2020 Review

Yes, this is meant to be a post on style guides. I do have that all planned out but it didn’t seem particularly appropriate to the time of year. And what a year! 2020 has been a year of highs and lows both personally and professionally. While I plan to have a full on business retreat in the new year, I thought now would be a good time to take stock of 2020.

 

Some new additions to the family in early 2020.

Context

In early 2020, pre-pandemic, I started the ITI’s Advancing Your Freelance Translation Career course. It was online, to cater to a dispersed group of participants, and offered a fantastic opportunity to learn and meet other translators. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to kick their career up a gear.

Thankfully my partner and I moved in together the week before lockdown came into force. We both work from home so not a lot changed in our daily routines. Not being able to visit my mum in Spain for her birthday as planned was disappointing, but things could certainly have been worse.

Fortunately, I was very busy with a large translation project for the first six months of this year so that took my mind off being at home all the time and work has continued at a pleasant level since that project ended. I’m aware how very lucky I am to work in a sector that hasn’t been so badly impacted by the pandemic, though it has hit home how important it is to have contingency plans.

We did manage to get away in August for a week to a shepherds hut on a farm. We enjoyed the change of scenery and the outdoor activities. We’ve also joined the National Trust and made the most of their various outdoor spaces. We even managed to see inside two properties – all appropriately socially distanced – before harsher restrictions were brought in.

 

Weald & Downland Living Museum in the South Downs

At the start of October I ran a solo business retreat over two days to take stock of my business and set goals for the coming quarter and year. As we come to the end of the quarter in question. I’m pleased to report that I’ve achieved the vast majority of those goals. Perhaps I need to be a little more ambitious next time.

Lockdown 2.0 was pretty much the same as the previous stint, working from home, socializing online, and visiting National Trust properties and nature reserves on the weekends. Now I’m looking forward to Christmas. As a fairly crafty person, I can get a little hectic at this time of year trying to get gifts made in time. I am, however, truly bursting with excitement.

 

 Our trusty old tree that I'm too sentimental to replace!

 2020 Highlights

1) Rev Club: This year I joined two revision clubs, one for French and one for Spanish. We discuss our work, learn from each other and have a chat. I look forward to every meeting and find our exchanges incredibly valuable.

2) Network socials: The ITI East Anglia Network has been on top form when it comes to keeping everyone’s spirits up. We had weekly chats throughout lockdown, more structured chats as we got used to the new normal and an excellent Christmas do. The coordination team have done a superb job in a really difficult year.

The ITI Coffee Mornings have also been a lockdown highlight. With guests from the various networks sharing insights, tall tales and recommendations, these profession-oriented socials have been a joy.

More recently I’ve joined MET – Mediterranean Editors and Translators – and  I’m looking forward to participating in more of their events. I’ve already gotten stuck in with the Christmas party on Thursday and a couple of virtual co-working sessions (amusingly named VCOWs).

3) Clients: My business would be nothing without my clients and I’m fortunate that they are all a pleasure to work with. I’ve met some great new clients working for worthwhile causes with interesting projects and strengthened relationships with existing clients. Thank you all.

4) Mentoring: This is the first year I’ve tried my hand at mentoring and so far I’m loving it. I’m doing both translation and business mentoring and so far I think it’s going well. I look forward to my mentees’ feedback so I can work on my approach and hopefully help more colleagues in future.

2020 Challenges

This year has honestly been one of the best ever for my business. I feel guilty saying it even though I probably shouldn’t. Like many I’ve found not being able to see friends and family in person difficult and not being able to travel has been unfortunate. But I’m lucky that I don’t live alone, that I have friends and family to chat to online and that I’m used to and enjoy working from home alone.

Looking forward to 2021

In 2021 there is a lot to look forward to (not to mention fewer deaths and easing restrictions as the vaccine is rolled out):

1) Business retreat in January

2) CIOL conference in early 2021 (online)

3) Seeing my mum in person (maybe)

4) Presentation to Bristol Uni students on being a translator in February

5) Hopefully lots more interesting projects with my fantastic clients

I would like to say a big thank you to all my colleagues, clients, friends and family who have made this a good year when it could have been really very bad. You’ve made a real positive difference to me and many others I’m sure.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Review: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

An engaging must-read for decision makers and communicators in all walks of life. 

Reputed psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman published Thinking Fast and Slow in 2011 after decades of work and research in the field. His easy storytelling style enables him to make complex psychological phenomena seem straightforward, even obvious.

This book is essentially about how we make judgments and decisions, and how we often err without realising it. Fortunately, Kahneman also offers some strategies to counteract the effects of our uncooperative brains towards the end of the book.

