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Archive for May, 2008

If you’re looking for some educational and enjoyable reading, have a look at German to English translator Jill Sommer’s newly hatched blog Musings from an overworked translator (don’t you love the title?). Her first post is on “The ebb and flow of the translation industry,” something I think all of us can empathize with!

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Moving on up

Sooner or later, a hardworking and capable translator in an in-demand language pair is ready to take the business to the next level. Let’s say you’re someone who has been in the industry for 5+ years, you consistently have enough or more than enough work and you’d like to transition from working for Your Average [...]

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A new header image

This is another image from iStockphoto, “Uluru at Sunset II” by Timothy Ball

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I’m still very, very happy with my recent switch from Heartsome to OmegaT, but one thing I’m still mastering in OmegaT is the use of tags in formatted documents. Tags in OmegaT aren’t a big issue if your translation work consists of documents that don’t have much formatting, or in which the formatting isn’t very [...]

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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 [...]

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Like many independent professionals these days, I’ve started using a few social networking tools such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn and MySpace. My experience with them is fairly limited, but I’ve been thinking about some of the positives and negatives of using these websites for networking and marketing. To me, the primary advantage of social networking [...]

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Recently I’ve been taking some copy editing classes with Alice Levine, a Boulder-based editor and trainer whose praises I’ve sung here before. In the translation industry, I think it’s not uncommon that translators who earn a client’s trust are often “promoted” into the role of a translation editor, although very few of us have extensive [...]

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When asked how their work load is these days, most translators I know and work with will respond, “Never busier.” This seems, not surprisingly, to have led to a situation where translation buyers are having an increasingly difficult time recruiting qualified translators, so I’ve put together a few pieces of advice on best practices for [...]

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When a translator and a translation client are located in different countries, the usual issues that have to be resolved with payments (rate, payment terms, etc.) are joined by an additional question, that of the payment method. From the perspective of a U.S.-based translator, here are a few international payment method options and some of [...]

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I will go back to writing translation-specific posts, but here’s an update on the treadmill desk based on my (admittedly still limited!) experiences this week. So far I still really like it, the adjustment has actually been much easier than I thought. I had planned to start by using it a few hours at a [...]

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