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2016 was some year! It was a year when the breakneck speed of globalisation got a bloody nose, first from the Brexit vote in Britain and then the U.S. Presidential election shock result. In many parts of the world it felt that the trend towards greater communication and business expansion worldwide might slow down, even contract as communities in many countries signalled their discontent with being left behind. Could this affect the translation industry in 2017? It seems unlikely at this stage. 2016 saw a big spurt in the need for translators and there seems no signs of this slowing down in 2017. So what are the trends on the horizon, especially for marketing translation in 2017? More demand for video translators Marketing is using the power of video more than ever. As consumers demand ever increasing amounts of data access and are using their mobile devices to make choices over buying preferences, video marketing has an ability to sell products in a more lifelike way than still im...

Hello everybody! How are you doing? Hope spring is bringing new blessings and challenges to you and your business. Please welcome Aniello Attianese with his first guest post in my blog. The topic we are going to talk about is marketing for freelance translators. Enjoy! Whether you’re just a rookie at the very beginning of your great translation journey or an experienced translator with years of work behind your belt, one thing simply doesn’t change – in order to get business, you must market yourself successfully to the potential clients. It is extremely important to find the appropriate methods which will maximise results for the effort you put in. This however, might sound much easier to do than it actually is. Remember, your goal is to stand out from the crowd of translators who might be just as talented and qualified as you are. Marketing your translation services isn’t just about getting out there and stopping. It is a constant effort to show your potential customers that you...

Hi everybody! How is your weekend going? Mine is a non-working one, first time this month! So I am using it wisely, updating my blogs, catching up on reading, and doing some things about the house. We got first snow yesterday! Can you imagine? Actually, the streets look much better all white and shiny, instead of dark, wet and gloomy, so I am not compaining. I remember I promised to write this post a while ago. So now I owe you top tweets for two months! So here they are. Check out those links. They are quite amazing!

Happy Sunday everybody! Have you noticed how quickly the summer is flying by? I can't believe it's August already. Very soon kids in Russia will start a new school year, and their freelancing parents will move to the normal crazy schedule built around school, after-class activities, sports clubs etc. Fun! ;) It is also high time I shared some top tweets shared last month about translation, languages, marketing and freelancing! Just a little reminder: this list has nothing to do with my personal favorits. Every month I visit topsy.com and find the most trending tweets on the topics mentioned above. In other words, those are the tweets that get most retweets, favorits and mentions. And then I publish them in my blog. I preserve all hashtags, so you can go to Twitter, type the hashtag in the search field and see what other people publish on the same topic. I also preserve the names and Twitter handles of people who publish those tweets, so you could check out their profil...

Image credit Hi everybody! How've you been? It's high time I shared some interesting, useful and fun tweets with you about translation , languages , marketing and networking . All these tweets were published in April and according to Topsy.com they got the most shares, retweets and replies. I had a great time while looking through those links, reading the articles that I missed because it's simply impossible to see everything on Twitter! I hope these links will be as useful for you as they were for me. As usual, you can see the names and Twitter usernames of all people who shared them, as well as hashtags they used. So you can follow these great twitterers and/or type the same hashtag in Twitter and look for more cool tweets on the same topics!

Hi everybody! I owe you something very important. As you know, every month I share an article with the best tweets about translation , languages , marketing and freelancing . But I didn’t publish top tweets for February, so I decided to cover two months in one post. I strongly recommend you to check out those tweets. They are truly THE best. I found some very interesting and useful information there. And if there’s a post or an article that inspired you in February and March please share it in comments!

Hello everybody! Hope you are having a great week. Mine is starting kind of tough, but I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. As usual, I’ve been preparing a new list of top tweeted content for the past month and I found a lot of interesting posts I missed! So this list is a huge help for me to stay on top of all the news concerning languages and translation. And as far as I know, it is helping at least some of you, too! In my previous post about best language and translation tweets I promised to add two new topics, so that’s what I am doing! From now on, I will look for top tweets about language , translation , marketing and freelancing . So, if your January was pretty busy and you haven’t been around Twitter a lot, or if you simply don’t use Twitter, but like learning new things, I recommend you to check out this list of top tweets in different topics. There’s a chance that you will find something interesting and helpful there.

May is really a very special month in Sharp End Training. We are about to reach 1,000 members in our LinkedIn group called Marketing for Freelance Translators! So we thought and thought how to thank you for being with us and found two ways we can do that. First of all, we are declaring May the social media marketing month . That means that every Tuesday at 5 pm British Summer Time starting May 14th we are going to have LIVE webinars on social media marketing for translators . Here's a brief program: May 14th - Jonathan Senior teaching about strategic use of Twitter . I've been through this training and I assure you it is extremely useful, especially if you feel you are drowning in the sea of information there and you are starting to forget your goals and your vision as a marketer of your own freelance business. The webinar is already announced. It costs 25 USD. You can register here: http://sharp-end-training.ru/how-to-swim-against-the-tide-in-a-sea-of-clutter-a...

