Oops! I had a long break from blogging. But you will have me excused. I was in the middle of a big project and I realized that I needed to step on it. 

I had to outsource some of my work, and even  then it was necessary for me to increase my capacity. There is an interesting thread here (https://shar.es/1OvVCW) about what daily word capacity should be expected of a translator, and what translators expect of themselves. As many opinions as there are translators, or even more. ;-)

Anyway, I found that I could go up to 4000 words and sustain it. I believe that on some days my capacity peaked as high as 5000 words. This morning the last pieces of the big project left my outbox.
And after that, during the next four hours I translated some 2500 words for another client and took half an hour to review it after translation. The document was slightly technical, and this shows that 4000 words is attainable, depending, of course, on the subject matter.

January 4th, late, late evening. Let me jot down a few words about the translator’s dilemma in the 21st century. On the one hand we are expected to use CAT tools and offer CAT discounts, but on the other we often receive documents for translation in a format which is not directly editable, for example PDF.

A few more recent versions of SDL Trados Studio can convert PDF files into their internal SDLXLIFF format and produce a Word file with translation at the end, but this process is not without problems. Once I converted a large PDF file, did the pseudotranslation and roundtripping test just to be on the safe side, but I wasn't on the safe side anyway! When I was done with my translation, the final document failed to export, even though all tags were correct.

That is why I prefer to use ABBYY Finereader to prepare PDF files for translation. And on top of that I mark text, table and image areas manually, to have ultimate control over layout. It is tedious work, but it pays off later.

It so happens that until January 10th new Finereader licenses are available with a 30% discount, for Windows: https://goo.gl/Int8lB and for MacOS: https://goo.gl/W4gCwZ 

January 3rd, morning. So, I am not a perfectly regular blogger, but at least I am trying. :-)  One of the things I need to change after the holiday break is getting up earlier, because now I get up a bit too late. But I am not the one who has the biggest problem getting up. The worst offender is our daughter, I often have to take her to school by car, and sometimes this results in delivering a translation job a bit late. Thankfully, most of my clients can understand.

Hello World! New Year, so here I am, trying new things, like writing a blog for example. Wonder if I persevere though. I hope I will.

In case you're wondering who I am. I am an English-Polish translator. I have been in business since 1992. 

Here's a web page about my beginnings:
http://englishintopolish.eu/inscv.html

And here's a more professional intro: on Google+

This blog will be mostly about the professional side of my life and things I am interested in, sometimes not very strictly related to translation.

I hope you will come back here often,  though in the first half of January my post will be rather terse, because I have a lot of work on my hands. Which is good for me, I guess. ;-)