This is a completely subjective list. It features albums that, with one exception, were all made between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties. I’ve been listening to them for years and when I really need to concentrate, I shut the door and put this playlist on. I make no excuse for the fact that it’s exclusively Eno (et frère) and Budd, the two have shaped relax music single-handed in recent years. Most discerning people will already have them or at least know about them. If you don’t, enjoy.

Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno:

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks The so-called (although not by himself), inventor of ambient music. This album was part of the soundtrack to For All Mankind, a film that documented the Apollo space mission to the moon. The film itself wasn’t released until many years after the album, by which time it had taken on a life of its own. A mixture of styles from the broody, atmospheric beginning to the country-tinged steel guitar of the later tracks, this was the first real ambient album I listened to. Like On Land, it evokes landscapes that are bleak and grey, not just lunar. As good a starting point to ambient music as you’ll get. Especially if you want to clear your head for any reason.

Harold Budd/Brian Eno:

Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors. The first of Brian Eno’s two collaborations with Harold Budd. It features Budd playing sparse, rambling piano with Eno’s “treatments” and sythsisers interjecting and underpinning at the same time.
The Pearl The second Budd/Eno collaboration. This one seems more languid, Budd in his drifting, dreaming Satie-esque style and Eno with treatments, echos that seem to underpin and continue the notes.

Brian Eno:

Ambient 4: On Land. The darkest of the ambient set. The ideal soundtrack to walking through windswept, grey landscapes, it’s a brooding, at times threatening wasteland. This is real ambient music and the antithesis to all that new age pap that purports to create atmospheres and relaxation.
Music for Films. Reminiscent of Eno’s work with David Bowie on his Berlin albums (Low, Heroes and Lodger), this is a collection of pieces brought together for various works produced between 1975 and 1978. The album was intended as “possible” music for “imaginary” films and sent to producers for possible inclusion. Three of them actually made it into films, Sparrowfall (1) to John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and Slow Water in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee and Final Sunset to Breathless. Although it is a compilation, it hangs together pretty well as a work in its own right.
Neroli & Thursday Afternoon are both single composition pieces about one hour long. More “problematic” for some listeners than the earlier works, they are worth persevering with. Individual notes are given poignancy and weight and even more than elsewhere, the silences express as much as the notes to themselves.

Roger Eno:

Harold Budd:

The White Arcades & The Room You can see a definite link between these two albums and the earlier work with Eno. The White Arcades is a lush affair, it’s music that envelops with its rich piano and synth passages. It’s the opposite of Eno’s dark and moody Ambient 4, it has an almost other-worldy quality that looks for beauty, rather than to threaten. The Room is the best of Budd’s albums without Brian Eno, expanding on one track on The White Arcades, it’s minimalist exercise that merits being put on a loop and being played constantly.

I get a childish excitement when I discover a new technology. It might have something to do with watching Tomorrow’s World and other new technology programmes when I was a kid. All the cool kids may just think communicating without wires is run of the mill, but I thought it it was pretty good.

When I started translating I didn’t even have a fax machine. I delivered the first few jobs I did to the one local client I had on my bike. It was a good distance away and up and down hills, so at least I got fit. I got a drink when I arrived and sometimes even lunch. It wasn’t however the best and most efficient way of running a business.

In 1998 I bought a modem

I’m not sure whether it was 1200 or 2400 bit/s, but even then, it was an antique. I was however able to send faxes. And receive them. Faxes had been around since the 1970s but these were the first time they had been sent directly to me – sad perhaps.

I remember the first time I transferred a file electronically

I used a French programme called Winphone to transfer a file to a client in Paris using the aforementioned modem and the Z modem protocol. It took a few attempts and the client was starting to get impatient, but in the end the file got through. I felt like I’d split the atom!

I tried getting on the Internet with a 2400 bit/s modem

Ever the optimist, of course it was painfully slow. What’s more I did with an audience of someone I wanted to impress. And I looked stupid.

Then I got a 14000 bit/s modem and got on the Internet

I installed three or four programmes without being too sure of what I was doing. My new modem was super fast and I could actually display whole pages on my screen in a few seconds on a 14″ screen. Welcome to the modern world.

