The event was particularly useful for translators working on creative texts, such as marketing copy, but most of the tips provided can be universally applied to other specialist fields.

Here are my take-aways from the event:

Top tips:

• Remember that as a translator you’re also a professional writer
• Trust your instincts
• Imagine yourself as an actor, giving the text a voice
• If you’re struggling, look at each paragraph in turn and break them down to establish what each is talking about
• Careful of ‘translationease‘ such as the phrase ‘in terms of’ - look for ways to re-word this
• When editing, remember to keep the text snappy by pruning superfluous words (particularly applies to Latinate languages)
• Always take a break before the final read-through of your translation
• Try printing out the text in a different font for your proofread, to create distance and objectivity
• Try reading your translation aloud, paying attention to rhythm
• Invest in a style guide
  
• Four eyes are better than two!

Book recommendations:

• Stephen King ‘On Writing’
• William Zinsser ‘On Writing Well’
• Jack Lynch ‘Online Usage and Style Guide’
• The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market (Perfect Paperback)

One thing that particularly struck me during the group activity was that as translators we have a reputation for getting obsessive and overzealous about what we perceive to be mistakes in a text, but which may simply be a newer term, or a term used by a particular industry. The way I see it, our role is to be linguists observing language and how it changes, not prescriptive grammatarians. Each industry tends to have its own dialect, and sometimes our role is also about speaking our clients’ language.

Happy writing!

First up was ‘EU Terminology and other EU Reference Material‘, jointly organised by the ITI office and Fiona Harris from the DGT. I attended this course yesterday afternoon at the European Commission Representation office near St. James’s Park.  On the agenda were presentations by Professor Margaret Rogers of Surrey University, a well known terminology expert, and Timothy Cooper, senior terminlogist at the DGT, and chair of the committee that oversees IATE. We discussed topics such as the importance of maintaining a terminology database, even if it means investing a little time in maintaining it. Professor Rogers argued that not only is it important to maintain a well organised terminology database, but that each entry should ideally also contain ‘metadata’ (e.g. definitions, context, register etc.) in order to be truly useful for a translator.

Most of the attendees were already very familiar with IATE, so Timothy Cooper focused on introducing some of its finer points, such as its quite powerful search and star functions. He also gave a brief history of IATE and how it was developed, in addition to the DGT’s famous style guide, and the ‘Fight the Fog’ style guide, which many attendees hadn’t seen before.

I’m now on my way, as I write, to the ITI Scotnet’s ‘Style Matters’ workshop in Perth. This event offers an opportunity for creative exploration and exchanging ideas with some of the best names in the business. It always surprises me how much I can learn just by working with colleagues on a translation - there’s not always a ‘right’ answer in translation, after all. The tutors are Chris Durban and Ros Schwartz, so we’re guaranteed a first class workshop. Next week I’m attending City University’s ‘Commercial and Corporate Law’ course, to hone my legal translation skills and general knowledge of this area of law. I think I can safely say I’ll have covered quite a few CPD bases by the time the month is out! I’ll write a couple of short posts about these events too.

If you’re a translator on LinkedIn and/or Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that a bit of a firestorm broke out earlier this week after LinkedIn put out a survey to professional translators with profiles on its site asking whether they’d be prepared to help translate their website into other languages for free (with a token amount of PIE - not the edible kind - thrown in). Within minutes, the Twittersphere was ablaze with fury and a group called ‘Translators against crowdsourcing by commercial companies’ was rapidly set up within LinkedIn itself, where members vented their increasingly angry thoughts about the very suggestion that LinkedIn would crowdsource free translation of its site from among its members. A couple of translators have already written very well-argued blog posts about it here and here.

This mini-drama has made it clearer than ever that as a professional community we are concerned about having an image problem, about being taken for a ride, about being the ‘little man’ against big business. I couldn’t agree more that offering our translation services for free is really only appropriate for a client with a very good cause but minimal budget - the latter is certainly not the case with LinkedIn - but perhaps we should now turn our considerable collective energy to showing The Big Wide World just why they would get  a better service from a professional translator paid a professional fee. It’s not enough to complain and say “pah, you obviously don’t know how great we are as professionals”, we must *demonstrate* this somehow. A professional service really is worth its weight in gold, so let’s focus on the positives and on all the great things we *can* do for the money we charge. We really showed what we can do when we unite as a professional community this week - let’s put that to good use.

