- Kwintessential for including Thoughts on Translation in their top 10 translation blogs for 2010! And congratulations to the other winners, they’re all in my feed reader!
- Jonathan Goldberg for interviewing me on his blog “Le mot juste en anglais.” And thanks to Marianne Reiner for the French translation!
Links
Links from the translation blogosphere
Here are links to a few blog posts that I enjoyed reading this week:
- Jill Sommer on Freelancing means the freedom to say no. I think it’s all too common that freelancers, especially women freelancers, feel that they can never object to a client’s terms or requests. Thanks for this reminder, Jill!
- Sadly, Paula Dieli is putting her excellent blog Essential Project Management on hiatus as she has accepted a new job (not as a project manager!). We’ll certainly miss her here in the translation blogosphere.
- Kevin Lossner on Choosing an agency or an independent translator, which is a commentary on José Henrique Lamensdorf’s excellent post here.
- Judy and Dagmar Jenner on Disposable e-mail addresses. I loved this tip; I have a webmail address that I use for purposes like online shopping, but the self-destructing temporary e-mail address is even better!
Insider tips for this year's ATA conference
Here at the Colorado Translators Association, we’ve launched a WordPress website with Insider tips for the 2010 annual conference of the American Translators Association, which will come to Denver in October of this year. We’re excited to welcome our colleagues from around the U.S. and the world to the Mile High City and we hope that this website will help you plan a fun and educational trip!
Some interesting links
Some coffee break reading from the translation/word industry blogosphere:
- Paula Dieli over at Essential Project Management has a great post on creative ways to save money in times of crisis. Paula reports that her local translators’ association is saving $1,000 and a lot of paper by using electronic voting for their annual elections! You’re welcome to add your own frugality tips too.
- On WordCount, Michelle Rafter asks Freelancers love direct deposit, so why don’t more publishers offer it?. Great question! Why don’t more translation agencies offer it either?
- Céline Graciet, James Ward, Sarah Dillon and Bianca Marsden are offering two webinars (small fee but these look really valuable) in May, the first is Céline and James on websites for translators and the second is Sarah and Bianca on low-cost tools for building a website; both of these topics are raised at nearly every translation event that I go to. The times are on the early side if you’re left of the U.S. East Coast, but I would get up early to listen to these webinars!
- Patricia Lane at Intercultural Zone has a very thought-provoking post on Advertising and humanitarian aid. As Patricia points out, humanitarian aid advertising (and the translation thereof) is even trickier now that sustainable and ethical business practices are in vogue in a variety of business sectors.
- Two very worthwhile posts from The Wealthy Freelancer: Where is the grass greener (i.e. what would it take for you to go corporate?) and Three penny-wise, pound-foolish web marketing mistakes.
- And finally, if you’re totally overwhelmed from reading and commenting on all of those blogs, here’s Jill Sommer at Musings from an Overworked Translator on Social media madness.
Happy reading!
A positive and a negative
Happy Monday! To start the week off, here’s some positive and negative news from the language world:
- Positive: I was just listening to NPR‘s Talk of the Nation while eating lunch, and today’s segment featured an interview with NPR’s longtime (and now retiring) war correspondent, Anne Garrels. Garrels started her career reporting in the former Soviet Union and was one of the few Western journalists to remain in Iraq at the height of the U.S. invasion, which provided the material for her excellent memoir Naked in Baghdad. My favorite moment from the interview (which you can listen to tonight on NPR’s website): a caller asks Garrels something along these lines: “Ms. Garrels, how about the role of foreign languages in your career? Especially now that foreign languages are being de-emphasized in American schools?” and Anne Garrels immediately responds “Knowing Russian changed my life” (seriously!). Garrels then went on to describe how she never would have been offered the chance to report from the Soviet Union had she not spoken Russian. At that time (I believe she’s referring to the early 80s), the only interpreters available in Russia were also employed by the KGB, so “unauthorized” reporting was done by the very few Western journalists who spoke Russian. I’m excited to see the transcript of this interview when NPR publishes it; a beautiful moment for language awareness in the US. Update: the transcript of this interview is online here.
- But then: If you want a less rosy take on the state of our industry, read Terena Bell’s blog post Is our industry disconnected from clients?. In this very thorough post, Terena describes her experience attending the recent Harvard Social Enterprise Conference and specifically the conference’s global health track. Warning: it’s depressing. Terena describes sitting in the audience as a professor from the Harvard School of Public Health dismisses medical “translators” (a.k.a. interpreters) as fundamentally incompetent and the Pentagon’s International Health Specialist Program director doesn’t realize that medical interpreting is a profession. There is also a lot of excellent information in the comments on Terena’s post.