My kids are growing up bilingually, and I can remember when my daughter became aware that you can’t always translate things word for word into another language. Or that if you do, you might not get the reaction you were hoping for. She wanted to tell my mum a joke she’d heard at nursery and, knowing [...]
It’s World Environment Day and so here’s a picture of… a doughnut! Why a doughnut? The doughnut model was first introduced by Kate Raworth in 2012 as a framework to bring together the social and environmental aspects of sustainable development. The doughnut helps us visualise two sets of boundaries that we need to stay inside if [...]
“Je m’appelle Jane.” You know how with some friends you remember the first time you met them? This was one of those moments. And it was also the moment when I first became truly aware of all the power and magic of learning a foreign language. I was thirteen or fourteen, on a camping holiday with [...]
How accessible is your website? I wasn’t planning to write another post just yet, but I’ve just seen that today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Which means that it’s the perfect time to launch my “Have you met…?” series and introduce you to the wonderful Kirsty Major. You might have heard me mention Kirsty before, as [...]
This was originally written for the Standing Out group on Facebook and was published there on 29th May 2015, five months after I set up my translation business. I just rediscovered the text and wanted to share it here too. Enjoy! ******************************************** When I left my corporate job to go freelance, I invited my colleagues to [...]
After a good conference or event I'm always motivated and full of new ideas. I like to make the most of that by going through what I've learned and thinking about how I can apply it to my work. And I make sure I follow up with contacts made at the event to get to know [...]
Some ideas just seem to come together by themselves. That's how it was with the #BlindBusinessDate in the Lovely Business Ladies Facebook group. The idea came to me after I’d been mulling over the following thoughts: We’re now over 1000 women, but you only ever seem to hear from a small proportion of them. Not everyone [...]
It’s always important to work on your business as well as in your business, and lately I’ve been doing some concept work and making plans about where I want to take things in the next few years. Having spent 15 years working as an in-house translator at a large software company, when I started my own [...]
Last week I was supposed to be in Nuremberg with over 450 other translators and interpreters at the BP20 translation conference. You won’t be surprised to hear that our event was disrupted by the Corona crisis, but fortunately in this case it was possible to switch to a virtual format. I’d been looking forward to [...]
Now that we’re all in the middle of the corona lockdown, February seems a long time ago. But just a few weeks ago, thousands of musicians from around the world were coming to the end of the creative frenzy known as FAWM (February Album-Writing Month). I’ve been taking part in FAWM since 2011, and have written [...]
