Hello everyone, so here I have a confession to make or a confession basically I'm gonna, well yeah confess because all this time I've been doing these videos and you know, I did the course the book and all that you know how to be a successful freelance translator. And I've been trying to focus on teaching how to be a successful freelance translator or how to be a successful Freelancer in general. And throughout all this time, I've not once I've checked all the videos not once have I tried to focus on how to be an unsuccessful freelance translator. And so for all of you out there who are saying, Well, I don't want to be a successful freelance translator I want to be an unsuccessful one. Finally, finally, finally, I'm going to make a video for you. This video is to teach you how to be an unsuccessful freelance translator.

These are just a couple of tips a couple of the preliminaries But hopefully, if you Follow these steps, there'll be enough for you to be an unsuccessful freelance translator. They're just the basics. So anyway, let's get started with it. First of all, how to be an unsuccessful freelance translator. Tip number one. Here you have a choice actually either never answer your clients or wait.

So this is simple when you get a request for a translation, or maybe you've sent out an application and they ask you for more information, either a don't respond at all. Or if you have to respond because the email there is there and it's bothering you. And so you have to get out of your inbox. You have to, you know, do something with it, at least waits to respond, I would say Wait, at least, I don't know. 48 hours. Anything more than 24 will work but 48 The longer you can wait, the better.

Just make them wait for that response. Because then this helps them to know that they're going to have to keep waiting every time they need a response for you. Okay, so at least you get them used to it right away that they're going to have to wait a long time for you to respond. So tip number one, never answer your clients or wait as long as you can to do so. Tip number two missed your deadlines here. If they give you a deadline, they say we need this Thursday by noon, then try to deliver it, I would say earliest by say Thursday 3pm you know because there if you know if you feel embarrassed about it, something like that, at least there you can still say, Oh, I was working on it.

But there was a problem with the email or there was a problem with that this or that or whatever excuse you can come up with and just send it you know, around 3pm but if you can, it's better just to send it Friday, whatever send it during the weekend. Who cares? At least there you can be sure that well, to be unsuccessful. Tip number three don't proofread your work. This is a big one because too many translators there, translate. And then, as even when they're done translating, they go through and proofread their work to check for mistakes to make sure they translated something correctly that they didn't miss something out or didn't use something incorrectly.

And they go through it again, to make sure that it's written well and written in a way that sounds fluent. If you do that, then you're just gonna be successful. So I mean, make sure you don't proofread your work. I would translate it very quickly and then just just close the document out. Don't send it right away because that goes against tip number two, but just close the document right there and don't deal with it anymore. After that.

Tip number four, I think we're at what do I have? Oh, formatting, formatting. Format get about it. That was a bad pun. I don't even think that was a pun. Anyway, forget about formatting.

Because a lot of times you're dealing with PDFs and or you're dealing with charts, you're dealing with graphs, you're dealing With a lot of stuff that needs to be formatted, and if you deal with Microsoft Word, you know what can happen you do, you know, you add one space or one tab over here, and then suddenly, everything changes and all the format changes, you have new columns, you have this, that and the other. I would just not worry about that. In fact, whatever you do the translation, just type it up. Don't worry about the formatting at all. If the initial document they gave you was five pages, and suddenly you have seven pages, and two of them are just on one column here and then that I mean, that doesn't matter. Forget about formatting, formatting, don't even think about it.

And if you have weird formats, it's even hard to look at when you're typing. Get through that. That's what it takes. So don't format. Good. Tip number.

I think we're at five I'm totally losing count. But anyway, tip number five. Oh, this is actually a good one because it helps with the other tips. wait until the last minute To translate, because this ties in well with trying to miss your deadline. So that was tip number two. So here, wait until the last minute.

If you have that deadline, let's say Thursday at noon, I would wait until say, Thursday when you wake up to do it. The best way to do this is to procrastinate a lot. So like the days leading up to it, say you're going to start working but there are million other things you can find that can take up your time, maybe you need to put an order your room, you need to run a bunch of errands you need to you know, make sure everything is just so you need to find the right place to do it because you go to a coffee shop, but it's too loud, go to another one and it's not loud enough, I mean, you know, you need some sort of noise around you. So keep doing stuff like that until the very last minute. And so you don't get started with your translation until the last minute.

And then this makes it like I said a lot easier to then miss your deadline. It also makes it a lot easier to not have time to proofread your work and and to forget about formatting so these really tie into each other and you know one of these tips can help the other ones. So keep that in mind. Tip Number six, I guess. don't deal with follow up. So yeah, follow us because a lot of times you'll be sending a translation, especially if you've been paying attention to not proofreading and formatting and all that.

They're gonna have questions about your translation. don't deal with that stuff. You think your translation you sent it in, don't deal with follow ups. They have questions about anything that they want to know about your formatting or maybe a mistranslation or whatever they you know, they're talking about, just don't deal with it. Once again, like I said, if it's really that email in your inbox is really bothering you then reply but wait at least 2448 hours before replying. Just so they know that they got to take their time with you.

Come on. So don't deal with follow ups. Is my recommendation. Tip number I think we're at seven here. Seven. Oh, yeah, of course.

Once all this is done, add complications for payment. What I mean by this is At this point, you want to tell your client Okay, I know I charge you 100 euros. But actually there's also a tax and 8% tax. So you owe me 108 euros. Oh, and by the way, I don't accept PayPal, I don't accept bank transfer, you have to pay me my cashier's check. So please mail it to my place, even though it's internationally, can you mail it and in my local currency, because I needed that way.

All these are great ideas for complicating the payment process. And this is really good, because it makes it a lot harder for them to pay you. And so it makes it a lot harder for you to receive your money. And you know, that's awesome. So what you should do is just try to figure out different complications as much of the ones I've listed. Or if you could come up with other ones, then feel free to add those as well.

There are other ones that I've heard of who say, oh, since you're based in this country, and I'm based in that country, then I need this, that and the other added on to it or other payment complications, give them the wrong bank account number and then have them go through it a bunch of times before you tell them Oh no, that's the wrong bank account number you No pay me in another account or something like that. Just try to add as many complications as possible for the payments. And, you know, anything you can do to delay the payment as much as possible. And, and yeah, that's about it. Those are my tips. In fact, you know what actually, I'm going to give you a bonus tip right now.

Now this is more advanced. That's why I'm using it as a bonus tip and not one of the main tips, but find a way to charge per target word instead of source word. So if you get a PDF, if you get a stack scan documents, something like that, you can tell them, Look, I can't count the number of words there. So I'm going to charge you per target word. And then when they say okay, to that to a certain price per target word, what you can do is make very long sentences, try to make your very long sentences even longer and longer and longer and longer and longer. See what I did there.

Do stuff like that. Try to add adjectives anywhere you can, instead of saying, Well, that was the gentleman's jacket you can say that was the gentle that was the jacket belonging to the gentleman or something like that just add more words whatever you can do. And because they certainly they totally will never realize how awkward it sounds Of course not. And that way you can get a lot more words, and then you can get totally get paid more, which will then get delayed because you're going to be added complications to payment. That's something they definitely will not pick up on at all. I mean, how could they and so just made it make it as wordy as possible.

It's also because it's definitely worth your time, trying to come up with different words for the extra cents you'll get for each word that you add and making a really awkward translation that you get to send them as proof of your work that you can do. So anyway, follow my seven steps, plus the bonus, and you are sure to be unsuccessful. You can thank me later