Working on my dreams - New Year's Resolutions

 

Feliz Año 2015

A new year has begun and most of us had thought about last year’s resolutions and checked if they've made it through. Me too. I did it yesterday evening with all my consciousness and the help of Marta Stelmaszak’s exercise at the Free January Business Camp. I was very surprised, when I started with the exercise, to see that I had a lot of wonderful experiences last year I nearly had forgotten or didn’t realize they were so important to me. I worked more than an hour on them until I started the “bad” things happened in 2014 and saw that there where only few things I would describe as not very good. This are the results:

The positive part of last year is centred in one word: JOY J

"My" hospital is changing outfit and looks great! 

©Marie-Claire

I enjoyed being able to organise my work schedule at the hospital (my workplace) and a very complicated university timetable together with my work colleagues who were also always looking to combine their shifts with mines so that I could assist my lectures at Faculty and work on weekends. It was very stressing but I learned how wonderful and necessary friends and colleagues in your working place are. I am so grateful for their help and for the special permission the management of the hospital gave me to make shift changes. 

In May, I enjoyed taking part at the 6th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics as assistant and coordinator of the volunteer student staff. With help of different teachers, which organized the whole Conference, I learned how to schedule my colleague students so that everyone could “work” and participate at the Conference. It was a great experience to welcome and register lots of professional specialists from all around the world, drink coffee together, listen to their speeches and hear them speak about their countries and work experiences.

During the year I enjoyed some very interesting ProZ webinars and paid my first membership as  a future translator. The courses on translation were:

• Traductores principiantes: 50 errores a evitar by Irène Guinez (Tips for newbie translators)
• Translation for the Food Industry by Anneta Vysotskaya
• Comercio internacional para traductores e intérpretes by Marcel Soler (International Trade for translators and interpreters)
• Consejos para traductores principiantes by Konstantin Kisin (Tips for newbie translators)
• How to Become a Successful Financial Translator by Francesca Airaghi
• CAT Tool & Software Day by ProZ.com
• ProZ.com’s 2014 virtual conference for International Translation Day 

I assisted at Eradication of Poverty, Aims in the 3^rd Millennium, seminars, organized by our Faculty.

I enjoyed working on my Blog Soup list, which grows day by day and shows lots of very special international blogs on the translation industry: voices in translation, interpreting, cultures and language matters are only a few of the issues you'll find on them.

I loved to get and buy books and enjoyed seeing growing my bookshelf:

• Marketing Cookbook for Translators – Tess Whitty 
• The Book of Standing Out – Andrew Morris 
• How to manage your Translation Projects – Nancy Matis
• Introducing Interpreting Studies – Franz Pöchhacker
• Handbuch der Notizentechnik für Dolmetscher - Heinz Matyssek
• 101 Things a Translator Needs to Know – WLF Think Tank
• Los 88 Peldaños del Éxito – Anxo Pérez
• Traducción y Traductología – Amparo Hurtado Albir
• Problemas actuals de la traducción – Zinaida Lvóskaya
• Competencia textual para la traducción – Isabel García Izquierdo
• Manual de la traducción – Peter Newmark
• Por qué la traducción importa – Edith Grossman
• Sobre la traducción – Eugene Nida
• Enseñar a traducir – Amparo Hurtado Albir
• La selva de la traducción – Virgilio Moya
• The Marta Stelmaszak business course for translators (Negocia, vende, ¡traduce! – The Spanish version)
• The new DRAE 

I enjoyed translating for PerMondo into German and felt amazed looking at my published work.

I enjoyed to translate a musician’s website into German.

I enjoyed the team work with my fellow students at the University and loved the amazing job we did with the Ebola translation.

©Marie-Claire

I loved the German consecutive classes.

I enjoyed coffee time between lectures

I enjoyed to be asked to translate an orthodontic book, a project I had to reject as deadline was too short and I had no time left to translate it. I learned to delegate on an other experienced medical translator.

I enjoyed the translations I did for the Institute of Legal Medicine (external practise)

What was wrong last year?

Mostly that I felt very exhausted searching for more time to do things. Our bodies have to rest and I didn’t let mine do so. I think I’ll pay for that in the future. Health is one of the most important issues so I have to learn to set priorities and improve this task.

What do I want to do in 2015?

Thanks to Marta's exercise I wrote down lots of things I want to achieve this year. My main goals are first, to write my end-of-degree project by May, what means that I need to read one specialized book on translation every week and write a reading data card for each before starting to write my essay. I also need to search medical texts to work with. 

This is how my baby project for this year looks like!  

©Marcel Díaz

As short term, I listed to assist to the upcoming webinars on medical translation, and to invest in German webinars on medical translation one each 2 month (both at The Alexandria Library). I also will finish the Frauenbusiness course I started last year.

I can see myself, after graduating, assisting at a Translators Conference to make new contacts, have fun and learn a lot more.

What I’m a little bit scared about is to manage my business finances, so I guess I need to learn about budgeting. 

Funny will be the creation of a professional website, CV and business cards in my work languages, to improve CAT tools and to buy an ergonomic chair. So, there is lots of work to do!

Looking for good clients will be my most important short, mid and long-term issue, and I would like to start my own freelance business by the 8th of December 2015. That’s THE day I dream of.

What about you? What are you dreaming of? What are you doing to make your dreams come true?