a culture of language and thought

In catching up on the week’s RSS feeds this morning, I came across two translator profiles on two different sites and just had to share them here.
The first is from the site Publishing Perspectives, which is wonderfully international in scope. The post from Friday is called "M. Frédéric Grellier, The Blind Book Translator of Paris". [...]

It’s odd how sometimes all of the documents you’re working on at a certain point seem to come from the same country, or be on the same topic, as if the world has a particular message or teaching for you… (OK, that may be going a little far, but you will allow me just a [...]

I read a recent post on a freelancing site (apologies, but I can’t find it again to link to here…) about how to differentiate your businesses by really looking at *why* it is you do what you do.
It was a question I hadn’t given much thought to, that I somehow intrinsically knew the answer to, [...]

I am a huge proponent of negotiation – not simply taking the price and terms you’re offered by anyone and everyone for a translation job, but seriously examining the time and effort the work will take, evaluating your experience and overhead, asking for what you’re worth. But that’s not to say I don’t find the [...]

Andrea G. Labinger is Professor of Spanish Emerita at the University of La Verne. She has published numerous translations of Latin American prose fiction. Her most recent publications include a translation of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s The Confidantes (Gaon Books, 2009) and Ana María Shua’s Death as a Side Effect (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska [...]

I occasionally wonder how my business benefits from my website. I must confess, I haven’t been very good about doing SEO (search engine optimization), promoting my blog, using tags, finding ways to move my stats up in Google ranking, etc.
That being said, I do think it’s important to have a Web presence and have had [...]

My latest novel translation went off to the publisher on Monday and the break I was aching for sadly hasn’t happened as deadline after deadline for my government/corporate clients rolled around immediately after. In a way it’s good to have been this busy as I often fall into a bit of a funk when a [...]

I’ve been incredibly busy for the last couple of months.  My work days have been 10-14 hours, 6 if not 7 days a week.
In the meantime, Jon redesigned my site (if you hadn’t noticed, take a look around!), and in every e-mail I found the time to write, I asked friends and family for their [...]

…your brain literally refuses to cooperate?!
Your workload is heavy, deadlines roll in one after the after, you’re putting in long hours to stay on top of things, and one afternoon you look down at your most recent project and nothing makes sense. The words float up at you like ciphered messages but, try as you [...]

What exactly is “literary merit”? And how is it defined? More importantly, who defines it?
These thoughts have been swimming around my head for months now, in part after the ALTA Conference in Pasadena, where I found the divisions/strata/hierarchy of profs versus poetry translators versus literary translators versus pulp fiction translators versus commercial translators almost more [...]