The Bilingual Side Hustle

Translation Strategist, Liane R. Grant, joins us on this episode of the SideHustle Lounge to share her framework for success in bilingual transcription. Hear how she earns 4X's more in her side hustle than she did with full time employment. Is this for you? Liane has the answer.

Guest Information:

Liane R. Grant founded The King's Translators, a nonprofit translation team that has translated over 5 million words and published 100 books. Liane is a certified translator (French/English) with a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from Université de Montréal. Her innovative training method has impacted hundreds of budding translators worldwide. Liane lives in beautiful, historic Quebec City.

Take this free assessment today to identify your potential for a side hustle doing written translation. You will quickly see if you have the 8 characteristics needed to succeed. www.lianergrant.com/potential

Purchase Liane's book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QT8CDM8

Episode Highlights:

24:47 You take each sentence and you put it into the other language. You take the freedom that you need to move the words around so that they sound natural in the other language. You want to make sure all the information is still there. You haven't changed anything, you haven't added anything, you haven't omitted anything, but you definitely have to move the words around.

28:58 The translation has to be faithful to the original document. It has to match. It has to have the same content. As translators we, we don't have the freedom to introduce new information or change information.

29:60 I teach my students to focus on fidelity, first of all, then readability and then conformity. So in each of those areas, I teach them three best practices that will help them achieve that result.

--- Full Raw Transcription Below ---

Liane R. Grant (00:00):

It really pays to get a premium translator because in the legal field, if you don't get it right, if you don't get the terminology, right, that could be very, very costly.

Introduction (00:12):

Welcome to the SideHustle Lounge. If you're looking for flexible ways to earn income, grow your mindset, and live the lifestyle you've always dreamed of, you are in the right place. So lower the lights. Grab your favorite beverage, and join your host, founder of NotaryCoach.com and Amazon bestselling author of “Sign and Thrive: How To Make Six Figures As A Mobile Notary And Loan Signing Agent,” Bill Soroka.

Bill Soroka (00:46):

Cheers and welcome to my next guest today, Liane R. Grant, she's a translation strategist and author of the new book, The Bilingual Side Hustle, use your second language to earn impressive income doing written translations. Liane it's such a pleasure to finally have you on one of my podcasts.

Liane R. Grant (01:05):

Thank you, Bill. I'm happy to be here. Ever since I met you in Austin at the Author Advantage Lab Accelerator, I've been really impressed by what you've done with your book and your business and now with the podcast. So congratulations on that.

Bill Soroka (01:19):

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. You know I remember when I met you at that event, I was so excited because I read one of your other books, Schedule Your Dream and I just was so impressed with that, just basic layout and no excuse manual for getting stuff done when you want to work towards your dream. So it was truly a pleasure to meet you too.

Liane R. Grant (01:41):

Oh, thank you.

Bill Soroka (01:42):

My pleasure. So the first question I think I'd like to ask is what is a translation strategist?

Liane R. Grant (01:50):

Okay, well, I am a certified translator, but as a translation strategist, I help two groups of people. So the first is translators. I help to train people who are bilingual that want to become translators or become better translators. So I teach them simple strategies they can use to do quality written translation. And then the other group that I help are nonprofits. So I help them with strategies to produce their resources, their written materials. Most nonprofits have a very strict budget. And so from my own experience, I actually founded a nonprofit team called the Kings translators and did doctoral research with them. And over a period of the last 10 years, I figured out the, the most efficient way to get resources translated for a nonprofit without spending a fortune. And so I help other nonprofits do the same thing,

Bill Soroka (02:44):

Right? Well, that's, that makes a lot of sense and what a perfect lead into what we're really talking about today and it's this opportunity as a translator. So you touched on the nonprofits that often need this translation service. What are some of the other, what's the opportunity?

Liane R. Grant (03:07):

Well, in my own experience, my original goal in studying translation at university was the need in our nonprofit organization. We had moved to Quebec and discovered that there were hardly any resources in French for our nonprofit. And that was a big problem because this province is 90, 95% French. And so English materials just weren't going to do the job. And so I made the big decision to go to university in my forties to learn translation so that I could help with this gap. So I did a BA, a masters and then finally doctoral research, cause I realized we really needed to have a good system and we needed a team. Just one person wasn't enough for this. But also along with that, of course, is the funding issue in a nonprofit. We didn't really have any funding for translation.

