Reevaluation of my goals

Having trouble with my router and sitting home without Internet for 2 days really made me realize I miss writing in my blog! It’s been awfully hot here, so I was very thankful for an opportunity to spend three days outside by a lake with my fam. I still worked some, but not half as much as I usually do. And then, when we returned home on the third day, we found out that our router apparently suffered a heat stroke :-(

However, it gave me time to reevaluate some of the things that I've been doing, including blogging. I realized that I never shared my goals with you.

WHY did I start blogging? – Well, as you know, I’ve been working as a freelance translator since March 2007. At the beginning, when I was leaving my job (I loved it by the way! But I realized that I needed to make a change for the sake of my family) other translators in the company weren’t optimistic about the career I chose. They thought freelancing would be absolutely a waste of my time, energy and money. So I made a goal to become one of the BEST translators in my spheres of expertise. Now, 3 years after that, I can say that I haven’t achieved this goal yet, but I’ve learned some really useful lessons and have fallen in love with freelancing. That’s when those other translators started asking me what’s it all about, how to earn money being a freelancer, how to discern scam and tons of other questions. So I decided to share my experience with other freelancers who, like me, strive for perfection and want to be successful.

And now, what are my TARGETS for this blog? – I realize that freelance translating is quite a narrow niche and there are quite a few excellent blogs of my more experienced colleagues with lots of readers. But when I’m reading those blogs I often feel there’s a vast difference between those super-experienced freelancers and me, who is continuing to learn and just being in the process of building my own translation business. So, my very modest goal is to attract 100 people to my blog in 2010. If you are interested in the stuff I write and would like to show your support please join me and become my reader =) It will make it easier for you to learn about new topics, and it will help me feel good about what I am doing =) I also welcome questions and comments because they will help me be more focused and consequently will make my blog more interesting to you. I really want to share my past and present experiences with you, so you and I can grow in translation business together. We’ll investigate linguistic, marketing, financial issues regarding translation and freelancing.

And my second target (not just for the blog, but for my life) is to be able to earn enough money to provide for all needs of my family and to be able to fulfil my dream... Hope you'll excuse me if I don't share it just now. I promise to do it a bit later, when I see it start becoming a reality. I promise!

Would you like to grow with me? Then follow me ;-)

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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