When working with direct clients, quality is a major advantage.
The Advantages of Working with Direct Clients
You’ll have an actual business relationship with your direct client: you’ll either be communicating with the person who wrote the source document or the person who’ll be using the target document. Unfortunately, when you work for an agency it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have any personal contact with either the document writer or the end user.
When working with direct clients, quality is a major advantage. If you’re really good at what you do, your direct clients will use you for their critical translations, and they’ll be more than happy to pay your rate.
A direct client welcomes questions and feedback; however, when working for a translation agency there seems to be an impenetrable divide between the translator and the end client. In fact, with direct clients it’s the to-and-fro conversation that makes the work so much more satisfying, ultimately leading to a translation that’s more readable, and more accurate.
The Disadvantages of Working with Direct Clients
Some of your direct clients, and we’re mainly referring to clients who are new to the translation industry, have no idea what’s involved with a translation project – meaning they have no idea what you actually do. Sure, they realize that you alter documents from one language to another but they have no idea what that entails. They’ll ask for the impossible, like 10,000 words translated by close of business tomorrow, and don’t realize that they’re asking the impossible. Because it’s not their industry and they’re not familiar with it, it’s not their fault, so now it’s up to you to educate them.
The work from direct clients may not be ongoing; meaning that they may only need you sporadically or for large amounts of work at any one time. Many direct clients only require the services of a translator for a couple of small jobs each year, perhaps when they have a press release or they issue earnings reports. Then there are the other direct clients who’ll have an onslaught of documents perhaps twice a year, at which time they require 100,000 words in a four-week period. This means that you must have access to a partner or backup person in order to complete their work.
Working for a direct client means that you really shouldn’t turn down their work, not unless you have absolutely no other choice. Alternatively, in the agency market (and providing you except most of their projects), you’re pretty free to accept and decline projects at will; and you know that the agency will call on your services again. However, if you leave a direct client at a vital time, you may never get another opportunity to work with that client. Your relationship with that client will probably be over because you’ve put them in a situation whereby they must immediately look for another translator. If they lose trust in you and don’t feel they can rely on your services, you’ll probably never hear from that direct client again.