Liane R. Grant (03:57):

So while we were incorporating volunteers into our process, of course there were still ongoing costs. And so I started my own translation side hustle to fund my nonprofit work. And I had started out, you know, when, before we moved to Quebec, I lived in Ontario. I was a law clerk and I was making a decent hourly wage when I left. And so when I first started doing translation, I was able to match that wage. However, I was working from home, so I didn't have commuting or costs or anything like that. My hours were flexible obviously. But as time went on, I was able to work up to where I had, I was earning double that wage as a certified translator, by doing things like transcript and certificates and diplomas and things like that. So you have to be a certified translator to do those types of documents.

Liane R. Grant (04:52):

And at the time I thought, oh wow, I've doubled my income. That's pretty cool. But then I realized that there were types of translations I could do that were more efficient as far as an hourly rate. And so I started translating, for example, essays and articles for students and things like that. And I realized that when I worked into my mother tongue, I could work so much faster. So I, I learned English to French translation. So for my side hustle, when I did French to English translation, I was so much faster because I was working into my mother tongue. So again, I, I was up to, I've actually attained four times the hourly wage that I was making as a law clerk doing my side hustle.

Bill Soroka (05:37):

Wow.

Liane R. Grant (05:38):

On the right, the right thing. So not just into my mother tongue, but also translating things in areas that I'm familiar with.

Liane R. Grant (05:48):

So my specialty, our nonprofit team is religion. So I do religious texts. So students who are writing articles for religious journals, things like that. I'm so familiar with that material that I can do it quickly and make a, a really good, I say an hourly wage but when you, when you translate for someone, you just give them a project fee. And so if you can work faster, you make more per hour. So you increase your own salary by, by strategizing. That's why I call myself a translation strategist. I show them how to do this more efficiently. And so with all that combined, I can now in my side hustle make about four times what I was making as a law clerk.

Bill Soroka (06:29):

That is just incredible. And I love that you clarified that even though you're talking about hourly, this is a, a per project fee and you mentioned efficiency. So if something, if it used to take you two hours to translate something and you create a system where you can do it in 15 minutes, you still charge a project fee on that.

Liane R. Grant (06:52):

Right? In my opinion, I don't think the client deserves to know how long it takes you to do something. If they feel like you're charging a fair rate and you have taken action to improve your skills and be more efficient and more strategic, then you gain from that. Because it's also, it would be unfair to the client to charge by the hour, because if you agreed on a certain amount per hour, and then you decide to work really slow, that's not fair to them either. So in my opinion, the project fee is fair to both the client and to the worker.

Bill Soroka (07:23):

Yeah. I, I love that pricing model for sure. And in, in the end, the client wants results and you're delivering on results at an agreed upon price. Mm-Hmm yeah. Now it, it sounds like you're also describing niches or micro niches within this industry, is that one of the things you advocate for?

Liane R. Grant (07:44):

Well, I feel that translation is a perfect second career. So if you already have experience say in banking or the medical field or something like that, and you're bilingual and you become a translator in those fields, then you bring an authority to your work because you understand the terminology, you understand their lingo and how they think. And so your translations are authentic. And this, this actually might be a good time to talk about machine translation or automatic translation.

Bill Soroka (08:17):

Yeah. Yeah, Please.

Liane R. Grant (08:19):

Okay. So I just want to give you sort of a, an example first; have you ever listened to a book or a document on your tablet or your phone saying Siri, voiceover, that, that function where it reads it to you?

Bill Soroka (08:34):

Yeah.

Liane R. Grant (08:34):

You think that robot voice mm-hmm and, and sometimes like read will be red, you know, because it's a machine, it doesn't know everything. So I like to compare that to machine translation and I, I don't want to point fingers, but most people would just say, Google translate. There are obviously many others, but let's just use that as an example. So that's the kind of effect that you get if you use Google translate. So you've got words pronounced wrong. Sometimes they're the wrong words. It's robotic. It, it has no feeling. And so I just, I guess I want to clarify right at the beginning, I do not teach people how to take a machine translation and fix it.

