Although this comment isn’t related to what I do professionally per se, it is very relevant to entrepreneurial life, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see its content shape my own professional life at some point in the future.
Having spent money on various business advice packages and related events with Chris Cardell, I remember certain things that he’s said to me. One of them is that it’s a myth that people buy primarily based on price. He says that if everyone always bought whatever was cheapest, everyone would be wearing the cheapest clothes, driving around in the cheapest cars, eating out in the cheapest restaurants and blah blah blah. And no-one would have iPhones – he recently told me this again in one of his advertising videos, and when he said that he produced an iPhone, saying no-one would have them.

But I got to thinking: wouldn’t people buy iPhones if, against all odds, they were the cheapest thing on the market? Or would they not exist at all? Part of me thinks that, if everyone did always buy the cheapest stuff, then iPhones wouldn’t exist, and although I don’t own one myself… how sad would that be?
I’m sorry – what a stupid thing to say. No-one would be sad that iPhones didn’t exist, precisely BECAUSE they had never been invented!

I continue doing pretty well as a self-employed translator (which is very comforting to know when the economy’s like this). It will soon be time for me to make the really big step of starting to get to know Internet marketing at a fundamental level, and learn how to spot trends in it and stuff; but I also want to get registration with the Institute of Linguists or something similar pretty soon.
In short, I’m fairly confident that it won’t be long before I’m playing at a level higher than merely looking for translation agencies to send my CV out to, doing this and then doing translation work as and when it comes along; which is what I want. After all, I’m sure most people would agree that not ALL important “things” in business speak for themselves.

Even so, nobody’s perfect, and I’ve been fighting the war against translation errors (real or imagined) a lot more resolutely lately. A case in point: one of my latest projects was a very small German to English one about motor racing, whose headline went “Rennabwicklung bei widrigen Bedingungen”. A literal translation of that in English would be like “Racing handling in adverse conditions.” But when I started the project I decided on “racing performance”, thinking that it was about drivers’ approaches to racing in adverse conditions.
But as I was doing it, I noted that what it was really all about was how the organisers of racing events manage the races in adverse conditions. Hence, when I did my final proof of the project at the end – as confident as I was that I had done a “good” job – I was just compelled to change the title from “racing performance” to “racing conduct”.
Also, I translated “Mischbedingungen” as “erratic conditions” rather than “mixed conditions”.