Your professional translator

Just like most full-time translators working for well-known firms worldwide, I did not start my language professional career in the field of translation or interpreting . As soon as I graduated from university, I started teaching English at a secondary school. It was both challenging and fun, as working with a wide variety of students of all ages and backgrounds provided me with good knowledge of the human brain and heart.

Thanks to my friend Magda for this badge! This is the third post in the series. As usual, I found tweets with most retweets and mentions with the help of the website called topsy.com. April was especially fruitful on language tweets, but translation messages were no less interesting and useful. So check them out! I am sure you'll find something worth reading and sharing :) Language tweets first: slate Slate Moist. Slacks. Crevice? Why do certain words sound so awful? http://t.co/YAnLPfFvoC #language #WordAversion

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...

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:

I have two very important announcements for you! Hope you find both of them useful. 1) I thought I already shared it, but I apparently forgot to post the info in my blogs :( Please forgive me! I am correcting this mistake, so here is the first announcement: Remember me talking about Joy Mo's book and then webinar ? Well, if you couldn't attend the live event, you can now watch the webinar replay !  You can follow the link and buy the recording. We got some wonderful reviews from the translators who attended the webinar, and I found it very useful, too. I really liked the fact that the webinar was literally packed with useful information and ideas for translators. Besides, though event went a little longer than planned everybody stayed till the end! That also proves that the webinar was extremely useful for translators. 2)  The second announcement is very important for all those who would like to   use Twitter to its maximum potential . Remember my review of co...

When you read translation blogs, especially advice from more experienced translators to their less experienced colleagues, the most popular topics are: setting your rates and keeping them, defining your fields of specialization, working on your quality, productivity and marketing. But I think there's one more thing we need to think about from the very first days as translators: topics that we won't cover, no matter how much money we are offered for our services. Those things differ from person to person. What you will or won't do really depends on your personality, views, religion, life experience and a lot of other factors. I don't translate texts that promote any occult practices, pornography, abortions, prostitution, smoking, drinking or any illegal actions. Please don't think that I am trying to impose my views on you! I don't work with such texts because of who I am and my priorities. My goal is helping people with my work , not doing them any har...

Hi! How've you been? I've missed you so much! The past couple weeks before my niece's wedding were so busy that I decided to take a week off right after the wedding. And I thoroughly enjoyed my small vacation! We celebrated the wedding which took part in Suzdal and in Vladimir, I did some reading for pleasure, slept a lot, took long walks with my hubby and my daughter and did many other things that I wouldn't normally be able to do. Now I feel a lot better. So it's time for a new post in "being a good translator" series. It's the last post in the series. Here we are going to talk not just about any translators, but about freelance translators in particular. Being  good specialists  and having great motivation  is not enough for becoming a good freelance translator. A freelance translator also needs good business skills, otherwise their business will fail. As I was thinking about this part, I realized that the subject is so vast that it may make a...