 Hi, so I think I'm going to have to delay the health insurance talk another week. In this video, I just wanted to talk about my journey, my trip, uh, in becoming a freelance translator. I've gotten a lot of questions from people who say that they, um, you know, that either they didn't study translation and what they should do about it, or should they take a course in this or that, or they already have a, have a bachelor and a master's and they don't want to do another course in translation and they're wondering what to do. And I just wanted to give a brief recap of my journey in becoming a freelance translator because it's not something I had in mind at all when I first started out. Just briefly, I was raised bilingual, my father's American, my mother's Italian. We grew up here and there, but mostly in Switzerland. This is the Italian part of Switzerland, the one part no one knows about. Everyone knows the German part with Zurich, the French part with Geneva. But there's an Italian part with Lugano. Yeah, it exists and everyone speaks Italian there. First, I attended this like Anglo-American school, then the local school in Italian, then I went to high school in Italian, then I switched to an American high school, went to college in the States, came back there and had my first job in a bank in a Swiss bank and that was all in Italian. Then I did grad school in the States and back and forth and everything. I studied business and then in my master's course, I studied finance, no translation at all. And then I worked in, as I said, in banking, in finance and then in market research and then in real estate. None of this had anything to do with translation. On the other hand, so in undergrad, when I wanted extra cash, I would teach Italian. I was tutoring Italian and I also did translations. When I was in grad school, I was doing translation. Pretty much anytime I needed extra cash or maybe I was in between jobs without a job or anything along those lines, my go-to was translation. I knew it was always there. There was always someone that I knew who needed some translation or help with editing in English or something along those lines and I was happy to help out. But it took a while. It took until after the real estate job to think, hey, since this is my go-to every time I want cash or money, why not try to make something of it and build a career out of it? But it was always secondary. So I didn't think, okay, I need to take this seriously and go to school and learn it and everything. I was very tentative about it, which was probably a mistake, actually, because it took me a while to get the thing running, whereas had I jumped into it headlong and actually took it seriously from the get-go, I probably could have done something with it much more quickly. It was only at that point that I decided, well, let's go on these websites back then. It was Odesk and Elance. I went on both of them and tried to see if I could get some job. As soon as I made enough money there to cover the cost of pros.com, I signed up for pros.com and got an account there. Again, I was really just trying it out and I didn't want to spend extra cash for this, and which, yeah, looking back, it's pretty stupid, but I just wanted to use the profits that I made from this and put them back in and see if I could build a business this way. And at the end of the day, yeah, I was able to. I was able to suddenly, I mean, not suddenly, and I shouldn't say that at all. Probably took about four years or so before I could say, okay, I'm earning a living from freelance translation. It definitely could have gone a lot quicker had I taken it a lot more seriously at the beginning. On the other hand, I was also flying blind, right? Because no one told me what to do, where to go, how to do it. You know, at the beginning I end up on pros.com. I had no idea what pros even stood for. Actually, I still don't know what pros stands for. Seems like a weird name. And the website is so hard to navigate. So it took me a while. That was a huge reason why I ended up making the course in fact, because it just seemed when I did get the hang of it, I was like, but this is actually not that difficult. If you know what you're doing, but it's really hard to know what you're doing because you're not working for a translation company. You're not in house or, you know, you don't have someone telling you what to do. So that's why the premise of my course is not to teach you how to be a translator or it's, but it's really to teach you how to be a freelance translator because of all these steps you have to go through. That was basically my journey. I studied finance. I studied business. And that was what I was into. I wanted to, you know, work in finance and work in either Wall Street or Swiss Bank or something along those lines. That's definitely what I wanted to do. And it took a while for me to change that mindset and realized, hey, if I could make this work and actually work from wherever I want to be and be location independent, all that good stuff, then actually that would probably be really cool. And I think I would prefer that rather than just, you know, wearing a suit every day and being a finance guy and all that just because, you know, I saw it in the movies and all that. That is more or less my journey. So I've never studied translation per se. I never got a course in it. I've got in various certificate, like where you can just take a test and stuff like that. I've done that a couple of times. It's all been on the job training. Everything I know, I've learned doing it. And I'm still learning as I go along, even now as I expand and, you know, I'm trying to set up my agency and whatnot. It's the same because there's no playbook to set up an agency either. Maybe at some point I'll do a course on that as well. Anyway, I've ranted long enough. I just wanted to let you know my story and to let you know that even if you are in school right now, even if you haven't studied translation, if you haven't taken a course in translation per se, you can learn by just doing. If you're worried and you don't know how to become a freelance translator, these videos, I make them once a week. So if you have any specific questions, you can feel free to write them down in the comments. And I definitely read all of them and I either reply by replying in the comments or else I make a video about them. And of course, there's also my course, which teaches you specifically what I'm talking about now. The steps that you have to take in order to become a freelance translator and in order to be able to earn a living online rather than doing so for another company. So that was about it. I hope you could relate or find it interesting. If you have any questions or anything once again, let me know. Otherwise, I definitely appreciate likes, thumbs up. If you want to see more videos about freelance translation, most of these videos that I make are tips and tricks for freelance translators and freelancers in general or translators, then do subscribe and you'll get more of these videos. Thanks. Bye.