My marketing efforts

Sorry I've been silent for so long! I've been really rather swamped in work lately, so yesterday was my first day free of translation. I'm thankful for the break. These past few weeks have been very busy and extremely stressful for me. I needed a break and I am enjoying one now. A couple more days, and I'll feel as good as new =)

Meanwhile, I decided to read some translation blogs (always happy to learn something new). A few days ago one of my favourite bloggers and translators finally reappeared after several months of silence. And she wrote about marketing for translators. Freelancers greatly depend on their marketing efforts, so they always have to think about new ways to make themselves known to their prospective clients as well as other professionals. Celine, the author of that blog, shares that her best marketing instruments are her website, personal networking and professional networking.

As I was reading her blog post, I started thinking about my own marketing strategy. And I figured out that I don't have one! Well, I do have a blog (a young blog, I just have a few readers), Facebook business page (it is just a fun thing for me as I really like sharing my experience, thoughts, and interesting posts from other blogs with my fans, the majority of which are my friends and colleagues), a website (it's a Google website, so I'm really surprized that somebody actually occasionally finds it and reads it!). But I don't have a strategy, i.e. I don't have a goal how many new clients I want to attract each year, how many words I want to translate or how many projects I want to do. I am more of a go-with-the-flow person I guess. And that probably needs to change. I need to think about that.

Well, as for the marketing instruments, my two main instruments are my two profiles in ProZ.com and free-lance.ru. As for both personal and professional networking, I totally agree with Celine, they are very important. I am very happy that I know many talented professionals, so when a client asks me if I can recommend somebody else with a specific knowledge/expertise, I usually know who they need. And there have been several cases when my colleagues recommended me to the customers and I got really interesting projects from them.

But I think that my best marketing tool is/should be my personal approach. I am not perfect in it yet, but I'm working on it. I really want my clients to feel welcome when they come to me, and then, when I send them my translation, I want them to feel happy about it and always welcome to come back. We'll see if that works! =)

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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