Time for another update about guest posts, business, blogging and more!

'Fat exclamation mark made from jigsaw puzzle pieces' photo (c) 2008, Horia Varlan - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Hi everybody! First of all, thank you for reading my blog. I love to see that the number of my subscribers is growing every week. That's so inspiring!
I've got some news for you. I am amazed with the way my work and business are developing. Life is getting more and more interesting and, hopefully, these changes will be good for you, too! So, here are my news:

1. First of all, I decided that my company blog at sharp-end-training.ru will no longer be a shadow of my personal blog. So, since the focus of the website is marketing and networking for freelance professionals, there are going to be articles published exactly on these topics. You can see the first post written by Ewa Erdmann. It is called "Are you networking with the right people?" We would also like to point out that we accept guest posts for sharp-end-training.ru blog. However, in order to write a guest post for us:

You need to be a freelance professional;
Your post needs to be about marketing or networking, or some business issues/aspects that freelancers may come across in their career.
You need to provide us with your short bio. We can publish up to three links to your website/social profiles etc.

I am looking forward to your offers!

2. Secondly, I am very pleased to say that my LinkedIn group has reached an important milestone. I prepared a short video where I share some info about the group. Right now there are 323 members and the group is growing very fast! You can see the video here:

So if you would like to take part in our group discussions please send me a request to join the group here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Marketing-freelance-translators-4370867/about

3. I had a wonderful time yesterday online with Jonathan Senior and Judy Jenner, co-author of Translation Times blog. Judy spoke about her blogging experience and also shared some cool tips about translation as a business. All this is a part of my new project. It took quite a bit of time to prepare everything and now, as it is finally coming to reality I am getting more and more excited about it. I want it to be as valuable for freelance translators as possible, so I've asked some very cool professionals like Judy to help me. I don't want to disclose any other names at the moment, but I am sure you have heard of them more than once! I am planning to present the finished project to you in a few weeks. So stay tuned ;)

4. And the last piece of news for today. A few days ago Jim Connolly wrote that Google is shutting down Feedburner. I know I have quite a few readers who get my posts via email, so this change might affect them. The others who get my updates via an RSS reader (Google reader etc.) won't experience any problems with receiving new posts. I am going to change the email service I use for the delivery of my posts; I am researching the possibilities at the moment. I don't think you have to do anything about it right now, I just thought you need to know about what's going on. I will find a substitute for Google Feedburner and you will continue receiving my updates as usual :) And if you are a blogging translator and you are using Feedburner, you need to look for other possibilities, too!
When I find a good substitute for Feedburner, I'll let you know in the separate announcement. Maybe it will be Mailchimp that Jim Connolly suggests, maybe some other service. We'll see.

So, these are all the announcements for today. Wishing you a wonderful and restful weekend!

Olga

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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