Posted in Freelancing, Marketing on June 26, 2008 | No Comments »
People posted such great suggestions in the Comments section for Break on Through that I think they deserve their own post.
Jill Sommer made a number of really helpful points. First, I should have clarified in the post that although working as an FBI Contract Linguist was the job that allowed me to get through the [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Links, Nubbin on June 24, 2008 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Links, Technology on June 13, 2008 | 7 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Technology on June 12, 2008 | 1 Comment »
After reading Jill Sommer’s post on job tracking systems for freelancers (for what it’s worth, I used to use a white board, then I switched to post-it notes, now I use a paper planner, but I agree that some sort of system is imperative), I thought I would write something about income tracking systems.
As [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Nubbin on June 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Jill Sommer’s blog “Musings from an overworked translator” has a great post on the definition of “end of day.” This is a subject that’s a frequent subject of jokes between myself and a friend of mine, who is also a freelance translator and also has a young family, since our “end of day” is often [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, tagged Boulder, tourism on June 4, 2008 | No Comments »
Yesterday, ever-observant EN>FR translator Marianne Reiner sent me a link to an article about my hometown, Boulder CO, in the online French publication Courrier International. In addition to being just plain amusing (I think I’ll start referring to Boulder as “a mini-Copenhagen with a view” as the author does!), this article struck me as illustrative [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, tagged translation clients, payment practices on June 4, 2008 | 3 Comments »
One of the most frequent questions that I see from beginning translators is how to decide if a new client or a job offer is legitimate. It’s a delicate process, and it’s not an exact science. Sometimes even experienced translators get scammed, and sometimes a client that seems a little shady during the first contact [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Links on June 2, 2008 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, Technology on May 21, 2008 | 4 Comments »
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 sites [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Translation quality on May 19, 2008 | 4 Comments »
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 [...]
