Archives for July 2008

Friday funnies: Hey, who transmogrified our office?!

Office jargon is one of those topics that’s so commonplace and overdone, at times it can seem like it’s just not funny anymore. But the following gem really made me laugh – a combination of the offending term itself and the amusing reaction of the “whistleblower”:

17. “I work in one of those humble call centres for a bank. Apparently, what we’re doing at the moment is sprinkling our magic along the way. It’s a call centre, not Hogwarts.”
Caroline Garlick, Ayrshire

Definitely time for the weekend when it comes to that!

This is from the BBC’s list of the 50 best worst examples of office speak, gleaned in response to Lucy Kelleher’s campaign against office jargon.

Big hat tip to Percy Baleman over at Translating is an Art for the BBC link.

5 Tips for building your portfolio career

by Sarah Dillon

Here are some ideas on how to increase your chances of getting what you want from a portfolio career, following my recent post on why portfolio careers deserve a second look.

Be brazen about creating your own work structure outside of the traditional work hierarchy. For example, this study identifies the importance of professional networks for translators transitioning to portfolio careers. Regardless of your field of work, there are three psychological processes that you are guaranteed to experience as a portfolio worker: autonomy, isolation and uncertainty. Start building the structures you need to deal with these as soon as possible, and accept that, despite all your planning, there may be times you can feel the worst of them circling overhead.

Choose your “work strands” carefully. Consider becoming a freelance translator! Freelance translators typically have better than average autonomy and control over their working conditions compared to other kinds of freelance workers. These are two key drivers in job satisfaction.

Take responsibility for your own success. Portfolio working can be both liberating and exploitative – it’s up to you to negotiate the conditions you require to ensure you’re on the comfortable end of that spectrum.

Learn to be an optimist, even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. This study shows that portfolio workers can buck the trend and avoid being stressed out by the same conditions that pressure their cube-dwelling colleagues, simply by moderating their levels of optimism. Personally I think this is less about having an annoyingly cheery disposition than enjoying a healthy level of confidence and self-esteem, to enable you to you feel capable of managing the inevitable downsides.

Take a long, hard look at the realities on the ground and be sure to factor these into your plan. The transition from a hierarchical to a portfolio career can be financially uncertain, but the details are likely to vary based on where you live. For example, if you live in a country where decent healthcare and/or education comes at a high personal cost, then you’ve got a lot more to weigh up before making the leap. Equally, don’t assume a web-based business will be a viable option for you just because the technology exists. My broadband cost rose fivefold when I moved from the UK to Australia, a massive increase in overheads that made freelancing from Brisbane a very different proposition to freelancing from London.

Any more words of advice from those already managing portfolio careers of their own?

Learning how to freelance

by Sarah Dillon

Logan Strain’s Four Reasons Why I Don’t Want To Be A Freelancer Anymore is not ideal fare for a Monday morning. In fact, it’s such a grim read it nearly had me weeping into my cornflakes. However it’s still worth a look because I believe the chances are that most freelancers are going to feel this way at some point in their career. (And forewarned is forearmed, after all.)

What makes this article especially worthy of a hat tip, in my opinion, are the tips, suggestions and even criticisms from other freelancers in response to Logan’s tale of woe. Like Mark Smallwood‘s gem:

…The key to freelancing is to learn how to freelance, not just how to perform the task you’re selling… It seems that many people who have authority problems decide that freelancing is the way out. Unfortunately, to be a successful freelancer, you’ll need to obey the authority of more than just a sucky boss at a regular job: you need to obey the requirement to get organized, pay taxes, sell yourself, spend a certain amount of time every day or week building your network and looking for new gigs, and last but not least, dealing with often unreasonable clients while keeping a smile on your face.

There are a couple of excellent points in there.

The best way that I know for translators to “learn how to freelance” is to enrol on the ITI’s Professional Support Group, an online course for translators trying to establish themselves as freelancers in the profession. The course comes highly recommended by translators from all kinds of backgrounds, education and experience levels, including yours truly (a proud participant on the very first course in 2002!) Expect to work hard and put in a minimum of 12 hours a week for the duration of the three to four month course. At £270 for intensive support from eight senior professional translator-tutors it represents incredibly good value for money, and that’s not an honour I bestow lightly. I believe there are also a limited number of bursaries available each year, so check out this page on how to apply and get in early – there’s usually a waiting list.

Image via Wikipedia

There's dumb, and then there's dumber…

by Sarah Dillon

LOS ANGELES - MARCH 23: Celebrity judge talk ...

