A year ago today was the first day I devoted entirely to freelance translation work. This past year has been only a modest success financially: my 2015 income was about half my 2014 income, and YTD 2016 is on a trajectory to surpass 2015, but not by very much. Only 40% or so of my freelance income has been from translation, so I am lucky to have ( Read more... )

I'm back from taking the certification exam for the American Translators Association, which is the big professional credential for my new profession. I feel weird.

It's been a Guinea worm of a week - sounds awful, doesn't it? I meant it to. (Don't follow the link. Trust me.) - and I've been going through an unusually deep depression for the last ( Read more... )

Today is the first day in a while that I don't have a translation assignment to work on. I had been giving short shrift to other responsibilities in the press to Make My Deadline, even as I dithered away pieces of my days while on deadline because the assignment was so time-consuming. So I'm working to catch up on stuff that got sidelined ( Read more... )

I missed the fortieth anniversary of my very first ballgame earlier this week. June 29th, 1975: I know my mother and my late Aunt Alice (the biggest Mets fan in the family) took me but I don't remember who else was there. It was a Mets-Phillies double-header at the old incarnation of Shea Stadium, the one that looked like a Wonder Bread wrapper. ( Read more... )

When I set out on my serious freelancing almost two months ago, I came up with a set of good work habits to adhere to ( Read more... )

It says something about the loss of esteem psychoanalysis as a discipline has suffered that the YA biography of Sigmund Freud I just read is subtitled "Famous Neurologist." I did learn from it, however, that the Chinese have taken to the talking cure in a big way, and that psychoanalysis via Skype from US therapists is currently popular in China. ( Read more... )

My friend Andy from my crossword-puzzle competitor crew joined with some of his fellow young independent puzzle constructor friends to create a new crossword tournament, the Indie 500 in Washington, DC, which happened this weekend. I wanted to support a buddy, and I haven't done a tournament outside the ACPT on my own in a few years, so it was an ( Read more... )

On another forum, I received the following query from barking_iguana:

Maybe the most striking bit of political rhetoric I have ever read is from an 1868 speech by Cuban revolutionary Carlos Manuel Céspedes known as the Cry of Yara. I've only read translations. One of them and notes on the discrepancies ( Read more... )

Wow, I haven't posted since January ( Read more... )

I got up an hour early to vote this morning, got there a bit after 7 am and it was already a mess. I was first directed to the wrong line for my district; then, when I got to the right table, they couldn't find me in the book. So I had to fill out an affidavit ballot instead. I got a special ballot, and an envelope with red writing on it where I ( Read more... )