Do you ever get annoyed with your clients’ manners? I often do, for example when they don’t acknowledge, far less thank me for, a translation I’ve delivered by email. If I were to walk into the client’s office and hand over the translation in paper format, I’m sure they’d say “Thanks”. So what happens to their …
Monthly archives: November 2013
Who’s not happy with “selfie” as Word of the Year?
What do you think of the Oxford English Dictionary’s choice of “selfie” as Word of the Year for 2013? I’m not mad about the word itself, although that’s probably an age/generational thing. In my young day (indeed, in most people’s young day) the technology for selfies wasn’t available: you took a photo of yourself, alone …
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Getting credit for our website translations: A good thing, surely. Or maybe not?
Twitter can be a great source of inspiration for blog posts. I spent some time this afternoon looking at Italian websites for a project I was working on and found only one that included the translators’ names among the credits. Indeed, with most Italian sites if you click the “Credits” link in the footer you’re …
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The Gettysburg Address: lessons for writers (and translators!)
Today is the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1863. Cordelia (aka Dilly or Dill) Ditton, a Glasgow-based actress, director and communication coach, wrote an interesting blog post about the Address back in February, entitled “Abraham Lincoln, the power of sound and maybe the greatest speech ever written“. …
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All about price? Not necessarily
Small-business owners and freelancers talk, and worry, a lot about pricing: how to charge a decent rate without frightening potential clients away. Price is certainly important, but it’s not the only factor motivating clients. I had confirmation of this recently from a new client. An Italian company had contacted me for an urgent translation of documents …
More about fonts: Helvetica 1, Arial 0
If you’re interested in fonts, and especially if you don’t like Arial but do like having your prejudices confirmed, you might enjoy a couple of articles written by typeface designer Mark Simonson. He describes Arial as: actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history …