Monday, February 25, 2013

Winter Shed: Week Seven




No, I didn't fall off the Winter Shed bandwagon! I was just too busy trying to meet my work deadline that there was absolutely no time to write this post on Friday, or even on the weekend. However, the translation has been emailed to the client, M. Sensible is at day camp and M. Gourmand at the sitter, the house desperately needs cleaning, but I allow myself to write a blog post first. The full back story of this blog hop hosted by Kathy at Bereaved and Blessed can be found here

Now to report on how I did during week seven:

1. Read more novels.
The book I had picked out stayed on my night table for the entire week. I only picked it up to read this weekend, which is officially no longer in week seven, so not much progress here this week. 

2. Follow the news more.
My work took up all my time and energy this week, so apart from some news snippets hubby shared with me I have no idea what went on in the world this week.

3. Pick up regular blogging again and start a series/hop on Cultural Differences.
Again I am glad for committing to do this blog hop, even though I'm again late in writing this post. I intend to write a Perfect Moment Monday post today as well.

4. Get my professional website up and running.
No time and energy for that this week, but I did get some new ideas for what to put on my website, mainly by things that came up during the translation job.

5. Find more clients / pursue more paid projects.
This week was taken up entirely by the second document that needed to be translated for the same client as last week. My father and his girlfriend arrived here on Monday evening and stayed until Friday morning and they were a huge help taking care of the kids so I could work. It was four times as much text, in about the same amount of time, so the job was split between me and another translator. I was very hesitant about this in the beginning, afraid that the two styles would be too different and we wouldn't have time to make one coherent piece out of it, but in the end it worked out fine. It clicked really well with the other woman - we kept in touch via Skype chat to quickly check translation of certain words / technical terms and then once we both had finished translating our parts, met up on Friday and Saturday to go through the texts together. We did some final tweaking last night and I emailed both files to the client yesterday evening. 

There is a third document in the pipeline, but I have no idea yet when I will get that and what the deadline is. I will not bother my client with that question today, as she is busy finalizing the layout of the other document so it can be printed ASAP.

Then I got two other requests for work this week! 
The first one is from a client I already did a project for in December. I call it my 007 assignment: it's a daily internet watch I have to do for news in Dutch about a certain company. If I find anything I have to mail the URL and a summary (in French) about the news, and also check if there are tweets, FB shares, etc.
The other request is for a translation from Dutch to French of a workshop manual. I'm a little hesitant about this one since I usually only translate the other way around, but I will respond to it anyway and ask a French friend to be on standby for proofreading if I do get the job. It's a lot of text so if they don't have a crazy deadline like my current client it would be a nice way of keeping me busy for the coming weeks or even months.

6. Start playing the cello again.
Again, just no time right now.

2 comments:

Kathy said...

Better late than never and I was so happy to see you linked up today! What a week you have had and I admire you staying the course with our Winter Shed! :)

1) Totally understandable! :)

2) I was laughing reading this one, but again I get it! :)

3) I am glad too, as I love sharing this experience with you! I also did a PMM post today and look forward to reading/commenting on yours.

4) Cool that you got some inspiration this week for this one, if nothing else. It is nice when that happens.

5) Wow! You go! That's great that your dad and his girlfriend were visiting and able to help with your kids, so you could focus more on your work. Way to go getting so much done and two other projects on the horizon! :)

6) Really?! ;)

Thanks again for doing the Winter Shed with me! I will see you on Friday (or whenever you get around to your next post) and likely sooner via Perfect Moment Monday! :)

Fran said...

The new work project sounds really interesting!! I nearly thought it was in fact a spying assignment! Well done on the translation and I can completely understand how splitting up a piece to translate could turn up a total mess. Really glad this was not the case. Did you know the other translator beforehand?
Much love, Fran