I had a reaction to Rowan Manahan’s carefully crafted cop-out against the under 30s, but I don’t think it was the kind of reaction he was aiming for.

The following thoughts popped into my head as I scanned his post:

1. I can see straight through him. He’s doing that whole traffic-baiting thing, bandying about a bunch of tattered old clichés in an attempt to provoke reactions.

OK. If that’s what he wants that’s fine – I’m sure there are plenty out there who’ll oblige.

Yawn.

To be honest, this kind of stuff barely registers a blip on my radar. Much like daytime tv, trashy novels and the American Pie movies, I’m interested enough to want to know what’s going on but I can see it for the car-crash entertainment that it is.

2. He’s blatantly copped out – it’s obvious he’s not given the issue any serious thought.

He starts with the stance “these are the points that someone else has made”, then goes on to use his own rather random personal anecdotes to back them up. Only then does he pretend to offer his own opinion – he’s sad to admit it, of course, but in his considerable experience, there may be just a few grains of truth to the fact that the younger generations are getting dumber. Cue downcast eyes, slow-mo headshake, woebegone frown. You know the score.

I’m mildly surprised.

I usually like Rowan’s writing, even when I don’t agree with him. But if I may be so bold – illiterate, alliterate, deluded, cut-off-from-the-world twenty-something that I am – I’m going to take the time to express myself this balmy Saturday night:

Rowan, you can do better than this.

You say your degree gave you the ability to quickly assimilate and critically evaluate information. So where’s the critical analysis? And why on earth are you aligning yourself with a squeaky wheel, just another self-nominated Jerry Springer of social commentary?

You’re clearly spending too much time with the wrong kind of people, both above and below the magic 30-year mark. Let me know next time you’re in Brisbane and I’ll arrange some suitable introductions. Curmudgeonry allowed, but only if you promise to leave the willful ignorance at home 🙂

Yes, but will it do my ironing?

by Sarah Dillon

I’m interested in new technologies and I enjoy jumping in and giving something a try. But I’m definitely not a techie and I often get bored by the trumped-up buzz around the latest virtual bells and whistles. So I had to chuckle when I saw Robin Blandford’s plea to would-be inventors last week:

Go get a hobby off your computer and solve a real problem…

If your idea is technology for technologists it probably won’t go anywhere. Go find a real problem that real people have and solve that.

Makes me think of something else I read recently, which said we should divide software manufacturers’ claims by ten to get a remotely realistic idea of what an application might actually offer us.

Gotta love those straight-talking Irish bloggers.

Turning the tide: freelancers returning to salaried work

by Sarah Dillon

I’ve spoken before about how I wonder what might happen if I were to return to traditional employment. How much of a shock would it be to my system? What would I have to do to help make it work for me again?

An interesting discussion is taking place on this very issue over at Freelance Switch, following Raj Dash’s article Can Freelancers Return To Salaried Work. Raj raises some potential pitfalls that I’d not even considered, and as usual, the comments and experience-sharing in the comments section proves just as valuable as the (excellent) article itself. Worth checking out.

Has anyone heard of experienced freelance translators who have returned to employment? Or any studies or articles looking into this?

Portfolio careers deserve a closer look

by Sarah Dillon

First published July 2008
As new career structures go, portfolio careers are only slowly starting to get the airtime they deserve. Marci Alboher calls them slash careers, Michelle Goodman refers to them as patchwork paychecks – dressed up however you like, many of us are already living this way whether we realise it or not. Best of all, it’s a phenomenon that transcends the much-hyped generational gap and could see us all the way through the retirement. What’s not to love?

The term was first coined to describe the experiences of so-called third-age workers (i.e. broadly, those in their fifties to mid-seventies), many of whom were being forced out of more hierarchical career structures by ageism. There are lots of definitions of what it means to have a portfolio career today, but Monster.co.uk gives it an especially thorough rundown:

A portfolio career is the pursuit of more than one income source simultaneously, usually by applying the various skills you’ve developed throughout your career to different types of work…

Another portfolio career characteristic is that you’ll work at different rates. Some jobs will pay well and others won’t, but the lower-paying positions might be fun or offer intangible benefits, such as an opportunity to give back to your community.

You will also likely deal with a fluctuating income stream, which you can smooth by securing ongoing part-time contracts. Alone, these contracts might not be enough, but when added to other contracts and jobs, they should give you enough to live on.

So where does being self-employed come into it? And are all freelancers portfolio workers?

