Pourtant, j’avais essayé de nombreuses autres solutions pour ne pas avoir à me souvenir de tout (bien que ces exercices de mémoire sont recommandés pour lutter contre un éventuel Altzheimer). Que ce soit Outlook ou les Post-its (qui disparaissent sous les dossiers), les Day Planner, Filofax et autres Exacompta, et sans oublier les fonctions du téléphone mobile, aucune solution n’offrait la souplesse et la facilité que je recherchais.

TeuxDeux est gratuit. Tout du moins pour l’instant. Et ils planchent sur une version pour iPhone et smartphone pour l’an prochain.

This is not a paid advertisement! I don’t know the creators and have not invested in their start-up (though if it ever goes public, I’ll consider investing). I discovered this tool just a few days ago: the more people use it and contribute to it, the better it will become.

A group of French entrepreneurs, headed by Patrice Lamothe as CEO, launched Pearltrees this spring. It is still in alpha mode, but it rocks.  So what is Pearltrees? A new GUI that allows you to create mind-maps of your Web, any way you like, to guide your friends and colleagues through your Web, discover and share in others’ Web, and much more.

If you are like me, over the years you’ve amassed an impressive list of bookmarks that become cumbersome to search through when you are looking for *that* article you read a while back that you need *now*.

Or you subscribe to many blogs through a feed reader and you’d like to organize some posts for future use in an easy way.

Or your Delicious account and those of your friends are overflowing, making it hard to share interests and resources, no matter how well tagged each entry might be.

Or your well-designed blog is losing aesthetic appeal as lists of thematic links clutter your sidebar.

Pearltrees will do all that.

And  if you are working on an article, a blog post or a project – alone or in a team – and you need to find an effective way to pull together your information, share it and have others contribute their resources, all you need to do is create a pearltree.

Driving this thing takes some getting used to and there is still the occasional bug.  Shifting from folders, files and lists to a visual organization (that you can change at will) can be disconcerting for some at first, but the advantages are quickly obvious. The plug-in for Firefox makes it a breeze to “pearl” whatever Web page you’d like to keep. You can also include your pearls in your blog, website, emails, Twit them or send them over to a friend.

Here is one I created to introduce you to Pearltrees.

Enjoy! And if, like me, you think this invention is hot, spread the word!

Independent professionals don’t have gobs of free time. Many already struggle with work/life balance issues; one of my colleagues, a French to English medical translator, often Skypes me grumbling “Gawd, it’s WDWEWDWE again!” – meaning her husband is hovering over her desk asking when and what is for dinner while she’s on a deadline. Mine occasionally quips I’m married to my computer more than to him.

Many freelancers participate in forums and discussion lists, finding substitutes for the office environment we lack, asking for help and advice, staying abreast of what is going on in our chosen profession, and of course marketing. You get out what you put in, it is important to contribute regularly.

How and when you visit and respond is up to you. The time invested is manageable, and if you’re off-line a few days because you are up to your ears in work, it’s not a big deal. I contribute regularly to about 3 or 4 forums, and occasionally to a couple more. It takes me a few minutes to about an hour a day. That works, it fits in.

As a self-confessed technophile and information junkie, social media attract me as much as a box of chocolates from Christian Constant (if you don’t know this chocolatier, check him out).

For a long time, I stayed on the sidelines, with an inactive blog, a small presence on LinkedIn and an even smaller one on Viadeo. I read a lot, I remained largely silent. Shyness was, I must admit, the main reason. Many don’t comment on blogs they read for that very reason. Please don’t be shy, bloggers love for readers to comment!

This summer, after redesigning my website, I gave myself a swift kick in the okol’e (hawai’ian word for your behind) and prepared a modest professional social media plan: redesign and revive the blog, commit to posting at least twice a week, get my nerve up to comment on others’ blogs, and start to make better use of LinkedIn.

And I’ve been doing that, and enjoying it! It is a bigger time commitment than mere participation on forums, but I still have control over when these activities take place. They do not interrupt my work – translators and copywriters’ work needs concentration and quiet! – and the process of writing blog posts like this one, surprisingly, increases my concentration skills.

Admittedly, my nights have become significantly shorter…

I’d put off joining Twitter until the small lull that hits the mid-November legal holidays in France. I joined with two clear goals in mind: drive traffic to my blog and have links to interesting blog posts and articles delivered to me without spending time looking for them.

After 24 little hours since my first “tweet”, I can sense how the time-concentration issue may spin out. Real-time social media is meant to be used…in real time, if you want to be serious about it and get the benefits you seek from it. TweetDeck is chirping at me every few minutes and even if I limit my curiosity to a cursory look at the maximum 140 characters in the tweet, my concentration nosedives. And tweeting constructively means more than just posting about your new blog post (which I will do in a few minutes) or that the weather’s turned nasty (it hasn’t).

