The ATA Chronicle - July/August 2024 - 30

BUSINESS PRACTICES by Anne Connor
Adding New Services and
Admitting I Was Wrong
The following was originally published on Next Level: The ATA Business Practices Blog. This initiative
by ATA's Business Practices Education Committee provides information for both freelancers and
company owners to use in all aspects of their careers, from improving their privacy protections to
planning for retirement.
From the Next Level team: At some point in their professional lives, many linguists consider adding a new
service to their portfolio. A major change like adding an entirely new line of work can seem daunting and
potentially disastrous, but what if it's successful? In the following, Anne Connor discusses how she took up
a former service and made it her own again.
P
lanning a career using
languages came to
me as a 16-year-old
studying Spanish, typing,
and shorthand in high school.
Seven years earlier, the
foreign language seed had
been planted in me when
my older sister, Mary Ellen,
started learning Spanish in
high school and taught me a
few phrases. While taking my
own Spanish classes, I sensed
that conversational fluency
would require paying close
attention to and mimicking
the accents of my heritagespeaker
classmates, who
graciously invited me into
their homes to hear and
practice my Spanish with
them and their families. At
Temple University-where
I studied business and legal
Spanish translation and
interpreting-I took a parttime
student worker position
as an exchange program
assistant at the university's
center for international
services, which gave me
real-life translation and
interpreting opportunities as
I kept up my shorthand and
typing skills. In college I also
took courses in Italian, which
I continued to study after
graduation at the AmericaItaly
Society of Philadelphia
in the evening after work.
Fast-forwarding to 1991,
when my husband, Bill,
and I were the proud-butnervous
parents of boy/girl
twins who had been born
prematurely a year earlier,
I realized that my dream
of translating from a home
office might actually come
true, thanks to the relatively
recent advent of home
computers, fax machines,
and modems. A college friend
and former coworker of mine,
Linda Pollack-Johnson, had
already been freelancing as a
French and Italian translator
from home for a year and
told me the first thing I
needed to do was join ATA
and its local affiliated group
(now an ATA chapter), the
Delaware Valley Translators
Association (DVTA). I then
attended a meeting about
income taxes as a freelancer
and immediately started to
market my services to local
translation agencies, making
up the $2,900 it cost back
then for my equipment within
a matter of a few months.
I was ecstatic that I
could help supplement our
household income while being
a stay-at-home mom. It took
a few years for the " peaks " to
This column is not intended to constitute legal, financial, or other business advice. Each individual or company should make its own
independent business decisions and consult its own legal, financial, or other advisors as appropriate. The views expressed here are not
necessarily those of ATA or its Board of Directors.
30 The ATA Chronicle | July/August 2024
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