This is not just a CV-friendly way of describing those stretches when you’ve held down more than one part-time job, I’m afraid – student/waiter/bartender doesn’t really cut it. Even when employed, i.e. holding down a paid part-time position, portfolio workers are usually self-employed too. This may be by virtue of the kinds of roles they take on and/or for tax purposes. Ultimately, they have a greater degree of autonomy and control over their work and have made a conscious decision to make a career out of pursuing multiple income streams. So portfolio workers tend to be freelancers too, although depending on the degree of variety among their work providers, it can be said that freelancers are not necessarily portfolio workers.

The obligatory either/or perspective

From a wider industry perspective, there seem to be two clear camps when it comes to viewing a portfolio career: those who see it as a panacea for all our modern work woes, and those who see it as yet another way to get away with paying less than the minimum wage. Stephen Overell from Personnel Today summed this up nicely when he said:

Normally, there are two camps. The first – shared by loaded downshifters and a certain type of gormless, grinning management expert – is that portfolio working is all about choice. They will tell you its about opting out of the soul-deadening rat race, doing your own thing, freedom, becoming ‘me plc’, and so on. The other camp – inhabited by melancholy economists and anxious liberals – is that portfolio work is better explained by lack-of-choice. Satisfactory employment options dip in certain sectors of the economy, and the lonely, itinerant ranks of portfolio workers witness a corresponding rise.

In fact, in some quarters it’s even considered bad for your mortal soul. In a 2004 interview with the Times, the Archbishop of Canterbury linked portfolio working with an inability to hold down relationships and a lack of integrity, saying that it destroyed the quality of human interactions. Dramatic claims indeed, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

It’s probably fair to say the reality is a little less black and white. Clearly, a portfolio career is not for everyone but for those who are prepared to make a go of it, it can mean a rewarding and satisfying career path whatever your age.

Thanks to sensesmaybenumbed on Flickr for the photo of the business card wall.

Moved house!

by Sarah Dillon

It’s official! My blog has moved house and is now self-hosted on my new website. Please update your bookmarks to www.dillonslattery.com – feeds should redirect automatically.

For those of you interested in gorey details, this is what has been going on back-end chez the naked translator this week:

1. New hosting package bought with Aplus.net, to go with my long-owned dillonslattery.com domain. I settled on this domain after much dithering and, as is often the way, came full circle to the decision: sarahdillon.com was the preferred option, but it’s taken and has been for some time (I know, I’ve been cyberstalking it for nigh-on 4 years now). A .co.uk is too region-specific for me personally, a .ie is outrageously expensive and only available to purchase for specific kinds of businesses registered in Ireland (i.e. not me). and a .com.au comes with hosting restrictions which turn me off… but I don’t want to have to change my email address, and I want consistency too, so why not stick with what I have?!

2. Installed wordpress.org onto my server. Sense of achievement. Found out afterwards that it came pre-installed with the hosting package.

3. Settled on a template that would allow me to have pages (for my website part) and posts (for my blog). Requirements: clean, widget-friendly, easy to read when filled with content.

4. Customised layout, added widgets, wrote a couple of pages for the website element.

5. Imported all posts and comments from www.dillonslattery.com with one easy, painless click. Changed a few settings and voilà, my blog was comfortably settled in its new home.

6. Tried to establish a redirect from each individual post on my old site to its corresponding post on my new site. Of course, Blogger (who host my free www.dillonslattery.com site) don’t want you to be able to do this, so it involves much cloak-and-dagger coding. This is difficult when you can’t do coding, full stop. The idea is not just to spare readers the dreaded http 404 error, but to preserve what is known in the business as my Google juice, i.e. all the Google goodness that my old site has built up over the past 2 – 3 years, which combines to push my site higher and higher up the list of Google search results. Two days of fiddling about with redirect codes, php files and MySQL tables and the idea of starting from scratch on the Google juice front didn’t seem so bad after all. So I set up a simple redirect and left it at that.

7. Deleted all posts at www.dillonslattery.com (to avoid duplicating content and therefore being sent to Google hell). Hovering over the big red delete button at first made me feel a ripple of fear, but this quickly turned to a sense of omnipotence at the thought of the destruction I was about to wreak, albeit within my own small domain. Of course, I’d already checked that my backup had worked.

8. Cleaned up. Requested old site be removed from Google indexing, submitted a Sitemap of new site. Changed feed at Feedburner and started a new listing at Technorati.

All that remains now is to make a couple of more design tweaks over the coming weeks as the site beds in, and to start the slow climb back up Google’s ranking system.

House warming party, anyone?

—

PLEASE IGNORE:

Technorati Profile