Yesterday the New Statesman ran an article which explores some of the possible reasons. I’m tempted to conclude that politicians in the UK  have simply not yet taken the internet seriously enough as medium (remember Cameron’s ‘too many tweets make a twit’ comment?). However, the major parties do seem to all have Twitter profiles, and the Conservatives even have their ‘WebCameron’, so it’s not as if they have completely ignored the medium’s potential.  

However, I think one of the problems is they still don’t quite fully understand it or know how to exploit its full potential. The internet is certainly a powerful vehicle which can quickly speed out of control, but instead of attempting to take the wheel, the parties seem to tend to just let it do its own thing. So we see the supporters, such as Grace Fletcher-Hackwood, starting their own Twitter campaigns and the politicians just piggybacking on that once the campaign gains in popularity.

Perhaps the politicians just don’t believe that using the internet to garner support will make a difference. But, from the voting public’s point of view, aside from door-to-door visits, reaching out via the internet (e.g. using something like Twitter) must surely be the most direct and democratic way of communicating, right? It offers politicians a direct line of communication with the public. If they’re worried that communicating with voters via social media may come across as cheesy or cynical, is this really more of a concern than the fact that TV and the press can never offer a truly neutral medium for a political message? There is always an editorial agenda of some kind, and while this is of course also true of much the internet (particularly blogs), it at least offers a more interactive, diverse medium. What politics needs, surely, is a two-way conversation with the electorate, not just one-way electioneering.

I imagine the real reason politicians have not made more use of Twitter, for example, is that they believe it is used only by the country’s chattering classes, liberals and progressives, who have probably already made up their minds about who to vote for. But this assumption really underestimates the far-reaching power of social media. Using the search hash-tag for my local town, I’ve certainly seen a number of undecided voters who have not yet engaged with any party and are looking for information.

I would argue that the internet really can help to change the course of an election, or at least help inform people about their options. Sites such as Votematch and 38Degrees help to provide the public with the facts and make an informed decision, an antidote to the irresponsible journalism and scaremongering often peddled by the press from both ends of political spectrum.

On a lighter note, it seems I’m not the only one trying to draw comparisons with the 2008 US elections  – The Sun has published a picture of David Cameron on its front page edited to look like one of Obama’s famous election images.  Alarmingly, they seem to be piggybacking on support for a US President in what is a completely and utterly different election, in completely and utterly different circumstances. At least, if Obama happens to see it (possibly via Twitter), it’d probably make him chuckle, given his previous meeting with Cameron. Oh dear, I think I’ve just been decidedly un-neutral

The response to our presentation has been really positive, with many people wanting to learn more or see the slides again, so we decided to take our little 2 person roadshow online for the big wide world to see. We are now pleased to unveil a stripped down, re-recorded version of our presentation available at Slideshare.net. You can view the show within this post (below) or by following this link to Slideshare if you have problems hearing or viewing the embed.

First up was ‘EU Terminology and other EU Reference Material‘, jointly organised by the ITI office and Fiona Harris from the DGT. I attended this course yesterday afternoon at the European Commission Representation office near St. James’s Park.  On the agenda were presentations by Professor Margaret Rogers of Surrey University, a well known terminology expert, and Timothy Cooper, senior terminlogist at the DGT, and chair of the committee that oversees IATE. We discussed topics such as the importance of maintaining a terminology database, even if it means investing a little time in maintaining it. Professor Rogers argued that not only is it important to maintain a well organised terminology database, but that each entry should ideally also contain ‘metadata’ (e.g. definitions, context, register etc.) in order to be truly useful for a translator.

Most of the attendees were already very familiar with IATE, so Timothy Cooper focused on introducing some of its finer points, such as its quite powerful search and star functions. He also gave a brief history of IATE and how it was developed, in addition to the DGT’s famous style guide, and the ‘Fight the Fog’ style guide, which many attendees hadn’t seen before.

I’m now on my way, as I write, to the ITI Scotnet’s ‘Style Matters’ workshop in Perth. This event offers an opportunity for creative exploration and exchanging ideas with some of the best names in the business. It always surprises me how much I can learn just by working with colleagues on a translation – there’s not always a ‘right’ answer in translation, after all. The tutors are Chris Durban and Ros Schwartz, so we’re guaranteed a first class workshop. Next week I’m attending City University’s ‘Commercial and Corporate Law’ course, to hone my legal translation skills and general knowledge of this area of law. I think I can safely say I’ll have covered quite a few CPD bases by the time the month is out! I’ll write a couple of short posts about these events too.

