Easy business to start: translation service. How to do it?
There are times in everybody’s life when it comes to the question: what to do, which career path to choose, which road to take? Business based on localization service can be an easy start for a person with managing or linguistic skills. It doesn’t require much investment and there will always be a place for you on the market.
There are many ways to start a translating business. Let’s take a look at the most obvious of them. As a student you found out that learning languages is something that you achieve without much effort. During studies you already start taking on some assignments and becoming a part of the market. As the graduation comes you already are visible and have a resume.
Not every career begins like that. Some tend to try translating as a job after spending years on different paths. That is important to mention while localization business is always open. It is a myth that only linguists and academics can do this.
Many localization service providers rely on experts with other professional background: engineers, doctors, IT experts and more. Such knowledge is of high value when entering the market. So even though you spend much more time doing something else – you can still polish your language and become a translator at any time in your life.
Freelance or agency?
One of the most common questions for translators starting their career is whether to work freelance or join an agency. Both ways have their pros and cons and it’s for each one to decide his/her own path. An agency can bring more security and work but freelance provides freedom to choose tasks and clients.
When starting your own business you can also choose to create your own agency. It’s a good choice for agile managers who know how to organize the time and workflow of their teams. The manager of such a company can focus on finding partners and strategic assignments while the actual translation work is carried out by the assembled team of translators.
A very useful tool to make such business even easier to manage is a TMS – translation management system. Such software has specific tools „packed” inside and therefore the whole company, as well as its single projects and human resources, can be managed in one place. This saves time and money.
Managing a small agency or working as a translator comes mostly to two challenges: doing current projects and finding new ones. The second task is made simpler with a large base of contacts which usually is also a manager’s tool of work, so no surprises there. A good TMS provides its users with databases that allow to store, share and expand contact bases, client’s information and view past, current and future projects.
If you want to test yourself as a translator – just start! And if you want to try yourself as a manager of a translation company – try SpaceTMS’s 30-day trial and see how intuitive it is to manage a language service providing company.
