Why does my workload fluctuate so much?

The translation industry is fluid, meaning that work one day does not equal work the next. Some language pairs can be ‘quiet’ for months, with enough work for an hour or two a week per editor, and sometimes language pairs can sustain hundreds of editors full-time. We never block editors from getting tasks, and we don’t have a secret batch of work that we can send out on request - it’s not in anyone’s interest to withhold work from editors.

The truth is that there are so many variables that often it’s impossible to tell what the cause for a fluctuation is, but there are a few listed below:

• Too many editors in one community - this isn’t necessarily caused by us opening the community to new editors, as it could have been a result of inactive editors returning to the platform;
• Less work than usual - a key customer might have had an outage or a fall in demand, meaning that there’s less translation work (although this is normally temporary);
• Change in working hours - we work with global companies who sometimes change their hours of operation, so the tasks you were used to might have moved to a different time of day.

The key to working with us and earning well is flexibility. There will be periods where there will be lots of work, and in order to benefit the most you should work as much as possible in these periods. They might be anything from one afternoon to six months, so it’s important to capitalise when you can, because the next day there might be a lot less work.

We know that for a number of reasons this can be tricky, especially for those of us that like to plan our routine, and that’s why part of our team’s mission as Community Managers is to ensure that work is distributed fairly and evenly. We do this as best we can with the information given, but sometimes when we’re up against it, we might only have a day’s notice or sometimes none at all that there is a vast amount of work coming. As soon as the team knows, so will you - we always prepare our editors as best we can.