My two cents about dealing with the clients - 7

It is not enough if you are a good translator. You should also be readily available. Many good opportunities in life come at the least expected moment. Success in life consists in, among other things, being in the right place at the right time.

Hence keep your communication route always open. This necessitates a telephone as a basic need. Another cardinal rule is to try to handle yourself the incoming calls. Children should not be allowed to handle the incoming calls. If this suggestion is hard to implement, keep a cell phone for your exclusive use. And another important thing to remember is to keep it always with you. A cell phone shall not become “univercell” phone! :))))

The use of cell phone opens up new possibilities.

In this competitive world, every person is in a hurry. The client wants to contact you assign you the job after bargaining the rates and possibly have the translation previous day itself!

Hence it is up to you to make proper arrangements for being always available. It is a good thing that nowadays telephone connections are easy to get, at least here in India. I remember the days when I started this translation practice way back in 1975. In those days getting a telephone connection implied a wait for a few years even.

But in those days the translation jobs came to me from the Government of India through Insdoc. They used to send jobs by registered post and I had to send the translations by the same route. Life was going on in a more sedate pace.

Let us come back to the present. It is important not to miss calls when you are not at home. The wife is there of course, but she too could be away when the phone call comes. This is how I handle the situation.

Whenever I go out, I transfer the incoming calls to my land line to my cell phone. Since there is another phone for the family's use, they are not affected. This call transfer feature in my landline is a boon to me, in that I get all the incoming calls in my cell phone. There is no question of missing any call. And this transfer is effective even when I go to other cities in my country thanks to the roaming feature in my cell phone. The only catch in this setup is the presence of signals in the place where you go. Gradually this problem is being addressed by commissioning more and more transmission towers.

To sum up: Your cell phone should be exclusively with you. You personally attend the incoming calls. I will add one more thing. Please be polite while attending calls.

Rest in next installment

Regards,
Dondu N.Raghavan