Category: Useful Links for Translators

After tomorrow, the Thoughts on Translation world headquarters will be closed for vacation through January 4, so before we dig into today’s topic, here are a few end-of-year recommendations:

• Start thinking about taxes as soon as you get back from your holiday break. You can close out your books immediately, so why not do it in January rather than on April 14?
• If you achieved your business goals for this year, be a good boss and give yourself a bonus. If you need some ideas, I wrote a whole post about bonuses last year.
• If you’re an experienced translator with enough work and income, take some real time off over the holidays. Put your auto-responder on and put the computer in the rear view mirror.
• If you’re a new translator, be aware that the holidays are a great time to pick up new clients; end-of-year panic plus lots of…

Gone Girl – Novel by Gillian Flynn

There are some books that seem to blow up all at once.  It’s as if suddenly EVERYONE is reading it, EVERYONE is talking about it, and EVERYONE is waiting movie adaptation.  These books are thrilling and successful, but are hardly ever very good (think The Da Vinci Code, 50 Shades of Grey), and typically have a great plot with surface level characters.  Frankly, these trendy books just don’t have much depth.

Gone Girl, in many ways, falls into the category of the book-of-the-moment.  Flynn’s third novel was wildly successful, with readers spanning from teenagers to parents to everyone in-between.  It was one of those novels everyone stayed up until 4am reading, just trying to get through one more chapter, and couldn’t wait to gush about to their peers.  But Flynn’s characters were complex.  As a reader, I developed emotions towards them: distrust…