About this blog

Although I already have a business website, I decided to set up this blog as a less formal place to talk about translation, the translation industry and becoming a translator. Some of my translator friends and I have noticed that while our spouses’ eyes glaze over at the first mention of any topic related to word counts, terminology databases, PDF conversion software or the merits of various translation environment tools, these subjects are the stuff that our happy hour conversations are made of. So, I’m excited to get some good discussions going here; everyone is welcome to comment!

For a long time I was a little blog-phobic despite the fact that I love technology. I kind of lumped blogging together with other timely trends that I managed to miss; leg warmers (although I did own at least one pair of knee-high pleather fashion boots back in the day…), mullets, the Macarena, you get the picture. However, my good friend Beth Hayden won me over by making blogging seem fun, easy and a good creative outlet for those of us who spend a lot of time translating corporate legal documents that don’t exactly scream for a creative twist. For anyone who’s thinking of getting into blogging, I highly recommend Beth’s courses, and although she buys me an occasional coffee, I don’t get a referral fee from her, I was just really impressed with her blogging courses!

I created this blog in WordPress by first registering my domain name with GoDaddy for $9.99 (I know, high-level users like my web programmer husband want to roast GoDaddy on a spit reeeeeally slowly, but for the rest of us they’re OK!) and then signing up for WordPress’ hosted service and a year of domain name mapping for $10. I then vowed to spend as much as $5 in pursuit of a pretty and multilingually-themed graphic, which I found at istockphoto (Beth turned me onto that, too!), but in the end it was only $3, so the total expenditure was $22.99, reasonable even for someone like me who washes out Ziploc bags and reuses them. I then cropped the photo down and used it to replace the header in WordPress’ “Mistylook” theme, and there you have it. I’m looking forward to connecting with other blogging translators too!