Kahneman starts by introducing his cerebral protagonists, the quick thinking system 1 and lazy system 2. He goes on to methodically demonstrate how they work together to lull us into a false sense of confidence in our own cognitive prowess.

His writing is accessible and clear and he uses practical examples to lay bare often counterintuitive phenomena. His concern for clarity certainly makes sense given that we are more likely to accept information as true if it is easy to process (a phenomenon he discusses at length in the book).

My 10 main takeaways from Thinking Fast and Slow are:

1) Our brains are great at averages and poor at aggregating.

2) If information is easier to process, we are more likely to trust in its veracity (I’ll write more about this soon).

3) We don’t handle statistical information well, nor properly take statistical facts into account when making judgments.

4) We are predisposed to making the wrong decisions because our automatic brain (system 1) relies on associative shortcuts and our conscious brain (system 2) is too lazy to check our working.

5) How information is presented can massively influence our behaviour.

6) Losses cause us more pain than gains bring us pleasure but our loss aversion is often to our detriment when it comes to risk taking.

7) We’re usually over confident in our judgments.

8) We care more about what we remember than what we experience.

9) Extraordinary success or failure is likely to be followed by regression to the mean.

10) Invest in tracker portfolios rather than heavily managed ones (they tend to do better in the long term).

Why read this book?

Thinking Fast and Slow not only sets out the reasons why we make poor judgments but it also offers solutions (outside view, pre-mortem, reframing). It will help you approach important decisions more deliberately, with greater awareness of the potential pitfalls. It will help you identify your assumptions and mitigate their negative effects.

This book won’t teach you how to present information but it does give you foundations on which to build your understanding. Kahneman explains that the way information is presented affects its presumed truthfulness, an issue of extreme relevance for campaigning organizations and marketers alike.

Don’t let the fact that this is a long non-fiction book put you off. Each chapter took me under 30 minutes to read, the information is presented clearly and the phenomena described will make you think twice about the way you think.

Please let me know your thoughts if you read it (or have already read it).

If you’re interested in how the mind works (or doesn’t work so well sometimes), I would also recommend the podcast You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney.

The Blog is Back

It’s been a year since I’ve written a post, almost to the day. I’ve been focusing on other things like translation work, micro-blogging on Twitter and so on. I had planned out my posts for the past year, but the plan was vague and that’s probably why it didn’t come to much.

 

 

This year I’m feeling much more inspired blog-wise. At least right now anyway. I’m planning to write a summary of my recent Twitter series on how everything sustainable development is connected, about what to consider when writing a style guide and some reviews of the indexes and maps I come across in my day-to-day work.

I hope these blogs will be of interest to my clients (as they are of interest to me) and help them in their work.

This post, however, has a different purpose. I’m writing this one specifically to hold myself accountable (to whoever reads it, I suppose). My target is to write at least one blog post each month.

Why did I stop writing posts before?

Like many translators I’m very detail oriented and writing blog posts took me such a very long time. I would obsess over the research, the structure, the wording and the possibility of a typo creeping in. I would spend hours revising the same thing over and over. Needless to say this was not a particularly enjoyable or fruitful process.

This time around, I’m taking a different approach. For a start, my posts will be shorter, just over 500 words, and they will not be as polished, but I will endeavour to make them interesting, informative and easy to read.

Working on my tweet series, and being methodical about doing so, has also shown me that I enjoy difficult tasks more when I’ve built a system around them. For my tweets I have a couple of spreadsheets that map out which topics I’ve covered and when and what I’m going to post next. For my blog, I’ve now set aside time to do research, write a first draft and revise it. I hope that breaking the writing process down into smaller chunks will make it less daunting and more enjoyable.

What do I plan to write about?

This is my post for October. I don’t want to run before I can walk and try to knock out two posts in one month. I’m going to pace myself.

By the end of next month I’m hoping to have finished Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman so I will write a review of that for November. I’ve long been thinking about writing a book review but I read so little fiction that I was put off the idea. But non-fiction books deserve reviews too.

In December, I’ll share some thoughts on the importance of clear writing, not only to improve readers’ understanding but to increase their engagement with the message by inducing “cognitive ease” (a concept I learnt about from Thinking Fast and Slow).

In January, I plan to write a quick guide to developing a language policy. This will be primarily aimed at the third sector but could be equally applicable to corporations.

If I can get those three blogs written, checked and published, I’ll be well on my way to forming a blog writing habit.

If I don’t, anyone reading this has my permission to hold me accountable. That is the point of this post after all!