Career & Finance: Self-Employment

Why do you want to do this?

The idea's been on my mind for a while, lurking there in the back. I'm not sure exactly what started it, but I do love translation, and the idea of having these experiences that I talk about and think about every day documented every so often is attractive. And more satisfying in some ways than my personal blog, which has grown less rewarding as more people transition all of their social interactions to Facebook (which I hate). I've also been noticing that translators and translation agencies who have a strong blog tend to capture my interest more and make me feel more like I want to work with them, because I can see the thought and philosophy that goes into what they do. So I think developing my own flavor of blog could be attractive to potential clients and therefore good for business.

What three things will you need to make this happen?

A concept. I feel a professional blog that doesn't have a unifying theme won't be strong (though, of course, it's fine to deviate from one's theme every so often). One germinated in my mind recently: "Words into words, culture into culture, actions into concepts" -- this means that I can not only talk about translation and localization in the usual way, I can also integrate the idea of acting on a concept as a form of translation: for example, I can translate the concept "I should use less plastic" into an actionable thing: "In situations where I would normally generate plastic, I should think about alternatives" etc.

Education. I don't want to leap in and start something mediocre, which I could do today if I wanted to, and then make it better later. I want to wait, put in the time, and start something that's good from the beginning. I need to learn more about my options, how to most efficiently build out my concepts into reality, and how to best set everything up to be what I want it to be instead of just a jumble that isn't really me. Not to mention how to do this in a way that will make for easy upkeep in the long term. Once I invest the time to put the blog together, I want to be able to spend most of my focus on content. Otherwise it will fall by the wayside, because content is the interesting part to me.

Time. Right now when I work on my business, I work on my actual assignments, because they're the part that HAS to be done as opposed to the parts I'd like to do someday.

What is the biggest barrier to your achieving this?

Time and discipline are the needs that are the hardest to meet. There are 1,000,000 things to do every day, and it can be extremely hard for me to assign them all relative importance, decide which ones I'm going to do, and dedicate the time to doing them without getting distracted or worried about the other 999,999 things.