What are we up to in week 18?

Written on: May 04

Missed updating last week, sorry! Anyway, THIS week we’re having lots of fun…

  • Rescued a (very embarrassed) new client’s website – they’d machine-translated it via the web, launched it in country, and had terrible feedback (surprise!) just DAYS before a national newspaper published their advertorial. We had only 3 days to re-translate the pages into proper French before stuff hit the fan for them – we did of course, and a happy client tells us they’re now swamped in enquiries!
  • Delivered lovely big Health & Safety project – 80000 words in 3 languages in 6 weeks for a global blue-chip
  • Biscuits galore, with 8 new projects landing in the last week – busy generally on Food & Drink translation (including lots of typesetting) at the moment
  • Hospital and legal interpreting all over the place (of course) – Urdu, Cantonese, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Bengali, Lithuanian and Gujarati (and that’s just today!)
  • 13000 word proof reading project for an online portal in 5 languages
  • Finishing transcription of a 5-day international conference in Finland – just in time for a 3-day one to land!

And updated our main webpages for Google’s new +1 widget – look forward to seeing the effects of that! We’ll shortly be firing up our web Guestbooks too – we’ll post and tweet when these are live of course

That’s far from everything, but probably enough for now – should post another update next week!

What are we up to in week 16??

Written on: Apr 19

Welcome to our first weekly update! We’ve tried to tweet the major stuff before – and partially succeeded  – but now there’s just waaaay toooooo much happening and you can’t say a lot with 140 characters. So instead, every week or so we’ll try to blog a round-up of stuff we’re doing that may be of interest and tweet THAT instead – but we’ll still be tweeting other good bits so don’t stop watching.

So THIS week we have…

… and more. Plus, this week we’re at the UK National Conference of Business & Professional Women – this is a leading international women’s organisation, with Consultative Status at the UN. This year the event’s in Chester, and BPW NW region are proud to host this excellent networking forum. This follows their International Conference held in Helsinki.

 

But, busy = good!

 

Back next week with more… if we get time!

A Christmas Creole!

Written on: Dec 20

Don’t you mean “A Christmas Carol”?

Well, no - Christmas is a-coming… and the job file’s getting fat! It always goes a bit nuts near Christmas in the language world and this year’s no exception, with major projects  in charity, food and chemical products typesetting, reams of technical and financial translation, interpreting jobs all over the country and a great big bilingual transcription project coming in. And that’s without all the regular stuff…

So what’s the “Christmas Creole” bit about? Well, this month’s cool language is Haitian Creole - we have a lovely translator for this and we’re looking forward to our biggest project so far in this one! Then we’re going to typeset it… the main issue will be space, as Creoles tend to be quite a lot longer than English (in which the source document was laid out). It’s a fascinating language too – there’s more info on the Ethnologue page, and an excellent Wikipedia article on Creoles in general is here.