I’ve been handling a string of rush jobs today, but here is a link to Masked Translator’s excellent new post, When your client goes bankrupt. The information on bankruptcy is very helpful (this was also discussed in a recent ATA Chronicle article) and there is also some very good general information on client solvency and how to keep your cash flow steady.
Links
Translator, unplugged
Credit for the new header image: “Cambodian Sanskrit in the temples of Angkor” by iStock member Yangshuo.
Michelle Rafter has a great post this morning called Time Out, on the merits of unplugging from your computer. In the post, Michelle references another blog post from a writer who takes a “technology sabbath” from Friday evening to Saturday evening, during which time he doesn’t use his computer or cell phone for work-related purposes. Michelle writes that she likes to get out of the office and go for a hike to decompress.
I will say that I agree wholeheartedly with this advice. There are times when being immediately available has its bonuses; if a client needs to call at a specific time with an update or question, it’s nice to be able to take the cell phone to the park, answer the call and then continue with the hike. But I do feel that more often, being “always on” is more a result of our own fantasies of indispensability than anything else, and that the vast majority of the time, we actually can afford to unplug for a few hours and get out from in front of the screen. In my own case, I take at least one computer-free vacation a year (and by vacation I mean ten days to two weeks, not a long weekend) and make sure to get outside and away from the computer for part of every day. Lately, my family has been experimenting with growing a lot of our own food, and I’ve found that there’s nothing like an hour of pulling weeds to really clear the brain!
Interestingly enough, many freelancers don’t seem to feel this way. Last year I was talking to another translator at the American Translators Association conference in San Francisco and the subject of vacations came up. When I told the other person that my family would be taking a two-week “beach and wildlife” trip to Baja over Christmas and punctuated it with “Two weeks without phone or e-mail, can’t wait!,” this person paused for a moment and then said “I didn’t know people still did that.” Granted, this vacation was during a time of year when many people take time off and business often slows to a crawl, but I have to say that my business didn’t suffer any ill effects, I really didn’t check e-mail or phone messages for two weeks, and best of all I was excited to get back to work at the end of the trip.
Unplugging: try it, you’ll like it!
Check out…
- Michelle Rafter’s guest post for The Urban Muse, on being a freelancer and being a mom. Michelle is a writer, but her advice applies to translators too!
- Gabe Bokor’s post about Entering the Translation Market. Gabe is a seasoned translator and agency owner, and he offers some very insightful tips.
- Keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org. Go to Tools>Customize>Keyboard and feast your eyes on all of these mouseless tricks. So far my favorites are the shortcuts for Insert Manual Page Break (Control+Enter), Delete to End of Word (Control+Delete) and View Nonprinting Characters (Control+F10).
Some interesting tools
This weekend, the Colorado Translators Association brought FR>EN translator and translation tools expert Jamie Lucero out from Seattle to present his workshop “Computer Tools and Methods for Great Translation Performance.” It was definitely a day well spent, and I’ve already started applying a few of the tips that Jamie offered. He also clued us in to a variety of useful tools for translators, and I’ll list a few here:
- Werecat, a Word template with two uses: Red Werecat extracts text from PowerPoint to Word and then re-inserts it, and Blue Werecat extracts text from text boxes in Word and then re-inserts it.
- Complete Word Count, a Word add-in that gives a full word count including text boxes, headers, footers, etc.
- Word MVP Macros site, where you can learn about macros, how they can speed up your work, and how to write Word macros for tasks such as changing dates from US to European format, changing the order of first and last name, etc.
Have fun with them!
Proofreaders' marks reference pages
If you’re looking for a quick reference sheet of proofreaders’ marks (and I promise, using them is so much faster than doing the corrections in longhand), here are two that seem useful: one from Merriam-Webster and one from Espresso Graphics. Both of these can be printed on one page, and they include helpful examples for each mark. Jenny Frost also recently sent me a link to her free online grammar checker that might be useful as well!