Musings from an overworked translator

Sharing PowerPoint presentations on LinkedIn November 12, 2008

One of my goals from the ATA conference is to learn more about social networking tools. Corinne McKay’s post this morning, New and Noteworthy, about a sundry of topics, including feeding your WordPress blog to your LinkedIn profile, was a revelation and sparked a flurry of investigative work on my part. Luckily I only have about 800 words to translate today. So I’ve now finally updated my web site this morning (another one of my goals) in addition to playing around in LinkedIn, which I have woefully neglected for a while now.

Feeding the WordPress blog to your LinkedIn profile based on freelance journalist Michelle Rafter’s instructions was a breeze, but I also discovered you can upload PowerPoint presentations as well. All you have to do is click on Applications, choose either Google Presentation or SlideShare Presentations, and upload your PowerPoint presentations (be sure to fill out a brief explanation and choose some tags). I chose SlideShare Presentations, but Google Presentation looks like it would work similarly.

I have had my PowerPoint presentations on my web site for years, but this is a great way to bundle all your PowerPoint presentations in one spot and free up some web space on your domain. Plus they were pretty hidden on the site. I now have four of my PowerPoint presentations online, and they have already had some hits. It’s a great way to show potential clients and fellow translators what you can do.

LinkedIn also has some other cool applications like Huddle, which gives you private, secure online workspaces packed with simple yet powerful project, collaboration and sharing tools for working with your connections. I could see this being very valuable when working together with other translators on large translation projects.