For many small business owners, marketing is a necessary evil, pushed aside by urgent deadlines, everyday tasks, and an occasional crisis. It is one of those important, but not urgent tasks, categorized by Stephen Covey <!  :en  >Business building Blogs for Small Business Owners<!  :  > in his now iconic Time Quadrant Matrix.

Time Management Matrix

Time Management Matrix

Let’s face it. Not every business owners is a born salesperson. This is especially true of service providers, who rely on their talent in a core competency to attract clients. The good news is that marketing is an acquired skill and you do not have to go to business school to learn how to do it. There is a wealth of useful marketing information on the internet and in books.

Following several choice business blogs is a simple way to pick up the necessary knowledge over time. While it might be difficult to implement a start-to-finish marketing strategy, you can decide to learn marketing in increments and apply this information consistently. In fact, marketing diva Fabienne Fredrickson says business owners must do something to market themselves every single day to escape the all too familiar feast-or-famine.

Fabienne’s fabulous blog is the first resource on my list of recommended reading.  As a marketing consultant, she has developed the Client Attraction system, which covers marketing strategies, management systems, and her think-big mindset philosophy. The blog is chock-full of high-content articles and videos on all aspects of business development.

Debbie Bernstein’s Marketing Morsels presents simple marketing ideas that make people wonder how they did not think of it themselves. Each post provides one bite-size tip you can put to use in your business right away.

Thursday Bram is a professional writer and consultant. Though her blog focuses on market techniques for content creators, some of these ideas are applicable to all small business owners. Thursday has even compiled her advice into an e-book (hint: the original posts comprising the book are available on her site free of charge).

Freelance Folder (as the name implies) is a one-stop resource for freelancers and solo entrepreneurs. The site covers all issues of interest to freelancers from productivity to lifestyle to marketing. Readers can solicit advice on the forum and even advertise their services on the job board.

Finally, no business blog review would be complete without mentioning social media. By now, you must be familiar with its uses for business. Still, signing up for Twitter and posting random Facebook updates is not enough. This is where Social Media Examiner comes in. Every day it provides valuable step-by-step ideas for building a strategy for attaining success one blog post, tweet, and update at a time.

If you don’t want to visit half a dozen blogs each day, I recommend signing up for RSS. Here’s how to do it:

What is your favorite business development blog?

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I am excited to introduce a guest post by Miryam Blum, a seasoned Hebrew<>English translator, who has been translating articles for the financial pages of Haaretz/TheMarker for over ten years and has a freelance business, translating mainly academic articles and PR films and materials for Jewish education projects. Miryam’s first introduction of the AutoCorrect technique, at the Israel Translators Association 2008 convention, won instant accolades. Miryam can be reached at miryam.blum at gmail.com

AutoCorrect – One of Microsoft Office’s most time-saving features for translators (or anyone who types a lot, for that matter) is AutoCorrect. Initially designed to automatically correct common typing errors, such as teh, instead of the, or feild, instead of field, AutoCorrect allows you to add words that you commonly misspell. In order to increase productivity, you can also add entries that you make up, so that you only need to type 2, 3 or 4 letters in a word or phrase, and the program will do the rest.

Any word that has seven or more letters, and even some four-letter words and two-word phrases with only 6 letters can be made into AutoCorrect entries to save time while typing.

The main principle is to reduce the number of keystrokes and switching back and forth between the right and left hands. Even a city name as simple as Lod can be shortened to ld if it appears many times in a text.

AutoCorrect is really helpful for typing words that use the same fingers on both hands, and which can be misspelled because the message goes to the correct finger, but on the wrong hand. One classic example is also. I have an AutoCorrect entry for this, so that I never have to think about switching back and forth between hands to type the l and the o. I just type aso, and Word fills in the l for me.  Another example is future – five out of its six letters are typed with the index finger, and your brain has to send messages alternately to each hand. Why bother, when you can type the whole word with one finger of one hand: ftr. If you are translating a document about furniture, you can change your AutoCorrect entry for ftr to expand to furniture instead of future.

