Back at the wordface

As has become my family’s summer tradition, we headed off on a bike trip for the month of July. Last year’s trip took us from Lake Geneva to Salzburg; this year we started in our very own driveway and wound our way through the Colorado mountains for three weeks, visiting Aspen, Crested Butte and Telluride, and ending with a visit to Mesa Verde National Park. As with any outdoor trip in the Rockies, combine equal parts of challenging and gorgeous, add in some good food and a few apocalyptic storms, and you’ve got the picture. The conditions ranged from pushing our bikes across snow fields:

…to lounging in the aspens next to beautiful mountain streams, to cranking over the formidable Cinnamon Pass, which at 12,600 feet, was the highest pass that any of us had ever biked. I remember it as being stunningly beautiful, but that may have just been the lack of oxygen!

As I’ve written about previously, I highly recommend a real vacation at least once a year as a way to remain enthusiastic about your job, recharge your creativity and give your family and friends some of your undivided attention. As opposed to last year’s completely computer-free trip, I purchased an iPod Touch for this trip in order to remain somewhat connected. Although I did not do any actual translation, I did really enjoy having the Touch along as a way to monitor my work e-mail. Also, I felt that the Touch was “just enough”–if I had taken my netbook, I think I would have felt compelled to work, and I knew that I really needed a break.

In the interim:

• Registration for the 2013 American Translators Association conference is now open! Check out the conference website here. I’m excited to present about time management with fellow ATA Director David Rumsey, and I’m also really looking forward to the excellent lineup of French sessions at the conference. Make your plans now to be in San Antonio, Texas from November 6-9!
• If you translate French to English or English to French, I also highly recommend Translate in Quebec City, which is this year’s edition of Chris Durban’s highly successful Translate in the Catskills conference. These are small conferences for premium-market translators, and they focus on very specific translation and writing skills. Grant Hamilton of Anglocom is organizing this year’s conference, to take place from August 29-31 at the Loew’s Le Concorde hotel in Quebec City.
• At this past weekend’s ATA Board meeting, the Colorado Translators Association was unanimously approved as ATA’s newest local chapter. Huge congratulations to CTA’s current Board for this successful application!
• The August session of my online course Getting Started as a Freelance Translator is full, but I’ve opened a new session that will begin on September 18.