Your professional translator

It's all here, in my new interview to freelancermap.com. I am grateful for a chance to share my experience and some tips with the subscribers of this wonderful website. The interview was an interesting process. I've been kind of silent here, because now being only a part-time freelancer, I can't decide what to write about. There are a couple posts in my drafts, but I've been hesitating about publishing them. So big thanks to Doreen for showing me that my experience can still be valuable for others. Dear Doreen, I promise, I will keep this blog living and active! So, things you will learn from this interview include: 1. How I became a freelancer (though you might already know that part ;-)) 2. Why freelancing is a part-time business for me now and how that transition actually happened. 3. What do I do to find new clients and keep them :-) 4. Some marketing and success tips from me. And of course, I will be happy to read your stories! Here's what you ca...

Anybody working online may at some point have to deal with negative feedback, both deserved and undeserved. It always brings negative feelings and emotions. Today I am going to share my own experience of dealing with negative feedback in social media. Everything posted there is picked up by Google and other search engines unless it's protected by privacy settings. That's why it's so important, first of all, to know how to deal with negative feedback correctly and, secondly, to stay calm and professional. Managing a translation school, I periodically come across various negative comments about it in social networks (luckily, it doesn't happen as often now as we are earning a quite decent reputation among Russian translators). At first, I got really upset about those comments, especially if they came from people who didn't even attend any of our e-courses or webinars, but they were sure nevertheless that we were just another info business in the worst meaning ...

Hi everybody! Long time, no see! :) There literally wasn't any single day when I didn't think about you. All my readers are very special to my heart. Thank you for your messages and for your cards! I am very grateful for your kind thoughts. As you probably guessed, this is going to be a recap post. I shared a couple recap posts back in 2014, so it probably won't be big news for you if I say that 2014 was an extremely challenging year. Sometimes to the point that I thought I was losing my mind. But at the same time there have been some changes in my life, and I would love to share them with you . 1. Remember last September  I talked about another surgery? It happened last December and it went very well. My body has healed well and my soul is healing, too. 2. I am not a freelancer any more. I already wrote once that I became a part of staff in two agencies. Since then the situation has changed even more, and I feel it is a very good change. Now I manage Translators...

Hi everybody! How is your weekend going? Mine is a non-working one, first time this month! So I am using it wisely, updating my blogs, catching up on reading, and doing some things about the house. We got first snow yesterday! Can you imagine? Actually, the streets look much better all white and shiny, instead of dark, wet and gloomy, so I am not compaining. I remember I promised to write this post a while ago. So now I owe you top tweets for two months! So here they are. Check out those links. They are quite amazing!

Hi everybody! First of all, belated congratulations to all my colleagues ! International Translation Day this year was filled with all kinds of events, both online and offline, in different parts of the world. It is so great to belong to such a wonderful army of smart, beautiful and talented people! I wish you all a prosperous, busy, adventurous and successful year! Another piece of good news is that my post " 10 worst mistakes I made as a freelancer " won ProZ Community Choice Awards as the best post for freelance translators. Big thanks to everybody who voted for it! Today I'd like you to meet another special person and a great professional. Joseph Lambert is an experienced translator, whose specialty fields include sports, marketing, medical, as well as technical translation! He also runs a blog, which is a part of his website jaltranslation.com . So let's meet Joseph Lambert!

Hello everybody! It's time for a new interview in the Meet the Linguist series. Today I would like you to meet Fedor Kondratovich , a translator, interpreter and a head of Alba Longa Translation Company from Saint Petersburg, Russia. Though the company is fairly young, it is already one of the most reputable translation companies in Russia. Besides, they have been nominated for ProZ Community Choice Awards for their online translator training courses which are very popular among Russian translators. I have been working with Fedor since May and I had a chance to see that he practices what he preaches, i.e. shares in his interview. So let's start!

Hi everybody! How are you doing? Last time I promised to share a big summer recap post with you, so that's what I am going to do now. This summer turned out to be one of the most challenging summers in my life. At the same time, I was blessed beyond measure. That's why the title mentions bad things turning out for good. So let's start and I hope I won't scare you away :)