If I told you that there is always a first time for everything, you’d start thinking about big, important things in life: the first unsteady steps, the first day in school, the first kiss. I already did those things, so here is the rather undramatic first blog entry.
Things you do for the first time usually don’t turn out that great. After the first few steps you fall flat on the floor. Your first school day, you maybe clutch your mother’s hand tightly and barely dare to look at your teacher or classmates. And the first kiss was maybe just slobbery and weird. Things don’t turn out great and wonderful when you lack experience. You need to practice what you do, and so I ask you to bear with me if the texts on this blog feel a bit clumsy. That especially goes for my translation of blog entries into English. It’s not my first language, so I’ll never write perfectly in it. Feel free to correct my errors, but to a reasonable extent. Hopefully both my language and my blog entries will get better. At least they should.
I recently got back from the annual conference of the Swedish Association of Professional Translators that this year took place in Jönköping. It was my fourth conference, and I have started to recognize many of the participants. It was fun meeting colleagues again and many of the lectures were interesting to listen to. Among others Charlotte Hågård spoke about the importance of finding your talent and focusing on doing what you’re good at. Her idea is that talent is not something you’re born with, but rather a skill that you get better at with practice. It’s supposed to take about 10 000 hours to get good at a certain thing. So, when I’ve spent 10 000 hours of blogging this should be a blog of top quality!
Another lecture at the conference was held by psychologist Anna Broman Norrby and was about procrastination, i.e. postponing things you know that you should do (such as translating this blog post into English). The solution was a take on the pomodoro technique: Make yourself aware of what you do instead of working, what excuses you have for not working and what consequences your procrastination has. Then make sure to remove your distractions and that you have well defined goals with your work. Set small intermediate goals that you can actually accomplish. Don’t have unrealistic goals such as writing the world’s best blog entry the first time around. Then set a timer for 25 minutes and work intently without distractions during this time. Then take a five minute break. Repeat.
I think that writing is something I’m fairly good at, so it’s reasonable for me to focus on improving that talent, at least according to the lecture by Charlotte Hågård. I will also try to do my blogging according to the pomodoro technique, in short, intense work sessions. This way of working seems especially useful when you just got back from a conference and your head is filled with impressions and your bag is full of notes, flyers and business cards. Your ambition is sky high, but then you might not get all that much done. However, if you do one thing at a time, at least that one thing gets done.
Right now this blog is resounding with the emptiness in which it’s being written. That seems to be the case with new blogs, and the question is how you do this. How do you get people interested? Do I have something to say? The aim of this blog is to write about translation, language, the translation business, books, opportunities for professional development etc. I think and hope that I have things to share that might be useful to others. At least now I’ve gotten started.
The culture house Spira, Jönköping, the location of this year’s conference
Quick notes:
The pomodoro technique is not new. It was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s. You can read about it here: http://pomodorotechnique.com/
The word “procrastination” derives from the Latin “pro-“, meaning “for” or “to” and “cras” meaning “tomorrow”. So, something “for tomorrow” and not today.