Liane R. Grant (09:15):

That is a totally different field of labor; it's called post-editing. And I don't teach that. I teach people how to actually translate from scratch. And businesses and people are starting to realize how important that is. And the impact of a, a bad translation is very far reaching. So in Quebec, as I mentioned, it's 90, 95% French. If you go on even, even a, a well recognized hotel website here, you're probably gong to find that a lot of the English translations are very awkward. And that impacts me as a client. I read that and I, I think, do I really want it to go stay there? They have not even taken the time to make sure that the grammar is correct or that, that the sentences are not awkward. So obviously English clients are not their priority. That's the impression I get. I don't know if that's what they intend to portray.

Liane R. Grant (10:13):

I don't think so, obviously. But more and more, I think businesses are starting to realize having real human translation is gong to make a huge difference. And so that's one of the things I address right in the first chapter of my book is that when I talk about a bilingual side hustle, I'm not gong to teach you how to fix Google translates mistakes. There are , you know, a machine can't understand emotion or context or nuances or even logic sometimes. Just to give you an example, there's a community center here in Quebec city. And so they have what we would call open swimming. So they put a post on their Facebook page for their open swimming hours, but Google translated as free baths so you can imagine in English,.

Bill Soroka (11:02):

That's awkward.

Liane R. Grant (11:04):

Yes. Someone who's English in the city who didn't know any French yet. And so they're relying on Google translate. They're like free baths. Oh, what's that? And it's just an open swimming hour for the family. Right. But.

Bill Soroka (11:16):

Right.

Liane R. Grant (11:17):

That's just an example of, of machine translation. So I won't get, I I'll try not to get too sidetracked on that, but I do want to clarify that this is real human translation that we're talking about.

Bill Soroka (11:28):

I'm really glad that you clarified that. cause I think, you know no matter what industry we're in, you know, there's always technology that keeps move moving in. Sometimes it helps, it helps things out and then other times it can slow things down. But I, I'm seeing more and more that these industries that were heavily reliant on people at one time then went and shifted to technology are now shifting back mm-hmm to human, that human element. There's something that a machine can't recreate just as you described mm-hmm so do you see, do you see that same trend in this and do you see a long term future in this career as translator?

Liane R. Grant (12:11):

Yes. So actually actually there's a conference that takes place every couple of years, depending on the pandemic now. And it's called a conference for premium translators and it's, it's for English and French right now. I don't know if there are other versions in other languages. But they're realizing that there are clients that want premium translation. They a translation that will accurately convey what they're conveying in one language in the other. So the style, the tone getting the right terminology, you know, not sounding silly. So that's a thing with machine translation. There are times where it's maybe 80, 90% correct, but that 10 or 20 think that's wrong can make you look really dumb.

Bill Soroka (12:56):

Yeah.

Liane R. Grant (12:56):

So businesses are wanting to move past that they want premium translation and also same thing that the type of work that I do translating articles for students, they don't want something robotic or their, their article is not gong to be accepted by the journal.

Liane R. Grant (13:13):

And that's in the academic world. That's really important to them. And so I had, I had one client who came to me from a referral, which is how I get most of my clients. And he said that his articles kept getting rejected. He was French and he was translating them himself into English. The content was pretty accurate, but it was just awkward because he didn't really know English fluently. And so you can only do so much with, with your dictionary if, if you had never been immersed in the language. And so I started editing as articles for him. He couldn't afford to pay me for the whole translation, but he would do the basic translation and then I would edit it and make it sound natural for him. in English. And he was so excited. He came back to me, said, my articles are getting accepted now. Thank you. So, oh, and for him that's so important in, in his pursuits to get recognition in his field.

Bill Soroka (14:08):

That's, that's a huge, and what a great example, I'm thinking of others too. Well, legal documents and contracts. Mm-Hmm , you know, the translation isn't always literal. So it's super important that those get translated correctly.

Liane R. Grant (14:20):

Yes.That's very important. And, and like I said, I was a law clerk in Ontario, and so I'm familiar with the, the legalese, the way that they say things. And so I have done some of that type of translation. I don't enjoy it as much. I have opportunities to do that, but I prefer the other, so, yeah. But one thing that that's an example of where it's, it really pays to get a premium translator because in the legal field, if you don't get it right, if you don't get the terminology, right. That could be very, very costly. And so you could, you could get sued just over the wording in something. It it's critical that it'd be correct. And when I mentioned translation as a second career, anyone who's done any type of legal work to do, and they're bilingual to do translation as a side hustle in the legal field that's, it's just the perfect fit.

