I recently had the opportunity to read Corinne McKay’s How to Succeed As a Freelance Translator, and I’m really glad I did.

I’ve been doing freelance translation for a number of years now, but this book made me wish I had read it before getting started. It would have helped me get off to a better start—and definitely would have helped me avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made.

A lot of the advice contained in this book you can get from working translators for the asking (for example, on SWET-L, Honyaku, or the JAT list), but this is the only resource I know of that gathers all of those useful tidbits of information into one convenient book.

McKay starts out with an overview of the translation business in the first chapter, and then follows it with practical advice on how to start and build up your business, maximize productivity, set up your office, make use of speech recognition and translation memory software, set and negotiate rates, and keep your clients satisfied. The book is written in general terms, so there is not a lot of advice specific to working as a translator in Japan, but it provides a great starting point for further exploration. (For information specific to Japan, take a look at Tom Gally’s Getting Started as a Translator: Gleanings from Honyaku.)

How to Succeed As a Freelance Translator can easily be read in a single day, but that one day’s worth of reading can really help you get off on the right foot for the rest of your career in freelance translation.