International Children's Day

Hi everybody! Today is a very special day here because it's International Children's Day. Wikipedia says that June 1st is mainly celebrated as Chidren's Day in the former communist countries, whereas other countries prefer other days.

What do we do on this day? The answer is simple - we honor children. There are all kinds of open-air celebrations everywhere with concerts, competitions and fairs with children's art for sale. So I'm going to give you a glimpse into one of them.

We went to a city park today and saw a concert with children's songs and dances.

Oftentimes, children in the audience were invited to sing or dance, too. My daughter didn't need the invitation. She danced for 1.5 hours nonstop ;-)

After my daughter got tired of jumping and dancing around, we bought some ice-cream and took a walk in the park along the tables with the children's art. Here's the picture that she liked best. Of course, she talked her mom into buying it. :)

Now we are home. She's watching another children's concert on TV and I'm ~~catching up on some work~~ writing this blog post.

Happy International Children's Day!

Comments

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.

Your professional translator

Search This Blog