Election Day Freebies in the US
November 4, 2008 by Jenna Brinning
It’s election day in the US and if you’re in the States and haven’t cast your vote yet, make sure you get out there and get in line to do so. And once you have an “I voted” badge to sport, you can also take advantage of a bunch of freebies all around the country:
- Ben & Jerry’s: Free scoop of ice cream between 5-8pm. Originally, materials stated you’d need some form of proof you voted (like an “I voted” sticker), but current materials just spell out “Free scoops!” (locate)
- Books-A-Million: Free cup of coffee after showing your “I voted” sticker. (locate
- California Tortilla: Free taco for showing “I voted” sticker. (locate)
- Chick-fil-A: “Several hundred” of 1,400 Chick-fil-A restaurants are handing out chicken sandwiches (the kind normally $2.70) to adults with proof of voting. (locate)
- Krispy Kreme: Free star-shaped doughnut with “patriotic sprinkles” (i.e. red, white, and blue) for “all retail customers with an ‘I voted’ sticker.” USA Today reports that 85 of 231 Krispy Kreme locations will participate. (locate)
- Shane’s Rib Shack: A free “Celebrate America Meal”—3-piece chicken tenders, fries, and 20-ounce drink—to the first 300 customers at participating locations, according to their press release. (locate)
- Starbucks: Free tall coffee at “any Starbucks.” “Tell us you voted” seems to be the bargaining chip, according to their recent TV ads. (locate)
- Vote & Vax: National project by non-profits to offer free flu vaccinations on election day. (locate)
Via Lifehacker
Frankfurt Book Fair
October 15, 2008 by Jenna Brinning
The translators centre at the 60th Frankfurt Book Fair is located in hall 5.0. You can find an overview of translation as one of the fair’s key foci here, which includes lots of links to various associations, programmes and partners around the globe.
If you’re in or near Frankfurt am Main this week, the fair will be running until the 19th of October and you might want to stop by. A day pass for translators as trade visitors runs at 36 euros. Regular (non-trade) visitors may attend the fair on the 18th and 19th only.
Addendum: there is also an English blog on the FBF website. It’s obviously modest in scope considering the short duration of the book fair, but nicely written all the same.
New Book on Personal Publishing and the Public Sphere
October 14, 2008 by Jenna Brinning
By the wayside, I’m pleased to announce that my (German) book in the field of communication and media studies, Persönliches Publizieren im Web 2.0, has just been published by vwh – Fachverlag für Medientechnik und -wirtschaft, a small publishing house for academic literature in the area of media technology and media management. The book examines the relation between personal web publishing and the public sphere while also exploring the derogatory attitude towards personal publishing so prevalent in German media. You can find it on Amazon or order it directly (postage free) from my publisher, vwh-Verlag. The front matter and preface are also available for download here (in German), as is an English-language abstract.
Website Relaunch: Kudos to Rebwebdesign
October 6, 2008 by Jenna Brinning
The relaunch of modilingua.com had been on the back burner for an awful long time, but things finally fell into place last week. The entire German version of the website is online and once some larger client projects have been attended to, I’ll be porting the English content bit by bit.
I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Rebecca of Rebwebdesign for her help with the template design and work in the backend. Reb is a Wordpress specialist who’s adept in PHP, MySQL, CSS and XHTML, and I can recommend her services if you’re looking for a designer who is easy to communicate with, responsive to specific ideas and offers great prices.
I’m excited about the website’s new look and hope that our visitors find the navigational structure as clean and comfortable as we do.
September Recap
September 25, 2008 by Jenna Brinning
It’s been an insanely hectic month here. My order books were overfilled, which was great. But in my “free” time I have also been working on the final edits of a book of mine, which will be coming out very soon. Add a bilingual website relaunch project to all that (which, I admit, was neglected most of the month), and the stress curve can get very high indeed. Essentially, I have been working 18-hour long days for the past four weeks, something that 9-to-5 employees can hardly imagine.
Things are starting to come together now though. We’re going to get the German version of the website out of the sandbox within a week and then I’ll start porting the English content. The clients are all happy, everybody has been attended to on time as always. October’s order books are already full and, of course, I’m looking forward to the galley proofs from my publisher…
Wordfast und Translations.com Strengthen Alliance
September 6, 2008 by Jenna Brinning
Wordfast LLC has been working together with Translations.com for two years now on the development of compatible translation tools. As announced in yesterday’s press release, both companies have decided to strengthen their alliance by merging their marketing programmes, working on tighter product integration and expanding their collaborative efforts to include another new partner, Alchemy Software Development.
As a long-term end-user of Wordfast, this news doesn’t particularly mean that much to me if it’s not going to speed up the release of the new Wordfast version. Ever since Microsoft dumped all Visual Basic support in its Office 2008 packet—at least until the next time around—, Mac users like myself have been forced to trudge along with Word 2004 in order to keep using our Wordfast macros. The new platform-independent, Java-based Wordfast 6.0 version is therefore very warmly welcomed. Originally, the rumour mill had it that 6.0 was to be released in Q3 this year. Yet since the summer, things have been mum with Yves Champollion, head of Wordfast. Let’s hope that the development of 6.0 will be given precedence despite the efforts currently being made in the name of marketing and product integration. Until then, we’ll have to sit back and wait while dealing with the aggravation of working with Word 2004 on a daily basis. Or I suppose we could migrate to Swordfish or Heartsome…
Back to Blogging
August 22, 2008 by Jenna Brinning
Work on the long overdue relaunch of modilingua.com is still going on in the backend, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to go ahead and set the blog up. For technical reasons, the English and German posts will be published in two separate blogs here at modilingua.com because a bilingual website like this makes it necessary to do a double installation of Wordpress. So you might want to take note of the German blog, as it could contain entirely different contents.
Both blogs are to act as a filing cabinet of sorts for thoughts on the daily grind of translation. A special emphasis will be placed on freelancing and SOHOs. Because I have also always worked in a Mac network, readers will likely be able to find some hardware/software discussions and tips here from time to time.
A word about me: I published a personal blog between 2000 and 2005. I believe it was the first German-English “mono(b)log” in Germany back then. With the modilingua.com weblog, I’m now breaking professional blogging ground for the first time ever, i.e. writing about topics that are directly linked to my professional activities as a translator and editor. Enjoy!
