Losing My Mind

I spent a good three minutes looking at a completely new word the other day. It was at the end of a marketing text, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it meant. Ретвитните (retvitnitye). The root was a mysterious "tvit." The prefix means to do the "tvit" again. The suffix means that it's an imperative.

And then it dawned on me - "tvit" means "tweet!" The text is asking you to retweet an announcement (on Twitter). A Yandex search turned up lots of ретвитните, плз (retvitnite, plz), which means "retweet this, please."

Google Books

I just discovered a new use for Google Books - when you own a thick reference book with an iffy index, you can search the full text in Google Books and grab the page number!

Retro Monday

It felt like 1995 at my desk today. First an engineer friend called and asked me to translate a technical term for her. My computer was switched off, so I reached for my two-volume scientific/technical dictionary and found what she needed in a few seconds.

About two hours later I finished what I was working on and headed over to look at the day's translation questions on Proz.com (for some reason I enjoy looking at other people's questions a lot more than I enjoy asking questions of my own - probably because I like digging around). A fellow translator wanted to know what the heck is the difference between the terms attachment, annex, addendum and schedule in a contract. Why waste time Googling when you have the book with the answer literally right at hand? I cracked open Ken Adams' Manual of Style for Contract Drafting and made a colleague's life a little easier. Good times.

And this evening I got an email from a reputable translation agency asking for a copy of my resume.

My resume?!

I was about to check the year on the calendar when my phone went off - project manager texting me about a new job. Whew. It's 2010.