I kid you not, we get at least 10 emails a day from freelance translators looking for work. Of those 99% of them go straight in the trash bin (we would reply to maybe 3 a week), yet maybe a lot more are actually quite good translators?
It is actually quite infuriating to see how so many professional translators are so inept at the business side of the relationship. At the same time I don't want to waste your time asking you to fill out a profile, enter skill-sets and qualifications etc. if I am not likely to have work for you in the future. In many language pairs we have a really good hard-core of people who we use constantly. Yet other times we will be looking to add to our existing crew.
So I thought I would write this up and give you some pointers; if you want to approach translation companies for work as a freelancer/contract translator, here are what I would consider the basic minimums.
1. State your language pair. Honestly, I cannot count the number of cover letters I get on a weekly basis that DO NOT mention the language pair, or if they do it is as a footnote at the bottom of the CV. Quite literally, WTF????
2. State your specialities. Anyone who says they can translate any field and any subject goes straight into my trash bin. Impossible. I am a reasonably well educated and well read English speaker, fluent in Japanese. But I cannot for the life of me understand a real estate sales and purchase contract, nor could I comprehend a nuclear facility evacuation protocol, let alone translate one. Get real, people.
3. State your rates in a format you are comfortable with. Pick A: a measure (e.g. source words), B: a currency, C: a ratio for rush rates D: a lower and an ideal rate, and state that clearly. Understand that different markets have different rates, and if you overbid I am not going even look at that.
4. Finally, spell check and proofread, and get your terminology right. Last week (and I kid you not), I got a letter from a translator in China promising perfect EN-CN translation, because she was fluent in "Margarine". Now we all know she meant Mandarin, but the unfortunate fact is Mandarin is not a written language, it is a spoken one. The scripts are called Traditional, Simplified etc. Chinese. There is no such thing as written Mandarin (or Margarine).
Can I suggest to all contract translators sending out resumes that they use the following format for the first three lines of the cover letter:
Language Pair: e.g. EN>ES, or EN< >ES for both directions
Specialities: spell it out! Marketing, Nuclear engineering, genetics etc.
Rates: >0.06, =0.12USD. i.e. the minimum acceptable is 0.06, the ideal is 0.12USD
Then both you, and the agencies, will save a hell of a lot of time and effort filling out forms, creating log-ins etc. that you will never use again.
