Some links for your reading pleasure

Thoughts on Translation has been on three continents in the last two weeks, so we’ll let some other translation bloggers do the talking. Fortunately the translation blogosphere has been alive with ideas lately, here are a few that I found interesting:

• Two posts from Kevin Lossner over at Translation Tribulations: The state of OmegaT and The truth about translation agencies. If you haven’t considered adding OmegaT (a free and open source TM program) to your suite of applications, I highly recommend Kevin’s post, which is an interview with OmegaT team member Marc Prior. Marc mentions some exciting new features in OmegaT; and as always a big thanks to the volunteers (yes!) who keep OmegaT running. Kevin’s post on translation agencies pings back to Wendell Ricketts’ post Ten reasons to hire a translator directly, but make sure to read Kevin’s comments too. I agree with Kevin: I work with both agencies and direct clients and I feel that there are advantages to both models. I also feel that the agency clients I’ve been working with for 7+ years pay me fairly, save me a lot of administrative and client relations hassles and are transparent in their dealings with me. However, I think that there are some grains of truth in Wendell’s original post and also in Kevin’s comments about agencies.
• Global Watchtower on MT tidal wave makes landfall in the world of LSPs, which is an interesting report from the recent conference of the ATA’s Translation Company Division.
• If you read French, definitely look at Patricia Lane’s post 5 idées pour booster votre élan marketing, which focuses on how to get your marketing juices flowing when you’re short of inspiration. I agree with Patricia about getting yourself a brand new pen; call me easy to bribe, but with a new roller-ball pen, I feel like I’m ready for anything.
• Sara Freitas-Maltaverne did a really nice writeup (also in French) of the “Web 2.0 for translators” session that Eve Bodeux and I did in Paris earlier this month. You can find it here.
• Finally, here’s Jill Sommer’s post on Lionbridge’s plan to require translators to pay to use Logoport. I don’t work with Lionbridge, but I think that this post and the comments on it raise some interesting issues.