Pricing: Video on Vendor-Client Relationships

Finally: a very funny video that has a professional point to make. This video eloquently summarizes the main points about pricing that we've discussed in the last few months. Without further ado, please have a look at this very well-made poignant video about how other services providers would react if their pricing strategies were challenged. Does any of this sound familiar? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Judy is showing this video, which has been circulating among translation organizations around the world, at a workshop...

Online Resources: World Languages

We just came across a very interesting website sent to us through one of the listservs that we belong to. It's a site that covers information on a wide variety of languages spoken around the world, including Malayalam, Pashto, Quechua, Dakota, Tok Pisin and many others that you probably aren't familiar with (we weren't.) It's a fascinating resource, especially for language professionals, and it has a wealth of extremely well-researched information, including difficulty of language acquisition, dialects, background, strucutre,...

Entrepreneurial Linguist Site: Live

While we are still in the final stages of editing our "Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation" book, we have received so many inquiries and pre-orders that we have created a website with more information, where you can also add yourself to the pre-order list. It contains a tentative table of contents, information on what an Entrepreneurial Linguist is, etc. Check it out here....

Professional Development: Health Care Interpreting Workshop

The Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association (NITA), for which Judy serves as vice president, is holding a one-week health care interpreting workshop in Reno, Nevada, from November 9 through 13. It's a week-long course that includes a certificate of completion and is given by well-known interpretation trainer and NITA founding president Tracy Young. The workshop is open to speakers of all languages and incldues a pre-course language proficiency exam by a third party. This is a full 40-hour course held in one week. NITA...

Translation Times Turns One

This week marks this blog's first year of life on the blogosphere, and we have been delighted with our blogging experience. We were inspired to add a translation blog to our list of blogs by many of our fantastic colleagues who have blogged about translation for years. Here are some of this year's highlights: 125 posts Average of 7 -9 blog posts per month Hundreds of comments and interesting discussions Appreciative...

Professional Development in Berlin: Meet a Twin

September and October are usually very popular months in the professional development world, and this year is no excception. The American Translators Association's 50th Annual Conference starts in NYC on October 28. This weekend is the German association's (technically, the Federal Association of Translators and Interpreters) long-overdue national conference in Berlin, Germany. As opposed to the ATA, the BDÜ does not...

Early Bird Special: ATA Conference in NYC

The American Translators Association's 50 Annual Conference is promising to be quite an exciting event, with a record number of submissions for seminars and speaking slots and a higher-than-usual expected attendance. It's fitting that the ATA comes back to where it all started: New York City. Judy will be there, just like every year, and she's presenting her seminar "Lessons from Business School: The Entrepreneurial Linguist" on Saturday, October 31, at 11 a.m. The conference is from October 28 through the 31. If you haven't...

Efficiency Nirvana: Empty Inbox

Last week, for the first time, Judy achieved something that Dagmar, the more organized twin, routinely achieves: a completely empty e-mail inbox. You don't need to be one of those office organization consultants to know that it's not good to have hundreds of e-mails cluttering up your inbox. While we are still working on achieving a very clean inbox on a consistent basis, here are some quick tips to get you started:Set up e-mail filters for all newsgroups and listservs that you belong to. These messsages will then bypass the...