Broadband

Today, we all take a broadband Internet connection for granted. Most people wouldn’t be able to run a business without one. I lived in a rural area of France at the time which was one of the last in line to get a high-speed connection, I’d almost considered moving to somewhere larger just to get it. Then, it suddenly happened, I got it just before moving to the UK. The phone could ring and I was still online, yippee! I wasn’t worrying any more about whether I’d used up all my time allowance on my crummy dial-up package (30 hours I seem to remember).

Since then?

It’s been a bit humdrum really, modem speeds have increased through the 56000 bit/s barrier to broadband speeds of, depending where you live, up to 100 Mbit/s. Disks sizes have grown exponentially. All same as, same as really. It hasn’t given us much really.

Social media

Then social media came along. Some people are still sceptical, but I think it’s a real game changer. Not just Twitter, Facebook and blogs, but ever since Amazon started putting product reviews by actual users up against the product descriptions, the way we do business changed. I still haven’t been using Twitter for very long, Facebook even less, but I’ve had more connection with potential clients than ever before. I’ll never send (or probably even write) a direct mail letter ever again.

We take these communication technologies for granted today and I’m sure I’ll get excited about more of them in the future. I hope I never lose that thrill. Am I wrong?

I gave up on the job I was doing last night at midnight and went to bed, shivering. I haven’t had that feeling for about 10 years and in fact, I don’t do ill. Then I started burning at the same time that I was shivering. Oh dear. The trouble is that your mind starts racing away with all kinds of ideas at that time of night. I had the flu jab in October for the first time in my life. But I didn’t have the swine flu jab! This morning it was worse. Headache, cold sweat, no energy. I had to finish the job (and a horrible one at that), but as soon as I had, I went back to bed with the idea of sleeping it off. A doorbell ringing and a couple of phone calls later, I was beginning to think that was a silly idea.

To be honest, I’ve felt terrible all day. Just in case you’re thinking, this isn’t a case of man ‘flu. I work through that – I can’t afford not to. Which leads me to a question. What do freelancers do when they get sick? Do they get sick any less than anyone else? Do they deserve any sympathy?

Post scriptum: It’s Sunday 14th now and I’m over the bug; the phone did ring a few times and I tried to be as professional as I could (if only they knew I was in bed!), I read a lot, watched a couple of films and reset my body. The world didn’t collapse but I’ve had to work all weekend to catch up.

I did a silly thing the other day. I accepted a job from a regular client without asking what the subject was. It’s the kind of bread and butter job that translators rely on. 3500 words is not too short and not too long, the kind of stuff that keeps us going. All the PMs in the agency know what I like doing and what I don’t, but for once it was the big boss who called me. Perhaps I was so surprised it was him, I didn’t think to ask. More fool me. When I opened the file, I realised what the subject was. Refrigeration. Oh deep joy. I think I’d rather have my teeth pulled.

Let’s face it, life as a freelancer isn’t always perfect and we all get boring jobs to do from time to time. So how do you manage a day’s work without yawning?

Allow plenty of time

Boring jobs always take longer than they should, however well disciplined you are.

Make a plan

If it’s a translation, read the entire document first and identify the difficult bits, look for as much vocabulary as possible before you start, it’ll make the job flow better when you start. If it’s writing, do all the research first and plan it out. It’ll spread the pain out a bit and get the job done just that bit quicker.

Break it down into stages

When I was a kid, to stave off the “are we there yet?” question, my parents broke journeys down into bit-size chunks. I still do that with large jobs by counting the number of words left. It’s a great motivator because I find myself measuring performance from
one hour to the next. It also works for the short boring stuff. Writing jobs benefit from establishing milestones and achieving them. You’ll get there quicker (honest…)

Take breaks

Reward yourself with something nice. Coffee and a biscuit? A walk around the block? Twenty minutes daytime TV? Whatever works for you.

Sleep on it

I know I can hear legions of translators laughing at this. We just don’t get time to sleep on this generally because most clients don’t know the meaning of the word “reasonable deadlines”. Having extra time to review an intersting document is always a good thing, with a boring one it’s a lifeline because you’re more prone to make mistakes.

I had a rant last week about never having time to do anything. Not very professional really, so I thought I’d better redress the balance.

