{"id":2251,"date":"2026-04-06T07:46:53","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T07:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/?p=2251"},"modified":"2026-04-13T08:57:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T08:57:16","slug":"the-translator-who-takes-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/06\/the-translator-who-takes-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"The Translator Who Takes Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"This<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There is a Hausa word, kawalwalniya<\/em>, that describes a mirage. From a distance, it looks like water, like relief, like something worth walking toward. Only when you get close do you realize there was never anything there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Generalism in translation is a mirage. To outsiders, translators who accept every job seem productive and versatile. They move between legal, marketing, and medical texts, work across multiple languages, and seldom refuse tasks. Yet, they compete on price, feel perpetually behind, and wait for work that matches their true value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This problem extends beyond Nigeria, though I suspect Nigerians would take a larger percentage of it than most. Between 2012 and 2020, I moved through professions the way a traveler moves through towns without stopping. I sampled countless professions over the years, many of which I can no longer even list. My most recent path ran through journalism, writing, and translation. I finally forced a decision and divided the surviving two by purpose: translation became my commercial business, and writing remained my personal pursuit. I told myself it was a range. In truth, I was sampling everything rather than building anything. Reading Key Person of Influence<\/em> by Daniel Priestley and Kevin Harrington gave me the language for what I had been doing wrong. Reading Greg McKeown\u2019s Essentialism<\/em> helped me understand why I had been so reluctant to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McKeown argues that spreading energy too thin leads to insignificant progress in many directions. Fear of missing out keeps us from narrowing focus, but saying yes to too many things means missing the important ones. Essentialists ask: \u201cWhat do I want to go big on?\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In translation, that question has a specific answer. Translation spans a wide terrain and includes many distinct territories: legal, medical, literary, technical, financial, UI\/UX, marketing localization, and more. Translators who wander across all of them are avoiding a decision. Priestley calls this the \u201cswagman\u201d problem, referring to itinerant workers who drift from job to job without claiming land of their own. The translation industry has no shortage of swagmen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Priestley argues instead is that every broad field is finely sliced into micro-niches, and the professional who plants their flag in one of them becomes impossible to replace. He describes a compound rather than a cage. Within any micro-niche, there are at least two or three adjacent sub-niches a specialist can absorb without becoming a generalist again. Darren Finkelstein specialized in boat ownership and, from there, built a dozen related services: cleaning, refueling, valet, and servicing. He went deeper rather than wider, and the revenue followed. Priestley writes about Lazo Freeman, a personal trainer who stopped marketing himself as a generalist and specialized purely in radical 12-week body transformations. As Priestley said, Freeman\u2019s rate eventually reached $15,000 per client, with a waiting list to match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translation has the same logic waiting to be used. Consider the translator who studied medicine before turning to language. They already hold the hardest part of medical translation, the clinical knowledge, the terminology, and the understanding of what is actually at stake in a patient consent form or a drug trial document. Spending their career translating general content is a waste of time. The same applies in reverse. My own path ran through journalism, linguistics, and a diploma in Data Processing and Information Technology. That background shaped the direction of my specialization: technical translation, UI\/UX, and website localization. Depth tends to settle where knowledge already lives, even without strategic planning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cases that make this argument most clearly are those in which narrowing the focus produced results that breadth never could. Priestley recounts in Key Person of Influence how Nancy Duarte made a deliberate decision to specialize entirely in presentation design, the work nobody else wanted. Before that decision, her agency blended in with every other design firm. After it, Duarte became the premier presentation company in the world. Greg McKeown points to Warren Buffett\u2019s documented philosophy of concentrated focus, the discipline to say no to most opportunities, and the commitment to deeply invest in a few, as evidence that narrowing your bets produces extraordinary results. Southwest Airlines built consistent profitability in a notoriously unprofitable industry by doing one thing: low-cost, point-to-point flights, and refusing to do anything else. Continental tried to do everything and lost hundreds of millions before its CEO was removed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pattern holds across industries because the underlying logic remains the same. The inner circle of any profession, the ten percent who hold ninety percent of the opportunities and the income, belongs to those who became known for something specific, who built a reputation deep enough that serious clients do not compare them to anyone else. Instead of worrying about running out of work, consider McKeown\u2019s question: \u201cWhat do I want to go big on?\u201dIn the next article, we will look at how a translator actually finds that answer; how to read your own history, your own knowledge, and the shape of your own curiosity to locate the micro-niche that already belongs to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a Hausa word, kawalwalniya, that describes a mirage. From a distance, it looks like water, like relief, like something worth walking toward. Only when you get close do you realize there was never anything there. Generalism in translation is a mirage. To outsiders, translators who accept every job seem productive and versatile. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,51,49],"tags":[56],"class_list":["post-2251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-localization","category-transcription","category-translation","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2251"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2255,"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251\/revisions\/2255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/habibinsights.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}