After a delightful evening meal at the library of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (the main conference venue), we reconvened early the next morning for another day of presentations, chat and lots of coffee. I felt that there was a perceptible shift on the second day towards the more practical, day-to-day aspects of translation and interpreting, with the emphasis on technology, work-life balance and professional development.

The day started with yours truly - co-presenting with Sarah Dillon. We’d done a lot (and I mean A LOT - see Sarah’s write-up) of preparation and research for our presentation, and it was both terrifying and exhilarating to finally be able to share it with our professional community in this way. We basically offered a whistlestop tour of the concepts behind social media and web 2.0, the type of online tools available, and how language professionals might best use them. Sarah did a demo of some novel uses of LinkedIn and Tweetdeck which appeared to be new to many delegates.

We had a small technological hitch along the way, with our remote presentation tool throwing a wobbly halfway through. Although it had worked fine in our tests, we had foreseen this happening, so managed to remain calm and carry on thanks to  our backup plan (a PowerPoint file containing screenshots). However, I think that our key messages still came through - that these tools are not scary or difficult to use, that they allow YOU to be in control of how much information you receive, that not every one of these tools will be right for you, and that’s OK, but that the online world is changing - big time. It’s almost a case of ‘find a manageable way to keep up, or get left behind’. I think these messages were fairly well received, and Sarah and I have been really, really excited to see more ITI members venturing onto Twitter, for example.

Watch this space for more news on our presentation, as we already have plans to make a recorded version of our presentation available at Slideshare and perhaps even to publish our research, thoughts and findings as an ebook via  Lulu. The ITI Conference website will also be uploading copies of every presentation early next week - go to  www.iticonference.org.uk.

Our session was followed by a panel discussion entitled ‘Where to draw the line?’ with Nick Rosenthal, Iwan Davies, Patricia Sommer and Paul Appleyard.  A few questions had already been sent to the panel in advance, focusing on the usual suspects such as how to chase late payment. We were reminded that it is important to operate a rigorous policy when dealing with late payments - don’t take any prisoners, and operate a zero tolerance policy, but remember to remain professional and courteous in all dealings with clients.

Next up was Dr. Steve Vincent from Leeds University Business School, on the subject of work-life balance for knowledge workers. Steve challenged the phrase ‘work-life balance’, suggesting that it was more an issue of ‘work-life conflict’ - this is a description that I also personally feel is more appropriate. Siobhan Soraghan, a business coach, ran the next session, again on work-life balance. Siobhan has personal experience of ‘burn-out’, and proposed that we check in with ourselves and our working/non-work habits and rationally analyse them.  We are all busy people, we all wonder how we’ll get everything done with just 24 hours in the day, so Siobhan suggested that in order to avoid burnout, in our daily tasks we should prioritise our endless lists of things we ‘need’ to do, by asking ourselves which of them are both important and urgent. The most important asset in each of our businesses is our health, and this needs investment through ’self-sustainability’ activities. To read more about Siobhan’s work, visit: http://www.active-insight.com

A truly original and inspirational presentation came next, by Phil Goddard on ‘Finding a work-life balance crossing America’. Some readers may already know about Phil’s 3000 mile walk across the USA for charity, but for those who don’t I urge you to visit http://anenglishmaninneworleans.blogspot.com and  www.nytola.com. Impressively, Phil found that he was still able to work on translation jobs while he was away, and often found himself delivering jobs from his laptop at random hours of the day or in unusual places - this really showed us just how ‘mobile’ it is possible to be these days if you really want to be.

Reinhard Schaler, founding editor of the Journal of Specialist Translation (JosTrans), and founder and director of the  Localisation Research Centre at the University of Limerick, presented a session entitled ‘Where is translation technology going?’. Reinhard started by stating a problem: there is more material out there online than translators can translate. Some examples: 40% of Facebook users are not using English, but Facebook’s mission statement is to make their product available in ALL languages. Their way of tackling this has been to crowdsource volunteer translators from within their existing user base - collaborative translation where users can comment on and update translations in order achieve a final version. This is a controversial practice among translators, and rightly so in some cases, but I am minded to agree that it is the most effective method for a product such as Facebook - after all, none of the language used on it is highly complex, and wouldn’t its users be best placed to understand the terms in context? The fact of allowing users to update other entries, Wikipedia style, would also go some way to resolving translation errors and stumbling blocks.

