We are avid readers of colleagues' translation blogs, and are always quite excited to hear about a new one. Unfortunately, one of our favorite bloggers, the mysterious Masked Translator, has not posted since the middle of last year. While we miss his/her honest take on the translation world, we are happy that there is another high-quality blog that just made its cyberspace debut. It is hosted by English-to-Swedish translator Tess Whitty, who lives in gorgeous Park City, Utah, where she runs her business, Swedish Translation...
Job Offer of the Week
While ridiculously low rates are offered to translators around the world on a regular basis, this one just had to be shared. Our colleague Karin Bauchrowitz, a English->German translator, just forwarded the following job offer to us telling us that it was quite unbelievable -- and it is. It was posted on Proz.com, which has many fantastic advantages, including glossaries and solid term search functions. However, many of the jobs posted on Proz are very poorly compensated. This one takes the prize (original text, unedited):
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The Lighter Side: The Office Assistant
Since Judy frequently gets asked about the source of the occassional background noise when she's on the phone with clients and colleagues, we figured we'd post some pictures of the noisemaker. It's Luna, a very friendly 6-year-old black Lab/St. Bernard (adopted from a no-kill shelter) who weighs in at 100 pounds. Her favorite activities include monitoring translations on the laptop (see picture), guarding the print dictionaries...
Link: The Evolution of Google Translate
Machine translation is a heavily debated topic in our profession, and not surprisingly, Google is leading the mainstream efforts. While we have personally only scratched the surface of the debate, we applaud Google's goal of making all online information available to all people via their translations. We are quite confident that professional translators will never go out of style -- because, really, who wants a computer that doesn't understand syntax and tone to translate their confidential multi-million dollar sales contract...
Purchase of the Month: Ergonomic Office Chair
Dagmar recently invested in an ergonomic office chair that cost more than Judy's first car (which isn't hard) that promises significant relief for her neck problems. Judy soon decided to follow suit. The American side of Twin Translations now has a good, but not top-of-the-line chair, which is much better than the 12-year-old chair (from a garage sale, really!) that she was using before. Judy's hestitation to buy a good...
Value, Not Price: Taxes, CPAs, and TurboTax
Today's post is by Judy, based on her experiences with the Twin Translations (an S-corporation) tax preparation process in the U.S.
Doing my taxes, both business and personal, has always been one of the tasks I gladly outsourced. However, our long-term CPA made a significant mistake last year, didn't return five or six messages we left her, but still sent us a holiday card thanking us for her business (an apology would have been better). I won't work with her again, so I met with a few other CPAs in town. I am really not...
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