Some interesting links

I’ve been really enjoying the string of comments on my last post. Thanks to everyone for your insightful tips and observations, which I’m looking forward to using as inspiration for many more posts! The reader community is what makes this blog so much fun to write, and I really appreciate your time and thoughtful comments.

To round out the week, here are some interesting links from around the web:

• Riccardo Schiaffino is officially The Person Who Knows Everything About Translation Technology. I asked him for suggestions on how to post my international development glossaries on my blog and/or website (a long-term project that’s been hanging out in my brain for a while), and he sent me this link to AgEdWeb’s online glossary generator. This online tool lets you use a tab-delimited Word or Notepad glossary to create an HTML glossary with a hyperlinked letter index: like this. I’m looking forward to trying this in the next couple of weeks!
• Speaking of NGOs, here’s a very creative awareness-raising campaign by UNICEF. UNICEF created “landmine” stickers that look like pavement or flooring on the sticky side; when placed sticky side-up, they stick to pedestrians’ shoes and the non-sticky side informs the person that they could have been maimed or killed by a similarly innocuous-looking landmine in a war-affected country.
• Completely not translation-related but just cool: from the Freakonomics blog, a story about a blind man who has taught himself to echolocate using tongue clicks. This technique works well enough that Daniel Kish, the subject of the story, can ride his bike in the road and precisely locate objects as small as one inch in diameter. In addition, Kish’s foundation helps other blind people learn echolocation so that they can live independently and (no joke) even go skateboarding.
• Sarah Dillon wrote a very thorough and balanced review of Chris Durban’s Book The Prosperous Translator. Both the review and the book are highly recommended reading!
• ‘Tis the season to think about taxes, and Get Rich Slowly has a helpful post on checking the status of your tax refund online, plus some additional information about why getting a refund doesn’t make great financial sense.
• Michelle Rafter has a very useful post on 10 ways writers can get the most out of Twitter; I think that all of these apply to translators too. One thing I really like about Twitter is that it can be one-way; I would be reluctant to ask a potential client to connect on LinkedIn, but I have no hesitation about following them on Twitter.

And with that, have a great weekend!