Bill Soroka (15:13):

Yeah. Seems that way for sure. How do, somebody who is bilingual? How do they know if they're, if they're bilingual enough, I guess is the question

Liane R. Grant (15:22):

okay. So when I started my translation program at university, one of the things they made clear to us at the beginning was we are not here to teach you a language. We're here to teach you translation strategies. And so they told us, if you don't feel like you're fluent, then you need to go take some language courses. So that's, that's the base that you need. Obviously you never know every word in the language. Pick up a big English dictionary. You're going to find thousands of words that you've never heard before. Never even read before. And so it's not that you need to know everything, but you need to, you need to have a good, solid base in grammar. And in my book, the Bilingual Side Hustle, actually, I, I provide a chart from the common European framework of languages. And it, it gives you an, you know, fairly simple language, how to know which level that you're at.

Liane R. Grant (16:16):

And so you have to be not super advanced, but, but near the top, you have to be able to form sentences properly and express things and, and use proper grammar. So that's really important. And one, one of the things I'd like to mention here is that being bilingual speaking is not the same as being bilingual writing. So let me just, I'm gong to pull on that thread a little bit.

Bill Soroka (16:42):

Yeah, please.

Liane R. Grant (16:43):

So the first time that I tried to do written translation, I thought this is gong to be easy because I'm bilingual when I speak, but it wasn't because writing is different than speaking. When you speak, there's a lot of flexibility. You can, you can correct something. You just said, you can leave out prepositions sometimes, or your grammar doesn't have to be perfect. People are very forgiving when you speak, but when you write, there's a whole different standard for that. So people don't want to see typos, they won don't want to see bad grammar.

Liane R. Grant (17:19):

If, you just, you have to give it more thought, but, it was quite a shock for me at first when I realized, oh, this is very different. And I was trying to translate into French, which was not my mother tongue. So there was all the other challenges that go with that. Now, when I started doing translation as a side hustle into English, it was a lot easier because I grew up with this language. I know how to say things. It's, it's what we call native speaker intuition. And so that, there's an advantage when you translate into your mother tongue. With my nonprofit, I still do translation into French because I'm not, my focus is not how much can I earn per hour, It's how can I help this nonprofit? And so I didn't, I didn't take the time that I need to do a good job. But when I want to earn money from it, I translate into my mother tongue so that I can do it more efficiently, more quickly.

Bill Soroka (18:10):

And you get to make that decision. So when you are taking on a client, is that one of your qualifiers?

Liane R. Grant (18:16):

Well, that's the joy of doing what we call freelance translation. And you can, you can choose your hours. If you want to work all night, then you work with clients across the, the ocean, right? Because they're awake then.

Bill Soroka (18:29):

Right.

Liane R. Grant (18:30):

And choose what type of subjects you want to translate. If you have a client that's difficult to get along with, you can fire them and find another one. . So there's all these flexibilities, but just mentioning that term freelance translation makes me think of Google translate again, because a few years ago I typed that term in French it's and Google translate told me that it meant translate to the pig. Oh yeah. And I took a screenshot because I, I collect translation bloopers, I call them. And so now Google translate has fixed that because with humans help, they fix their mistakes over time. Right. If you search that today, you won't find that mistake, but I have the screenshot for my collection.

Bill Soroka (19:14):

love it. Yeah. I love it. And again, just highlights the value of having a human being there. Mm-Hmm How do you, since we're going down that path now too, with like crafting your business, how do you grow this business?

Liane R. Grant (19:33):

Well, getting the first client is always the challenge. Right? So, but I found that I just use my connections. For me my connections were at university because I was in university. And so I connected with the head of the religion department and she, she had me do some work for her. And then she started referring all her students and her postdocs and, and it just spread from there. And I literally don't do any advertising. So I don't do as a, I do it as a side hustle. So my full-time work is really with my nonprofit, mostly volunteer, but I have to fund that somehow. So I, I do translation work on the side and basically referrals I have found is, is the best way. Of course, there are many different ways you can market yourself and that's not my specialty necessarily. But in this business, for sure, if you can use your connections to get your first couple clients and it will spread from there, you do a really good job for them, you make them really happy and they will just naturally tell others about it.

