tranfree issue 38 - 21 August 2001

Working While Abroad

By Alex Eames

We've been quite busy over the last couple of weeks.

Several occasional clients have contacted us, even though we're away from home. They've had assignments that they needed doing.

We assume these were given to us because of our availability. Several people said they were having trouble finding translators at the moment. We've had to turn a couple of jobs away!

Well, it is August. The last 2 years in a row I've written articles in August about the clients that we get and keep because other people are not available.

I'm not going to write the same article again. But it's still as valid now as it was last year and the year before.

Although we are away from home, we don't particularly consider it a holiday. It's more like...

• a change of location
• going to our other base

...and we're almost as available for work as we would be at home.

This is thanks to call-divert. We could have diverted all our calls to our number here, but since we have been moving around a bit we diverted them to Phil. He's been telling people how to contact us (and no doubt filtering out all the idiots who try to sell us something - thanks for that mate!)

So if such a thing as call divert exists in your country, it's saved us losing a substantial amount of work in the last 3 weeks.

Obviously I wouldn't do this if it were a "genuine holiday" to Barbados or some other expensive exotic location. If that were the case, I'd warn all our best clients that we'd be away for a while before going.

Still Free to Turn Away Work

Of course, we are still free to turn away work if we want to have a couple of days or a week off. And the last week of July and the first week of August worked out to be fairly quiet. So we did get a bit of a break before all this work came in.

Language Refreshment & Tax-deductible Travel

Almost by definition a lot of translators live away from their country of origin and like to return back there for periods of time each year.

Not only that, but you can justify these trips back home as refreshing your language skills and then the travel expenses can be tax-deductible. It's perfectly reasonable. A translator needs to stay current as much as any other professional. And there's no substitute for...

...fully immersing yourself in the culture and language.