If you’re a translator on LinkedIn and/or Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that a bit of a firestorm broke out earlier this week after LinkedIn put out a survey to professional translators with profiles on its site asking whether they’d be prepared to help translate their website into other languages for free (with a token amount of PIE – not the edible kind – thrown in). Within minutes, the Twittersphere was ablaze with fury and a group called ‘Translators against crowdsourcing by commercial companies’ was rapidly set up within LinkedIn itself, where members vented their increasingly angry thoughts about the very suggestion that LinkedIn would crowdsource free translation of its site from among its members. A couple of translators have already written very well-argued blog posts about it here and here.

This mini-drama has made it clearer than ever that as a professional community we are concerned about having an image problem, about being taken for a ride, about being the ‘little man’ against big business. I couldn’t agree more that offering our translation services for free is really only appropriate for a client with a very good cause but minimal budget – the latter is certainly not the case with LinkedIn – but perhaps we should now turn our considerable collective energy to showing The Big Wide World just why they would get  a better service from a professional translator paid a professional fee. It’s not enough to complain and say “pah, you obviously don’t know how great we are as professionals”, we must *demonstrate* this somehow. A professional service really is worth its weight in gold, so let’s focus on the positives and on all the great things we *can* do for the money we charge. We really showed what we can do when we unite as a professional community this week – let’s put that to good use.

One of the most exciting aspects of social media is how it democratises news and information – everybody has a chance to report what is happening where they are in real time, possibly making it more ‘authentic’. Do tools like Twitter make the reporting more ‘real’? Does the absence of the editorial agenda attached to a newspaper or TV channel make it more transparent? For example, the TV and newspaper footage of the Hudson river plane crash was great and everything, but Twitter was the one that really came into its own. Traditional media have more skills and equipment to draw on, but for practical reasons they just can’t match Twitter in terms of immediacy. This was something picked up on by The Guardian and the LA Times (check out the photo):

The major media outlets in New York responded quickly and on the whole they did a good job of reporting the news of the so-called “miracle on the Hudson”.

By contrast, news was all over microblogging website Twitter within minutes. One of the early reports came from New Yorker Janis Krum who wrote: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” Krum also uploaded this pic of the plane floating in the river. Krum was interviewed by MSNBC later yesterday and his pic had more than 100,000 views on TwitPic by this morning.

Yet the most immediate and compelling reports and images came from citizens. Even if you had the most rapid response system in the world, reporters were not able to teleport themselves to the scene – not to mention the fact that the on-the-ground location changed as the plane floated downstream.

If you go to Twitpic, you’ll see that the photo had 354129 views to date. Impressive.

Going back to Obama, this very same feature of social media offers the potential to bring greater transparency to politics and government. Note that within 1 minute of President Obama’s inauguration a new blog was set up on the White House website.  Go to our very own Number10.gov.uk, and look at how they’ve really pimped up their site with Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. Perhaps, in the post-inauguration euphoria, we can dare to dream that these tools will be utilised to the fullest, and that this ‘reaching out’ to the public will genuinely lead to greater transparency and public engagement in news and politics.

Looking at the website of OneHour Translation, I’m sceptical (to say the least) about their ability to turn around larger documents (projects they say they can take on include websites and presentations) within just 1 hour. To me, the best use of this type of service is for something like Twitrans, not important or lengthy documents. What do others think about this type of service?

In Obama’s victory speech he said that the unsung heroes are his campaign managers and his strategist. Just look at how they tapped into communication tools that no candidate has ever bothered with before, such as Facebook right from the early days of the campaign, to creating his very own online community at MyBarackObama, to the point where Obama’s internet following was a self-driven vehicle.

For example, Obama (or one of Obama’s assistants) was tweeting on Twitter, with no less than 119,730 followers. Everytime he was speaking at a rally, a little link would be posted to allow his followers to watch it in realtime. By engaging with new forms of media, Obama has succeeded in reaching out to a new generation of voters, showing that he is a man of the world, for the world. He realises the amazing potential of social media and is able to use it as a means of getting his message across and cultivate a grassroots following through it.

For those of us who were unable to vote, how amazing it was to live through an historic event like this and, thanks to the internet and social media, to be able to feel like you’re really part of it. No matter who you supported in the campaign, after Obama’s victory, we must all agree that the internet’s ability to unite people and allow them to share experiences and interact should not be underestimated. Just look at some of reactions of people around the world, which we are now able to see for ourselves.

This article in the pioneering Huffington Post discusses how in this election the internet has done more than supplement traditional media:

While discussing with a friend an election night viewing party he’s throwing, he announced there would be “televisions all over the place.” “That’s great,” I said, “but just make sure the WiFi is working.” Because this year, the laptop — along with the array of Internet-connected mobile devices — has replaced the television as the must-have election night device.

P.S. While we’re on the subject, the blogosphere is currently alive with Obama-inspired posts, even suggesting that as freelancers we can learn from the campaign in terms of how we present ourselves, such as this one over at Contract Worker.

