Your professional translator

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:

Many people in November take the 30-day gratitude challenge. This morning I read a new post by Judy Lee Dunn " Can You Name 99 Things You Love in 10 Minutes? " and I immediately felt inspired to try. Especially given the fact that I've written a post about gratitude a very loooooong time ago. So let's see how many things I can come up with in 10 minutes. Some things stay the same as they were 2 years ago, plus there are a few more:

Dear readers, I know how much you like my blog and are looking forward to new posts every week. This announcement is specially for you. Some of you have noticed that I've been doing some changes here lately in order to make all posts easier to find. I am also going to rewrite most of the pages. Some older posts which are of zero (or close to zero) value are going to be deleted. The rest are going to be grouped nicely, so you can search and find them by categories listed on top: Freelance business , Professional translation , Foreign language teaching , Russian culture , Blogging , and Tips for clients . You can still use the search box in the top right corner and type any keywords, including "personal" to find the posts that have that keyword. I am going to delete the page about guest blogging because I've been getting too many weird requests from people who can't even spell words in English. You know I am not a native English speaker, that is why I always do...

Hi everybody! As you know, I am speaking at the Sharp End Training virtual worker conference this Tuesday. If you haven't heard about it yet, you can check the info here . We already held a similar conference for freelance translators and it was a great success! But there were also quite a few people who couldn't come, so this is your chance ! The online conference features a panel of speakers all experts in aspects of virtual working, blogging, client relations, networking, presentations and more .

I decided to write this post thanks to my dear Twitter friend and colleague Sarai Pahla who mentioned once on Twitter that she honestly wonders how I find time for blogging regularly. Well, I am about to share my secret with you now. I am also going to share a couple tricks that help other blogging translators. Interested? Then read further.

First of all, Happy Valentine's Day to those who celebrate ! But I really couldn't be silent today for one more reason: The Take Control of YOUR Business Conference starts tomorrow! So I want to make sure that all my readers have grabbed their chance to register! If you are a member of our LinkedIn group you might have noticed that I have been doing something special this week. Each day I introduced one speaker. I'd like to do the same here, in my blog now. 1. Ewa Erdmann . Ewa Erdmann is a freelance translator and interpreter (English-Polish) running her own business – Transliteria . Ewa has linguistic and legal academic background, which enables her to specialize as a legal translator. Ewa works closely with a marketing company and runs her own group of Polish business owners. She actually wrote a guest blog post for our blog which you can find if you follow the link: http://sharp-end-training.ru/are-you-networking-with-the-right-people Ewa is going to speak...

This post was inspired by the posts of my colleagues. I thought it would be good to look back and see what I did right and where I didn't do such a good job. That would probably give me some basis for defining my goals for the next year. Overall, I can say that 2012 was a good year for my business.

Do you remember me talking about interviews with great blogging translators? I said then that they were all a part of our new project. Well, now I am ready to announce that our Complete Blogging Translators' Toolkit is ready! It is a whole set of products including: 1. Full comprehensive  online video training in setting up wordpress – the most widely used blogging platform on the web. 2.  A parallel training course on what to avoid with wordpress . If you are new to DIY webdesign – The course will show you how to develop a knock out site – straight off the bat and keeping the newbie mistakes at bay. 3. Blogging translator star interviews – 3 x mp3 interviews with BIG HITTING blogging translators who share their blogging experience and useful tips.  4. A comprehensive pdf manual crammed with cheat sheets, links to blogging resources, shortcuts and time savers 5. 30 days free membership to our blogging translator support group . Every month we meet up onli...

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:

Remember I promised to share useful links? I've been reading cool stuff on marketing recently, so I thought I'd share it with you. Maybe you will find this info useful for your freelance translation business, too :) So here's the list:

After two years of blogging I can definitely say that I love it. Can't imagine my life without it now. And there are some pretty serious reasons why I wouldn't give it up. Would you like to know them? Then read further :)

My twitter friends and experienced translators, Liudmila Davydova @ldavydova , Ewa Erdmann @Transliteria , and Aga Gordon @acgtranslation , nominated me for the Versatile Blogger award. This award is given from bloggers to... bloggers. The nominees have to be recently discovered or new bloggers. It's such a great honour for me that these wonderful ladies and absolutely amazing professionals have chosen me among the other nominees! Liudmila is a great translator. She has a wonderful blog which you can find here . Her posts are very useful for both translators and their clients. I learn a lot from her blog. The same can be said about Aga's blog " acgtranslation " and Ewa's blog " Transliteria Polish translations ". Aga and Ewa are both wonderful professionals. But what's more, they are very kind people who made me feel welcome on Twitter :) So it's a great honor and a joy to be nominated by Liudmila, Ewa and Aga. The rules of the award ...

December and January are my time for reviewing my life and setting big and small goals for next year. Do you remember my post from July 20 ? So let's watch if I made any progress. I have to admit that I haven't achieved my targets for 2010 that I set to myself, but I am far from being disappointed. I wanted to attract 100 people to by blog. Well, I don't have 100 readers. But my FB fans read it, I know. That makes 62 people. Plus I know of 1 or 2 more people who regularly check out my blog for new posts. That makes 64. Not bad for the first half a year of blogging! =) And I don't want to just attract anybody, I want my blog to be interesting for people who have something to do with translation! So I am not disappointed. =) My second goal was to earn enough money to be able to help my husband support our family. Well, I can say that I've been doing better at that, too, though I haven't reached my target monthly income yet. But, what's more imp...

Having trouble with my router and sitting home without Internet for 2 days really made me realize I miss writing in my blog! It’s been awfully hot here, so I was very thankful for an opportunity to spend three days outside by a lake with my fam. I still worked some, but not half as much as I usually do. And then, when we returned home on the third day, we found out that our router apparently suffered a heat stroke :-( However, it gave me time to reevaluate some of the things that I've been doing, including blogging. I realized that I never shared my goals with you. WHY did I start blogging? – Well, as you know, I’ve been working as a freelance translator since March 2007. At the beginning, when I was leaving my job (I loved it by the way! But I realized that I needed to make a change for the sake of my family) other translators in the company weren’t optimistic about the career I chose. They thought freelancing would be absolutely a waste of my time, energy and money. So I ...