Learning from the past is good for us! Which is surely part of why one of the popular topics each January is the “Year in Review” post, like those I recently read by fellow translators. Two favorites: Corinne McKay uses some questions to take stock—”what went right in 2013, what needs to go better in 2014, and where do you want to be a year from now?” and Carolyn Yohn looks back at the goals she set for 2013 and evaluates where she is now in relation to them.
These list-format posts are popular for some very good reasons, and it’s not just that we human beings love lists (though we do). It’s because:
- We humans love lists!
- Actively summarizing things helps us understand them. Just like a recap at the end of an essay helps the reader understand it, the very act of summarizing events in your own life helps you, the writer, to understand them better.
- Learning from our past = good. Hopefully we’ll do more of the things that had good results and remember not to do some of the things that had bad results. And we can tell ourselves it’s for the readers, too: maybe they can avoid some of our mistakes or repeat some of our successes!
- Knowing where we are in the present = crucial. It’s pretty hard to honestly confront where we are in life, which is why it can be painful to get on the scale at the doctor’s office or terrifying to see a financial planner. But if you don’t know where you are, you’re less likely to get where you want to go.
So, okay! I will follow my colleagues’ example and figure out where I am. What the heck did I do in 2013, anyway?!
Read on for Part 1, the money side of things, or stay tuned for Part 2, the professional development side.
The Details of 2013: Filthy Lucre
- I went to my first ATA conference, and it r0x0red in all ways. Well, except for the part where I immediately lost my voice. But that’s a tiny detail. I met wonderful colleagues and had GREAT (very hoarse) conversations with them, met potential translation vendors for my employer Group 1200, learned cool new stuff about Chinese from my awesome roommate Evelyn Yang Garland both in her session and through chatting, and just generally geeked out about translation in ways I don’t get to every day. Why is this conference in the money part of my review, you ask? Conferences are not cheap! The outlay for registration and lodgings can be daunting, not to mention travel. It’s very fair to ask, “Is investing in the conference worth it?” But in 2013 it made sense for my full-time employer and I to split the financial burden, and I split my focus accordingly: learning and networking/recruiting on behalf of my employer first (you may remember a bit of the recruiting odyssey from “ATA Conference Notes from a Buyer’s Perspective”), and then on my own behalf as an individual translator. And I am happy to report that the investment worked out just fine for both of us! Group 1200 had some very specific needs that it took a lot of help from my expert colleagues to work out, and I got leads on those at the ATA conference that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. That’s not even mentioning the things I learned in sessions that are and will be very applicable to my work for them. As for me personally, you’ve seen some reasons above already; stay tuned for Part 2 for even more.
- I earned more in 2013 than in 2012, but did lose some money to a nonpaying customer. When I looked at Corinne’s question “Did you earn what you wanted to earn?” and did the math in my invoicing program, I did in fact beat both 2012 and 2011 in freelance income. Another question of hers is important here, though: “Who did you work for?” My accounting program tells me that…
- My sales were mostly driven by one particular client whom I like very much, but who probably won’t have projects for me in 2014. A similar long-term project for 2014 recently came in from another quarter which will replace that income, but the fact that one client drove the majority of sales in 2013 is something good to know.
- Tutoring made up over a quarter of my freelance income, as it has done for a while now (in past years it’s been as much as 40%). This is really important to keep in mind because when I think about my business, I tend to think of tutoring as “on the side,” not as a huge part of the business. Income-wise, though, it is a big part.
- Unfortunately, my next-biggest client in 2013 went bankrupt while I still had a bit over $1,000 in unpaid invoices with them. For me, that’s a lot of money. Lesson learned: even if you love working with that client (which I did!), and even if they’ve paid in the past, it’s still smart to space out projects with any one client so that if something does go wrong, you aren’t out too much all at once. Waiting to receive payment for one project before doing the next isn’t always possible, but it may be smart if the projects are big in the context of your business.
- I lost some of my motivation in my tutoring. I’ve noticed my enjoyment of tutoring declining in the last year or so. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it at all; I still like having this block of time where I do something meaningful, helping people reach their goal of speaking Japanese. Those warm fuzzies are good for my soul during weeks where I feel like I’m not making things people actually need. I’ve never thought seriously about quitting teaching before, but it crosses my mind casually a lot lately. However, as I said above, it turns out that tutoring is a huge part of my business! So it seems like I really should dig deeper and figure out what’s sapping my motivation, and see what I can do to make this better before just burning out. Here’s me trying to figure out the causes:
- Outdated textbooks—for years I’ve been using an ICU textbook series, because it’s better organized than most other texts I’ve seen, and better integrates speaking and writing. Too many Japanese textbooks are frustrating for both me and my students because either they focus on only one thing or the explanations are not clear/detailed enough. But unfortunately, the series I’m using is just plain old now. The examples are less and less relevant and VHS is still a technology people talk about in them! So naturally they don’t engage the student like they once did. I’ve been aware that I can’t go on using these, but don’t have a good alternative for beginner to intermediate learners.
- Frustration with progress—I have a student who struggles a lot with writing, and I’ve tried all sorts of different ways to help her, but she keeps hitting plateaus. Some of it is down to her study skills, which we’ve talked about. Some of it is down to individual learning styles, since I have another student I teach the same way who loves kanji and nails it. But I suspect half of it is down to me never quite finding the way to make it click for her. Back when I was learning Japanese characters (kanji/漢字), you memorized them by writing them, and learned to write and read at the same time. These days, writing is less important because we all type everything, and typing Japanese only requires recognition of the kanji, not actual production from scratch like writing. I read a website once that teaches students kanji with no writing component, but I don’t know whether it’s proven to really work, and I don’t know how I could teach it that way.
- Some of my favorite students moved away in late 2013—nothing to be done about that!
So What Does It Mean for 2014?
It definitely makes sense to try investing in ATA 55, the next ATA conference. The ATA 54 hotel was expensive enough that I would definitely either get a roommate again like I did this year or consider staying at an alternate hotel, though I know staying at the conference hotel is best for the ATA. I’m in talks with the Japanese Language Division about presenting a session, so if that goes through I should get a bit of a discount, and it would serve as marketing, too. I’ll give it another year and see how it goes, then decide whether it should be an annual or every-other-year thing for me. (But it’s so fun!)
It also makes sense to keep track of how much work I do in a short time for individual clients, so that not too many invoices pile up before it becomes clear that they’re not going to be paid. This is tricky, but a good goal for 2014.
As for tutoring, this whole issue ties in to an article on growing small businesses “the right way” I read in November’s issue of Money. It called out something I think we all know: not every client or service is equally profitable. Some aren’t really profitable at all, and it’s a smart move to cut them. Tutoring is obviously a profitable part of my business—it’s more than a quarter of my freelance income and the effort investment is perfectly okay in that context. Whereas already in January 2014, I’ve taken on one totally unprofitable job. Tutoring = profitable. World War II documents and other historical artifacts = very interesting to me, which makes me always say yes, but not profitable in a financial sense. Conclusion: I should invest in the profitable by investigating new Japanese textbooks and new kanji teaching methods to see if that lights the fire inside once again (as well as helping my students). Meanwhile, I should take a hard look at how I weigh “interesting” vs. “financially beneficial” when I consider job offers. Maybe the solution is to say yes to the interesting when I have some real free time, and say no when I’m busy?
And that’s a wrap for the “filthy lucre” New Year’s thoughts. Stay tuned for Part 2, professional development. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts to share about the old year’s march offstage, please do!