The Elastic Life

Despite a myriad of translation engines and web sites, human translation is still a very important job that requires a lot of experience and knowledge to be done properly.

It’s not just the language.

No-one in their right mind should tackle e.g. legal or technical translations if they’ve never worked in any of the fields (unless the job pays really, really well and it’s worth digging through books and Googling everything :)).

Translation work is well paid (and rightly so) - and thus quite expensive for the client.

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Image via Wikipedia

How many books do you read per month nowadays?

Two? One? Half a book?

If you’re a busy professional, perhaps not even that?

I’ve always found reading to be an essential part of personal development. Not blogs - I mean the normal, in-depth, catch every word - not just the headlines - reading ;).

Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed how my shelves started getting full of books I had no idea when I’d come around to read. Business books, fiction, language books, you name it …

Looming over me like a very pronounced shadow of outdated aspirations.

But why do I read less?

I suppose partly due to the standard reasons that we all face - apart from the apparent busyness, it’s ever-shifting interests and professional pressures that are making it increasingly hard to sit down and dive into one of the classics that you’ve always felt bad about not having read.

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An absolutely fascinating talk by Susan Blackmore about memes and “temes” and the way they control our everyday life by “having” to survive. A must-see.

I got my Woopra private beta login today and I’m impressed!

Woopra is an installable (Windows, Linux and Mac) application that displays web site analytics in real time, like a real (and beautifully designed) web general’s HUD.

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Of course there is more to a podcast than just words turned into audio (as you can clearly discover by listening to these fine examples) -

but Odiogo does a very good job of creating MP3 versions of your blog posts and posting them for your readers to play - either on the website itself or as a podcast on their iPods (or similar devices).

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