Why working as in-house translator slowed down my freelance career
Immediately after graduating in Translation and Interpreting I worked as part-time in-house translator for a company that doesn’t deal with translation, in fact it is a telecommunications and IT company. I was pleased to accept the contract they offered because it was one of the first work experiences for me.
A year and a half passed since then and not long ago I realised how much this experience slowed down my freelance career. And why? One could say that this has been an occasion to put in practice the skills acquired when studying, to learn new technical words, to understand how the labour market works, to make more experiences. All this is true, I learnt a lot of new things and I am happy for the opportunity they gave me, but I want to explain why this slowed me down as a freelancer.
Why?
When you work with a contract and already have some other clients you don’t worry about finding new ones, about marketing yourself, your services and your skills; you don’t worry about understanding how freelance market works, because you are half of a freelancer.
However, once this experience ended, I had to face the challenge of finding new freelance jobs and I didn’t know where to start.
As I already had a “client”, which was my employer, I didn’t try to understand how to find new costumers, my practical knowledge about freelance market was as low as it was when I finished my studies. I didn’t think about reading articles on translation and freelancers, I didn’t create a network of potential clients. And after more than a year from my graduation, I had to start from zero a new process of self-marketing, search of clients, understanding how to make it work, even if I already had work experience.
I have realised that while I was focused on company dynamics that I should have ignored I was losing precious time to prepare myself and be ready to debut in my freelance career. Furthermore, as it is not a translation agency, I couldn’t acquire project management skills related to translation projects.
My advice is not to reject a job proposal with a “contract”, but to have very clear in your mind what is the path you want to follow once the contract ends in order to be ready to launch yourself in the freelance market.
This is my experience, did you have a different one? Feel free to share it with me in the comment section!