As Billing Time’s chorus (in my book, the national anthem of all intellectual service providers) repeats, “my mind and my time are my merchandise.” I can see how Twitter can become habit-forming; I don’t know yet if it will be useful professionally. I am marginally comfortable with its inherent contradiction: increased connectivity to others, but in an increasingly deconnected way (language included). I do think I’ll have to schedule Tweet Time like dog walks and coffee breaks.

I’d like to hear from translators and freelancers who leverage all these various forms of on-line marketing and networking for business purposes. How and where do you ventilate your “2.0 time”? What tips can you share to preserve work-life balance? Are there social media you’ve tried and abandoned and why?

No, I am not referring to precise terminology used by a specific group of people and only occasionally understood by those outside the group. If, for example, you are writing or translating a medical text for an audience of specialists, you should be writing perorbital hæmatoma and not the plain English ‘black eye’ or the French layman’s ‘œil au beurre noir’.

I am talking about my pet peeve (or one of them, rather), the use of jargon that has become as prevalent as driver incivility.

The French have a more imaginative way of calling it: langue de bois or wooden tongue, that is to say the ability to expound at length, striving to sound intellectual/intelligent/in the know (pick one) without having to provide any real content. Listen to public officials’ speeches or the talking heads on news programs and you’ll see what I mean.

Often, the author of a text is unaware of its jargon density ratio.

As a translator, what do you do when your jargon-meter goes into the red zone? Do you remain faithful to the source text or do you strive to improve it? Savvy clients will want copy best suited to their target audience and objectives. Open-minded clients might even revise their source text for clarity or ask you to do so.

Jargonspeak can be contagious. Like a behavioral tick, you may not always be 100% aware jargon has slipped into your own writing. And when on a tight deadline, chances are you’ll focus your final review on spelling, grammar, and typography rather than on clarity of style (you’ve already spent a lot of time on that, right?)

Here are some free tools that can help you get rid of the last bit of drivel in your copy.

• Bullfighter, software originally developed by Deloitte that works as a plug-in in MS Word and PowerPoint. Its “Bull Composite Index” calculates your text’s jargon density (hint: you want as low a score as possible). BullFighter works best with Office 2003 and XP. I have two computers with Office 2000 and XP Pro: BullFighter works on one, but not the other. Why remains a mystery…
• DrivelDefense, a Java-based application that helps you check if your text is written in plain English. It analyzes your sentences and suggests other words if it suspects you’ve let jargon slip in. Because this application is Web-based, there are no compatibility issues. The Plain English Campaign’s Web site is full of freebies, including Plain English magazine, style guides, and specialized glossaries. They also run the Golden Bull Awards in honor of the year’s best examples of gobbledygook. Click here for the 2008 Golden Bull winners.
• You can check your terminology against the MBA Jargon Index and contribute your own definitions. Better yet, take a break and read through the Index: laughter oxygenates the brain.
• If you run business English writing workshops, you might like to try the Buzzword Bingo game.

Of course, none of these solve the question “How or if to translate jargon” and I plan to chat with my client tomorrow about his French jargon-infested piece. Maybe I should have written a post called What happens when a management consultant writes marketing copy for a non-profit? But these tools may help me catch whatever drivel words managed to disguise themselves as acceptable vocabulary.

Do you find yourself staring at a blank word processing screen or procrastinating turning on your computer?

Are you motivated by reward (”quick wins”) or by sanction? Or a combination of both?

Then this little web app is for you. I stumbled onto Dr. Wicked’s Writing Lab this morning and am using Write or Die to compose this post. I gave myself 15 minutes and set it to Kamikaze Mode.

I am motivated by both carrots and sticks. Write or Die helps me focus my thoughts so I can keep typing away and rewards me when I have met my word count and time goals.

But should my mind wander off somewhere (“Is there any coffee left?” “Does the dog need to go for a walk?” “Egatz, I’ll never make this deadline…”), it punishes my waning discipline. The sanction in Kamikaze Mode is stiff: your prose is erased, one painful word at a time (there are tamer settings for those times a gentle reminder is enough).

Check out Dr.Wicked’s website and see how his web apps and advice can help you get writing.

A colleague recommended Mavenhosting, which I had never heard of. Their service plans seemed to offer everything I was looking for and more. I was dubious at first as their front-end website does not provide as much information as a programming newbie and network neophyte might need, but one of my hosting plans was coming up for renewal so I took the plunge.

I’m sold.

Aside from the 40% reduction in my overall web hosting budget once the transfers are done, what did I gain?
More web space
Cpanel management tools
Web software, including Wordpress (no need to host your blog on Wordpress.com and no design editing limitations!)
Multidomain hosting and management from one account
And much more.

