Archive for the ‘business’ Category
The following is a summary to a long article here, from June 2009, when there seemed to be a fair amount of gloom around. It seemed to be inspired at least in part by a drip, drip, drip of news about salary freezes and cuts in the wider economy (e.g. Doncaster Council just yesterday; I’m […]
A new, yet also old, outrage has come to my attention of late. It’s new, inasmuch as the penny only really dropped yesterday that the delightful, relatively newly-created private-sector quasi-monopoly on court-related interpreting in the form of Applied Language Solutions’ love-in with our own glorious Ministry of Justice (sic) includes a further affront to my […]
(This was originally an article I posted in my Articles section in April 2009. I recently got involved in another discussion about tests and I haven’t posted since my holiday – yes, thanks, it was splendid – so here it is, tweaked just a tad.) Ah, indeed, tests, and the payment or otherwise thereof. An […]
Review here meaning the process of checking someone’s translation. Were I Samuel Johnson, I might be minded to define a reviewer as “an ideally, but regrettably not always, harmless drudge, that busies himself in comparing with the original, and detailing the shortcomings of others”. We can also assume that Muphry’s Law will at some point […]
(This was originally an article I posted in my Articles section in Feb 2009. That has now been linked to from elsewhere, so I’m replicating it here in case anyone wants to comment.) And so the question du jour is… Should beginners work at low(er) rates? Charging extremely low rates is a fairly common beginners’ […]
So, what about the legal/contractual side of this alleged trend in the industry to pay nothing whatsoever for 100% matches? (See original post here.) Not all jurisdictions are the same, of course, but this delightful crew are, happily, based in England so I can indulge in some bar-room level speculation. If you’re not getting paid […]
Another LSP is causing a minor stir with a unilateral change to its T&C, or so it would appear (I don’t work for them). Applied Language Solutions (ALS), who claim to “Respect everyone like a friend”, which seems a clumsy turn of phrase as well as an odd thing to say, have emailed the world […]
Some of the following was drifting in and out of my thoughts as I drafted the previous blog entry, and perhaps it would be helpful to add it here (as ever, part of the aim is to clarify my own thinking, none of which will probably turn out to be devastingly original). (And my apologies […]
Once again, in the interests of tying up loose ends, in this case from the comments section in my own Nov 2010 blog post “Who sets prices?”, I think I’ve managed to crystallise the logic behind my instinctive rejection of initiatives like those mentioned – No peanuts, the italia.it petition crew, the United Translators group […]
I promise to try to make this the last bit of blog-related navel gazing. I’ll also endeavour to make it the last post with an abysmal title including the word ‘blog’, but no promises on that score. Having been wondering who would read a freelance business-related blog and why, and possibly taken huge strides to […]