As Thoughts on Translation wraps up for the holiday week (U.S. Thanksgiving is Thursday), here are some websites and blog posts that you might enjoy looking at:
- Eve Bodeux is giving away some SmartPlay language-learning products for kids on her blog; see the end of the post for how to enter.
- Writer Michelle Rafter has a fantastic blog post (applicable to translators too!) called When it comes to writing, economize. As someone who has a tendency to ramble, I printed out Michelle’s tips and posted them above my desk.
- Is there any German, Spanish, French or Portuguese translator out there who’s not yet using the terminology site Linguee? I’m not quite sure how to pronounce this website’s name (Lingwee? Ling-oo-ee?) but I have come to love its features. Linguee searches huge amounts of bilingual texts on the web, then displays sentences that contain the source term you enter and the target term that other translators have used.
- There’s an interesting discussion on Jill Sommer’s blog about ATA certification and why so few people vote in the ATA elections .
- And finally on a non-translation note, here’s a Get Rich Slowly post on inexpensive Christmas gifts and another one on DIY gifts. And here’s my own suggestion: I like the “memory drawing” idea described in the second post, but I am totally (totally; believe me) un-artistic. I recently stumbled upon the idea of using Wordle word clouds to make gifts for friends. You can type in whatever words remind you of that person, i.e. “runner, mom, Brownie~leader, lawyer, likes~her~coffee~with~a~splash~of~cream” (put the tildas between multiple-word phrases that you want to appear as one “word” in the cloud) and then create a word cloud that you can frame, give as a card, etc.
Would be pronounced “Lingwee” in German, as the site owner is German. I like it a lot, too.