AutoCorrect’s does not limit the length of the entries, making it possible to “type” entire paragraphs with just several keystrokes. This comes especially handy in client communications via Outlook. You can create shortcuts for large blocks of information (payment details, driving instructions, project rules, etc). AutoCorrect entries can be changed as often as you want, to suit your evolving needs.

The more AutoCorrect entries you have, once you develop a system that makes it easy for you to remember your entries, the more you can increase your productivity. The following example, taken at random from a newspaper article I translated, illustrates how maximizing the use of AutoCorrect can increase your translation speed from 600 words per hour to as many as 1,400 words per hour.

What I typed The sentences that appeared on the screen
The ii fl mkt has psnd itself betw wst, ldn and hkg. The world cmkt igl, and in isr iplr, is exping an upward trend. The Israeli financial market has positioned itself between Wall Street, London and Hong Kong. The world capital market in general, and in Israel in particular, is experiencing an upward trend.

How AutoCorrect works:

AutoCorrect is activated by the space bar, the Tab key, Enter, and any punctuation mark – comma, period, apostrophe, question or exclamation mark, or mathematical symbol – so you can even use AutoCorrect to help speed up typing formulas.

The fact that AutoCorrect is activated by the space bar and the punctuation marks really speeds up typing, because once you learn the abbreviations that you create, you just type the three or four-letter combinations as you go along, without even thinking about them – the computer does the rest.

Make short words even shorter:

aso - also
bf - before
bc - because
betw - between

Type 3 letters for 3-word phrases:

iot - In order to
iow - In other words
iplr - in particular
itp - in the past
itf - In the future
itm - In the meantime

Like any Microsoft feature, you can access and add or change AutoCorrect entries in several ways. Read more about AutoCorrect on Microsoft’s Support site.

Create AutoCorrect entries for:

  • Common words
  • Frequently used phrases
  • Names of people, places, countries, institutions
  • Acronyms – let AutoCorrect capitalize them for you
  • Frequently used information chunks

Your goals when creating AutoCorrect entries:

  • Reduce the number of keystrokes and hand changes.
  • Any word or phrase with more than 6 letters that is used repeatedly should have an AutoCorrect entry

Keys to creating easy-to-remember AutoCorrect entries:

  • Find letter combinations that are not real words, but are easy for you to remember.
  • 3-letter combinations work best
  • Use the main consonants or sounds in a word or phrase

Tips for maximizing your AutoCorrect glossary:

  • When you create an entry for a noun, create a second entry for its plural
  • Add suffixes to the 3-letter basic abbreviation eg.: dfr = different; dfrc = difference; dfrly = differently
  • Change the 3-letter entries as necessary – you can always change them back

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Would you believe seeing a clause from Google’s Terms of Service could become a jaw-dropping experience for a group of professionals and business owners? Neither could I, until last week I presented a short resources workshop to a Jerusalem networking group.

When asked whether they use Google Translate in their workflow, almost one half of the participants raised their hands. However, when I showed a slide with the following excerpts from Google’s TOS, hands clapped over mouths all around the room:

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Recently, I was asked to teach a resources workshop to aspiring translators as part of WritePoint’s translation course. Countless hours spent collating everything I have learnt during my decade in the industry and researching some things I have managed to miss,  produced too much material to squeeze into a four-hour session.

(If you’d like to receive more information about the upcoming Tools for Translators workshop, scheduled to be held in Jerusalem on June 21, please contact me.)

Meanwhile, in the coming weeks, I would like to share some of my favorite solutions with the readers of this blog. While most veteran translators have found their trusty tools and tricks, software companies continue to produce new offerings, not necessarily intended for translators, but useful nonetheless.

Today, we will take a look at some essential productivity programs.

Backup – the standard recommendation is to back up all your data at least once a week. No matter how reasonable that may sound, in the real world of surprise projects and tight deadlines, many language professionals just can’t be bothered. Read the rest of this entry »

sholder <!  :en  >Shoulder or Shoulders?<!  :  >While on the road the other day, I came across this sign, recently put up by Maatz, the Israeli government agency responsible for road upkeep.

