How not to use a blog for self-promotion June 23, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Random musings.trackback
Wow, I had to share this little gem with you all. Someone on PT found the link on Craigs List for Berlin. For those who don’t read German, he says “I’m not much of a translator. My German isn’t that great, but we offer ‘tranlsations’ [sic] of documents, web sites and whatever else you want. We offer you over 150 languages, and our prices are great! Contact us today your free offer [sic].” I don’t know about you, but I’m sold… so I click on his link and find one of the worst examples of a blog I’ve ever seen.
If your blog posts are primarily all about how wonderful you are and all the services you offer – and one blog post makes you scroll fifteen times to get to the end, chances are slim you will have anyone subscribing to your RSS Feed or taking you seriously. This isn’t a blog – this is a cheap, bottom of the barrel alternative to a pseudo-professional website.
I’m ashamed that this “translation company” is from my home state of Ohio. Oh, and if you are pushing your language skills and trying to convince clients to hire you, Jon, you really should use proper English like capitalizing “English” – and a list of every topic you have ever translated also isn’t all that impressive.
Musings from an overworked translator 
[X] Difficult-to-read white text on a black background
[X] Strange symbols used for bullet points, so that said bullets display as u-umlaut
[X] Meaningless “survey” on you blog (question “Do you think Springfield’s population is still decreasing?”)
[X] Translation sample (Portuguese to English) which reads as a ponderous translation
[X] Same for the French-English sample (“To apply this procedure, it is required to connect to the machine as root.” – I’m not an English native speaker, but normally this should be written as “To apply this procedure, log in to the machine as root .”)
[X] Same for Spanish-English sample (I don’t think you can say “at the border between both countries”… shouldn’t it be “at the border between the two countries”?)
[X] Same for Latin-English (was this translated with Google? just asking)
[X] Risible list of “languages supported” – but it’s nice to know where to go should one need a translation from, say, “the French Middle” (I kid you not)
[X] Ridiculous rates (EnglishJapanese for USD 0.06 / word, anybody?)
Pretty cool post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say
that I have really liked reading your blog posts. Anyway
I’ll be subscribing to your blog and I hope you post again soon!