 It's that time again. It's that time of year. It's that time to go back to school. You see all the sales. You see all the announcement. You see all the marketing for that backpack or this pencil case or I don't know whatever the hell people are marketing these days. And so you know it's finally the season. If you are a student well then I hope you're getting ready to go back to school. If you're not a student well then soon there'll be a lot fewer kids milling about. So who cares right? This is a channel dealing with freelance translators with freelancers and what does that have to do with going back to school? Well nothing you might think but there's actually quite a bit of overlap here and so actually going back to school or the season of going back to school and when people go back to school can be a great opportunity for freelancers and freelance translators more specifically. So I want to get into this and want to see how you can take advantage of this going back to school season and what you can do to try to get ahead of the curve here. First of all if you're a student obviously there are a lot of things going on and but there are definitely ways that you can take advantage of this as well. I will get to you a bit later. First of all though I'm going to deal with the non-students people who have nothing to do with school who are out of school maybe you've been out of school for a long time and so you couldn't care less that people are going back to school. You know the only thing is there will be fewer kids out in the parks. It's still something you should pay attention to because there's there's quite a bit that you can do. First of all when I talk about schools by the way I'm talking mostly about universities but these can be all types of schools. They can be vocational schools. They can also be high schools depending on you know prep schools or this that and the other. By and large I will be talking about universities though and so that's going to be the focus of what I say. Most of what I say should apply to other schools as well though. So anyway just keep that in mind. So first of all pretty much all schools will have a language department. Their language department will most likely deal with one or more of the languages you deal with. So say you are an Italian English translator and you're in the States and so school is starting so they will have a language department or a romance language department. European languages department something along those lines something that encompasses that also includes your language and they'll definitely have a department you can contact. So what you should do is look up this department and look up how to contact them. An email address or phone number or you know someone you can meet face to face whatever you feel most comfortable with. Some way to get in touch with them. Find this language. If they have more if they have an Italian language department and a European languages department and a romance language whatever contact all of them. Very often it will be the same person dealing with all of this you know so find the person you need to contact for these. So get their contact details and set it aside. Just a second though I want to tell you someone else to contact first before I get into all the stuff to tell them and why you should contact them. The other thing is language clubs. Usually most campuses have language clubs including whatever language you're dealing with. Again it'll be some European languages. It'll be the European association of whatever university or the Italian club of whatever university or this and the other. Find out which of these clubs. Find all of them all of them that can pertain to what you're doing. Once again they'll all have someone to contact. Sometimes you're going to have to wait for school to kind of get started before you can get the contact details because they'll have the information from last year or something like that. But usually whoever was in charge last year keeps being in charge this year until they get things going. So they'll usually be someone to contact and you can find that information if they don't have the contact information you can contact student activities or whatever equivalent there might be and they'll give you the contact information. Okay so now you've got in touch with the language departments and now you've got in touch with the language clubs. However there's one other group that I want you to get in touch with and that's the international students. The international students department or the international students club association something along those lines. Usually there'll be something official and something maybe a bit less official and this really varies from college to college from school to school. Find out what there is in your school and get all of their contact details. So you want to get the contact details of the person to contact for all of these departments or associations or clubs. The reason I say to get all the contact details ahead of time is that a lot of times it's overlap. So the same person will be in charge of multiple associations or clubs or the head of the language of our department will also head up the Italian club or something along those lines. So get all their contact information ahead of time and then is when you can contact them. Once you have all of these the language departments that pertain to you, the language clubs, the international clubs, international associations, the international student organizations, whatever they might be. Once you have all of these contact details then you can finally get in touch with them and what you do when you get in touch with them is that you offer your services. A lot of times these clubs will find themselves needing to translate. They will have to translate certificates, driver's licenses, passports. They'll have old report cards from other countries that need translating and so on and so forth. A lot of documentation, a lot of correspondence and all that type of stuff needs to be translated and so you can contact them and very often they'll be very happy about this. Why