Liane R. Grant (20:36):

Now, before the pandemic, I did do some things by mail and I would obviously include my business cards or actually magnets so that they wouldn't throw it out. yeah. And they would often refer me to other people. But now obviously most things are done by email. When I was, when I talked about mail, that was mostly when I was doing diplomas and transcripts, where they needed physical copies.

Bill Soroka (21:00):

Right.

Liane R. Grant (21:01):

But I realized that's not the most profitable. And in fact, you do have to be a certified translator to do that type of thing. And so there's a longer path to get there. But the, the more profitable translation work such as the articles, I mentioned websites, even books, there's no requirement for you to be certified. You just need to show that you can do a quality translation.

Bill Soroka (21:25):

No, that's interesting. Mm-Hmm  

Liane R. Grant (21:27):

The certification requirement is only for government documents or universities. Like I mentioned, transcripts diploma certificates, sometimes legal documents as well, but not always. I've, I've translated wills and they've never asked for my seal on my certified translator seal on it. They just needed a good quality translation.

Bill Soroka (21:48):

Do you find that most of your translation services are written translation? Or do you ever do the the verbal?

Liane R. Grant (21:57):

I, I do interpreting occasionally for our nonprofit when there's nobody else available I can do it. It's not my preference because I like to take my time and find the perfect word. And, and I, I'm not I guess I'm not as outgoing as some people, so I prefer to work in the background. Yeah. So for anyone who, who has that type of personality written translation is, is amazing because you can kind of hide behind your computer and work your craft.

Bill Soroka (22:29):

Yeah. Well, I'm really glad that you mentioned this. It could be an introvert stream, but I'm curious what's the, what's the actual work look like? Like what's, I mean, are you just literally just looking at two documents, translating, researching, translating, researching, or…..

Liane R. Grant (22:45):

Okay. Before I address that, I would like to mention that interpreting is a very valuable community service and it's needed in hospitals and, and social settings. However, it's very, very often volunteer. So for an interpreter to earn money doing that is kind of difficult. Written translation because it's so tangible you have something you can actually print or put on a website. It seems like companies and even nonprofits are more willing to pay for something like that. And so that's why I, I think someone who's bilingual, if they want to do a side hustle, the written translation is going to be more profitable for them. So as far as the work, basically from the a client, you'll get a document and they will give you some basic instructions. And so normally the type of work that I've done, the clients don't have a lot to say about it, except I want a good translation.

Liane R. Grant (23:45):

Now, in other fields, there might be times where the, the business might say, I want this translated, but I want you to change the style a little bit. So it was written for adults. Can you make it for kids or, you know, that kind of thing. Those are things you need to know up front. If you don't get any instructions. And basically your job is to recreate the document in the other language, same style, same tone, same level of language or formality, proper terminology. And so I teach a very simple process for translation. The first step is called just read or review. So I recommend that you read the entire document first, so you can kind of capture this style to tone, get an idea of what's going on. There's nothing worse than starting to translate, getting halfway through and realize, oh, I, I just got new information that changes what I, what I started out doing, go back and change all my terminology.

Liane R. Grant (24:41):

So it's really helpful to read the whole thing. If it's a book, you might want to go one chapter after at a time, but.

Bill Soroka (24:47):

OK,

Liane R. Grant (24:47):

That's the first step. And then the second step is simply to translate. So you, you take each sentence, you put it into the other language and you take the freedom that you need to move the words around so that they sound natural in the other language. You want to make sure all the information is still there. You haven't changed anything, you haven't added anything, you haven't omitted anything, but you definitely have to move the words around. You can't just, and that's, that's the problem with machine translation. Sometimes it's so literal. It's like, we don't talk that way. We don't write that way. So you have to move it around and make it natural in the other language. And then the, the third step is to edit or review. So read, translate, review. I call it one, two, three translation.

Bill Soroka (25:34):

I Love that. Yeah, that's it sounds simple. And I love that. I mean that really paints the image, even for me. You know, I'm not bilingual, even though I took Spanish for like six years, it, I just did not stick, but I can, I can actually see how this this service works.

