On Monday evening, Eve Bodeux, Riccardo Schiaffino and I presented a professional development session on “Social Media: Web 2.0 for Translators” for the Colorado Translators Association. I covered LinkedIn and Facebook, Riccardo handled Blogging 101 (you can download Riccardo’s excellent presentation from his website link above) and Eve wrapped things up with Twitter. Given that [...]
Archive for February, 2010
A freelance best practices checklist
Posted in Freelancing on February 22, 2010 | 6 Comments »
I’ll be honest; I love self-evaluation tools. When I presented a seminar on “Beyond the Basics of Freelancing” for the Northern California Translators Association last summer, I decided to create a self-evaluation tool for the attendees and we also used this checklist at a meeting of the Colorado Translators Association. People seemed to find this [...]
Translating official documents
Posted in Freelancing, tagged official document translations, official documents on February 11, 2010 | 20 Comments »
Over the years, I’ve observed that many translators are somewhere between lukewarm and downright scornful of translating individual clients’ official documents: birth certificates, educational transcripts, diplomas, drivers’ licenses, you get the picture. I think that a lot of experienced translators view this as “beginner’s work” or not worth their time, so they take it off [...]
Maybe it’s not all about the design
Posted in Marketing, Nubbin on February 5, 2010 | 10 Comments »
I need to update the look of my website and marketing materials; it’s a task I really struggle with because I’m just not a very visual person. Read me a sentence and I can tell you right away if I like it or not, but show me an array of colors, shapes and layouts and [...]
When to throw in the towel on a task
Posted in Money, Productivity, tagged accounting, outsourcing on February 3, 2010 | 9 Comments »
At the end of 2008, I wrote a post about post about outsourcing that generated quite a bit of interest, so I thought it was worth raising this topic again. After years of battling with my business payroll taxes (I have an S-Corp and thus have to file quarterly payroll taxes and a separate year-end [...]
Planning a successful event for translators
Posted in Professional associations, tagged Colorado Translators Association, CTA on February 1, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Over the weekend, the Colorado Translators Association held our annual “holiday” party (which we always have in January, hence the quotation marks). We’re an association of about 100 members and we typically have about 40 attendees at this party, which seems to prove either that translators really need to get out of the house, or [...]
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