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Expanding Your Freelance Business, or Turning it Into an Agency

By Next Level | November 27, 2024
Expanding Your Freelance Business, or Turning it Into an Agency

This post is a reblog, originally published on Training for Translators. It has been republished here with permission from the author. From the Next Level team: For a different perspective on whether or not to start an agency, see “Should You Start a Translation Agency?” by Sara Maria Hasbun. Lots of freelancers wonder about whether it’s a good idea to expand your freelance business, or even turn it into an agency! Particularly if you’re in a situation where: Clients ask you for referrals to translators in other language pairs Clients need more work than you can do by their deadline…

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7 Marketing and Productivity Tools for Gmail and Google Workspace (G Suite) Users

By Next Level | February 23, 2022

This post is a reblog, originally published on Madalena Sánchez Zampaulo’s blog. It is reposted with permission from the author. As freelance translators and interpreters, we can spend a lot of time in our inboxes on any given weekday. This can be both distracting and a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, as you try to answer all your emails and keep…

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Successful Freelancing with ADHD and Other Brain-Based Conditions

By Next Level | February 9, 2022
Successful freelancing with ADHD

If you continuously struggle to stay organized and tend to work long hours to compensate for daily distractions, learning about productivity can mean wading through a body of presumptions. The advice of self-help materials–repeated in a myriad of online resources–can be difficult to follow, as there are relatively few productivity resources that openly acknowledge the impact of physical and mental…

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Ready to Plan for a Mid- to Long-Term Medical Leave? Part 2

By Next Level | January 19, 2022
Thoughts on Planning for Medical Leave

In the last post, we looked at the financial issues underpinning a need for COVID-related medical leave. This week, we turn to organizational issues. Since I first drafted this article, some of those issues have changed, both in the United States and around the world. Response to the highly contagious Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus differs from what we’ve…

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Ready to Plan for a Mid- to Long-Term Medical Leave? Part 1

By Next Level | January 5, 2022
Thoughts on Planning for Medical Leave

The idea for this post was born on my most stressful day in recent memory: the day I took three of my children to the doctor for COVID-19 tests. If even one tested positive, all three would need to skip school and spend up to two weeks at home with me. Along with my fears for my children’s health, my…

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How to Get Approved for a Mortgage as a Self-Employed Person

By Next Level | December 8, 2021
How to Get Approved for a Mortgage as a Self-Employed Person

Imagine if you could freeze your rent payment forever. Now imagine that it could disappear by the time you retire. That financial advantage is a major reason why people take the plunge to become homeowners. Being a homeowner means that your “rent” will never increase unless you authorize it. Sure, taxes will increase, but never as much as rent tends…

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Teamwork: The Pros and Cons of Being a Lone Wolf or a Pack Animal

By Next Level | November 24, 2021
Teamwork: The Pros and Cons of Being a Lone Wolf or a Pack Animal

This post is a reblog, originally published on Nikki Graham’s blog, My Words for a Change, and later published in the vlogChronicle. It is reposted with permission from the author. From the outside looking in, most translators probably seem like lone wolves, happily working at their desks all day with hardly any social contact. In fact, many freelancers highlight…

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How’s Your English?

By Next Level | November 10, 2021
hows-your-english

Most of us have heard it before: To be a good translator, you have to be a good writer. Today this maxim is truer than ever. Successful translators have always sought to provide high-quality copy to their clients as a way to add value and stand apart from the rest, but the increasing popularity of machine translation gives us even…

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Enhanced Productivity with Text Expansion

By Next Level | October 27, 2021
Enhanced Productivity with Text Expansion

This post is a reblog, originally published in the Audiovisual Division Part of the vlog’s Deep Focus Newsletter, Issue 7in 2020. It is reposted with permission from the author. I haven’t typed my full name or email address in years. Instead, I type abbreviations that get expanded after I type a punctuation mark or press a trigger key,…

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How to Use Your Website to Get Translation Clients

By Next Level | October 13, 2021
How to Use Your Website to Get Translation Clients

This is a summary post from Tess Whitty’s ebook Quick Start Guide: 10 Steps to an Optimized Website, published in 2019. Having a website is one of the best ways to maximize your online presence. Your website serves as the hub for all your marketing activities and is a good place to store information about your products and services. When…

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Scams and Default to Truth

By Next Level | September 29, 2021
Scams and Default to Truth

This post is a reblog, originally published on the Austin Area Translators & Interpreters Association blog. It is reposted with permission from the author. If you’d walk into a major bookstore today, one of the first books you see on display will have Malcolm Gladwell’s name on it. In one of his books, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know…

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