Your professional translator

Hi everybody! First of all, Happy New 2013 Year to you! I sincerely wish that this new year brings you more joy, more precious moments, more laughter, more loyal clients and more great opportunities than all the previous years. I am in the midst of great family celebrations now as we have bank holidays until January 9th. But I have also been doing a lot of thinking and planning for 2013. I can promise you more quality posts about translation, freelancing, different business and marketing issues, networking etc. I want my blog to be as helpful as possible for fellow freelancers. I am still planning to accept guest posts (see the guest posts policy ). And below is the first guest post in my blog this year about the benefits of teaching children a second language . Interested? Then read further ;) Language is a mysterious thing to many people; they don’t know exactly how they learned theirs, and they find other languages very confusing. Even if they try to learn a new language ...

As I promised in my previous post , here are some pictures of our New Year . First, on December 28th there was a New Year party in my daughter's kindergarten. They staged "The Snow Queen" by Andersen. In the beginning kids had fun dancing rock-n-roll. They loved it. Their parents did, too :)

Dear readers of this blog, Thank you so much for staying with me through this year, for reading and commenting on my posts, for suggesting topics for discussion and for letting me know when there were any typos/mistakes! I can't express how much I value each one of you. I'd like to wish you all a very merry Christmas ! May the Lord bless you with joy and peace ! And may this New Year bring you many blessings from above ! Olga More free Russian New Year and Christmas pictures here:  открытки и анимация с Новым годом

 Last year I wrote a post about Santa Claus and Ded Moroz . There, I mentioned a character called Snegurochka, or Snow Maiden in English. I recently came across a wonderful article in Russian on one of my favourite websites, so I thought that I definitely need to share at least some of its most interesting parts so you can know more about this beautiful legend.

I promised some weeks ago to my Facebook readers that I will translate or post a summary of that article about Santa Claus and Father Frost. So since I am not too busy now I decided to fulfill my promise and so here is the summary + a couple added little details found in Wikipedia (as usual, I couldn't just translate the story, I had to make my own little investigation). Here's how the figures of Ded Moroz and Santa Claus might have appeared. Version 1: Ded Moroz (=Father Frost) appeared long-long ago. At that time Russia was still a pagan country, and the people believed that the spirits of the dead kept them safe, made the weather nicer and also made sure their animals had healthy babies. So every winter people would dress in weird clothes and give sacrifices/presents to the spirits. One of those people would be the most scary one, and he also wouldn't be allowed to speak. Everybody would call him "Ded" (=Grandfather). He might be a type of Ded Moroz...