I attended the translation technology parallel session run by Ana Luiz Iaria. Ana is well known to be very knowledgeable on this subject, and took us through a run-down of productivity tools, back-up, tag verifiers etc. Look out for Ana’s presentation on the ITI Conference website to see the links to the tools she introduced us to.

And so the conference drew to a close, and there were a lot of tired but happy faces in the audience. To finish up, we discussed ways that the ITI is supporting the profession, with training courses and several new initiatives in the pipeline for the coming 12 months. Despite the feeling of tiredness I could sense we were all experiencing, I could also feel the unmistakable sense of renewed enthusiasm, new ideas and new contacts we so often come away with from conferences. At their best, conferences and any indeed any gathering of freelance professionals remind us why we’re in this profession, and help spur us on to develop ourselves and our businesses. I can safely say that this was one such event.

At the conference I attended last November, I decided to ‘live tweet’ from the event. But this time somehow the mood just didn’t take me, and I also knew that a few other delegates, particularly @nickrosenthal and @serenadorey would be tweeting updates, so I knew it would be well covered. Not to mention the fact that I was cripplingly nervous about my Sunday morning appearance as a speaker, so was rather distracted by that! So, I stuck to good old-fashioned paper notes this time, and here are my thoughts:

The conference had 3 key themes: ’sustaining the profession’, ’sustaining the professional’ and ‘moving with the times’; each  session being built into these. The Saturday morning began with the keynote speaker, Katerina Germanis from the FSC, describing the FSC’s work, and also giving a brief insight into its translation needs. This set the tone for the weekend very well. It seemed clear to me that the FSC are currently rethinking their translation ’strategy’ and assessing how best to proceed, so there may be some interesting developments there.

Next up was Helen Wolfson, international coordinator at Friends of the Earth, who gave a great overview of some of the work they do. Helen (clearly a very experienced and talented speaker) explained that FOE work with 3 official languages, and all their material needs to be available in each of these, meaning that their translation needs are huge. I was so impressed with the presentation, I decided to join FOE!

One of the most eye-opening sessions for me came up next: ‘Where have the translators gone?’, by Klaus Ahrend, Fiona Harris and Terry Clough of the DG Translation. I wrote a blog post a while ago about this, when the problem of sourcing talented into-English translators first arose in the mainstream British media, but I really had no idea that the problem had got so serious so quickly. About 1/3 of their staff translators are due to retire in the coming years. Some figures for you:

• In 2000, they worked with 10 language pairs and had 185 translators
• In 2004, they worked with 19 language pairs and had 222 translators
• In 2008, they worked with 22 language pairs and had 156 translators
• Their order volume has gone from €1.2m in 2005, to €3.8m in 2008.

As you can see, the general trend is fewer and fewer suppliers, against increasing (and wider) demand.  A particular problem is finding high standard English translators for the languages of the newer EU members. This is something Fiona Harris is seeking to address, namely by starting a MAJOR awareness-raising campaign (even using Youtube videos!).

According to Marcel Lemmens of Teamwork Vertaalworkshops, a similar situation is unfolding with the Dutch language. He explained there is a mismatch in the market in terms of Dutch>English translators. There is a major shortage, and only 2 universities in the UK offer translation courses where students are able to have Dutch as their source language. Marcel also emphasized one of the key take-home messages of the conference - that target language writing skills are the single most important skill in translation.

I really, really relished the next sessions - a series of presentations from recent MA in Translation students from assorted universities across the UK. They gave us a brief overview of their dissertations, which varied from translation gains in the international reporting of Chinese leaders’ speeches, to issues surrounding working as a sign language interpreter. You can read about some of the graduates in interviews on Sarah Dillon’s blog.

The conference then moved back towards an environmental theme, with a presentation by Cat Akana of Blue Planet Multicultural, a translation company specialising in the environment. I think our eyes were opened to just what a dire situation we’re in, in terms of the environmental challenges that lie ahead, and we were reminded of the need to take action now, before it’s too late. In fact, as Cat pointed out, climate change is happening NOW, and peak oil may already have happened, meaning that the ‘future’ we still assume to be far off may already arrived. Some of us may have noticed translating more and more environment-themed texts, and this is likely to continue to increase.

We were then treated to a fascinating presentation by Silvia Ferrero, owner of MediaLoc, on the games localisation industry. I’m not very familiar with this type of translation, but learned alot about what is involved, including a high degree of creativity and sometimes rewriting in order to achieve the best final result.