will they be happy? Well there are a couple reasons. First of all, I mean because you're thinking okay these are international organizations, the organizations that deal with my language so obviously they have people who speak that same language so why would they want me? First of all because someone who's bilingual is not a translator. Don't forget that just because you're bilingual does not mean you're a translator at all and so you as a translator introducing yourself as a translator you can state that and say look I can give you something more official rather than someone just writing what they think sounds right, a student no less writing what they think sounds right and then you risk it being wrong and something that you can't use and even worse can get in trouble for because it's not the right legalese or the not the right terminology to use for say a passport translation or driver's license translation etc. So you can offer your services in this sense. Also you can and this very much depends on where you are. A lot of times these translations need to be notarized. If you're in the states this is great because actually notarization when it's needed for schools almost always just means the notary needs to notarize your signature when you say I promise that I have translated this. They obviously can't check the translation itself because the notary doesn't speak that particular language but the only thing they need to notarize is your signature of it. So you can meet the notary it's usually five bucks five ten bucks something like that and you meet the notary and then you just show your ID and you say I translated this document from Italian into English and they put their stamp and so that at that point it's been notarized. Once again I should just mention this has been my experience I've only been back in the states for a month and I know that in other countries getting a notarized stamp can be very different in Switzerland it's a whole big ordeal so it can change depending on where you are but the fact is if you can offer a notarized translation then it's definitely more than a student can offer who doesn't even have any clue about how to go about getting a notarized stamp or anything along those lines. So it's definitely an opportunity for you to contact these departments and offer your services should they be needed and here's the issue they might not pay you or they'll pay you very little because they don't have much of a budget that's why they're using students in the first place. So what you can do if you're just starting out is say look you don't need to pay me you pay me something small minimal something like that but in exchange I get a rating or referral because when you're first starting out I've said many many many many many times a rating or referral is very important. This rating or referral can be something that you have in writing on your profile on your resume or if you have a profile on pros.com upwork.com translators cafe any one of those websites then you can ask them to write down a rating there if you're offering them free translations they should be happy to do that you can tell them look it's a very easy thing for you to do and it really helps me out and I'll give you free or cheap translations in exchange and so it's a win-win for everyone. So yeah that's why this is actually a very good opportunity school getting started again it's a whole new market that you can access and that you can help out so you should be keeping track of where schools are when they're starting and who you can get in touch with so you can kind of get things going and get things kick started for the whole new school year. Now I mentioned before that if you're a student I also have some advice for you well the advice is first of all everything that I've mentioned so far you can obviously do as as a student as well and it'll definitely get you one step ahead for before you graduate in case you want to start making this a career if you want to try to start making a career out of it during the school year then this can be great. Also what you can do as a student is that you can join all these language clubs you can join the language the international associations you can join the language departments you know and or get to know the people get involved and the added benefit of all this is that it gives you contacts it gives you people that you can access even after you've graduated even if you don't do any work for them even if you're not doing any jobs for any of these people and you don't earn anything you don't do any translations you can still keep in touch with them after you graduate and having this group of people you know even if it's the informal Italian club and all you do is get together and watch Italian movies and and drink some wine after the end of the school year all these members are going to be going to different places some of them to Italy some of them to the states some of them to wherever it might be and chances are they're going to be dealing with something international between the different languages and at that point in time if they know you and they know that you are in translation and you're a translator then it can definitely be very helpful so you should be joining as many of these clubs and whatnot as you can because you never know what's going to help in the future so so yeah there you go that's why you should be looking forward to school starting because there are various ways that you can use that to help your career so yeah I hope you found this useful and I hope that you can use it for yourself if you did find it useful please click thumbs up because that always helps and don't forget to click the subscribe button and if you want to know when new videos are coming out so you don't have to always check for you know try to memorize what day the video comes out you can just click on that bell next to the subscribe button and then you'll get a notification every time there's a new video and so you don't have to keep track of it yourself and you'll be you'll be notified so that's pretty much it I'll see you next time thanks bye