International boundaries and time zones have never meant very much to me, and when I decided to drop out of law school it was to try my hand at living overseas. I moved to Iceland and quickly found a freelance/contract-based writing, copy editing and proofreading job, capitalizing on my skills and English-language expertise (and the dearth of others in the labor market who could fulfill the exacting requirements of such a job).

Through the ups and downs of overseas life, I ended up having to pack up and go home to Seattle on a number of occasions, and by my first return stateside, the manager of the company for whom I worked found my services indispensable and decided to give the international freelance medium a try.

Since I had worked for this man for over six months without ever having met him in person, working from home, my geographic location was fairly meaningless. In fact the owner of the company was able to beat more deadlines having me on the west coast of the US because of the considerable time difference (he could send me documents in the middle of his night, which would be delivered to his clients by the next morning).

About the Work: The work itself involves a wide array of skills from light proofreading for grammatical, mechanical or typographical errors to writing from scratch or rewriting existing materials. All the jobs involve a good deal of “anglicizing”, that is, taking rough translations and not only creating something that makes sense in English but also something that comes across as professional and polished.

Types of Projects: The projects are varied. One day I might be editing a 30-page summary of a court case and its ultimate decision; the next I might be editing or rewriting a document about soil erosion. The clients come from all different industries in the private and public sectors, and I work with legal documents, marketing and ad copy, business proposals, financial and annual reports, fact sheets, webpages/sites, and much more.

Requirements: Apart from the ability to work efficiently, independently and accurately, this job requires the ability to understand a wide variety of subject matter and to assume a certain responsibility of the content/information the client wants to convey. So, even if I am not an expert in land-use management or hydrogen-gasoline-powered public buses, I must gain at least a certain amount of knowledge in order to undertake these projects in a professional manner.

Receiving Assignments: The majority of the time assignments arrive by email. The company owner usually phones me (wherever I happen to be in the world) when he knows a project is coming up to ask if I will be available, describes the nature of the project and any of its anomalies (if there are any) and then when the project is ready, he sends the documents to me by email. On occasion, mostly when I lived in Iceland, I have had to be more directly involved, phoning or visiting the clients directly to ascertain their meaning where meaning was ambiguous.

I also built a stable of my own freelance clients in the years I lived in Iceland, and they continued to rely on me for the same kinds of services when I lived in the US. With these clients, documents still arrived by email but were usually less time sensitive than the documents my main employer provided.

The Time Difference: The time difference, as I said, worked mutually in favor of my boss and me because it allowed my boss to look better to the client (because projects were always completed before their deadlines) and kept me busy with plenty of work. It also allowed my boss to contact me to do many last minute projects without the fear of waking me in the middle of the night (he works nocturnally, and most other employees would rather not get a call from him at 2 in the morning; living in Seattle, I was able to take his 2 am calls because it was only 6 pm for me). Indeed, as I said, the time difference and the time/deadline constraints consistently worked in my favor.

Working Relationship with Client(s) & Getting Paid: From the very beginning of my working relationship with the company for whom I freelance, things went smoothly with regard to the logistical details. That is, the technical solutions for sending and receiving documents were well established; he always paid my invoices in a timely fashion.

I know that HE sometimes had trouble getting clients to pay him and faced the language barriers that occur when one does business in a foreign country. Happily, I was not the middle man in the arrangement, so I did not have to deal with payment issues. (Even when I have completed freelance jobs, I received my fee almost immediately upon completion of the work.)

My boss is an American who also moved to Iceland to live permanently, so he handles business in a style to which I am accustomed. He has to deal with the language and cultural issues that occasionally arise. For example, Icelanders tend to put everything off until the last minute, which is why everything we do seems like a last-minute emergency.

Also, we frequently encounter the syndrome of “this is an emergency… do it right now”, only to put ourselves out and go above and beyond the normal parameters of customer service only to be told when we are finished that the document is no longer considered an “immediate or important” need.

Frequently, clients will put my boss on alert, claiming they will send a time sensitive document, leading my boss to alert me as well. I have wasted many afternoons and evenings, foregoing other activities, thinking that I would have work to do… work that never materialized. Better planning, organization and communication within companies here in Iceland would foster a better system for farming out freelance work, but planning, organization and communication are not skills deemed terribly important within the Icelandic business community.

The only real language barrier in Iceland is that 99% of Icelanders are functionally fluent in English; therefore, they also believe that their language skills are nearly perfect and professionally sufficient. Unfortunately, only their spoken English is good and idiomatic (they watch a lot of American tv). Their written English suffers a great deal, but there is an astounding amount of pride and stubbornness surrounding the issue.

Problems: Icelandic businesses want to reach out and participate in the rest of the world economically, but they refuse to believe that, for example, their English is not good enough as-is. Icelandic pride IS a hindrance sometimes to finding clients, leading to one of the greatest challenges of this business: its feast or famine nature.

Doing Business in Iceland – The Editorial Calendar: In the spring when Icelanders emerge from the darkness of winter and their long, post-holiday hibernation, business picks up rapidly. Between November and February, however, there is a near full-stop in business that creates a nearly untenable financial situation. My boss, for example, has to do all the work that comes in himself in order to pay his bills. The rest of the employees have to have some other job(s) in order to sustain themselves during these lulls in business.

When I lived in Seattle, it was not a problem because I had a regular, full-time job in addition to the freelance work. But now that I am back in Iceland, I rely on the freelance projects much more than when I was in Seattle. No amount of marketing oneself or formal advertising seems to alter the barren business landscape of winter.

About Iceland: Iceland is a monumentally expensive country; the pay is, therefore, considerably higher than one would receive in a comparable job in the US. Unfortunately, because the projects are just projects (and not ongoing) the obscenely high hourly rate does not amount in the end to an obscenely high take-home rate because projects only last for a few hours! Naturally this depends on how fast you work, but I am known as the fastest proofreader in Iceland, so I don’t do myself any favors working on an hourly basis.

Also, given the expense of living here, making a large sum of money by American standards will not go far here. As I said, getting paid is not often a huge struggle. On occasion, there are clients who don’t pay within the timeframe you set for them, but this is usually an oversight, and once you remind them, they pay immediately. The banking system here is very straightforward and simple, and companies are easily able to just transfer your fees directly to your account from theirs instantly.

Overall Experience – Summary: Overall this kind of work is an exceptional experience because it affords a great deal of flexibility. If I need to be in Spain or want to take a holiday in Chile, I am free to pack up and go as long as I can secure an Internet connection wherever I go.

I don’t mind the idea of working on my holidays since I am free to take as many holidays as I want with this kind of working scheme. Just a change of scenery is sufficient. It’s great to be able to work at home, baking cookies and wearing pajamas while rewriting someone’s venture capital proposal. On the downside, though, you can’t count on a specific amount of money coming in regularly and must plan carefully for that if you rely on your freelance work to pay your bills.

Also, though the work and schedule are quite flexible, you have to be quite flexible too. It isn’t like a 9-to-5 job where you can just turn everything off at 5 and not think about it again until morning. You could consider yourself on-call all the time; even though the work of writing and editing is not sometimes emergent, like medicine, it is something based on deadlines (you know the saying “time is money”).

Because the work can be so sporadic, you really have to take on the projects as they come in, even if that means working through your weekend to satisfy a client’s needs.

©2005 – Erika Wolfe. This article may not be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in any form, for any reason, without the express, written consent of the author. Violators will be prosecuted.