Sarah's Archives

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

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Hello to ITI Bulletin readers

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ITI Bulletin cover, July - August 2009

ITI Bulletin cover, July - August 2009

A big hello to readers who have found their way here from my recent article in the ITI Bulletin. You might find these posts of particular interest:

  1. Twitter: this director’s cut – screencasts of Twitter in action, including examples of professionals who are doing it right and a live demo of another kind of Twitter tool called TwitKit.
  2. ITI Conference round-up: a social media perspective – a full write-up of a side to the conference you may not even know existed (the Bulletin article was an extract of this).
  3. The royal we: why small is the new big – a perspective on why setting our sights low as freelancers can reap rewards.
  4. The value of professional organisations: another view – ideas on the value of professional organisations to newly-established translators.
  5. If you’ve had enough of hearing how essential social media is, try these posts for a slightly different perspective: A healthy dose of scepticism and 7 ways NOT to use Twitter for business purposes.
  6. Finally, see what you think of my series of short interviews with professionals in the translation world: 5 Qs.

Enjoy!

Work in progress!

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Excuse to shabby décor. I’m busy refurbishing today this week. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy the content, it’s just the cover that looks bad 🙂

First impressions: translating in the UK vs translating in Australia

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The last eight months have been a real roller-coaster ride professionally speaking, as I’ve tried to settle into life on the Other Side of the World. On the one hand, despite my best efforts to stay connected virtually, at times I’ve felt isolated and demotivated without the face-to-face contact that I enjoyed with my peers in London. On the other, I’ve had a stronger sense than ever of the wealth of opportunity and choice that translation as a career can offer me – if only I could get myself focussed enough to tap into it.

Thankfully last weekend’s 2008 AUSIT Biennial National Conference in Brisbane delivered just the shot of enthusiasm I needed to top up my motivation levels. My one and only aim in attending was to gain an overview of translation in Australia. What I got was a lesson on how the oldest profession in the world is forging its place in country with needs far different to those I’d ever considered before.

Brisbane CBD and the Story Bridge, Brisbane QLD.

Yes, this is where I live now. And yes, this is the frankly breathtaking mode of transport I used to commute to the AUSIT conference last weekend 🙂

[Read more…]

24 hour Read-a-thon: mini-challenge

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I’m taking part in my second 24 Hour Read-a-thon today. It starts at 1400 GMT / 0000 AEST and is being run by the rather amazing Dewey over at the hidden side of a leaf. Click through for all the details on the who, the what, the where, and of course, the why (assuming it’s not immediately obvious!). For a list of everyone participating, [Read more…]

Hello to SmallBizPod readers

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A big hello to readers linking through from SmallBizPod.co.uk to put some words to the voice following my recent audio review. You might find these articles of particular interest:

  1. The royal we: why small is the new big – a perspective on why setting your sights low can also work
  2. 4 tips on pricing to attract clients you’ll want to keep – some conventional and not-so-conventional things I’ve learned from running my own small business
  3. Portfolio careers deserve a closer look and 6 tips for building your portfolio career – a business case for the dilettantes among us 🙂
  4. Is Skype over-rated for business use? – weigh in with your opinion
  5. Write-ups of two of my favourite career books: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies For Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra and Laura Vanderkam’s Grindhopping: Building A Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues.

Plus, anything from the freelance workers category.

Enjoy!

Drum roll, please…

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I’ll be starting a new series of occasional posts called 5 Qs with, where I’ll ask five questions of different people in the industry and then post their responses here for your delectation.

I must admit, I’ve been toying around with this for ages – over 18 months to be precise. In fact, ever since I saw a similar series by the excellent Urban Muse and got her blessing and advice on running a translator-specific series of my own.

The first post will appear next week – here’s hoping they’re as fun to read as they are to do!

Hello to the Brazen Careerists

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A big hello to readers linking through from my recent Brazen Careerist article on life in London. You might find these articles of particular interest:

  1. There’s dumb and then there’s dumber – my response to a Gen Y critic
  2. My personal productivity nirvana – a write-up of my search for the perfect productivity tool
  3. Being your own boss may not be as hard as you think – for anyone feeling they may lack sufficiently brazen credentials 🙂
  4. Portfolio careers deserve a closer look and 6 tips for building your portfolio career – as featured on Brazen Careerist
  5. And write-ups of two of my favourite career books: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies For Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra and Laura Vanderkam’s Grindhopping: Building A Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues.

Enjoy!

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

The rain in Spain…

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… falls fast and furious, and causes endless power cuts!

Yes, I know it’s been a while. I have another week to go in the rainy but frankly rather gorgeous city of Malaga, and hope to be settled Down Under and back to blogging regularly by early March. I’d planned to continue blogging over this period actually, and even went so far as to have a couple of half-completed posts on stand-by. As usual, things keep getting in the way and let’s face it – real-life fun trumps cyber fun every time 🙂 (Things would be a bit tragic if they didn’t).

My language course is going well and it’s really great to blow the cobwebs off my spoken Spanish again. As expected, my written skills really aren’t being stretched but I plan to work on that via distance learning over the coming year.

The first time I ever lived away from home was in 1997, when I spent a couple of months in Granada as part of my university studies. I’d been to Malaga before both on my own and with family, but the experience was still very “foreign” and frightening at times, and I struggled with the culture shock of it all. So it somehow feels right to be here again more than ten years later, feeling very much at home even as I prepare to relocate to Australia!

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