Liane R. Grant (25:51):

Well, the final step is, is so important review. There are some people that finish the translation and they think I'm done. No would you publish a book without an editor? No.

Bill Soroka (26:00):

No.

Liane R. Grant (26:02):

You had Chandler Bolt on your podcast recently.

Bill Soroka (26:05):

Yeah, I did.,

Liane R. Grant (26:07):

And in fact it was, I had always had a dream of publishing a book. And so the year I turned 50 my husband bought me that course and I published my book and then the light bulb came on. It's like, I can use this. I know how to publish on Amazon now. We can use this for our nonprofit, cause it was so expensive to publish books using a printer. And now we can print on Amazon and there is no upfront cost. And so that's why over the last decade, we've been able to publish 100 books in French, on Amazon, all because of self-publishing school, opening that door for me.

Bill Soroka (26:43):

How amazing is that. That is so cool. So you, your organization has published a hundred. How many have you published personally?

Liane R. Grant (26:53):

Well, the bilingual side hustle is my 10th book, so right. One of my books is in French. I'm hoping to publish some of the others in French too, but most to them are in English.

Bill Soroka (27:04):

Congratulations. That's so huge.

Liane R. Grant (27:07):

Thanks.

Bill Soroka (27:07):

You're an inspiration there too. And before we go though, I want to, I, I want to circle back to how to grow this business and I love that you started out with relationships. I think most of the people who are listening to my podcast, I've been introduced from the notary business or some of the other side hustles that are out there. And it just seems like every, so many of these businesses come down to two things to generate business and that's relationships and technology. Mm-hmm So have you found that, I know this isn't the specialty or the, even the focus of the, of the book, but is it, does it come down to the same thing, your referral network tapping or cultivating your, your own network and search engine optimization and websites?

Liane R. Grant (27:54):

So I'll address the referral part first and then the technology. As for referrals, that's only going to work if you do good quality translation. And so during my doctoral research I was trying to identify what are the problems that new translators have? So in my organization it was nonprofit volunteers. So they had no training in translation. And so I, I identified the mistakes they made most commonly and I tried to figure out, you know, what's causing them to make that mistake. And so I was able to identify nine best practices that would help them correct some faulty thinking and help them be a better translator. So that's what I teach in my courses, the, these nine best practices. And, but they fall into three quality categories. So I'll just talk about those briefly. The very most important quality aspect is what I call fidelity. It means faithfulness. I just wanted them all to end in ITY. So I used fidelity.

Bill Soroka (28:56):

All right. I Love it.

Liane R. Grant (28:58):

The translation has to be faithful to the original document. It has to match. It has to have the same content. Okay. So that's some most important. As translators we, we don't have the freedom to introduce new information or change information. So it's really important that we take the time we need to make it match. The second most important is readability. And that just means that someone who's reading it in that language, who's a native speaker of that is not going to find it awkward. It's going to flow nicely. They're not gong to have to read each sentence two or three times to understand, it's just, it's going to, you know, ideally not even sound like a translation, it's going to sound like it was written in their language. And then the third element of quality is conformity. And that just means that it adheres or conforms to standard language practices.

Liane R. Grant (29:50):

So good grammar, good spelling, but it can also conform to you know, a certain style guide. In my case, if I do, if I translate an article for a student, they might tell me, well this journal requires me to use MLA or Chicago or APA style. And so that would be part of conformity making it conform to that style. Now, if you're just doing a general text, you're doing a website, you don't have to worry about APA or MLA, but you do have to worry about the spelling and punctuation part, right? So if you want to get good refer, you have to give a quality translation. And so that's what I teach my students is to focus on fidelity, first of all, then readability and then conformity. So in each of those areas, I teach them three best practices that will help them achieve that result.

Liane R. Grant (30:36):

And then the second thing you mentioned was technology. So as I said, I don't, don't do a lot of marketing. If I wanted to turn my side hustle into a full-time career, then I would pursue that more. So my my goal, actually I have kind of this double mission to help translators and nonprofits, but I feel that if I can help a bilingual person who maybe has a day job, that they don't really like, if they started a translation side hustle, at some point, they might be able to turn it into their full-time income, but in part-time hours, because they'll be making more. For example, I'm making four times the amount I did as a law clerk. So I could take a 40 hour workweek and turn it into a ten hour work week with the same income. So my goal is that the more people who do that, they have the skills now that they could volunteer some of their time to help a nonprofit.

