 Hello, everyone. Today, we are going to discuss the first questions you should be asking your new employer. If you get a new job, if you're starting to work for someone for the first time as a translator, then these are some of the first questions you should be asking them. And also some of the first things you should do. I've sort of talked about this before, the first things to do when finding new clients, stuff like that. I wanted to delve a bit more into what your first communication should be with a client once you've been accepted for a job, once they've assigned you a job. So the first thing I want to say, number one, is don't ask too many questions. This might sound a bit weird when I'm saying these are the questions you should ask, but always keep in mind that the client is assigning this and they probably have 50 other things to assign. I mean, not 50, but they're having a busy day anyway and they're doing a bunch of stuff. So they do need to answer some questions and obviously they need to handle what you need. But also if you just send an email saying, well, do you want this or would you prefer that? Or now that I think about it, I'd rather do it by this deadline and not that deadline. Are you looking for more flair here and less here? And if you kept sending emails over and over again about all this stuff, it can be more trouble than it's worth to them and then they won't hire you again. So also this means that when you do have questions, sometimes it's better to wait until you can send them all in one email rather than keep sending emails over and over again. Anyway, let's get into the actual questions. So first, actually, no, first of all, we're not going to get into the questions yet. First of all, the first thing you should do, and I hope you have done, and I've mentioned this before, is you should check the blue board. This is on pros.com. On translatorscafe.com, you also have a hall of fame and shame. Check both of them. Whoever the client is, look at the name of either the client or the client's company and do a search for it on the blue board or on the hall of fame and shame and see what people say about it because there you can get a good idea of the reputation of this company of what it's like to work for them and you see what their score is on the blue board is out of five and usually people give five. There's no real reason not to. But once you start seeing threes and twos, that should be a red flag. So usually the average will be around five or shortly, just a bit under. And then try to pay attention. You might see an average of, say, 4.2, but maybe they were all fives, but in the last six months you see a bunch of twos and threes or ones or stuff like that. That is definitely a red flag. That means lately something's changed and things have gone downhill. So anyway, check the blue board because that should be one of the first things you do. Now we're going to get into the actual questions to ask. And these are questions because you need to know the information before you get started. And so first of all is the payment terms. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel embarrassed about this. They don't want to bring it up until later. They kind of don't want to jinx it. They don't want to jeopardize their job and the fact that they got to sign something. But it's very important to know the payment terms. If you can accept payment via bank transfer and PayPal, that's great. But if they want to pay you by check and you have no way of cashing in a check, I mean that's the problem. And so you need to establish payment terms. Now there's several ways to do this. Very often when they assign the job, they'll mention the payment terms or they'll have it in the original job announcement. And if that's the case, then you're fine. Or maybe when you apply for a job, you said, I accept payment via PayPal and bank transfer or something like that. And then they accepted it. Then frankly it's on them. You can say just to confirm these are my payment terms, but they should know that that's how you accept payment. Anyway, you need to make sure these payment terms are clear before you get started because otherwise they can be a headache and a half and you might not get paid, which can be a bad thing. The second thing is a deadline. Obviously you need to know the deadline. And so if they're assigning, say we need so-and-so pages translated, you need to know by when. Deadline means not only the day but the time. And time also means you need to know which time zone they mean. Your time zone, their time zone, something in between because chances are, since we're working in translation, you have clients all over the place and time zone can mean something very different. By the way, make sure you're very clear on this. I had one person say she needed the translation by 12 a.m., which is midnight. She said 12 a.m. on February 28th. And it sounded a bit odd because she wanted 12 a.m. her time. And usually you say end of business or something like that. And so I kind of want to specify. I'm like, okay, so 12 a.m. you mean midnight. And she's like, no, 12 a.m. noon, come on. But she, I mean, 12 p.m. is noon. 12 a.m. is midnight. If you're not sure about how you say it, just say midnight or noon. Or use 12 and zero o'clock or however you want. Anyway, make sure that it's very clear when this is due because, yeah, that's the deadline and you need to have it in by then. By the way, with deadlines, it's a minute after the deadline. That's bad. But if you send it before deadline, so if you send it earlier than deadline, that's great. Obviously, ideally you can send it a few hours before the deadline so