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an archive of content from ≈ 2005 - 2015, relating to international business, translation, freelancing, and working online.

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Archives for 2008

Turning the tide: freelancers returning to salaried work

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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

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business card wallFirst 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!

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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?

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PLEASE IGNORE:

Technorati Profile

Fancy translating for the Olympics?

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Apparently the International Olympic Committee is looking for an inhouse translator to work from English and French to Spanish, based at their headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. Full transcript of the announcement here.

A big hat tip to Julio A. Juncal for this. I’ve just come across his blog Translation Notes and was impressed to see that not only has it been around since 2002, but it’s regularly updated and often features inhouse translation positions at top international organisations. Definitely one for my blogroll.

Some words of wisdom never get old

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A portrait of Johnson from 1775 by Joshua Reynolds showing Johnson's intense concentration and the weakness of his eyesJohnson was annoyed to see his
favourite blogger copping out on
fresh content again.
Image via Wikipedia

Some more lazy link love today – but don’t let that put you off, these little posts really do deserve another look (even if I say so myself):


Zemanta Pixie

There's ALWAYS Something About Translation

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I’ll emerge from my busy silence only to say that I will be back to blogging again very soon. In the meantime, check out the following articles from my archives:

You read it here first…

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I was pretty chuffed to see The Weekend Australian Magazine last week led with an article on swear words, featuring the very same set of linguistic experts I wrote the previous week in Swear-way the heaven: everything you ever wanted to know about cussing. Not only am I sure this is more than mere coincidence, I’m also convinced it has nothing to do with the fact that the ABC’s brilliant Lingua Franca featured them in January…

So, hello to the TWAM, if you’re reading! 😉

Swear-way to heaven: everything you ever wanted to know about cussing

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A common cartoonish depiction of profanity substituting symbols for words.Image via Wikipedia

Catching up on past episodes of Lingua Franca, I was amused to hear a pair of experts in linguistics, Dr. Keith Allan and Prof. Kate Burridge, describe taboo subjects and the way in which we use slang and swear words to censor our language. It can’t be easy for academics to speak about such delicate matters without sounding utterly ridiculous, given the necessary real life utterances as examples, but this pair manage it. I’ll even admit to an instinctive titter at the sound of some of the “rude words” – although, of course, this may also have been a simple expression of glee at those wonderful Australian vowel-sounds.

Unfortunately the audio file is no longer available on the ABC website, so here’s a brief summary of some of the things they discussed:

WARNING: Please don’t read this post if you are offend by coarse language.
I’ve tried to avoid being gratuitous, but this post does contain occasional references to coarse language.

How to tell your euphemisms from your orthophemisms

  • Euphemism: a mild, inoffensive expression for something which is unpleasant or embarrassing, e.g. poo
  • Dysphemism: a harsh, blunt, deliberately offensive expression, e.g. shit
  • Orthophemism: a term coined by Allan and Burridge to account for direct or neutral expressions that are neither euphemist nor dysphemistic, e.g. faeces
  • X-phemism: a collective term, referring to a set of all the above. E.g. the x-phemism for poo, shit and faeces refers to the same thing, but the individual terms are used in different ways to denote different styles and connotations.
  • Euphemistic dysphemism: expressions which are seemingly at odds with the sentiment that lurks behind them, e.g. golly gosh, goodness me, strewth, cor blimey, etc. Apparently, many of these sprang up during the Renaissance when there were laws against using blasphemy on stage.
  • Dysphemistic euphemism: using a dysphemism as a term of endearment, e.g. g’day you old bastard, hi bitch, etc.

The power of the forbidden

Did you know that English has more than 1,000 terms for penis, 1,200 for vagina, another 800 for copulation and an extraordinary 2,000 to describe “wanton women”?!

Of course, language is in a constant state of change, and taboo words rise and fall with it. Studies have clearly proven what we all instinctively know, i.e. that while forbidden words are more memorable and evocative than other word stimuli, they lose their punch through frequency of use. Interestingly, too, studies on bilinguals have shown that taboo words are more evocative in a person’s first language than their second, regardless of the degree of fluency.

