 Hi everyone. So this video is to deal with the question that I've been asked a couple of times and that is whether you, as a freelancer, as a freelance translator, should be contacting end clients or if you should be contacting translation agencies. To answer that, I'm going to step back and start from the beginning. And if you're just starting out, then you're probably using one of those websites like Upwork.com, Pros.com, Translators Cafe. If you are using them, you're dealing with translation agencies. You usually will not contact the end clients until later on. Translation agencies are intermediaries. They deal with the company, the end client on the one hand and freelance translators on the other hand. And there's a big reason for this. They actually do quite a bit of work. I've learned that the hard way, trying to contact end clients, running my own agency now. Having said that, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't contact end clients, but you should definitely keep a couple of things in mind before you do. First of all, if you're first starting out, I actually would not contact end clients. You're going to have enough work as it is dealing with translations and rightly so, because you're going to have to concentrate on them and make sure they're done well. So you don't want to have to worry about other things. You need to put yourself in their shoes. They do not deal with translators. If they're a bank, then obviously they're busy with their financial stuff. They run a website. They're busy focusing on sales for that website. If they're a law firm, then they're really busy doing their own. Anyway, they don't care about the translation world. These documents, these financial statements or this website, they need it translated and they need it done quick in XYZ languages, which means right off the bat, don't talk about your price per word. They don't know what source languages are, target languages are. They don't know that we use that. You need to skip all that. If someone wants a website translated, let me say, yes, I can translate the website for this amount. You know, that's it. And obviously you want to tell other stuff. You want to show the benefits you can give them, as I mentioned in the past video. And you also want to show them that you've done this type of thing before that you're used to it and that you can work on it and they don't have to worry about it. You are there to make their life easier. If you get a haircut, which I desperately need, that's why I came to my mind. You can't have the hairdresser tell you, well, I usually cut using this type of scissors, but you know, I can also do this type of scissors. No, you just want to look good. You don't want to know how the sausage is made. So my sincere advice to you would be to start off dealing only with translation agencies. They deal with the source and target language. They also deal with the editing. All too often you deal with translators. They'll translate what's in the financial statement, but the numbers will be off or they haven't been touched or, you know, the layout will be weird because it's from an Excel to Word. You can't have any of that. If you're dealing with an end client, it needs to be perfect. The thing you send to them would be something that they can directly send to the client. In my experience, it's just a different type of mentality. Maybe it's just me, but it definitely took me a while to get there, to get where I could feel that I could deal with end clients and deliver what they're looking for. Having said that, it's also trial and error. The worst thing that'll happen is that they'll say no, and hopefully you can understand why they said no, and you can learn from that. So that's just my two cents about dealing with end clients, especially when you're first starting out. Later on, when you do start dealing with them more regularly, there are many other things to keep in mind, depending on the client, but I won't get into any of that stuff yet. Those are my two cents. I hope they make things a bit more clear too. I know when people first start out, they don't understand, wait, what's an agency? What's an end client? What am I? What's this? What's that? If you have any questions about this, feel free to let me know, and I'm always happy to talk about stuff like this. And in the meantime, if you found this useful, please click like. Feel free to subscribe as well. There will be more videos about freelance translation about translation in general. It's great to you, to your computer screen, so you can absorb it, and hopefully it can help. That's it for now, and I'll talk to you later. Thanks. Bye.