How to start a translation agency

When studying French texts back many years ago, I had no idea that I would one day earn my living as a freelance translator and owner of an online translation agency.
My fascination with foreign languages began after a trip to Europe when I was 18. It was one of those 3-week 10 country/capital wonder tours, in which you get a taste of everything and see all the major sites and quickly move on, waking up to get on the bus early , staying on schedule. France was the best part: Paris, Lyon, Cannes, Nice, Tours, Chenonceaux, Chartres….

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Paris, Notre Dame

It turned out that France was my favorite country, so when I got back to the university in California, I started taking French courses and bought a Living Language 2 LP set language course. While cleaning my dorm room or student apartment kitchen, I would put on the record on the turntable and repeat endlessly phonemes and phrases until my accent was nearly perfected.Paris

Still couldn’t speak correctly, but I developed a good accent. Near native. What remained was the dogged and painstaking vocabulary building that entailed reading with dictionary at hand and looking up thousands of words. Not much fun, but I slowly dissected works by Camus, Moliere and other French writers, and studied grammar books until the point of boredom.

For fun, I would go to university language lab and just practice listening and repeating to the reel-to-reel French lesson tapes. There was also a two-month French film festival at the university, so I went to every film each Friday night.
I must have taken in around 30 French films spanning three decades.
I also gleefully took advantage of any opportunity to speak French with a native speaker.
After graduation, with a degree in English literature/creative writing, and a minor in French language and literature, I rented every French video I could. I covered up the subtitles with a strip of paper, taped to the TV. It helped me focus on listening and trying to figure out what the actors were saying in French from context.

After a spontaneous two or three week backpacking tour of Europe in 1991(I had been bored with my secondary education courses), I returned to L.A. and got a job at the Lycee Internationale de Los Angeles. I had to translate French history books for the English classes and teach English grammar. My colleagues were French speaking, so I got in some practice.

Then came nearly 12 years abroad teaching English in Turkey, Czech Republic, Spain, Andorra and Poland. I then had to learn other languages besides French: Spanish, Polish, Turkish, and Czech. Wow! Really tough, but survived and now have many different “language departments” in my brain’s linguistic centers…

Turkish resort in Side, Antalya with fellow English teachers

PRAGUE

Staroměstské náměstí, Prague

Czech translations

I became tired of teaching and got a job as a proofreader and editor of translations in Prague. There , I cleaned up translations into English made by Czech and Slovak translators. It was a tedious and difficult job at times, but I soon graduated to French and Spanish>English translations and the manager of the agency gave me these translation projects, which were paid 3 times as much as the Czech>English translators.

I did this for a year, earning a living to rent an apartment at the end of Tram #9 in upper Ziskov, Prague. I kept up my Czech as well, and spent 3 years in this city.
I soon started sending countless , and I mean in the thousands, of resumes and CV’s of my skills to thousands of translation agencies online. I applied to dozens a day on agencies’ online forms.
It took a year or so to establish myself as a freelancer. Problems at the beginning were : waiting for payment(sometimes 2 months!), building glossaries and finding difficult terms online, negotiating per-word rates, formatting documents, and always, deadlines. I was so slow at first, and I often did very literal, work –for-word translations in a desperate attempt to remain faithful to the source text. This of course led to poor or mediocre translations.
Another year was needed to start re-fashioning the texts into correctly styled English, transforming the source text into real native English.

The Beginning

In the highly competitive world of online freelance translating, I began to find it difficult to make a decent living; so I decided to start my own agency.
I took a website building course based on Dreamweaver program. I learned the skills of creating links and formatting and uploading and maintaining a website.
It took a year of building and promoting my website online to get it up to first or second place on Google search for my particular keywords and agency location.
I registered at tons of free business directory listings sites and put up ads several times a week on many online classifieds.

After about a year, I really began to get lots of client calls. At first, I took all the jobs myself, but soon started subcontracting jobs to other translators. Then the record and bookkeeping started: Invoices, purchase orders, tax record keeping , 1099 forms, outstanding invoice archives, Excel files of translator databases, Payment records, profit tables, project records. My calendar filled up with due dates and payment reminders.

Mobile Office: The Trip to Spain

In 2007 I went to Spain and operated the business by laptop computer and global cell phone (4 –band cell phone with Spanish SIMS card).
That became rather difficult, as Malaga, Spain, is not the best place for Wi-Fi signals and I didn’t have landline Internet. I went to government office cafeterias, department store cafeterias, Internet cafes with Wi-Fi signals, the RENFE station at Malaga is a large Wi-Fi zone, on and off connectivity.Main problems were lack of Internet, possibly clients suspecting a foreign telephone signal....
I lost money on that venture, and my profits dipped.

I figured out I would need a Blackberry World Edition PDA phone, the FON Network Software for hooking up to residents personal networks, possibly Cantenna, etc.

2008 has me setting up an agency in London and continuing with my Los Angeles agency. We send out interpreters in the L.A. area and do certified translations of diplomas, birth certificates, etc. We also have been translating a lot of technical manuals (see examples here).

Translation service in Los Angeles

All-Texts Translations European Hub Centre Site

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