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Are you an established translator or interpreter looking to take your business to the next level? You’re the reason we’re here!

Next Level supports translators and interpreters with five or more years of experience as they seek to achieve their business goals. We provide information for both freelancers and company owners to use in all aspects of their careers, from improving their privacy protections to planning for retirement.

Statements of fact or opinion are the responsibility of the authors alone and do not imply an opinion on the part of the members of ATA.

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Expanding Your Freelance Business, or Turning it Into an Agency

By Next Level | November 27, 2024
Expanding Your Freelance Business, or Turning it Into an Agency

This post is a reblog, originally published on Training for Translators. It has been republished here with permission from the author. From the Next Level team: For a different perspective on whether or not to start an agency, see “Should You Start a Translation Agency?” by Sara Maria Hasbun. Lots of freelancers wonder about whether it’s a good idea to expand your freelance business, or even turn it into an agency! Particularly if you’re in a situation where: Clients ask you for referrals to translators in other language pairs Clients need more work than you can do by their deadline…

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ATA65 Conference Preview: Business Practices Education at ATA65

By Next Level | October 16, 2024
ATA 65th Annual Conference in Portland, OR on October 30 - November 2, 2024

Autumn is in the air again. For me, the beginning of the season means mountains covered in brightly colored trees, fresh apples—along with apple pie, applesauce, and apple cider donuts—and a new briskness in the air. It also means I’ve spent too much time on the ATA65 website, poring over descriptions of too many fantastic-sounding presentations and wondering how I’ll…

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The Global Reads Book Club

By Next Level | September 4, 2024
Global Reads Book Club

Translators read all day long in their second language and interpreters speak all day long in their working pairs. As language professionals, we want to make sure that, after the workday is over, we keep feeling the joy that originally attracted us to the languages we know. Many of us also enjoy the process of discovering new ideas from different…

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Getting Your Freelance Business Ready for a Summer Slowdown

By Next Level | June 26, 2024
Getting Your Freelance Business Ready for a Summer Slowdown

This post is a reblog, originally published in the Slator Tool Box. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. My translation clients are primarily based in Europe, so my project flow tends to slow down quite a bit in July and August every year. Europeans, it turns out, take their summer breaks much more seriously than Americans. With decision-makers…

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Breaking Into Book Translation

By Next Level | June 5, 2024
Breaking into book translation

Recently, a colleague with ample translation experience contacted me with some questions about breaking into book translations. For freelance translators, fiction and non-fiction books present an opportunity to expand our offer and to learn about the publishing business. Our exchange focused on the business end, not the challenges of the translation itself. “Book translation” can be as small as a…

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Narrowing Down, When You Want to Do Everything

By Next Level | May 15, 2024
Narrowing down when you want to do everything

This post is a reblog, originally published on the Training for Translators blog. It is republished here with permission of the author. How to narrow down, when you want to do everything? I don’t think I’m the only freelancer with this characteristic (I refuse to call it a problem, it’s just a characteristic!). I always tell my family that my…

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Adding New Services and Admitting I Was Wrong

By Next Level | May 1, 2024
Adding new services and admitting I was wrong

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 this week’s post, Anne Connor discusses how she took up a former service and made…

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The Case Against Raising Your Translation Rates In 2024 (and why it doesn’t hold water)

By Next Level | April 3, 2024
Raising translation rates in 2024

This post is an updated version of article that originally appeared on the LION Translation Academy blog. It is published here with permission of the author. In the ever-evolving landscape of professional language services, new technologies such as neural machine translation (NMT) and generative AI (genAI) have inevitably sparked debates about how we should be pricing our services. Many freelancers…

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Managing Your Freelance Client Portfolio

By Next Level | March 20, 2024
Managing Your Freelance Client Portfolio

This post is a reblog, originally published in the Slator Tool Box. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. An agency that occasionally gets in touch sends me an email with four image files attached. Taken with a phone, the pictures show separate pages of a medical patient record. No attempt has been made to redact personal data,…

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Oh BOI, oh BOI! New Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Small (and Large) Businesses

By Next Level | March 6, 2024
Oh BOI Oh BOI New Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Small (and Large) Businesses

BOI is short for Beneficial Ownership Information, meaning, information about who actually owns or controls a company. On January 1, 2024 a new Federal regulation went into effect in the US that requires many companies to report this information to FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury. This new regulation was devised…

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Recent Independent Contractor Classification Rule Changes and What They Mean for Translators and Interpreters

By Next Level | February 19, 2024
response-to-independent-contractor-rule-changes

Insights from the Advocacy and Business Practices Education Committees of the American Translators Association on the DOL’s final rule on worker classification under the FLSA. Employee or independent contractor? In recent years, many professions that include a high number of independent contractors, the language services industry included, have been rocked by the passage of oftentimes problematic legislation aimed at imposing…

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