One of the beauties of being a freelancer is the ability to work when you want. Or that’s the theory anyway, the reality is that you’re generally rushed off your feet (if you’re any good anyway) and you don’t know what a weekend is. I’m generally a useless time manager, I fall into these pitfalls from time to time, but when I’m on a good day, this is what I do.

1. Make a plan and stick to it. A good old fashioned task list. It doesn’t matter whether you write it in some flashy time management software or on a grubby piece of paper, get it down.

2. If you can, set yourself goals to complete every hour. I find that motivates me.

2. Turn off the email, Twitter, Facebook etc

4. Shut the office door, break only at times you pre-arrange with yourself. A kind of working contract.

5. Do regular tasks at set times. Get unpleasant things like the accounts out of the way on a Monday morning. Get a system because we all know things work better with a system don’t we?

6. No food (except lunch), reading, television or any other breaks (coffee’s fine, part if the pre-arranged stuff)

7. Make sure your family is understanding. Just because you work from home doesn’t mean to say you have time to do all the household chores. Whatever you use to earn your livelihood is an office. Treat it as such.

8. Don’t have rows with your family either. There’s nothing better to kill your concentration than a row.

9. Get some sleep. If you’re really tired, now amount of caffeine or Red Bull will cover up for it. We all burn the candle at both ends as freelancers, but there comes a time when the body says “no”. I write this of course at 1.14 in the morning with my body telling me it’s time for some shut eye.

10. Don’t be afraid to give up from time to time and do something else. Especially if you’re a creative and inspiration won’t come. Do something else on the task list, something mundane preferably, you’ll feel refreshed if you do.

Last week I finally cracked. My Windows XP partition had lasted two years on my MacBook Pro, for as long as I’d had it. It had come close to being wiped a few times in the past but had always won a stay of execution because there had always been a job on so I didn’t have time to reinstall all the applications. I’d cleaned out the temporary files more times than I cared to remember but they’d gradually eaten up all the free disk space like spam in an email Inbox causing the thing to grind to a halt again. It was going to have to go.

I only use Windows because my translation software doesn’t run on anything else. I’m looking at Mac-based systems but have yet to find the right work flow. All my other work is on OS X and increasingly through a web browser, like writing this post.

I’m careful with my work files. As I work on a desktop and a laptop, I always have two, if not more copies of each. At the end of each year, I burn everything to DVD to have an extra back up or an archive. So I’m pretty much covered with back-ups.

Even so, I did another back up, with Apple’s Time Machine this time, just for good measure.

There’s something thrilling and scary about wiping a disk. I pressed the Erase button at let the process roll. Mac OS was installed quickly and I did the partition to install Windows 7. Once that was done, I went back to OS X restore my data.

I’d never restored data from Time Machine before but it was surprisingly easy. The Documents and Downloads folders came back fine, the Desktop too. Then it stopped. No Applications.

I looked around, I restarted the process. Nothing. Then I remembered, I’d excluded Applications or Applications Support from the back up to save disk space.

Always have a back up, everyone says it. Just remember to back up everything you want to restore.

Who said that the advantage of being a freelancer was that you could choose the hours you worked?

I’m lying in bed at the moment writing this on the Wordpress app on my iPhone. Luxury eh? The alarm’s on for 5 tomorrow morning so I might have a sporting chance of finishing a project by the end of the week. I’ve been at it since last week, all over the weekend and 10 hours yesterday and today. And I turned some more work down yesterday.

The good bit is that I’m taking Friday afternoon off. And Saturday (well, I’ll be formatting my Windows partitions on my Macs), and Sunday and most of Monday.

So that’s what they meant about chosing when you worked…

What with plummeting rates and ever-demanding clients, life can be a bit tough for translators at the moment. Lots of businesses think that computers can produce acceptable translations, so why bother employing someone to do it?

I sit here in my comfortable Western European economy, albeit one that’s struggling a bit, and it’s easy to see the arrival of low-fee translators working in emerging economies as a threat. Quite frankly, I don’t. So what’s the best way of surviving in this new world situation?

