Why I Chose to Work as a Freelance Translator

Just like most full-time translators working for well-known firms worldwide, I did not start my language professional career in the field of translation or interpreting. As soon as I graduated from university, I started teaching English at a secondary school. It was both challenging and fun, as working with a wide variety of students of all ages and backgrounds provided me with good knowledge of the human brain and heart.

Our trip to Suzdal, one of the oldest Russian cities and the greatest tourist magnets

Suzdal is a very special town. It is very small, only about 11,000 people live there. There are no factories, no big buildings. Nowhere else you will see so many horses. Nowhere else you will see so many churches in one place. It has a very special atmosphere which is hard to explain, yet you will definitely feel it if you visit Suzdal.

That's why I was so happy when I learned that Delia's class was going there! I couldn't miss another chance to see the town, so I went there to help the teacher. And I made some cool pictures to share them with you.

If you've been reading my blog long enough, you certainly remember this post about Vladimir and its World Heritage sites. Well, Suzdal's white stone churches and monasteries are also included in the same UNESCO list. And of course, Suzdal also belongs to the Golden Ring of Russian cities. This is a panoramic view of the town.

As you see, there are no multi-storeyed buildings, because people want to preserve the ancient look of the town. So churches are naturally the tallest buildings there.

Customs and international trade terminology for translators and language learners

Not long ago I finished a translation project related to international trade. At times I had real fun while translating. Why? Because customs seems to be that kind of service where everything, including translations, needs to be brought to some kind of a uniform standard. In reality, it's not always so (especially in the Russian-English non-native translations I came across). But I thought I'd put my discoveries here for future reference. As for those terms that have more than one variant of translation, you can always ask your client which option they prefer. Even if you are not a translator, these links may be very useful if you are learning English or Russian, especially for business. So check them out!

Some very useful information for freelance translators who want to enhance their marketing, networking and blogging skills

May is really a very special month in Sharp End Training. We are about to reach 1,000 members in our LinkedIn group called Marketing for Freelance Translators! So we thought and thought how to thank you for being with us and found two ways we can do that.

First of all, we are declaring May the social media marketing month. That means that every Tuesday at 5 pm British Summer Time starting May 14th we are going to have LIVE webinars on social media marketing for translators.

Here's a brief program:
May 14th - Jonathan Senior teaching about strategic use of Twitter. I've been through this training and I assure you it is extremely useful, especially if you feel you are drowning in the sea of information there and you are starting to forget your goals and your vision as a marketer of your own freelance business. The webinar is already announced. It costs 25 USD. You can register here: http://sharp-end-training.ru/how-to-swim-against-the-tide-in-a-sea-of-clutter-and-noise

May 21st - Sara Colombo's training session about using Pinterest for marketing your business. I am very much looking forward to this training because I don't use Pinterest, but I see how fast its popularity is growing, so it has a great potential for translators, too! More information about the course on sharp-end-training.ru very soon!

May 28th - My training session about Facebook as a networking and marketing tool for translators. It is my second favourite network after Twitter. At first I wasn't very successful in using it, but then I figured out what was wrong and now my business page is doing much better. In fact, even though the numbers there are still not very large I managed to reach a very good engagement ratio. I have also been studying what other successful marketers (both translators and other professionals) are doing to achieve success, and I want to share my conclusions with you. I am sure this info will be very useful for you and your business! More information soon on sharp-end-training.ru

But this is not all. Please see the slideshare presentation below. We are announcing the biggest sale on our training packages since the time Sharp End Training started! The sale will end as soon as our LinkedIn group reaches 1,000 members; it's your chance to get premium training for a very affordable price! All links in the presentation are clickable.

Sharp End Training team has got some great news for you from Olga Arakelyan

Hope this info will be useful for you :) 

Top #language and #xl8 related tweets in April 2013

Thanks to my friend Magda for this badge!

This is the third post in the series. As usual, I found tweets with most retweets and mentions with the help of the website called topsy.com. April was especially fruitful on language tweets, but translation messages were no less interesting and useful. So check them out! I am sure you'll find something worth reading and sharing :)

Language tweets first:

slate Slate

Moist. Slacks. Crevice? Why do certain words sound so awful? http://t.co/YAnLPfFvoC #language #WordAversion

Being a healthy freelancer

First of all, I'd like to share my impressions about yesterday's webinar on proz. I was really nervous. For some reason, teaching in Russian seemed much more of a challenge than doing the same in English. But all my fears just went away the minute the webinar started. It went very well. My Russian speaking colleagues asked great questions and I really hope my presentation helped them!

Now back to business :) Today I would like to share a little reminder with you.
It's possible to be working from home and to be healthy. We just need to remember to do at least some of the following things:

1. Exercising
If you don't know where to start, here's my favourite workout. The lady speaks Russian (with a stroooong accent though as she clearly spent no less than half of her life in the US), but you don't need to know Russian to repeat each exercise 15 times ;)

Has it ever happened to YOU? I sure hope it never happens to me again :(

I just had to post this picture here, initially shared on Translators Do It Better page on Facebook

I still remember what happened that day in March and that overwhelming feeling of shame... Awful. Why did that happen? It was all my fault. I knew I couldn't give my 100% to work because I was sick, but I still agreed to do it because I really, really missed translating. Money wasn't the issue. I just wanted to work.

I thought I did a good job, sent the file to the project manager, and felt very good about myself because I was able to work in spite of the fever... 

The next day I got my file back from the editor. That pretty small text had 3 serious mistakes, plus a couple less serious ones... Imagine my shame....

The worst thing is I know all about saying "no". I've written some pretty wise and popular posts about it, like this one, or this one. Yet sometimes the desire to work is so tempting that I can't help it. And then I reap the consequences. :( Good thing it doesn't happen often. Hope it never happens again. Hope I finally learned my lesson. That's why I am posting it here. I want to remember it for the rest of my life.

So far, since the experience is still pretty fresh it's easy to remember about my limits and say "no" to projects or redirect them to other colleagues. In fact, I refused a project today because it's my daughter's birthday on Saturday and I've been busy with preparations for the party. Of course I felt tempted to do that file because it was very interesting. But I am actually feeling relieved now, because I can sleep at night and do the necessary preparations during the day and work on a couple other projects with more generous deadlines.

Have you ever broken your own rules if you got a really tempting project? Did you do a good job? If not, did you learn the lesson once and for all or do you sometimes repeat your mistakes?