Ironically, whoever authored the sign, got both the English and the Hebrew wrong. Since the sign refers to the shoulder only on one side  of the road, singular “shoulder” would have been more appropriate.

So what do you think? Is “שול”  a good translation for a road shoulder? Is there a singular form for שוליים? Please enlighten us.

Our last month’s Lost in (Mis)translation photo contest attracted some hilarious translation mistake photos. Here is a sampling of the best submission.

While circumnavigating the world, Kati came across this do-it-yourself translation gone wrong in the city museum of Cadiz, Spain. Apparently, the dictionary used by the “translator” failed to note that download is a computer-specific term.

download1 <!  :en  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo Contest Results<!  :  ><!  :ru  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo <!  :  ><!  :he  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo <!  :  >

Considering the setting, a memorial site at the Jerusalem zoo, this mistake is not funny (except in a black-humor sort of way). Apparently, someone confused “lookout” with “outlook.” Submitted by Raphael Blumberg.

Unfortunate mistake at the Jerusalem Zoo

Jonathan Spector sent it this translation blooper, which illustrates that even a simple two-word sign should be translated professionally.

wheelchair <!  :en  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo Contest Results<!  :  ><!  :ru  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo <!  :  ><!  :he  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo <!  :  >

And the winner is… Yehoshua Paul, who provided us with two interesting photos.

This sign in a Jerusalem church would have been much clearer without the writing.

church sign2 <!  :en  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo Contest Results<!  :  ><!  :ru  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo <!  :  ><!  :he  >Lost in (Mis)translation Photo <!  :  >

Are people really SO traumatized by school grammar?

bathing sign

Congratulations to Yehoshua on winning a $25 gift certificate to be used at Amazon.com.

Finally, although I was prevented from taking part in the contest, I’d like to share a “gem” of English marketing writing from a Jerusalem furniture store. If you are a Hebrew speaker, you probably recognize the stanza from the popular Yeladim Ze Simkha song. However, the translation just doesn’t work in English. The connection between the sign and the sale of kitchens is as blurry as the picture.

children are certainly a source of joy

While this year’s contest is over, we always welcome your submissions of interesting translation mistakes.

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With the joyous month of Adar upon us, AQText is sponsoring a photo contest for the funniest or most blatant translation or writing mistake.

Here is your chance to win a $25 gift card from Amazon.com.

How to participate:

  1. Upload a photo or image illustrating a funny or wrong translation or writing to Twitpic.  (Make sure your image does not violate any copyrights). Provide a short explanation if the mistake, if not self-evident in English. Tag the image with hashtag #AQText.
  2. Leave a comment with a link to your Twitpic image under this post to enable our visitors to view and vote for it.
  3. Tweet your photo using hashtag #AQText. Ask your friends to comment on your image on twitpic.
  4. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at @leah_aharoni and join our Facebook Fan Page.
  5. The contestant receiving the greatest number of comments will win a $25 gift card from Amazon.com.
  6. Contest ends March 2 at 5 pm (GMT +2). Winners will be announced and contacted on March 4, 2010. No entry fee.

To get you into the mood, I have posted my favorite mistranslation that graces many a corner on the streets of Jerusalem.

A Jerusalem street sign. In "real life" a parking ticket is w... on Twitpic

Fine print

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Since posting an article on crowdsourcing yesterday, I have uncovered this “gem” – an excerpt from Twitter’s Translation Agreement (hat tip to Angel Dominguez). This is the very agreement that volunteer translators are required to sign before having the privilege of translating Twitter.

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As a college freshman (way back when), I took an advocacy workshop, during which one of the speakers screened a beer commercial similar to the following one and asked us to think about the company’s goal in creating the ad. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever been on the receiving end of your work? I have. Last year, after arriving to the delivery room for the birth of my daughter, I was approached by a doctor with a request to take part in a clinical trial. Although it was very late at night and I was preoccupied with the business at hand, I took her up on her offer. For one, it provided a distraction from contractions. But beyond that, after handling innumerable clinical trial documentation projects over the years, I welcomed the opportunity to find out first hand what it was really like to be a “human subject.”

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