Folder organization for freelance translators

Over my freelance career (1998–today) I’ve tried several folder structures. The one that’s worked best for me uses two top-level folders:

1. “Work” — everything related to my business except the translations themselves.
   Inside, I keep one subfolder per topic, e.g. CAT, CV, Taxes, Marketing, Miscellaneous, Website.
   
   

2. “Translations” — all translation deliverables, TMs, termbases, dictionaries, etc.
   Within this folder I create one folder per project named:
   
   

YYYYMMDD ClientName, EndClient, Language
Example: 20140721 Arrow Translations, Ford, EN>ES.

The date is the delivery date (year–month–day). Rather than dumping everything in that folder, I create subfolders such as TM, Instructions, Reference translations, etc. When I finish a job I try to invoice immediately; if not, I prepend “INVOICE” to the project folder name so I don’t forget.

Additional subfolders:

• Reference — recurring resources (TMs, glossaries, dictionaries…).
  
  

• Invoiced — projects already invoiced.
  
  

A very simplified outline might look like:

Work/

  CAT/

  CV/

  Taxes/

  Marketing/

  Miscellaneous/

  Website/

Translations/

  Reference/

  Invoiced/

  20140721 Arrow Translations, Ford, EN>ES/

    TM/

    Instructions/

    Reference/

    Deliverables/

Advantages

• Simplicity & backups: everything business-related lives under two roots, which makes backups easy and reduces the risk of losing files.
  
  

• Faster term searches: with all jobs and refs grouped, you can limit searches to the Translations folder.
  
  

• Planning at a glance: the Translations folder shows, in chronological order:
  
  

  • Pending jobs (by delivery date).
    
    

  • Completed but not yet invoiced jobs (thanks to the “INVOICE” tag).

© 2025 Alejandro Moreno Ramos – www.ingenierotraductor.com