Summer’s bliss July 6, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Random musings.add a comment
The July Fourth weekend is always the highlight of the summer. Summer is reaching its peak, and the days become more languid. It is the payoff for living through months of winter’s snow, sleet and gray skies here in Northeast Ohio.
I have worked through several holiday weekends, and I swore I would not do it this past weekend. Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry… My favorite customer, who I only say no to if I am completely overwhelmed, contacted me at 5 PM on Friday with a 10,000 word marketing survey job due Wednesday at 2 PM. As a freelance translator, the most important skill you need to develop is time management, so I budgeted how much I needed to get done over the weekend to make the deadline and then threw myself into enjoying the holiday.
I took Thursday afternoon and all day Friday off to spend with my family and my nieces. Celebrating the holidays through the eyes of a three- and (almost) five-year-old made it all the more special. After my afternoon massage on Thursday to work out the tension from the quality management job, I drove to Medina to attend their July 4th Festival and watch the fireworks. I also treated my nieces to their first taste of cotton candy. The next day my parents joined us to play in the backyard, blow bubbles, and enjoy a cook-out.
I translated about 10 pages out of 47 pages throughout the day on Saturday, in addition to preparing a summer picnic at Blossom Music Center to enjoy the Cleveland Orchestra performing Orff’s Carmina Burana, Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with my German Meetup group. The evening was capped off with breathtaking fireworks, including three encore finales. The men blowing off the fireworks certainly had a sense of humor.
Today I am doing some much-needed housecleaning and plan to translate another 10 pages. However, I also plan on sitting under the umbrella on my balcony with a cool drink and a good book. I hope you enjoyed your holiday weekend as well.
A little levity: Photobombers of the Day July 2, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff.1 comment so far
My favorite blog (which shall remain nameless because it is not at all translation-related and is written by a total curmudgeon who regularly uses colorful language) made my day today by posting a link to Photobombers of the Day. Photobombers are people who deliberately try to ruin your photos while you’re taking them. I’m completely stressed out trying to finish a quality management handbook that is taking waaaaay too long to finish (it was due at 9 am today and it’s 4 pm now and I still have 1,500 words to go – luckily my client is really understanding and I’m keeping them apprised of the status as I go), so I really needed the levity to lighten my day. Hope your day is going better! I’m taking tomorrow off for a super-long July 4th weekend, so if I don’t post anything tomorrow have a Happy Fourth!
ASET acquired by COMSYS July 2, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Translation Sites.add a comment
Ted Wozniak just posted this on the Payment Practices list:
HOUSTON, TX (01 July 2008 ) –COMSYS IT Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ:CITP) today announced the acquisition of ASET International Services Corporation, a leading Arlington, Virginia-based provider of globalization, localization and interactive language services, including: translation, multilingual publishing, audio/video production, and simultaneous interpretation and conferencing for live events in over 140 languages. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but COMSYS expects it to be accretive to earnings in 2008.“ASET International has developed a strong practice in the globalization and localization industry, serving both the commercial and public sector, and will enable our existing globalization practice to substantially expand its reach,” commented COMSYS CEO Larry L. Enterline. “With former owners Erika Nobel Hendzel and Kevin Hendzel and their team staying with COMSYS to help us run this business, we are excited about our prospects in this sector, which is currently growing at faster rates than traditional IT staffing. ASET’s multilingual services are a great complement to our existing services in this sector and our current customers should benefit greatly.””About COMSYS IT Partners
COMSYS IT Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: CITP) is a leading IT services company with 52 offices across the U.S. and offices in Puerto Rico, Canada and the U.K. COMSYS service offerings include contingent and direct hire placement of IT professionals as well as a wide range of technical services and solutions addressing requirements across the enterprise. The COMSYS TAPFIN Process Solutions Group delivers critical management solutions across the resource spectrum from contingent workers to outsourced services.
I find this particularly interesting, because both companies are my clients. COMSYS is one of my oldest clients. They don’t send me a lot of frequent work, but I have been working with them since 2001 and have lasted through three name changes. They have always had really good payment terms (depending on the job, some jobs are paid in two weeks, some in 30 days), so hopefully this will translate to better payment terms for ASET and I will actually consider working with them (ASET) again. Time will tell…
Favorite tools: EditPlus July 1, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Tools, Translation Sites.add a comment
EditPlus is a 32-bit text editor, HTML editor and programmer tool for the Windows operating system. While it can serve as a good Notepad replacement, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers. I particularly like the fact that it color codes the tags, so there is no confusion when you are working in an HTML or XML file. Other features include an HTML toolbar, user tools, line number, ruler, URL highlighting, auto-completion, cliptext, column selection, powerful search and replace, multiple undo/redo, spell checker, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and more.
EditPlus is shareware. You can download it and try it for 30 days. If you find it useful and decide to keep using EditPlus after the evaluation period has expired, you must buy a license. A single user license is only $35, but you can download it and try it for 30 days.
One particular feature that I think most translators will appreciate is its tag stripping feature. I am translating a highly formatted quality management manual in TagEditor at the moment. To track how many words I have translated that day, I simply copy the text from the English View tab and paste it into EditPlus. To strip the tags, I select View->HTML->Strip HTML tags. I can then copy and paste that text into Word and do a quick word count.
Musings from an overworked translator 