“Enjoy your holidays!” writes one of my clients at the end of her email thanking me for sending a translated file. I had also mentioned in my email to her that I will be unable to take additional work, starting that day and for the next eleven days, because I am already fully booked with several large translation projects. Enjoy my holidays? Thank you, but no, I won’t be enjoying any holidays, though I wish that were the case.
“Thank you for your response. Please let me know if I can send you the entire file for translation or what word count you can translate by the deadline,” writes another client, who received my email auto-reply about eight days into my unavailability period. Since her original email was a “bcc:” group email sent to several translators to inquire who is available to help with her project, it is quite clear that she didn’t bother to read my email “reply” to her group email. If she had, she would have seen that I am currently NOT available to take ANY of the words she has for translation. Read the emails you receive, darling, and stop wasting my time making me send you another email to repeat what my automatic one already said: I am not currently available to take any additional work.
After the eleven days are over, my email auto-reply automatically turns off. Another client then sends me a translated file for editing and writes, “Welcome back. I assume you are sporting a Riviera tan.” Again, no. And again, I wish that were the case.
These are three examples of some of the reactions I get when I periodically turn on my email auto-reply – NOT because I am taking a “holiday” or vacation – but because I honestly, truthfully already have so much work that I cannot fit in anything more without simply never sleeping or eating. There must be translators out there who basically lie – they turn on their email auto-reply for a week or two, indicating that they are completely booked for that time period and can’t accept additional work, when what they are really doing is simply taking time off or they are actually on vacation (or holiday). But why lie about it? Why not just have your email auto-reply simply state that you are taking time off?
When I do (rarely) actually take a day or two off, my email auto-reply says that I am out of the office/taking time off for those days. Sometimes it’s for a US holiday and sometimes it’s because I am on a work trip and the day(s) I am taking off involve plane travel and lack of time and Internet access and I can’t work. The bottom line is that I don’t lie in my email auto-replies.
Whenever my workload gets to the point where I know I will be working 12-15 hours every single day for the next ten days or so, I turn on my email auto-reply to say that I am unavailable for additional work. It helps to a certain extent in fending off the email inquiries I get when I am too busy to reply to every single email. If the client does receive my email auto-reply (sometimes they don’t – more on this below), they instantly know that I am out of the picture for their project…if they read the email, that is. Some of my clients also have areas in their online vendor portals for their vendors to enter dates of unavailability. This is helpful if the project managers take a look to see if the translator they want to contact is available or not, but they don’t always check before emailing. Also, one client’s calendar that is mandatory to use when you want to indicate unavailability does not work.
A couple of my clients have group email addresses that many of their project managers have to use, and with Google’s gmail, if you have set up an email auto-reply, once it goes to an email address, it will not be resent to that same address again for four days. So if one of the project managers using the group email address gets my email auto-reply, none of the other project managers using that same address will get it until four days have passed. So this means that I still have to reply to every email from project managers using the group email address to tell them that I am unavailable. But still…using email auto-reply saves a bit of time when I am working 12-15 hours a day.
It gets annoying, though, when it is insinuated or flat out assumed that I am “yet again” on vacation/holiday. I have periods of huge volumes of translation work fairly frequently – about once every couple of months. So the (possibly envious) doubting Thomas clients who don’t believe my email auto-reply that I am unavailable must assume that I take vacations every other month. I wish that were the case!
But I don’t have the money or the desire to take vacations every other month. And I don’t know where I would go or with whom on so many vacations. Even if I did have that kind of extra time and money to take six vacations a year (each lasting ten days to two or three weeks), my husband has nowhere near that amount of vacation time. He has ten days total per year and we dole it out carefully to make the most of it. I could ask our two sons to accompany me on a vacation or two, but now that they are in their twenties and busy with their own lives, vacationing with Mom is not a priority, obviously. I have a couple of girlfriends who might go on a vacation with me, but really they would rather spend their vacation time with their husbands and/or kids. My siblings might join me on a vacation, but the ones who are married would prefer to vacation with their spouses and/or kids and the two who are not married don’t have enough money or time off work. Besides, my siblings and our families usually get together every year or two for a reunion.
I also have cousins who would join me on a vacation, but I already spend working time every year in the country where they live because one of the languages that I translate from is spoken there and I need to immerse myself annually in the language and culture to remain current and fluent in that language. I just wish I had cousins in the other four foreign countries whose languages I speak. If so, I would do a lot more speaking of those languages in those countries than I ever get a chance to do traveling there alone, spending most of my time translating in a hotel room, and not interacting with a lot of people. But I still do spend some working time every few years in one or more of the other countries whose languages I speak. Any kind of immersion helps my fluency.
The client who “assumes I am sporting a Riviera tan” currently, now that my “time off” is over, is actually fully aware that when I turn on my email auto-reply indicating unavailability, I am not lying and “secretly” on vacation. He just has a rather dry sense of humor and welcomes me back after every period of me being too fully booked to take more work. But he’s the only one who believes my email auto-reply. I know that the client who wrote, “Enjoy your holidays!” thinks I am actually on vacation every other month or so because she always wishes me “nice holidays” whenever I turn on email auto-reply. I don’t think I could convince her that I am honestly working that whole time unless I sent her the 80 to 120-page files I am translating. But if I did that, first of all, I would be breaking the rules of confidentiality for my clients and secondly, it would open up a whole other can of worms that I don’t want to deal with.
Which is this: I don’t think any of my clients would believe me and I could never convince them of the truth if I told them the real volume of work that I do. Basically, for the past five + years, I have been translating, editing and proofreading almost every single day, including all weekends and many holidays. I usually work between ten and sixteen hours per day, though sometimes less and sometimes more. I have only taken off a maximum of five or six days per year in those five years. If I added up the total number of words and/or pages I have translated, edited and proofread, it would probably be in the millions of words and hundreds of thousands of pages. Having been a vendor manager for a language services agency for over three years, I have a fairly good idea of what other translators (linguist vendors) handle in terms of work. And for most of them, what they handle is not even close to what I handle as a linguist vendor.
First, most translators translate from only one language into their native language. There are some who translate from two or even three languages, but the higher the number of languages, the lower the number of translators. I translate from four languages into my native language; and I edit and proofread from five languages into English. This means that my potential volume of work is up to five times more than most translators. So the number of requests/emails I get for work is around three to five times more than other translators get. I have been forced to learn how to say no quickly, nicely and repeatedly. But I still accept way more work than I should. I realize that I am the only one who is putting myself into a situation where I am basically a workaholic.
Part of the reason is that I love the work that I do and – even though I am boasting a bit – I am very good at it. Many of the project managers I work with like to have me do work for them, so they email me with work requests repeatedly. They know they will get quality translations with very few, if any, errors, and that deadlines will be respected. Another part of the reason I work so much is because I could not afford to take working trips to other countries to reinforce my fluency in those languages and get up to date on those cultures if I didn’t earn enough money.
However, even though I love my work and I am very good at it, I do have to sometimes “put up the hand” and turn on my email auto-reply to indicate that I cannot take additional work for a certain time. That does not mean that I am on “holiday” or vacation or simply taking time off. On the rare occasions when I am truly not working, my email auto-reply will indicate that with “taking some time off/out of office” or similar wording. I might even include the word “vacation” or “holidays” if I feel that it won’t come off as too breezy, carefree and “Riviera tan-like!”
But you can be sure that if my email auto-reply says “Unavailable to take additional work/already fully booked,” that’s exactly the case and it is not code for “On vacation, watching the blue waves splash languidly on the golden sand as I carefully cultivate my Riviera tan.”