Be better than the others

Quality is paramount in any business, but even more so in translation. It’s the job par excellence where you’re only as good as your last piece of work. Deliver quality, the best you can, all the time. Sounds obvious doesn’t it? Have you you never been tempted to cut a corner or two. “Oh, that’ll do”, “I’ll make it up next time”, the best way to lose a client’s trust is to do it gradually. A big howler can often be forgiven, 5 mediocre jobs might not be. Which means you should

Cultivate your relationships

Your clients are all human beings. They have husbands, wives and partners. They have kids, they have interests and they have problems. Basically they all have lives. Just like you. Just talk to them, if you get the opportunity, meet with them, take them out to lunch. A strong personal relationship with your clients will help you weather the storm when things do go wrong (and they will).

Specialise

The best way of making yourself the best is to specialise in a limited number if subjects and turn down any job, however big, in a subject area you’re not too sure about. I was mad enough when I first started to take on almost everything that was offered to me. My first job was medical (how mad was that?), I did engineering, a 9,000 word construction job without a single punctuation mark and more than one tooling machine job. I learnt my lesson pretty quickly. Remember that there are two types of translator, the specialist ones and the hungry ones.

Read

In both source and target languages. Especially in the target. Read in your specialist areas because that will keep you up to date with modern language but also modern and classical literature because that will teach you style. Remember, you are first and foremost a writer in your mother tongue. You just happen to be able to translate from another language.

Target markets that you’re interested in

It’s just common sense to target areas you are interested in because the work you do will be better. You would be very lucky to only get interesting jobs, but a high proportion will be stimulating. Spreading your scope too much will mean you attract jobs that you’re not good at and you will invariably find boring.

Customer service

Rule one of customer service (in fact the only rule of customer service), create expectations and exceed them. So always deliver on time, and when you can, early. There is no excuse for not doing this. When life gets in the way and things do go wrong, you must communicate with your client. No-one likes being kept in the dark. And often you have more time than you think because the real deadline is further away than you’ve been told. Just pick up the phone and have the conversation.

Admit to your mistakes

No-one (not even you) is perfect. We all have bad days from time to time. Admitting to it and learning from the mistakes you made will drastically reduce the chances of it happening again. Failing to own up will only make things worse.

When your client is wrong, stand your ground.

I had a client last year that radically changed the text of a marketing brochure I’d translated (marketing agencies, always think they know better!). The modified text was riddled with errors. I wrote back listing them all and why they were wrong. They paid up.

Stay away from aggregator sites

Bidding for jobs on line may seen like a good idea. Unfortunately, you’ll get into a price war which will only end up with one result. You’ll perhaps make a living, but it won’t be a great one. Apply these other techniques with a few carefully targeted agencies or direct clients and you’ll be a fulfilled translator and a (slightly) richer one.

Once Christmas Day is over, my thoughts turn to the New Year. What’s going to happen? What are my plans? This year, I’m taking what has worked best over the previous 12 months and using that to develop things next year. So any bankers or benefactors out there with deep pockets, here’s my business plan!

twitter

- I’ve only been on Twitter for about three months. In that time, I’ve made contact with influential people in my business, been asked to write guest posts on other people’s blogs and won a contract to write a blog for a travel insurance company. There’s loads of advice out there about how to make a success of Twitter, but when it comes down to it there’s only a couple of things to remember. Be helpful, be interesting (no descriptions of breakfast) and engage with people.

bilingual marketing

- Developing markets across the world don’t just mean developing markets in English. Google may be forecasting a mainly Chinese-speaking Internet for the near(ish) future, but products are still marketed in hundreds of different languages.  I’ll be Tweeting and blogging in French to help the English-challenged French get their message across in our language.

video

- YouTube and live television channels have shown businesses and consumers that video streaming and downloading is a viable proposition. I have partnerships in place that will take off next year writing scripts for an making films to promote and help businesses on line.

personal branding

- Twitter, Facebook, blogs. So many places to go, so many opprtunities to develop an image. Brand myself or my blog, or both?  All those questions will be answered.

blogs

- New blogs will appear in 2010, particularly on music, watch this space.

Of course, there are plenty of other things to be considering. What about Twitter business accounts? Will it still be around? Will News Corp finally succeed in reducing the once-promising My Space to a niche where only bands wanting to promote themselves go? e-books, online courses, offline media. As someone once said, the future’s bright.