As we moved towards wrapping up the 1st day, we discussed contingency planning with a panel of experts. Questions from the floor included (paraphrased) ‘how safe is the internet?’, ’should I use online word processing tools?’ and ‘how often should I back-up my work?’. We were shown techniques in supporting mobility and flexibilty through folder and software syncing, how to boot from Linux in the event of a system failure, and how to link your main PC to others in your office. The main message from this session was that we should never just rely on ONE solution, contingency planning means preparing for several eventualities.

The final session was by Liz Robertson, Chair of the Association of Translation Companies, entitled ‘Sustainable relationships in a recession’. I really enjoyed Liz’s presentation, and particularly appreciated how well she set the tone for the 2nd day (and for our presentation). Her key points were that translators and translation companies are usually seen as 2 separate groups, that there was a lack of mutual recognition. Instead we should be focusing more on working in cooperation, since we already share a common goal. Her take-home points were: 1) know your client, 2) understand yourself and 3) ask for feedback, and welcome it when it comes.

This is a bit of a rhetorical question, as I think most people would probably agree that we do!

More probing questions you may wish to consider are:

Have women’s voices got deeper in recent years?

Do women find it hard to carry authority in their voices?

Do women talk more than men?

Do men use language to put women down?

What is the ‘ideal’ female voice from an advertiser’s viewpoint?

Are there really big differences between men and women’s brains in terms of how they process language?

These were all questions discussed in this morning’s Woman’s Hour in an interview with Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford, and Professor Sophie Scott from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, prior to a conference this Sunday at the Institute of Contemporary Arts entitled ‘Our Speaking Selves’.

The half-day conference sounds absolutely fascinating - particularly the bit where they demo how ’stuttering’ can be induced in normally fluent talkers, by playing their own speech back to them when they are reading aloud - but I won’t be able to make it, as I’ll be around the corner at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, where I’ll be co-presenting with Sarah Dillon at the ITI Conference (set to be equally fascinating!).

Word in context: “Bernardo Atxaga’s ’s abecedary of war starts with a malevolent flower and ends with the ultimate solution”

Definitions:

• Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):

Abecedary

(n.)
A primer; the first principle or rudiment of anything.

(a.)
Pertaining to, or formed by, the letters of the alphabet; alphabetic; hence, rudimentary.

• Hutchinson’s Dictionary of Difficult Words:

Abecedary (n.) book arranged in alphabetical order; elementary text-book. abecedarian, n. member of 16th-century German Anabaptist sect who refused to learn to read. a. alphabetically arranged.

• online casinoBabylon free online dictionary (user-generated content):

Abecedary
(n.) study book that starts at the beginning of a subject, the abc’s of a subject

• Wikipedia:

Abecedarium
An abecedarium (or abecedary) is an inscription consisting of the letters of the alphabet, almost always listed in order. Typically, abecedaria (or abecedaries) are practice exercises.

• Collins English Dictionary, 6th edition (2003)

Abecedarian

(n.) 1. A person who is learning the alphabet or the rudiments of a subject.

(a.) 2. alphabetically arranged.

History: from Late Latin abecedarius, from the letters a, b, c, d.

Unfortunately, although the modern economy is very much global, there are still those with a quite astounding lack of geographical knowledge of our global village, as seen in this video clip that’s been doing the rounds on YouTube for a long time now, but deserves another airing*. I love the kid sniggering as the contestant flails around in search of an answer:

* Sadly this ISN’T an April Fool’s joke.

Here’s a little progress report on the targets I set myself:

