ONE PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATOR’S CHRISTMAS AFTERTHOUGHTS
Well, Christmas Day 2017 has come to an end. My Christmas was pretty quiet and low profile in that I spent mine with no-one other than my family, never leaving the house; although we watched the Queen’s speech together, I was more interested in completing missions on Watch Dogs 2 than watching repeats of Dad’s Army with my parents when we weren’t eating big meals and drinking a lot. There wasn’t even any snow.
Of course, I realise that none of this is important at all when weighed against the topic of my business plans for 2018. If anything, I’ve got my eyes on mastering LinkedIn and other social media proper when I’m not too busy doing translation work, sending invoices or chasing debts – I’m wondering if all the money I spent and all the work I did to get my new website on the first page of Google (go to Google and type “translator uk” and see for yourself) was really worth it. Still, I am a bit disappointed that I have failed to post any Christmassy business blog content this year; well, until now, when all the hype has died down.
That said, I can still remember the time I wished my clients a Merry Christmas and included a picture of the Christmas tree I had at the time – it was 2013, to be exact – but I don’t want to develop a habit of posting unoriginal rubbish; I would only feel like I was defiling myself out of the notion that I was acting insincerely. I know that lots of people send their clients Christmas emails and while I got my share from translation companies that I work for – how easy is it to forget exactly whom they were from, or even that individual ones even existed?
When all’s said and done, though, I hope my clients had a Merry Christmas this year, and I wonder how many languages I will remember to say “Merry Christmas” in by next year from this list https://www.whychristmas.com/customs/languages.shtml
…although, if I may say so myself, I was surprised to see it translated in certain languages, such as Hebrew (for Israel is a Jewish country) or Arabic (the language of Muslims) etc. Shows what I know, I guess.