Livelihood Circle

Overview

The Livelihood Working Circle is responsible for the translation agency side of the collective. Livelihood work concerns paid work and the list of responsibilities of the circle includes checking our e-mail and Social Media inboxes, keeping correspondence with the clients, answering enquiries about our services, securing prospects of paid work, maintaining communication with clients, determining prices, invoicing, keeping record of the livelihood wordcount, the allocation of tasks among the team, complying with the deadlines, and very importantly, seeking flows of paid work.

Membership

As for general membership in the working circle, that would be all Guerrilla Translators.

Given the fact that dating members do not have access to livelihood work until the second stage of the Dating Phase (paid at a 50% rate during the 2nd stage and at a 75% rate during the 3rd), this circle is pretty much populated by full-fledged members. For a number of reasons, though, we recommend dating members to focus on lovework while going through the dating phase. Participating in the livelihood circle requires responsibility with the client, solid knowledge about our services and methodology, confidence at representing the collective and having an idea of our capacity at any given moment.

The admin of a project, (not to be confused with the steward) is the person who keeps in touch with the client, sets a price, makes sure the work will be ready before the deadline, and finally, sends the translation (once it’s finished and reviewed) and the invoice to the client. It is every translator’s and editor’s responsibility to keep track of their own wordcount.

As in the Love Circle, the rotating stewardship of this circle is dual to ensure that both target English and target Spanish workflows function properly. The steward of the circle must have a general idea of the load of work at any given moment and make sure that the admins of each work are aware of the due dates and other requirements. However, each admin is responsible for the communication within every work they are involved in and everyone in the circle is expected to work side by side to make sure everything works as it should.

Procedures

When we are contacted for a paid translation (normally via e-mail or Facebook message), the first thing to check is the capacity of the team: are there available translators and editors to carry out the job at that precise moment? Once the translators have agreed and the tasks have been assigned, the work is accepted and a Trello card for the new project is created.

We determine the price charged to our clients according to this External Pricing spreadsheet, based on the entry on External Pricing and Internal Distribution of Credits. Nevertheless, the pricing grid is only for internal reference and is not meant to be a strict and rigid protocol; there is room for flexibility and personalization when deciding on the price.

We try to discourage urgent translations, as it may compromise quality (and stress the Guerrilla Translators involved). To encourage the culture of Slow Translation the world needs we have decided to increase the price of “urgent” translations.

Tools

Slack: Here we discuss whether to accept the job or not depending on the deadlines and the team’s capacity, determine the pricing and form the admin-translation-edition team.

E-mail and Social Media: This is the usual means of communication between our clients and us.

Trello: Again, Trello is extremely important for tasks such as complying with the deadlines, coordinating with the editor, reviewing the corrections, uploading the final versions, and in general, keeping all the information about a project in the same place.

GDrive: This is where we store the invoices and translations. Additional external tools – like, for example, the word counter of your choice or subtitling tools such as Aegisub or Amara.

Connections

The Livelihood Circle is closely tied to the Media Peers Circle in terms of reaching out new readers and potential clients. The connection with the Love Circle is also evident, since it is precisely our pro-bono translations which capture the attention of our clients. There also exists a not-so-obvious but crucial connection with the Community Circle since paid work shouldn’t make any member oblivious to carework, lovework, and the needs of the Community as a living organism.

Rhythms

Daily – checking the inboxes for messages related to paid work.

Weekly or twice a week – Checking deadlines and communicating difficulties in the course of the translation/edition/admin work.

Biweekly Check-in – During the Biweekly Sprint we will have overview of livelihood work coming in (e.g. not enough Spanish, too much weight on one translator, etc.).