• Desk stretches: thanks to @bonnjill, a translator I had the good fortune to meet via Twitter and the blogosphere, I have discovered Workpace. This neat little (fairly unobtrusive) program that reminds you to take regular breaks from your desk and prescribes a series of exercises you can do (best thing about working from home: only the cat can see me do these :).  I usually obey Workpace and now take regular 5 minute breaks every hour or so. Gold star! Thanks Jill!
• Sitting position: well, not much of an improvement. My tendency to sit cross-legged at my desk has been my default setting for so long that it may take a lot of time and persuasion to change that…but still, at least I’m actually moving about more now (see above).
• Getting daylight: hmm, another one I need to work on. Work has been very busy lately and sometimes there literally isn’t time to get out while it’s light, but I do try to at least get out into my garden (especially to water the herbs and rocket leaves I optimistically bought a few weekends ago)
• Water: all good in this department I think. Gold star.
• Lunch: plenty of tasty food eaten, yum. Away from the desk? Not so much…that’s the problem of having too many interesting blogs to read ;)  Today, even though I ate my food at my desk, I did manage to get to the gym beforehand, so that must count for something. Half a gold star.
• Working late: hmm, a difficult one for a freelancer. My hours are not set in stone, so sometimes I will work later because it suits me. It’s hard to judge exactly how long my hours are each week, in that sense. A lot of time is still spent on the PC, but if I’m going to use a computer in the evenings or weekends, I’ve begun to make serious efforts to limit this and to use my laptop in a different room in order to offer some time away from the four walls of my office.
• Holidays: this has been the funnest target of all! I’m off to Portugal next week for a bit of R&R, and I’ve also booked my other half and I into a guest house for a night away from the city for our wedding anniversary shortly afterwards, and I’m currently compiling reams of bookmarks for places to go in the summer*.  I’m resolute that none of these holidays will involve me working, as we remember how that went last year. Two gold stars!

One of the first things cubicle-bound people normally ask me about freelancing is whether I find it hard to resist the temptations of daytime TV. After I ask them whether they’ve actually seen what’s on offer on daytime TV these days, I tell them that actually the biggest problem for me is resisting the temptations of my office, crazy as it sounds. I actually NEED programs like Workpace to be told to get up from my desk every now and then. So, I was relieved to read today that I’m not the only person who has this problem, Paul Boag wrote an inspiring guest post today on Ramblings of a Remote Worker called The Reality of Home Working.

I thought that Paul’s helpful hints about a homeworker’s workspace were spot on, especially about the importance of having a separate space to work in, if possible. I have a separate room in our flat where I can work with a nice big desk (upgraded recently - very good move) and proper office chair.

Sarah Dillon also wrote two great posts about this very recently on her blog, in which she asked readers to share pictures and descriptions of their home offices. Fascinating to be able to peek at other people’s offices! Everyone really does have a working style that suits their particular lifestyle and needs.

My next target is to try to put the ‘free’ back in my freelance lifestyle and being to work on a slightly more mobile basis. After a recent crisis with my wireless internet connection I decided to purchase a mobile broadband dongle so that I can do this more. I also decided that, even though I have quite enough space, that didn’t mean I needed to clutter it up with paper and machines. For example, I have a web-based fax service for that reason, rather than for reasons of not being tied to my office. In in all, although there are many ways for me to work away from my fixed desk now without it necessarily affecting how I work, like Sarah I still find that that working from a fixed home office for the majority of the time suits me best right now.

* On a separate note: In the interests of frugality (buzz word of the year already), our holidays this year will mainly be camping ones. Sites like Cool Camping show that you don’t need to spend a lot of £ to go on holiday in comfort and style.

While there may be around 7,000 distinct languages in the world today, many of them descend from the same roots and therefore share many similar characteristics.

Romance languages, for example, comprise all languages that have descended from Latin, and today equate to 700 million native speakers across the globe.

And this goes at least some way towards explaining why over a third of Lingo24’s translation projects contain at least one Romance language, with French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian ranking among the most commonly requested translations.

When is a rare language not a rare language?

Among the rarer Romance languages we’ve been asked to translate include Catalan and Galician, although between them they still have around 15 million native speakers.

Then there is the often-overlooked Romance language that isn’t all that rare at all. Romanian – spoken by around 30 million people worldwide (the majority of whom live in Romania, might I add) - is the 34^th most commonly spoken language in the world.

However, there are an estimated 47 Romance languages and associated dialects spoken throughout Europe, from the Swiss vernacular Romansh, with around 36,000 native speakers, to the Walloon language, spoken by some 600,000 people, located largely in Belgium.

Just how close is this language family?

As all translators will know, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to learn a second language. But with genetically-related languages such as Romance, there is often a certain degree of mutual intelligibility that aids understanding between the two languages.

The word ‘black’, for instance, can be ‘negre’ (Catalan), ‘noir’ (French), ‘negro’ (Galician/Spanish), ‘nero’ (Italian/Venetian), ‘neir’ (Piedmontese) or ‘negru’ (Romanian). And the word ‘shop’ can be ‘magazin’ (Romanian) or ‘magasin’ (French).

