Why I like working virtually

I've got some friends who are also linguists and who have worked as inhouse translators for a long time like me. They are considering going virtual, but at the same time afraid of the change. So I'm thinking now about an article (or series of articles) about the life of a freelancer, its advantages and drawbacks and what a person can do to get astablished as a freelance translator.

The first thing I am thinking about is advantages and disadvantages of being a freelancer. A couple days ago I came across an interesting article exactly on this subject. Here's the link to it: The case, and the plan, for the virtual company

I really like this article. The only thing I can't agree with is that when you are working from home your life becomes less dynamic. For some reason my life has become a lot more dynamic when I started working from home! Very often I feel sorry that there are only 24 hours in a day =) It would be so much better if there were at least a couple hours more!

One of the things I still haven't fully got accustomed to is that there's no guaranteed income every month. So I usually try to get one or two bigger projects that give me this guarantee for a couple months and then there are always smaller projects that go along. That's my strategy right now. I feel comfortable that way. But I know translators who prefer just doing many small texts. May be one day, when I get lots of clients and have a good amount of small assignments every day, I'll change my strategy, too. ;)

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10 interesting facts about the Russian language

In my previous post I promised to follow with the interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately 8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)

15 interesting facts about the English language

I prepared this list for one of my English classes. And then it dawned on me that I can share it with you, too! So here are 15 facts about the English language that I find very interesting. Hope you do, too ;) Rudyard Kipling was fired as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. His dismissal letter said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language. This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers." No language has more synonyms than English.

Clients vs translators: how do we show that we're honest?

This is a personal post, and I'd really like to hear the opinion of my colleagues about such situations and how to deal with them. My situation is kind of like the one described in Mox's blog . In December a new prospective client wrote to me asking about my availabiility for a new project. When I read the overall description of the project, I got really interested in it. But the client needed to know exactly how much time it would take and how much it would cost. No problem, just send me the text to look through or a part of it so I could get the gist of the style, level of complexity etc. In the reply that person just stated the wordcount, but there was no sample. I thought, maybe they didn't understand me. English is not my native language after all. In my reply, I stated the estimated time and cost based on the client's wordcount, but I repeated the request to see a part of the text. And then the person thanked me and ... disappeared.

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