Where were you 10 years ago and where do you want to be 10 years from now?

Happy New Year and merry Christmas, my dear readers!

10 years seems like an awfully long time. Yet it seems like it was yesterday. 10 years ago my daughter was 2 years old and I was frantically searching for some kind of work I could do while still staying at home with my child. 10 years ago I made up my mind to become a freelancer. I was scared, yet I knew it was the right thing for me.

Today, I am managing translation CPD courses and working as a freelance marketing translator and editor in my favourite fields: education, tourism, and everything connected with pet foods. I feel real joy because I love what I am doing. I am truly blessed.

I've had different times in my freelance life. Some were good, others not so good. But when I look back I see an exciting story unfolding. I can't wait to see what my life will be like 10 years from now.

Some great things that happened in 2017:

It was probably my best year financially so far.
I was able to regularly donate some money to an animal shelter and to some other causes I believe in.
I saw two parts of Russia I had never seen before.
This year I went to my third translation conference.
One of my last year's New Year resolutions was the following: I wanted to change my mindset. Whenever I came across new ideas I used to think at once about the reasons they couldn't work. This year, I've been learning to analyze those ideas and see their potential, and then to plan steps in order to implement them. I can say I am getting better at it and I can see the difference in my attitude and in the things I am able to achieve with the new mindset.
Being a part-time freelancer, I managed to complete over 130 projects, translating more than 500,000 words in 2017.
I held master classes in three different universities in Moscow, Ufa and Vladimir, speaking about the most frequent mistakes startup translators make and how to avoid them.

One of the things I am not proud of is that I didn't publish as much in my blog as I wanted. But that was because I also wanted to spend time with my family and sleep (occasionally). :-)

Things I would like to do in 2018:

Attend a translation conference in Europe.
Attend the Translation Forum Russia in Ekaterinburg (I already have a pre-approved topic for my speech there, so it looks like I am definitely going).
Earn as much as I earned this year or even more. Definitely not less.
Double the number of CPD courses at LinguaContact translation school. By the way, in April we are going to partner with Nancy Matis again! You can already sign up for her translation project management class if you like.
Make my own translation course and teach it. I already have the topic in my mind. Working on the content bit by bit.

Dear colleagues, what are your best achievements in 2017 and what are your professional goals for 2018? And thinking about even a bigger picture, where would you like to be 10 years from now? What would you like to achieve? Looking forward to your comments.

Wishing you a very happy New Year!

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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