4 cool things that happened in my life in May

Hi everybody! I am so happy to see you again! Today is my happiest day in a loooooong time - the end of Delia's school year! Yay! Parents love summer vacations just as much as kids do :)

A few good things happened since we talked last:
1. I had a webinar on ProZ about Google Plus and what it offers to us, translators. In spite of some unexpected sound problems everything went excellent!
2. A few days before the webinar I was interviewed by Maria Kopnitsky about my experience as a translator, trainer and social media enthusiast. Here is the link. Hope you like the post.

3. Also, a few days ago another interview with me about Google Plus was published by Tess Whitty, a lady and a colleague who I absolutely admire. Tess is amazing, and her podcast is full of very useful information for all freelance translators. The interview actually took place in winter, during the Olympics, so I am both happy and a bit embarrassed. The thing is that now I know so much more about Google Plus that I'd like to cross out some things I said then, specifically when I said that you can only invite people from your circles to webinars you held using Google Hangouts. I was wrong! But I didn't know it back in February. Just a couple days ago there was a great post published about Google Hangouts and specifically about using Google Hangouts for webinars. So check it out, it's totally worth it!
4. Another great thing was that both my blog and my Twitter account were nominated for Top 100 Language Lovers 2014 competition! So if you like my blog and like what I share on Twitter, please support me, and I will be forever grateful! :) This is the link for voting for your favorite language professional blogs, and my blog Your Professional Translator is almost at the very end of the list. And this is the link for voting for your favorite Twitterers! You will find a lot of great names there, and my name (Olga Arakelyan, in case you forgot :)) is there, too. Thank you in advance!

I also noticed that I got kind of behind my Meet the Linguist series, but I am going to get back to it as soon as I can. There is actually one more good thing that happened to me in May which made me slow down in my business a little. This thing is more wonderful than all the other great things I shared already, but I am not ready to share it with the world yet. I will, so stay tuned ;-)

Dear readers, my best wishes to you for this summer! In many ways, summer is even more challenging for us, freelancers, but I am sure we will do just fine. Have a great time and talk soon!

Olga Arakelyan
Your Professional Translator

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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

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