The minibar in your room contains refrigerated drinks and snacks! The drinks and snacks you consummated are put on your bill.

Turn your TV, by pressing button<1> at your remote control, on. Press button <TEXT>. The current time appears at the right top.

How much do you think this hotel spends daily on making their clients comfortable and satisfied? Hundreds of Swiss francs. Yet their total once-for-all translation investment must have been less than that. They made a very common mistake: they went for the ‘best offer’.

Does it matter? Probably not, once the client is safely in the hotel room, enjoying the free coffee machine, the comfortable, spotless beds, the warm, clean bathroom with its fresh, white towels and the beautiful view from the bedroom window. The translation howlers will just add to the enjoyment. But what about before they get to the hotel? What if a dreadful translation gives your potential client a bad impression from the outset? What if they don’t take you seriously, just because your translation budget was too tight?

Your website is often the first thing a potential client sees. If you target international clients at all, your translation budget must be on a par with your publicity and communication budget. If not, those clients may never come your way. Time and time again, I have seen businesses asking translators for their ‘best price’.  Why do businesses often underestimate the impact of a bad translation on their reputation? Simply because they don’t understand the target language and know very little about the translation process.

Read more here: How to choose a translator

I have had a lot of time to think during the past fortnight and one of the things I have been pondering about is how other freelancers cope with interruptions. You’re working flat out on a project (or several) and something crops up that you weren’t expecting. It could be anything, from a chatty neighbour dropping in for afternoon coffee, because she knows that you work from home (and everyone knows that people who work from home have time to sit and sip coffee all afternoon…) to more serious events such as illness, accidents or a death in the family. How do you deal with minor interruptions and life-changing events?

I usually try to ‘factor in’ minor interruptions when I accept a project, because they are part of daily life, so I can still have a – short – cup of coffee with my neighbour or help my husband when a cow decides it’s time she had that calf she’s been expecting for over nine months (yes, cows have nine-month pregnancies too, give or take ten days). I never take on same-day jobs, because you never know what might turn up during the day, especially if you’re married to a farmer. I usually promise to deliver in the morning rather than the evening, to avoid having to rush to make the deadline.

Big events are a different matter. I have never yet missed a deadline, but I have been known to work all through the night. It’s part of the job, as far as I’m concerned, and I am blessed with good health. What about you? If you’re a freelancer, you’ve come across this problem at some point. What do you do?

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Welcome to my very first blog post!  I’ve had this website for a few years, but I was using the very basic WYSIWYG site creator provided with my hosting account. Now, several years later, I have finally got a professional webmaster to customise this lovely TemplateLite WordPress theme, so I also have a blog.

The website is still ‘under construction’ as they say, so I hope you’ll be patient with me during the next few weeks, as I get my bearings. I’m still at the teething stage. Hmm. How’s that for mixed metaphors?

I have loads of ideas for this blog, but time will tell which ones will be developed and which will fall by the wayside. As you can gather from my homepage and the ‘about me’ section, I am a professional French to English translator. The primary aim of the website – which has served its purpose up to now, even in its previous basic, ugly form – is to provide a place for people to find me when they need someone to translate a document from French to English. There are dozens of translation-related blogs around, and I don’t feel that I have anything significant to add to the blogosphere in that respect.  However, I’m looking forward to using this space to share my passion for French and English words and expressions.  That’s why I’m calling it ‘French and English’. At the moment, the blog is only available in English, but I’m hoping that my amazing webmaster will come up with a French version of the website very soon.

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