Forming your own translation company

Search for "translation company" online and you're bound to find a huge number fighting for a piece of the proverbial translation pie.

The bad news is that anyone that can speak two or three languages think they can be a translator and often flood the market offering their services.

The good news is that most of these do not make it as translators, and out of the ones that do, only a handful actually get to the stage of thinking about starting their own translation company. So this means that you'll have a better chance of leveraging your knowledge in the industry as you set up your business.

Owning your own business
So before you get too crazy starting your translation agency, one thing to remember is that it's not as hard as you might think it is at first. Owning a translation agency isn't that much harder than being a freelancer, except that there's more to keep track of.

So make sure you are an organized freelancer. What does this mean? Well, do you keep track of your freelancer finances? What do you do with information about your clients? How about things like advertising, online web presence, etc.? If you don't keep track of these kinds of things now, it will be hard when you are outsourcing your translations to other freelancers and need to keep track of what everyone is doing.

A lot of times, people will tell you that you should start small and see how things go before you grow your business. Well, with the world becoming more and more globalized, there is no reason to not shoot for the moon. You can offer any number of language combinations without actually having any freelancers for those languages.

What you can do is wait until a client needs a translation in a particular language combination and then find a freelancer with those languages. There are a bunch of websites you can use to find translators to bid on your new project. One website that I've used for contracting other type of work is elance.com. You basically just post a description of your project and people all over the world can bid on it.

In this way, you can make sure that you pay the freelance contractor less than what the client is charging you, thus making sure you still get paid, but without having to do any of the translation work.

Match this type of potential with the advertising from a website you have offering your translation services, you'll be able to build your client base and have more clients with more language needs.