Liane R. Grant (31:33):

And that's something I encourage a lot. But what I would like to mention about the technology aspect, although it's not specific to marketing, your profitability or your hourly efficiency as a translator is very dependent on the technology you use. And so I've invested quite a bit of time in, in having a setup that works for me. So I have three screens, I have an external keyboard, an external mouse, and some people might think that doesn't make a big difference, but when you figure out all the time that you spend opening and closing windows and then when translating you, you have to have the original document on one side and then your translation on the other. I don't recommend that people type into the original document because they accidentally eliminate words and sentences sometimes. So, so I'll split my, my middle screen. I've got for me English on, on one side, French on the other, if I'm doing non-profit work vice versa for my paid work.

Liane R. Grant (32:32):

And then on the left, I've got, you know, my, my file search on the right. I've got some databases and, and internet tools that I use to help me look up terminology, the external keyboard and mouse. This is kind of interesting. I had done an experiment. I was editing a, a translated document and I was working actually in a vehicle. I had my laptop. And so I kept track of how much I could edit in one hour, how many words. And when I got home, I continued with the same document, but with my three screens, my external keyboard and my external mouse and my time I was able to do twice as much in one hour.

Bill Soroka (33:13):

Oh wow.

Liane R. Grant (33:15):

So when we're talking about increasing our income potential, we, we overlook how technology can help us with that.

Bill Soroka (33:24):

That's huge. And I love that optimization. I know you use the word optimize in the book quite a bit, which I love taps into everything and everything geeky in me, but that's about optimizing your systems. And if you're really gong to do this to gain time him back, if you do want, like, I love the example that you gave, you're earning four times the amount of income you can make in 10 hours in what you're making, or what's taking you for the hours to work now, what do you do at that time? You can donate some of your time. You can spend time doing the things you love with the people you love when you're more efficient and you optimize that. Mm-Hmm

Liane R. Grant (34:01):

. Yes. And for me, I I've chosen to invest the majority of my time in my nonprofit, because it's, it's a passion of mine. Yeah. But there's so many possibilities you could decide to, to work 20 hours. And then, and then you increase your income. Or like you said, spend more time with family. There's so many options. And that's the thing. When you start a side hustle and you, the wheels start turning, you think, well, this could turn into full-time income. It just opens up so many possibilities.

Bill Soroka (34:31):

Yeah. It really does. Liane, I think you have an amazing framework for success here. I really love the information and the value that you brought to this episode. So thank you for that. If we've got somebody listening who's bilingual or in their head, they're thinking still thinking, am I bilingual enough? Would this work for me? What resource do you have for them?

Liane R. Grant (34:55):

Okay. I have a free assessment called discover your translation potential. And in this free assessment, as basically you'll find out if you have the eight characteristics, you need to succeed doing written translation as a side hustle and good news. If you don't have all eight of them, I have some suggestions in there for how you can fill the gap. So these are characteristics that I identified working with my, my volunteer translators. And then also I've, I've taught many students in university, Concordia University and University of Montreal. And so I find that these are basically the eight core characteristics that you would need to succeed.

Bill Soroka (35:37):

I love it. And where can they go to find that out?

Liane R. Grant (35:39):

Okay. So to download that free assessment, it's at lianergrant.com/potential. So I'm going to spell that cause my name's a little different. So L I A N E R G R A N t.com/potential. And it's a free assessment. It won't take very long to do. It's a fillable PDF and it will give you your results.

Bill Soroka (36:01):

I love that. And of course, as usual guys, you can go to sidehustlelounge.com/vip. Join the VIP room. I'll have a link to that free assessment with Liane, as well as a link to her book, The Bilingual Side Hustle. And you can explore Liane's author page and see the other nine books that she is already published on Amazon. Liane, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Liane R. Grant (36:29):

Thank you, Bill. I've really enjoyed it.

Liane R. Grant (36:32):

Thank you so much for listening to the Side Hustle Lounge podcast.

Bill Soroka (36:36):

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Bill

This episode was produced and marketed by the Get Known Service

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