is no fun at all. The perfect time to travel to Asia is from early November to the end of June.
      I know it seems too risky to travel to such an exotic country on your own, but I was just blown away by the hospitability and kindness of Thai poople. This is one of the things that amazed me the most – Thai and Cambodian people are extremely nice and kind (especially those who are not selling anything), so travelling there was absolutely safe and pleasant.

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    1. Thank you Alena! Yes, I was thinking about Latin America aswell, but Asia took my heart, you know 🙂 And there are so many countries yet to see there: Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka…

      But definitely the world is big and amazing, so I’m really happy to be a freelance translator, free to travel around the globe 🙂

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