“la parole exportée”

Matthew Bennett, a Twitter friend and fellow translator introduced me to Diigo, a bookmarking service that at first sight looked very much like del.icio.us, but on second examination seems to have a lot more potential for my documentation needs.

I am still at the discovery stage, and therefore far from mastering all the intricacies of the service, but I am very pleased with my initial attempts, and provided Diigo doesn’t fall apart in the next few months, I might be able to set up my main reference system there.

So far, I’ve been able to bookmark a handful of articles and to highlight/annotate specialized terms, phrases and explanations that I want to collect in one place, in fields that are close to my areas of specialization. Later I’ll bookmark actual websites of interest, highlighting terms that will be useful to review when preparing documents in a hurry.

When I’m a little more advanced, I’ll probably be able to sort my bookmarks into different categories. At last I’m finding a viable alternative to my rather messy system of lists kept in Excel files, or worse even, on individual sheets of paper, loose bits and backs of envelopes, to be organized ‘tomorrow’, or more likely ‘never.’

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I hate to brag, but I like encouragement like everyone else, and this selection of quotes from e-mails that arrived in my inbox last week, really made my day…

‘…So anyway, thank you so much for all your very hard work. I thought you did a wonderful job altogether. It was a pleasure to work with you and I will be sure to keep your contact details for the next time. I’ll also pass on your details to anyone who may need help in Paris with interpreting needs.’

‘…Par ailleurs, je tiens à vous remercier de nous avoir rejoint ce 17 juin, votre prestation a été bien appréciée par nos collaborateurs anglophones.’

‘…All that stuff about translators isn’t really for you. We have been very happy with your work over the years.’

For many years now, I’ve got into the habit of keeping congratulatory comments in a corner of my office. All clients (including me) often forget to thank their service providers. These sweet messages are my insurance against rainy days, when everything seems to go badly, and a little encouragement like this is much better (even for your health) than a cocktail!

photo credit: debaird

I shouldn’t read other people’s posts. Seriously. I end up reading lots of stuff that is not directly relevant to anything I do.

Yet I find all those blogs fascinating, because they refer to things that are sometimes very different to what I can do/should do, and thus get me to think outside the box.

Like this one:

Joanna Young’s post took me to Wordle, and I started playing with it using a selection of words from my tag cloud. (It helped that I had completed all my urgent jobs!!!)

First experiment got me this:

A little bit of tweaking colors, layout, etc. and I came up with this one (strictly identical in terms of colors, font, background colors).

Mmmmm…

I’m left wondering why I find the bottom one more “acceptable,” when the top one “appeals” to me as being untidy, yet more creative?

Apparently simple things like that tell you more about yourself than all the manuals you could read on the subject. Translating is a mental and cognitive activity that requires order and method. But it also needs some creativity. Maybe that’s the explanation?

A better explanation, anyone?

This is just a transitional post, to acknowledge the fact that I’m moving from extremely busy to plain busy…

I have a puzzle for you faithful readers.

It’s my birthday, and my age today matches my year of birth.

Leave a comment if you think you have guessed.