Saturday, October 16, 2010

Business Success for Freelance Translators by Alex Eames

Alex Eames has launched the third edition of his well-known ebook How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator. Nine years ago this ebook was the only source for translators who wanted to start a freelance business. Only some days ago Tess Whitty blogged his book among the Great books for translation and localization professionals. Nowadays there are many books and blogs helping the freelance translators to success in their business. In addition to the list of Tess Whitty I could point out Oleg Rudavin's Internet Freelancing: Practical Guide for Translators, which is very useful for beginning freelance translators in Ukraine and Russia. Among all of them the Alex Eames' ebook stands out because of its effect on lives of many translators at the beginning of the century.

I've read the ebook today and tried to compare my impressions and this edition with the ebook I read in 2001. Yes, Alex Eames has amended a lot of new text. The ebook contains 145 pages compared with 127 pages of the previous edition. He has corrected the book according to new trends, such as crowdsourcing, machine translation, social networking... However, its basics have been kept, and these basics are topical at present. There are a few new ideas, but they are of great worth. For example, how NOT to set your rates, how to cope with isolation, how to get the life balance right, how to use the job portals and others.

My main impression is that my professional life is ripe for correction. So I like when Alex cited Ecclesiastes:

"There is time for everything, and a season for every activity"

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