Besides weird, clearly inappropriate inquiries and request for services, I have long been uneasy when not able to say yes and leave the inquirer alone finding for an alternative resource. There is a strategy behind offering to introduce someone else that goes beyond simply being nice. In fact, there is a strategy beyond niceties that is less related with the hope that by passing along assignments to you might make you think about me when you have an assignment on your hands you can't take care of. It has more to do with letting an imprint in the mind of the service requirer that I was the guy who decline but found a spare wheel. Sometimes, somewhere in the future, it might help my business further along the line. Don't smile at that pure ingenuity. There is no mercy but an intend devoid of goodwill for goodwill. A virtuous circle in this profession, as a non-Japanese in Japan, could expand the potential to yield more job opportunities although the naysayers will doubt or deny. Freelancers are weathermen, and women. Only they don't release reports but basks under the sun, or feel gloom under the rain. I used to do so, so I know and might come back to the old black or white pendulum movement with nothing in between, and nothing beyond. Unsecured by the knowledge that today's assignment, and the satisfaction to have one's gears used for service and generate revenues might stop tomorrow, I have only seen in the mirror and beyond people content to have been under a continuous stream of steady assignments, or at odds in face of crisis and long term low tide employment. Smile or cry. It is true that assignments are part of a serendipity dynamics no science may explain the innards of. Sheer lucky encounters may explain part of the assignments I got since January. But there are elements that suggest not all of this is linked to luck. It has to be seasoned with a pinch a strategy to help the odds fall down on the bright face. This blog is part of a strategy to spread wider the net of my professional web site and be caught rather than catch into the dynamics of businesses coming to Japan and needing the very services I provide. Somewhere else, an other blog unrelated with this profession has brought examples of encounters that transformed into assignments and jobs opportunities. I have seldom seen cooperatives of interpreters online. I have never seen any example of networked interpreters or translators with a strategy of common visibility. There are associations of same profession people having private mailing list, a window on the Internet to recruit, regular meetings here and there that nurture over time a web of relationship where exchange of work opportunities do happen. They even carry for some a public directory of members. But that's as far as group promotion can go. I think that there are further domains and strategies to boost market creation beyond the standard scenario for small knit gathering of professionals to be tested, that rely on the will of members to abide to a small set of rules over time. One such experiment due to be launched but facing the standard reluctance of freelancers is to build visibility around a common web site attached to a blog regularly fed by members, feeding the blog being a condition to be part of the scheme. It has yet to get born.
Technorati Tags: interpretation, interpreter, interpreting, interprète, Japan, japanese interpreter, Japanese language, japanese translator, japonais, liaison interpreter, liaison interpreting, Tokyo, translation, translator
0 comments:
Post a Comment