Freelance Translator: Frontline Guidance

Rather than being a manual or style guide, this chapbook by a freelance translator discusses the psychological angles of manning the frontline of interlingual communication on your own. The book will dare you to ignore your teachers and their teachings. It will tempt you to consider what it would be like to work without a language lead and project manager. Encouraging you to craft creative translations your clients like and their clients understand, FREELANCE TRANSLATOR provides hands-on advice on how to survive in that no-man’s land of self-employment where common sense beats principles and where your best bet is to trust your senses. “Guillemin’s account of what it actually feels like, on a day-to-day level, to earn a living in professional translation, is raw, intimate and honest, at times painfully so. It is also laugh-out-loud funny. At a historic moment when many of us are struggling to compete with the speed and rapidly improving quality of neural machine translation engines, this could so easily have turned into an elegy for a profession on the brink of economic obsolescence. Instead, Guillemin gives us a compelling argument for the added value human translators bring to the task: the craftsperson’s passionate desire to do something well for its own sake” (from the preface by Silke Lührmann, MA). GEORGE GUILLEMIN has been in the translating business for about two decades, initially as in-house translator for a corporation, then for translating agencies and eventually at the helm of his own agency, Guillemin Translations. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.