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Writer's pictureAlfonso De Luca

Great Mindset and Keywords to Land Jobs as a Freelance Translator

Ok, last time we had some insights for applying to agencies. We talked about the different types of agencies and tips to approach them. But how do you actually start with finding one in the first place? The answer is to know your keywords and use them in a search engine. And to do it faster, we can just find lists of companies and go through each one of them. Brutal, isn't it? Let's dig into this further.



A Brutal Mindset for Job Application


You just started finding work online. You have an overview of the language industry and, by now, you know that there are agencies out there that hire translators. And you want to make a living as a freelance translator. And a successful one. Great.


So, what you need to understand if that quality is just as important as quantity. Now, there are tons of experts out there that will tell you that you need to tailor your resume for each of your clients. What I really think is that this is not necessarily the best approach, or the only one.


This is impractical if you want to reach as many clients as possible and get as much work as possible. Especially in the first stages of freelancing, you might need money as soon as possible - and a steady flow of it, even.


Let's cut it short. What I do is just 'spam' my application to agencies, while making sure that they are grammatically correct and customized enough - yet not too specific. I just talk about my experience and all I can bring to the table in terms of language-related solutions.


If you're starting out, you might not have a lot of things to 'show off' in your application. Making use of these tips and tricks will help you with regardless of your experience level, although they're even more useful for beginners.


But How to Find Agencies via Search Engines?


If you have your field of expertise clear to you, just search keywords related to that on Google, or your favorite search engine.


For instance, if you work with audiovisual content, what makes sense is typing '<target language> television agency', '<language pair> movie translation agency', 'netflix partner agency'. These are good keywords to start your research. Try being creative with your queries, change the word order of the query, add and remove words, go beyond the first page of results, etc.


Similarly, if you work with video games, try '<target language> video game agency', '<language pair> gameloc agency'. You get the idea.


These are good tips to find the company page. Once you get to their website, you can browse through their website sections. You just generally need to go to the 'Contact' section. Often times, you also have a footer on the website with a link called 'Work with us', 'Work for us', 'Jobs', or something like that. By making use of these tips, you'll quickly find the contact info you need to apply, almost all the times.


Next time, we'll see an even 'more brutal' approach - collecting agency lists from market researchers' websites - such as Nimdzi Insights' and how to make use of such lists to land a job as soon as possible.

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