everyone's happy and they're not getting nervous waiting for the deadline to come. But sending it a day or two before the deadline, you don't get any bonus points for that. So don't try to do that thinking you're going to impress the client. Obviously, if you've finished it and you know it's done and done well and you kind of want it off your plate and not worry about it, then fine, send it. But don't think that this will get you bonus points for the client. In fact, what might happen, and quite frankly, yeah, because I've seen it with me. I have a couple of my translators who deliver ahead of time and I do appreciate it, but I've kind of come to expect it now. So many times when I say there's a deadline on Sunday or let's say on Wednesday, I'm going to expect it a few days earlier because that's usually what they do. So I try not to expect it because I know it can be dangerous. I expect it by the deadline and that's it. But so anyway, it's a judgment call. Ideally, I always think is a few hours ahead of the deadline, depending on how long you have to work on the whole thing. If you've had a week to work on the whole thing, send it a day ahead of time because it'll be a big translation anyway or something like that. The important thing is though by the deadline, it needs to be by the deadline precisely, not a minute after by the deadline. So budget your time accordingly. Next question you want to ask, you know, the information you want to ascertain is the glossary. You want to ask if they have a glossary. If this is the first client for you, if you haven't worked for them before, chances are they've worked with other translators before or they've had translations done before. If that's the case, say you're translating a user manual and they've had this user manual translated in past years and now they just have a new one and they need it translated, that means they have certain terms that they've translated a certain way, which means they either have a glossary or they have examples of past translations. You should ask for one or the other because you need to make sure you're using the same terminology because they need to use the same terminology throughout. Some companies will say, just look at our website and see how we use it, which it can be a pain because then you spend half your time searching through the website not knowing where to find what. Ideally they have a glossary, but even an example of a past translation, if you're translating an annual report, if they have past years annual reports, then that's perfect, because then you can look and check and usually they're structured more or less the same way. So you know where to look and check for the terminology and so yeah, you should ask if they have anything along those lines because that can definitely help you and definitely save you time when you're looking for what terminology to use. You might find terminology that's better, by the way, than what's been used in the past, but you should still use, as long as it's not a mistake and what was used was correct, you should use the terminology used in the past because they want to keep, you know, they want to keep things standardized and so yeah, ask about that. And that's about it. The last thing I want to mention is, once again, don't ask too many questions. So once again, try to include it all in one email. What's going to happen after this is that once you start going, you might start getting questions to be like, oh wait, this is not clear or the margins a bit off or there's some text that's hidden or you know the header or maybe they want me to translate from French to English but there's some stuff in German. What do I do with that? And anyway, if you have questions like this, I'd recommend waiting, you know, give it a couple hours or whatever you're working on it and then see if you get a group of questions because then you can send them all at the same time. And that I find usually that's better than sending a question then back then, then you have another question 20 minutes later, which they reply, then you have another question 30 minutes after that and that can be a bit much. So I try to, you know, wait and send, obviously don't wait too long, don't wait three days to send your question, which, you know, you should have been able to handle three days ago, but I kind of wait to make sure, you know, I'm not going to bombard them with question after question after question. And that's pretty much it. At least that's all I can think of right now that you should ask your clients, also because once again, you shouldn't be asking too much. The other thing should be clear. All you need to know is enough to do the translation and to make sure you get paid. And so that's pretty much it. Keep it simple, ask the necessary questions and get on with your translation. And that should be it. You're trying to make their life easier. So ideally they can hand you the translation, you work on it, no fuss, nothing about it, and you send it to them and they're happy with the result and that's it. That's the perfect job from their point of view because, you know, you did everything they need and you weren't a headache or anything. And that's usually what I shoot for when I'm working for a client. And, you know, that's the kind of the impression I want to give and the result I want to get to them. So yeah, that's about it. I hope you do find this useful and good luck getting your client and if you have gotten your first client recently then congratulations and hopefully you can find this video useful for when you're dealing with this first client and this first job. And yeah, I'll see you in the next video. Thanks, bye.