That final quarter

So far, work's been arriving through local networks rather than online. Recent efforts: 4 hours of coaching for an academic bound across the Atlantic to give a talk at a conference in Florida, editing a major paper in bio-inspired robotics for an international journal, and a fire notice. The latter was the trickiest, and payment for that will be only in kind, but it was also quite fun.

I have updated my CV and registered with proz.com and translatorscafe.com. I've sent off a few responses to job offers posted there, if they seem relevant to my interests, but so far I've had only one response, which merely indicated they were keeping my CV on file. There's not so much work out there, and where the rate negotiations are opened by the potential client, rates of about $0.04-0.05 seem prevalent, so I guess I'm always losing the auctions. That's fine though: I haven't seen any jobs going there by that are so interesting I'd think about doing them for free: most often it's dismal financial documents, or bizarrely obscure software manuals.

The next step is to translate all this material I have assembled in English into something coherent in French. Once that is done I'll contact local agencies, and some contacts I have at the medical faculty. I have an idea for a seminar on using the internet for translation which should aid the development of relevant networks locally.