Coping with the ups and downs of translation business

They say life is like a balance sheet –it keeps changing every year! If this is what can be said about life, what does one say about a business? Haven’t we known for ages, from the time man learned to do business, that uncertainty is the only certainty in business? Does this explanation offer us a solution to the problem of coping with the ups and downs of translation business? Is there anything that is different about coping with the ups and downs of translation business?

There are some aspects of translation business that are unique to it. First, most projects are long-term. When a client wants a website or a body of literature to be translated into another language, it is usually not something that is expected to be finished within days or weeks. This perhaps provides the first glimpse or clue about coping with the ups and downs of translation business. Since projects are usually long, planning can be done over time. With proper and efficient time management, coping with the ups and downs of translation business becomes a little easier, because in the time saved on planning, one can go about looking for newer projects.

Another way of coping with the ups and downs of translation business is to expand the areas of one’s business specialty. When all that a translation business offers is one language, it makes little sense to be in the business itself. When looking out for translators who do the work for the company, the business could do well to start out with more languages in which to offer translation services.

Of course, the steps mentioned here need resources, enormous patience and careful planning. But since a business is already into translation; it speaks of its simple business logic to offer more areas. More than anything else, this is a profound way of coping with the ups and downs of translation business, because while doing one major project in one language, a project of another language or languages can act as a buffer! Diversity is a kind of load balancer to the idea of coping with the ups and downs of translation business.