If you’re looking for some coffee-break reading today, you might want to click on over to:
Masked Translator’s post Freaking out about the economy, which made me laugh out loud and is a nice complement to Get Rich Slowly’s The national economy versus your personal economy. These posts both drive home an important point (backed up in the comments on MT’s post as well): the world’s economy might be in free-fall, but if your work volume is holding steady, resist the urge to panic and keep running your business the way you always have. Kevin Lossner’s comment on MT’s post makes a great point: if anything, now is the time to cherry-pick your work and focus on clients who require high-quality translations.
Over at About Translation, Riccardo Schiaffino posted a link to a great resource, the E.U.’s “Summary of Legislation” site in 11 languages. It’s particularly appealing that when you switch the language selection, you get the same page in your newly selected language (rather than being redirected to that language’s home page), so looks like quite a useful site for translators.
Lastly (and admittedly OT), Get Rich Slowly featured a link to a fascinating article on Amish geeks and the Amish attitude toward technology in general. Make sure to read at least to the part where the Amish gentleman sums up the digital culture by saying “you got messages rather than conversations.”
Regarding your navigation comment, that’s something to keep in mind if we do multilingual sites ourselves. I dearly love company web sites that give me the same context in the other language when I click a flag icon, etc. and I simply hate being dumped on the home page for the other language.
In the last 24 hours I have wasted far too much time following various woe-is-me discussions in two languages and following the reactions to a thread I started to discuss successful strategies. Some of the doom and gloom reminds me of something I heard in a marriage counseling session once, where one person was very frustrated at her situation (which included lack of professional prospects). When the counselor suggested various options for taking control and making positive changes, the person screamed “I don’t need therapy, I need sympathy!” and stormed out. Now I doubt that most translators need therapy (except some special cases like we’ve read about recently), but a good lesson in business principles wouldn’t be out of place with many of us, including some who are successful so far. But God forbid some of the strugglers should perceive a suggestion that they are not helpless victims tossed about in the stormy seas of life without a rudder….
Thanks for passing on the link for “Summary of Legislation” — very handy. I have bookmarked it and will add Riccardo’s blog to my RSS feed!