Marketing yourself as a translator locally

There are a few things to bear in mind about marketing yourself as a translator locally. Firstly, it is helpful to know a lot of people and to be active (or have previously been active) in various local associations.

Secondly, to attract new clients it is probably necessary to have a shop front, i.e. rent office space. This is one factor that I believe translators overlook when criticising agencies. Agencies need premises. According to experience, local individuals and representatives of small businesses in the area like to entrust the translation to someone whom they can meet in person. They will not simply upload their text to an unknown translator's web page (or even a translation agency's web page) over the Internet. They may do this in future, however, if they have visited the translator's or translation agency's premises on a previous occasion.

This brings us to another point. Such clients often like to hand over a hard copy of their document. That means it needs to be scanned, and the quality of the copy may turn out to be poor. In conjunction with yet another factor - that they often need another language pair - that the translator does not work in - it may turn out to be an expensive affair to attempt to outsource the work. Firstly, you either have to spend hours unsuccessfully trying to OCR the document and eventually typing it up manually, or you have to outsource a poor scanned copy and expect either poor results or a high charge. On top of that, the client does not like to wait very long, and, allowing for the time taken to find the right colleague in the first place, this may turn out to be a rush job, as well as the scanned copy being poor. Add to this the fact that local individuals and small businesses are on a very limited budget and cannot be charged a lot, the disadvantages become clear.

If you nevertheless wish to take this route, in order to find clients anyway you will need to start designing and distributing glossy leaflets, and possibly also visiting clients at their premises - especially if you do not (yet) rent office space.