Your professional translator

How are you, my dear readers? Hope you are doing well. I haven't been posting anything here for quite some time, but I've been thinking about reviving this blog. And today it occurred to me that I can write here about any important work related events. I do a lot of things online, so it's time to actually speak about them :-) I have recently recorded my first marketing translation analysis (as part of my ongoing efforts to make a full-scale online course on marketing translation). Here it is. Hope you'll find it interesting (note: it is in Russian): Since last year, I have also been a member of the Translation Teachers Association. A couple weeks ago I was invited to speak about methods of effective online teaching. The webinar was also in Russian. Hope it will be interesting for those of you who speak Russian and teach online. Wishing you all the very best! Talk soon.

A few days ago I finished teaching the translation block at our Basic Course for startup translators. It was an unexpected turn as somebody else was supposed to do it. But the situation changed a few days before the New Year, so I had to stand in the gap. While teaching this group and while watching other groups for the past 4 years, I noticed eight common mistakes startup EN<>RU translators make in their translation work: 1. Word for word translation and various calques 2. Punctuation and syntax mistakes 3. Wrong sentence structure (Theme–Rheme relationship) 4. Making unnecessary transformations and forgetting about them when they are necessary 5. Adding things that are absent in the original 6. Skipping parts of original text while translating 7. Not studying the topic of their translation 8. Forgetting to check their work before sending it I strongly suspect that the above-mentioned mistakes aren't exclusively made by beginning translators in the EN<&g

Happy New Year and merry Christmas, my dear readers! 10 years seems like an awfully long time. Yet it seems like it was yesterday. 10 years ago my daughter was 2 years old and I was frantically searching for some kind of work I could do while still staying at home with my child. 10 years ago I made up my mind to become a freelancer. I was scared, yet I knew it was the right thing for me. Today, I am managing translation CPD courses and working as a freelance marketing translator and editor in my favourite fields: education, tourism, and everything connected with pet foods. I feel real joy because I love what I am doing. I am truly blessed. I've had different times in my freelance life. Some were good, others not so good. But when I look back I see an exciting story unfolding. I can't wait to see what my life will be like 10 years from now. Some great things that happened in 2017: It was probably my best year financially so far. I was able to regularly donate some

Hi everybody! How've you been? Has 2017 been good to you so far?  My 2017 has been very busy, although I have been working on getting back to the balanced lifestyle. The more busy I am, the more I realize how important it is to give myself enough rest, physical activity, and pleasant emotions. And the best thing that unites all three of the aforementioned aspects is of course travelling. A few days ago I took a short break and went to Saint Petersburg with my daughter and my nephew. Saint Petersburg is more than just a city. It's a historic legend, UNESCO World Heritage sight, and definitely one of the must-see places in the world. My break was short, but it was so good that I decided to share our itinerary with you just in case some of my readers find themselves in the situation when they have just 3 days to spend in Saint Petersburg and they can't decide where to go and what to see. Especially if you are travelling with teenagers (my co-travellers are 12 and 18 yea

When we approach learning a language, thoughts of grammatical correctness and learning lists of words by rote are often uppermost in our minds. However, there are many elements of language learning that creep up on us unawares. Some of these are inextricably linked with the culture from which that language developed. This is something that those in professional translation embrace as part of learning a new language, but is it possible to learn a language without absorbing its culture as well? Take the Portuguese word saudades , for example. It doesn’t have a direct translation in English. Google Translate provides ‘miss you’ as the translation, but this is a long way from the mark. Saudades is a deep-rooted sense of longing or yearning for someone or something – a melancholy that touches the heart and the soul. It’s not a word to be used lightly! The very existence of such a word offers a hint into the Portuguese character and culture. It expresses something that we have no dire

A few days ago I came back from Translation Forum Russia which took place in Ufa, Bashkortostan . My daughter Delia went with me because she never visited Ufa before (neither have I) and because of the trip to the Southern Ural mountains we planned to take after the conference with a small group of colleagues. Ufa is not considered one of the primary tourist attractions of Russia, though I am convinced now that it definitely should be. Some pictures of the city (not all of the pictures are mine, some were made by the official photographer of the conference Elena Ekaterininskaya, our company CEO Fedor Kondratovich and some other colleagues): The bee is a symbol of the region as Bashkortostan produces the best honey in Russia. We saw installations shown below in different parts of the city. There were still covered because of the cold weather, but they will be full of blooming flowers as soon as the warm weather comes. The bee as we saw it That's what it