Thanks to Marta Chereshnovska and Marta Stelmaszak I learned about a new tool for presentations called prezi.com . I decided to give it a try and created this presentation called How to benefit from your cooperation with a freelance translator: Clients' guide to success . Let me know what you think about it :) Oh, you need to click on the final words (they are red) to see them clearly, but do it after you have viewed all steps, ok?

First of all, Happy Valentine's Day to those who celebrate ! But I really couldn't be silent today for one more reason: The Take Control of YOUR Business Conference starts tomorrow! So I want to make sure that all my readers have grabbed their chance to register! If you are a member of our LinkedIn group you might have noticed that I have been doing something special this week. Each day I introduced one speaker. I'd like to do the same here, in my blog now. 1. Ewa Erdmann . Ewa Erdmann is a freelance translator and interpreter (English-Polish) running her own business – Transliteria . Ewa has linguistic and legal academic background, which enables her to specialize as a legal translator. Ewa works closely with a marketing company and runs her own group of Polish business owners. She actually wrote a guest blog post for our blog which you can find if you follow the link: http://sharp-end-training.ru/are-you-networking-with-the-right-people Ewa is going to speak...

Financial matters is the hardest part of freelancing for many people. And for me, too. It can be a real nightmare, because your income can change month after month. Hopefully this will be a good change, but there will also be slow periods with almost no work and thus no payment coming in. I am still learning to manage my finances. The fact that I am a registered individual entrepreneur motivates me to keep the budget and not spend all the money at once (though at times I do feel like spending it all on shoes, makeup and other absolutely necessary things ;)) So here are my financial tips or rather lessons that I've been taught. Please feel free to add yours in comments!

Hi everybody! First of all, thank you for reading my blog. I love to see that the number of my subscribers is growing every week. That's so inspiring! I've got some news for you. I am amazed with the way my work and business are developing. Life is getting more and more interesting and, hopefully, these changes will be good for you, too! So, here are my news:

Remember I promised to share useful links? I've been reading cool stuff on marketing recently, so I thought I'd share it with you. Maybe you will find this info useful for your freelance translation business, too :) So here's the list:

Sometimes learning to use social media feels like wandering in the deep forest. Have you ever felt that way? No wonder that you can make a ton of mistakes in the process. I have made quite a few, that’s why I want to talk about it today. I am also inviting you to participate in the discussion, share some mistakes you've noticed and possibly ways to avoid those mistakes. 1. No interaction. Social networks were made for interaction. That's why they are called "social". Social media marketing is not like posting an ad in a newspaper. Solution: The first thing you need to do after creating your own profile is finding people who you would like to connect with. Read carefully what they post, ask questions, share your comments. When you get fans/followers/people who add you to their circles you also need to interact with them. The resources you share may be very useful, but interaction builds a personal bond between you and your audience. That bond is priceless. It ca...

Hi there! Glad to see you again! Remember my first post about social media marketing ? It's time for the second post in the series :) What I write here is solely my opinion  based on various posts, journals and other materials studied in the past year or so + my own small marketing experience. What's the most important thing in social media marketing? You need to show that you are an expert. There are literally thousands of possibilities for translators now thanks to the Internet. You can answer questions on LinkedIn, take part in terminology discussions on various translation portals and other networks; you can start blogging or tweeting about translation, or make your own Facebook fan page and publish relevant links there. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of options! Whichever way of promoting your skills you choose, it will help your prospective clients understand where your interests are and what fields you are most experienced in. You will also get to know ...

I started my journey in the freelance world in March 2007, so I am a relatively young freelance translator. My very first year as a freelance translator was pretty tough. In fact, I landed only one or two jobs during that year. But then (thank God!) I met the first two agencies who were satisfied with both my experience and quality enough to work with me on a regular basis. I got about 90% of all my translation work through them and was completely satisfied with that situation (big mistake! Now I know that I still had an employee's mentality back then, and this mentality didn't serve me well). But two years ago the situation changed and I started getting a lot less work from those agencies. That was horrible! I realized that I had made a mistake somewhere along the way. So I used my free time to surf all over the web and find information on how other freelancers look for clients and projects, what kind of rates they consider reasonable and how they build their schedule. And I c...

I'm talking about the discussion at http://www.proz.com/forum/russian/158030-Движения_на_рынке_переводов.html The discussion was about recent tendencies in the translation market: More and more direct clients and translation agencies insist that translators should lower their rates for translation. Many prefer to seek translators in the former USSR territory because the cost of life is cheeper there and because there's a huge amount of translators willing to work for prices as low as 0.02 USD per word and less. There are more and more agencies. Many of them have very short life, but still clients prefer to look for agencies than individual translators for reasons which are important for their business. But it is not exactly a great tendency since agencies traditionally suggest lower rates for freelancers and working just for agencies will merely help you and your family survive, but no more than that. There is a clear tendency for not taking quality into consideration. ...