savvy-newcomer-header

The Savvy Newcomer aims to serve newcomers to the translation and interpreting professions by publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed content on a weekly basis. We strive to provide you with the answers to the many questions you face as a new or aspiring translator or interpreter.

Professional Etiquette to Lower Your Stress and Improve Work-Life Balance

By The Savvy Newcomer | August 6, 2025
Professional Etiquette to Lower Your Stress and Improve Work-Life Balance

What people are looking for in a career is undergoing a massive shift in our culture. Younger professionals tend to prioritize mental health and often want the ability to arrange their schedule to make time for life commitments outside of their professional endeavors—such as pursuing other jobs or embracing family responsibilities. In fact, according to Upwork, “Gen Z is abandoning conventional 9-to-5 corporate jobs for more diverse, flexible careers in freelancing.” Similarly, Kate Palmer, an employment services director at Peninsula UK, states that “Generation Z are known to place more importance on flexibility, work-life balance, and personal well-being, and, therefore,…

Read More

Savvy Diversification Series: How I Became a Translation Editor

By The Savvy Newcomer | June 22, 2021

The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. With this in mind, we’ve invited a series…

Read More

Is There a Future in Freelance Translation? Let’s Talk About It!

By The Savvy Newcomer | June 15, 2021

This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. While the demand for translation services is at a record high, many freelancers say their inflation-adjusted earnings seem to be declining. Why is this and can anything be done to reverse what some have labelled an irreversible trend? Over the past few years globalization has brought…

Read More

Savvy Diversification Series: Online Language Teaching

By The Savvy Newcomer | June 8, 2021

The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. With this in mind, we’ve invited a series…

Read More

Getting Started: 10 Tips

By The Savvy Newcomer | June 1, 2021

This post originally appeared on Translation Times and it is republished with permission. We oftentimes get questions about how to get started in the profession, and that’s a long answer. Actually, part of this blog is dedicated to answering precisely that question, and we have a long list of articles that we’ve marked for beginners. However, a dear friend of…

Read More

Savvy Diversification Series: From Text Translator to Film Subtitler in Just a Few Months

By The Savvy Newcomer | May 25, 2021

The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. With this in mind, we’ve invited a series…

Read More

Setting a Fair Price: It’s All about You

By The Savvy Newcomer | May 18, 2021

This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. We are freelancers. We don’t need to maximize profits for invisible stockholders, who tend to only care about their dividends or capital gains and not a whit about language or what we do. For us, the definition of being rich is not to want for anything.…

Read More

Savvy Diversification Series: Translator Training

By The Savvy Newcomer | May 11, 2021

The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. We’ve invited a series of guest authors to…

Read More

The Translator as an Editor

By The Savvy Newcomer | May 4, 2021

This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. When it comes to reviewing copy, translators are often at what I like to refer to as “the very end of the line.” By the time copy is deemed ready for translation, it has usually been reviewed and edited by a plethora of people, including a…

Read More

Savvy Diversification Series: Monolingual Editing

By The Savvy Newcomer | April 27, 2021

The Savvy Newcomer team has been taking stock of the past year and finding that one key priority for many freelance translators and interpreters has been diversification. Offering multiple services in different sectors or to different clients can help steady us when storms come. Diversification can help us hedge against hard times. With this in mind, we’ve invited a series…

Read More

Four Myths about ATA’s Certification Exam

By The Savvy Newcomer | April 20, 2021

This post originally appeared on The ATA Chronicle and it is republished with permission. ATA’s certification exam was instituted in 1973. Its purpose is “to elevate professional standards, enhance individual performance, and identify translators who demonstrate professional level translation skills.”1 Every year, a large number of professional translators and aspiring translators take the exam in one of the 27 language…

Read More