How Much Would You Pay?

We hope all our colleagues around the world had a fantastic start into 2010. We took advantage of a few relatively quiet days to make major progress on our book. We are still on target for a spring publication of "The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation," which we are planning on self-publishing on Lulu. We are able to set our own price, and we are in the process of determining what the price should be. We'd like to make a modest profit off our work, but we also want the book to be accessible, price-wise, to everyone. As it stands at the moment, the book will be a nicely bound paperback of high quality with approximately 150 pages, illustrations, graphs, and a detailed glossary.

What do you, dear readers, think in terms of pricing? How much would you pay? We'd love to hear from you. Simply leave a comment. Thanks, in advance, for your input.

Link: Video From ATA Conference

While the ball was dropping last night in NYC, we received news from a fellow linguist, French->English audiovisual translator Alexander Totz, who tackled a time-consuming project: interviewing many translators and bloggers during the ATA conference in NYC at the end of October.

He's compiled a short video with brief interviews featuring Corinne McKay, Eve Bodeux, and one of us, Translation Times' Judy Jenner. These interviews were held at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, just like last night's NYE festivities (but it was infinitely less crowded during the conference).

Watch the video on Alexander's blog here. Enjoy and thanks to Alexander for all the hard work -- it's quite a challenge to make appointments with folks during the busy conference. We admire his perseverance and dedication to compiling a bit of oral history of our profession.

Multilingual Food Glossary

One of our colleagues from the American Translators Association, Kristina Moeller, just shared a link to an interesting four-language online food dictionary (French, Spanish, German, English -- just up our alley). We quickly tested it with a few fancy food terms, and it appears to be quite accurate. As with every online resource, this is simply a glossary and not a painstakingly compiled dictionary, so take the results with a grain of salt. This is a good place to start if you do translations in the area of hospitality, travel, restaurants, etc., which we do quite a bit. Enjoy and let us know if you find the glossary to be solid! Visit the Gourmetpedia here.

Nifty Online Tool to Frame Digital Pictures

Our web guru, Tom Gruber, is always on the lookout for new useful software that we can use and share with our colleagues. This free online tool, still in beta testing, is delightfully simple and effective. Try Clip Your Photos Framer --nothing to download, install, or learn. Simply upload an image and make it look professional/interesting/edgy/artsy (your choice) by adding one of a dozen or so digital "frames." This will beautify your image and make it ideal for use in company presentations, marketing materials, PowerPoint presentations, etc. We tried one of our images, and in ten seconds produced the framed image to the left. We are partial to simple, useful, and free tools, and this one certainly fits the bill. Have you used it?