International Translator's Day is coming soon!

I am so excited about the International Translator's Day! I love my profession, learning new things related to my spheres of expertise, to the technical and marketing side of freelance translation and acquiring new skills, too!
This year ProZ.com has prepared something absolutely special and unique - a whole week of interesting and useful events. You can visit the 2011 Virtual event series page for details and register for events that you are interested in.
The program includes:

September 26 - Certified PRO Network virtual conference 

September 27 - ProZ.com site guidance day 

September 28 - Recruitment day 

September 29 - TAUS & ProZ.com present: The Great Translation Debate 

September 30 - Freelance translator virtual conference

I have registered for the Certified Pro Network virtual conference, Recruitment day and Freelance translator virtual conference. I'd really like to register also for the TAUS & ProZ.com event, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to attend since it's also my wedding anniversary :)

How about you? What events are you planning to take part in?

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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