Your professional translator

I recently read a wonderful post in Writing Happiness blog called " 10 habits of highly successful bloggers " and I thought it would be interesting to find out what successful freelance translators have in common. Also, in the past two weeks I had three interviews with experienced blogging translators, so they also gave me some food for thought. Plus I've been following a few translation blogs and my conclusions are based on what I've learned from them. But first of all, I need to share my view on success with you, because all of us define this term differently. Some people think that being successful is being in demand . Others think that success is financial security . Yet others think that being successful means being a well-known professional with a spotless reputation .

A few weeks ago my dear Twitter friend Magda Papas ( @magdameta ) wrote a brilliant post for the Freelance Writing Dreams blog . I loved it and thought that I have to mention it here. Really, being a freelancing parent is a lot harder than some people think. For example, my mother and some of my neighbours think that I can easily fit a whole lot of other things into my day. After all, I just stay at home, right? I remember one morning when I was planning my day and was frantically trying to figure out how to handle at least 6 or 7 things besides work with each of those things requiring quite a bit of time and effort. This is not the first time when that happened in my freelance life. So here are some of the lessons I learned so far.

My blogging experience started with a post about my typical day. I am still not sure anyone read it besides me ;) ( note from 2013: that post is now removed ) I now realize how hectic my life then was, and all because I thought I could be both a full-time ESL teacher and a translator. I can't, and I'm glad I finally realized it last year. That's when I reevaluated my work and made a choice to give up teaching through Skype with a company I used to cooperate with and choose translation as my primary work. There were many reasons for that. This year I took only 2 students who could come to my place to study and I am glad I made this change. I feel not as tired and overwhelmed this year, and I am thinking about adding a couple Skype students next year, we'll see. But that alone wasn't enough to bring my life to a balance. This week I came across another great blog about/for freelancers. I loved the post there called " Living a Balanced Freelance Life ". Si...