Sorry for the unannounced week of silence here at Thoughts on Translation; I went on vacation for a week and suddenly became violently allergic to using my laptop… but it seems that the bad reaction has now passed and Thoughts on Translation is back at the treadmill and ready to open up some new topics. [...]
Archive for March, 2009
Some thoughts on feedback and the translation process
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on March 30, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Link: the psychology of passive barriers
Posted in Links, Working from home on March 19, 2009 | 5 Comments »
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of the personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly, and I was particularly enthralled by a recent guest post (by Ramit Sethi, whose own blog is I Will Teach You To Be Rich). Ramit’s post on the psychology of passive barriers (subtitled “Why your friends don’t save money, [...]
Lowering your translation rates, continued
Posted in Marketing, Money, Rates on March 18, 2009 | 2 Comments »
There were so many excellent comments on my last post about translation rates that I think the topic deserves another post. First, thank you to everyone who commented; I think that your insights are more valuable than what I originally wrote, because they represent the viewpoints of people in all different language combinations, geographic areas, [...]
Lowering your translation rates: why/why not
Posted in Marketing, Money, Rates on March 17, 2009 | 23 Comments »
Lately it seems that many freelancers are considering lowering their rates because of the worldwide economic downturn. In most cases, I think that lowering your rates is an unwise business decision that devalues not only your own work, but the work of other translators as well. In addition, I really believe, based on my own [...]
New and interesting on the web
Posted in Links on March 12, 2009 | 1 Comment »
If you’re looking for some interesting reading, here are a few suggestions: Masked Translator on the Spellchecker Conundrum and whether you should use the spellchecker to correct words that you routinely mistype. I was especially intrigued by Ryan Ginstrom’s suggestion to create a macro of your most common errors and run it on every document. [...]
How long does it take?
Posted in Getting started as a translator on March 6, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Many beginning translators are (understandably!) very concerned about how long it will take them to establish a viable business. For obvious reasons, including differences in the demand for certain language combinations, variations in different people’s business and people skills, etc., it’s hard to give hard and fast figures on how long it takes to get [...]
Speaking of Translation: translation blogs
Posted in Nubbin, Technology, Translation industry news on March 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The third episode of Speaking of Translation is live! Speaking of Translation is a podcast (I think that you can guess the general topic…) hosted by Eve Bodeux and myself, and in each episode we focus on a different aspect of the translation industry. This time, we reviewed a number of translation and language-related blogs [...]
How will the recession reshape the translation industry?
Posted in Translation industry news on March 2, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Today’s installment of Talk of the Nation (a good lunchtime or mid-afternoon listen, depending on your time zone) gave many interesting examples of how recessions reshape entire industries. For example, the number of startup auto companies in the U.S. has jumped since the Big Three have been teetering on the verge of collapse or obsolescence. [...]
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