The evolving shock-value of a term has legal implications too. Allan and Burbidge mention a defendant recently charged with using offensive language, whose case was eventually dismissed. Consideration was given to the extreme prevalence in the community of these particular, albeit savage, swear words and their frequency in the general media. Given all this, the magistrate concluded that while the language used was indeed offensive to good taste and manners, it could not in this day and age be considered intrinsically offensive in the legal sense. The point was made that any form of racist language, on the other hand, would not have been dismissed, in lines with the sensibilities of society today.

Cross contamination

Such is the power of taboo words that some of them even contaminate similar words with completely unrelated meanings. For example:

  • Coney (to rhyme with honey) was originally the English word for rabbit, until it faded from popular use around the 1800s. It began to be considered obscene as it sounded like a word (still used today) to refer to female genitalia.
  • Feck has absolutely no etymological connection to the versatile F word we all know and love, but is still no longer used in its original sense.
  • Niggardly is another innocent bystander which has suffered decreased use as a result of connotation leakage.

There’s also a discussion of the power of the use of FCUK as a brand name for a popular clothing line.

Anyway, if you’re interested in all this talk of swear words (and judging by the keywords readers use to find this blog, many of you are), Burbidge and Allan have written a book called Forbidden words: taboo and the censoring of language. There’s a thorough review of the book here and a more general introduction to the linguistics of cussing here, if that’s what you’re after. Finally, Wikipedia do an excellent run-down on profanity, including a short section on the topics most likely to be the subject of bad words in a range of different languages and religions. Knock yourself out.

Personally, I’m interested in why I’ve long had the feeling that it is more acceptable to use frequent and colourful swear words (within a set of specific, unspoken circumstances) in certain circles of Irish society, while this same behaviour has… I mean, would produce mild shock or horror among otherwise equivalent circles of, say, British or Australian society. Does anybody know if there’s a word for this, or an area of study which examines the different frequency and impact of taboo words within regional variations of the same language??

Beware the fine line between spamming and "reaching out"

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Address BookImage via Wikipedia

Translators who buy email lists of industry contacts to send their CV to, beware: you could be making enemies of the very people you wish would hire you.

As editor-in-chief of Wired, an online magazine reporting on technology trends across all spheres of society, Chris Anderson is a key industry leader. So if you were promoting a new book about technology, you might think he’d be a good contact to send your press release to, right?

Wrong. Chris gets over 300 of unsolicited emails a day with just this kind of untargeted, randomly emailed information, and has resorted to drastic measures. On his blog, he has published the email addresses of anyone who has sent him “inappropriate” material over the past month. Plain as day, for all the world to see.

As always with these kinds of posts, it’s the discussion that takes place in the comments afterwards that is most interesting. Some people think he should get over it, and that unsolicited emails are a tool freelancers simply have to use if they are to compete with the big boys. Others cheer his actions, and love the idea that spam bots are likely to harvest these addresses as they crawl the web, resulting in a deluge of spam for their owners. In fact, even some of the named and shamed emailers themselves have responded, with (it must be said) some legitimate and valid explanations as to why they sent him these emails in the first place.

It’s worth pointing out too that Chris doesn’t take issue with unsolicited emails per se. He says:

…I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I’m interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that’s why my email address is public). Everything else gets banned on first abuse.

I think many of us can see ourselves at both sides of the face-off here. Emailing agencies to look for work is a key (and often very necessary) marketing strategy for many start-up translators. But in an era of MySpace friends and Facebook pokes, it’s too easy to forget that commercial email is a whole different ballgame. Taking a legal eagle view doesn’t help as there seems to be little real, practicable guidance, especially when working across borders.

I have a few ideas of my own on this, but until I pull it into post, I’d be interested to hear: what do you think? What’s the best way to approach a potential work provider without being branded a pest?