The icing on the cake, which in the last few days has saved me from pulling my hair out, is superb, responsive, quick support by email, 24/7. None of this “closed on Sunday”, limited office hours, autoresponse “we got your email, we’ll respond eventually” nonsense professionals have no time for.

These folks in Quebec take client satisfaction seriously, they walk the talk.

Thanks, Mavenhosting!

A few days later

There’s been a severe heatwave here in Savoie. My garden is toast; there will be no rasberry jam or ratatouille to brighten up the long winter ahead. Quebec, though, has had a few rainy days lately; William over at Mavenhosting offered to share some.

• General glossaries

Grand dictionnaire terminologique (Office québécois de la langue française)
Termium (now free!)
FranceTerme
Lexique des mots des affaires (AFPA)
IATE
Termium (subscription required)
Larousse
Wordreference

• Architecture and design

Muleta, European encyclopedia of urban planning and housing
If someone knows of a good on-line FR<>EN architecture and design glossary, please post a comment!

• Finance

Lexique bancaire UBS (FR, EN, DE, IT)
GDF-Suez financial glossary (English)
Institute of International Auditors
International Trade Centre glossary on trade financing terms (FR, EN, ES)
IMF multilingual directory

• Aeronautics

Skyguide Air Navigation glossary
French Civil Aviation Authority glossary
Dassault Aviation glossary

• Environment and agriculture

European Environment Agency’s Environmental Technology Discovery Service (multilingual glossaries)
FAO’s AGROVOC (multilingual)

• Energy

Petroleum and Natural Gas International Standardization glossary

• Measurement converters

Alaide (FR)

• Style guides (English)

  Online Stylebooks

Not until my computer started to show clear signs of needing a major Spring-cleaning.

My husband will attest that I’m OK with the daily tidying up bit, but ask me to sort out closets and I run for the hills. My computer is more persuasive: “reinstall my OS from scratch or you’ll eat my dust.”

So I chose Saturday to overhaul my C:/ drive. I back up work everyday and do a full back up once a week, so I was all set to go. I figured I’d be done by lunch and be free to enjoy the rest of the day.

Yeah, right (mumbled in a very New York tempo). Like with your toothbrush, coffee maker, and ergonomic pillow, some things are so taken for granted you forget they are there and that you use them everyday. By dinnertime, I had just reinstalled XP Pro, all the drivers, and my essential business tools: what I absolutely cannot face Monday morning without. I had not even gotten to the stack of useful but more creative software (need another free day or two for those!).

Maybe novice or not too tech savvy colleagues will find something useful in this post, and I hope tech junkies will add suggestions to this list of resources. I’ll skip the basics – MS Office, firewall, anti-virus, Internet navigator, Adobe Reader.

My CAT tool is Wordfast Classic, which I use mainly for quality control and individual client glossary development purposes. Repetitions and fuzzy matches are not an issue in the type of work I do, but Wordfast boosts my efficiency and ensures I use client-specific terminology.

In addition to a host of online and paper resources, the Robert Collins French-English digital dictionary is practical when I’m on the go. We all know relying on MS’ spelling and grammar checker is risky and that’s where tools such as Stylewriter for American English or Antidote for French come in: they catch many (OK, not all!) bloopers – by v. buy for example – flag jargon you might want to avoid, zero in on spacing errors, and help you tighten up your final copy. Antidote also includes style guides, an extensive French dictionary, regional variant options, and thesaurus. For publication work in English, The Chicago Manual of Style digital version is an essential companion.

TO3000 and related applications from the great folks at AIT Software make running my business a heck of a lot easier. Quotes, invoicing, tracking payments, and managing work files are a tidy breeze. If you need to assess your productivity, know how much time you really spent on a project, or provide your client with proof of your work hours, then Time Stamp from Syntap Software is a great option.

Data preservation and safety are big issues. I back up work in progress every evening, automatically, with Mozy. If you click on this link and start using Mozy, then both of us will get an extra 256 MB of free storage space (thanks!). If your data gets corrupted or erased somehow, restoring those precious files securely with Mozy is a cakewalk.

Though I have a Gmail account, I prefer dealing with my e-mail off-line, with Outlook. To protect my computer from spam and malicious files, I use MailWasher. If you only have one e-mail account, then the free version will suit you. If you have several, go with the Pro version. MailWasher lets to see all incoming e-mail before it hits your computer (at which time, it is usually too late), set friends and blacklists, delete or bounce e-mail, and restore e-mail you might have deleted accidentally.

What are some of your favorite “I can’t face Monday morning without” tools, aside from a perfectly brewed cup of java?