Your professional translator

How many times have your read about the benefits of specialisation in translation? Many, I bet. A sure-fire way to differentiate and add you credibility in an overcrowded market of language services, they say. In my language combination (English to Russian), the competition is fierce. Numerous translators with the same education and the same tools offer their services to the same LSPs. Too often, everything comes down to price. To land clients who do care about their translators, you definitely need some extras — subject field excellence, impressive recommendations, huge experience, etc. Your authentic point of differentiation. But here comes the tricky part. Where is the way to translation expertise?

Would you like to know more about specialization in the language and translation industry? Ewa Erdmann is going to share her story with you now. How did she choose her fields? Here's what she says: Passion first Just as doctors and lawyers choose areas they want to specialise in, translators should decide what field they want to pursue. Unquestionably, it is a very important decision, since it will determine their future work, marketing efforts and lifestyle. The reasons behind their choice vary from translator to translator, but most frequently the determining factors are experience (being previously employed in a particular industry), passion / interests (depending on how strongly they feel about this area of specialisation) or academic background. 

I've been following Sarai's blog for a few months now, and I should say this unique lady continues to amaze me more and more. Her writing style, the issues she touches upon in her blog and her sincerity really help her to stand out among so many of her colleagues with similar specialty areas. I wrote an email to Sarai asking her to take part in my series and hoping to get a reply in the next couple days. Imagine my surprise when she wrote back immediately sharing her story! So here's what Sarai says: How I chose my specialty fields My answer is very simple: my entry into translation was completely the “wrong” way. I studied medicine and I didn’t enjoy it, and then I worked in IT for four years and decided to go freelance. Meanwhile, during my time at medical school, I had to do an elective rotation at a “real” hospital (i.e. not a training hospital) and they said we could go anywhere in the world – so I chose Japan. I’m fairly certain my classmates tho...

Hi everybody! I am back! Pages are still being updated, but you can now search for pretty much any post (except for a couple personal ones) using the categories in the upper part of the website. I do hope that it will make the navigation easier for you. And you can still use the search field in the upper right corner of the page to look for any other topics. Marketing and social media posts are now grouped together under freelance business category, so don't worry, they did not disappear :) So, I am back with a fresh mind, and here's what a bit of rest does to me: I get creative :) And I thought it's high time to introduce a new topic to my blog, which is specialization and its importance for freelance translators . But instead of just me preaching about it, you will learn from fellow translators who have determined their spheres of expertise and are successfully growing their business. And my first guest is Konstantina Drakou ! Here's what she has to say.

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...

First of all, I would like to welcome new readers to my blog! Thank you for following me. And I would also like to thank those who have been reading my blog for some time. I am happy to see you back :) I can't believe how fast the time flies! I just realised that June is almost over and it's high time to share some language and translation related tweets for this month. For those who just started following my blog: every month I look up and share top language and translation related tweets. I try to keep the process as objective as possible, so I go to topsy.com and choose the tweets with most retweets and mentions. The only thing is that I don't publish pure advertisements here, no matter how many times they were shared. And I also try to make sure there are useful links in the tweets. I personally check all links to make sure it's high quality content that may be interesting and useful for my readers. In case you are new to Twitter hashtags, #xl8 stands for ...

If yes, we are inviting you to take part in the longest webinar of your life ! It’s going to take place on the 25 th and 26 th of June . Yes, it’s this coming Tuesday and Wednesday! It may sound like an absolutely crazy initiative of Sharp End Training, but we really want to break the previous Guinness record, and in order to do that we need to make it last for 36 hours and 1 minute! So, since we got this chance to hold this important and FREE training session we thought the best thing would be to divide the 36 hours into 1 hour sections. And can you imagine the number of people who became as passionate as we are? Fabulous speakers signed up in an extremely short time to fill those 36 hours . And look what people have signed up! They are kings and queens of virtual work, marketing and freelance business. And of course translators are on board! You have a chance to learn from Konstantina Drakou , Sarah Colombo , Marta Chereshnovska , Lucy Brooks , Joy Mo , and yours truly ...