My age group straddles Generation Y and Generation X, and I often find myself caught between these two rather different mindsets. On the one hand, I blog, and use Facebook fairly extensively, I use RSS feeds to manage information, and I share bookmarks. On the other hand, I’m still quite new to all this, only having had a Facebook account for just over a year, and a blog for roughly the same length of time. I’m still struggling with Twitter, not really fully understanding the term ‘micro-blogging’, not to mention what on earth Twitterific is. And all this on the day I find out that even the Beeb has a Twitterer (is that the term?) for my favourite breakfast radio programme, Radio 4’s Today programme.

Nonetheless, I think the important thing is that I’m willing to learn, and although I don’t fully understand some aspects of social media as much as I’d like to, I am totally wowed by the possibilities it offers. I want to be part of it, and like any good Generation Yer I am learning how to use these tools more or less instinctively.

The same cannot be said of Radio 4, though. Despite their impressive forward-thinking with Twitter, I was disappointed with how Radio 4 reported the Queen’s visit to Google this morning. They broadcast a ‘comedy’ piece called ‘The Queen’s Blog’, in which someone imitated the Queen emailing and accepting friends on Facebook (yeah, like, totally not the same as blogging). Listen again here and weep. I felt like this was a misguided send-up of social media (rather than of the Queen), and as always I look disapprovingly on those to dismiss it so readily.

Long live social media! Once I get my head round it that is…

My husband was surprised to be greeted by the above message when he logged into Facebook over the weekend.

For those of you who like me are slightly visually challenged and have to squint to read it, this is what it says:

“Do you speak English (UK)? Help translate Facebook into English (UK) so that it can be used by people all over the world, in all languages. Click on the Translate Facebook button…etc.”

Well, what it a relief it is to know that British English speakers may finally have the chance to communicate via social networking in our own language! Gone will be the days of cruel exclusion from Facebook by virtue of our language.

Just kidding This is obviously an automated message that has (I hope) been mistakenly programed to include British English, as opposed to American English, but we found it very amusing nonetheless. Good to see that Facebook is going to be translated into languages other than (International) English, in any case.

I actually feel like I’ve been blogging for longer than just 1 year, in a good way. It’s hard to imagine how I engaged in any self-reflection or tracked what I was learning and discovering in my career before I had a blog, or read blogs; blogging is so diverse (and time-consuming) that it has ended up being a major part of my job/life.  I guess the self-reflection and learning and discovery activities happened before somehow, but being able to share them and contextualise them in the form of a a blog makes the learning and opinon-forming process a lot more tangible.

Having ideas for my blog is not difficult, I think of them all the time. What’s harder is to express them in a coherent and meaningful way so that others might be able to relate to or comment on them. I really have to discipline myself to do this. But this is another part of the learning process, and what’s great about blogging is that you can learn from other bloggers.

I’m particularly struck by the fact that my original reasons for starting a blog have held true. Rather than being self-indulgent diary writing, blogging should be a way to offer something positive, your own viewpoint on a particular topic that is important to you. This is particularly relevant in terms of your career, especially when you are freelance like me and don’t have in-house colleagues to bounce ideas off.  This was my raison d’être in my first ever post:

With this in mind, and self-consciously trying to avoid being guilty of any ‘narcissistic shrieks’, I hope to be able to use for the following purposes:

a) express and invite opinion about developments in translation and linguistics
b) recommend authoritative links on other translation bloggers‘ sites, particularly with translation students in mind.

c) learn from others’ blogs
d) raise of the profile of translating and interpreting as a career
e) most importantly: publicize my profile as a freelance translator and seek opportunities

I recently read this article on Freelance Switch about blogging that reminded me why it’s all worth it, and this one and this one on Young Go Getter.

I’ve made some good progress within these quite general objectives. In particular, I’m flattered to report that my blog was recently listed in the Top 100 Language Blogs. Here’s to a good first year, and to the next year!

Over the past couple of months my life has mostly been like the above. The reason? I’ve been doing a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course at Saint George International and oh what a busy time it’s been. Anyone who has done one of these courses will know just how crazily intensive they can be, not mention the sheer exhaustion of meeting deadlines for both the course and your daytime job (as I have been).

Anyway, something which has both hindered and helped me is the sheer extent of teaching resources available on the web. True to form, the internet has opened up a plethora of suggestions, lesson plans, authentic material, even TEFL blogs, for me to browse and use as my own. However, I find it very difficult to know when to stop searching and clicking and just ‘get on with it’.

Progams such as Netvibes and del.icio.us are genius tools for customizing and categorizing our browsing, in just one manageable and portable viewing platform, but in the age of Web 2.0 are we letting the internet overwhelm us? I personally am conscious of becoming a bit of a ‘click-a-holic’, without ever really concentrating on any of the many sites I click through.

This is an issue I’d like to explore further in later posts, when I have time of course……….!