Great news and important personal discoveries

Creating a new post on a snowy, frosty day

Hi everybody!
How has your week been? Hope everything is great and you are ready to enjoy your weekend, be it a relaxing or a working one. I am going to share some news and a couple new personal discoveries with you.

News first:

1. Remember my guest post in Wordyrama blog "So, graduation! Translator? And, then what? Olga Arakelyan's story"? On January 8th Konstantina published a post "So, graduation! A Translator? And then, what: Closing the Curtains!" where she shared a sweet gift for her blog readers. She made an e-book with all the guest posts in the series. So now anybody can download, read it and get inspired by our diverse stories and backgrounds! I loved that idea, so maybe I will use it with different guest post series published on my blog, too. That is, if I finally learn to create e-books :)

By the way, my series about staying fit and healthy as a freelancer is going to continue soon! I have two more posts to publish, and if you'd like to take part, just drop me a note at olga (at) yourprofessionaltranslator (dot) com! Ideally, I would like to publish one post each month on this topic, so I am looking for more contributors!

2. A couple weeks ago my dear friend Ewa Erdmann asked me to participate in another cool idea. She wanted different translators to share their predictions for the translation industry in 2014. Actually, it seems that a lot of colleagues are concerned about the future of translation these days. At least, I don't remember reading as many "predictions" and "expectations" posts ever since I became an avid blog reader in 2010. Maybe there were similar periods before, I don't know. But it's definitely something new for me.
Anyway, I shared my view and now I am saying big thanks to Ewa who published it. I am not a big fan of any predictions, so what I shared is far from being called a prediction at all. It is my own personal conviction that has helped me in my freelance business since 2007. And I hope that it will help others now, too. I also like what other colleagues are saying, and I think I know why they are saying that. The post is here. Please read it and let me know what you think.

And now I would like to share a couple useful blogs I recently discovered.

First of all, my dear friend and colleague Magda Papa has finally started her own blog about translation. 'So, what's so new about it?' you might ask. Everybody seems to be writing blogs these days. Yes, but nobody writes like Magda. Just check it out, and I guarantee you won't want to stop reading. Here is the link.
Last year was excellent for me in terms of meeting new colleagues. Lucy Brooks was one of the greatest professionals I met and I am grateful for that. Imagine my surprise when I found out she's been blogging about eCPD Webinars for more than two years! I love her blog and I believe that the whole eCPD project is extremely useful for all translators, not just newbies. So check out her blog and subscribe, it's definitely worth it!

Have you made any personal discoveries lately? Please share them in comments! Let's inspire one another!

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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