Of course, there are always the infamous false-friends that come along and ruin the show, such as ‘carte’ which could refer to a ‘book’ if you’re in Romania, or a map/card/ticket if you are in France.

Spanish and Portuguese, in particular, are similar to the point of having a significant degree of mutual intelligibility for speakers of these languages. And to make matters worse, they can look almost identical on paper to those who have had little exposure to either language.

And this caused Lingo24 a little bit of bother recently, after being asked to carry out an English to Spanish AND Portuguese translation.

After receiving the translated and fully proofread texts from us, the client asked if they could be reviewed again, as the translations seemed identical to each other!

However, this is not too uncommon, whereby we have to explain the subtle differences between two seemingly identical languages. But fortunately, most of our clients are only too happy to take the advice of an experienced translation company.

This can often mean explaining to clients the importance of using, for example, a Latin American Spanish translator over a Spanish translator. Although this news normally goes down rather well, given that it is generally cheaper to translate into Latin American Spanish than it is Spanish.

Similarly, we are often asked to translate between French and Canadian French, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese and even non-Romance languages such as UK and US English. The importance of localisation in a translation can never be understated, and this is a message that seems to be catching on across most industries.

Of course, whilst nobody can be held personally accountable for any similarities that exist between two Romance languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, it does serve as a timely reminder that, at a time when globalisation is one of the biggest business buzzwords, it certainly pays to be wary of the more subtle cultural and linguistic differences.

© Paul Sawers

“Arse, poo and widdle.” With this unholy trinity of coy expletives, Stephen Fry introduced us to the joys of Twitter earlier this month

By far the most disappointing report on Twitter that I’ve witnessed was on Newsnight yesterday evening. Apprarently Baroness Greenfield has piped up and said that communicating online is contributing to a rise in autism and is increasing the social isolation of children. Paxman had a couple of ‘experts’ on the show to discuss this. Watching this discussion felt a bit like watching the blind leading the blind, since nobody really seemed to have actually used Twitter or any other social media tool, despite professing to be experts on the matter. My favourite quote from one of them was “Children could be writing to people in another country who they’ve never met before”. Shock! Horror! Damnation! As someone who works at the global interface, I couldn’t quite understand why it would be such a terrible outcome for children to communicate with other children in different countries/cultures, provided that is done in a safe environment (remember internet parental controls?). My other half, equally bemused by the discussion, said to me “What about at school when we all had penpals abroad?”.

In reality, however, it’s not actually children who are using Twitter.  I’ll do my best to try to dispel that myth and others about Twitter here:

• Twitter is just for kids/teenagers/people under 25. Stats show that Facebook is still mostly used by the under 35s, but heavy users of Twitter are in fact more likely to be in the 25-45 age bracket. There is even a sizeable number of over 65s using it. I would (as have others) suggest that this is because the majority of Twitter users are on Twitter because they are mainly using it in connection with their work.
• Tweeters just send text messages to themselves to tell Twitter what they’re doing all day (I actually heard this description last week). Anyone who does that too much is pretty much an instant ‘unfollow’ for me - the most productive aspect of Twitter is that it helps people share news and information about their fields of interest or their occupation, with the occasional anecdote about their personal lives thrown in to show that they’re human.
• Twitter stops people from going out into the world and socialising in a normal way, and destroys peoples’ social skills. As with any new-fangled, revolutionary device, there is an initial ‘craze’ period, and a period where everyone scratches their head and worries that it signals the end of civilisation as we know it. I wasn’t alive at the time, so you’ll have to do your homework on this one, but sources tell me that people were worried about this when the telephone was invented too.

Twitter can help people build a ‘community’ of like-minded people, yes. This is a ‘community’ in the traditional sense of the word, nothing more sinister than that. That ‘community’ is a very valuable virtual water cooler for those of us who work freelance. I’m not sure how others working in open plan offices, for example, use Twitter. Perhaps they use it to reach out to virtual ‘colleagues’ beyond their immediate co-workers. That’s what it’s all about, folks. COMMUNICATION. BUT you still can’t beat socialising in person, and I’m pretty sure that most ‘normal’ Twitter users still do that. Perhaps even with someone they initially met on Twitter and found they had a lot in common with. There have always been reclusives,  and there always will be, with or without social media.

Feel free to share any other myth shockers you’ve come across, or even ones that you believe to be true.