Remembering the Freeagent demo I tried a few years previously, but opted out of because of a lack of multi-currency support, I went back to check. It turns out that they have added multi-currency support and a host of other features alongside.

Ease of use

Having set up both Sole Trader and Limited Company accounts at FreeAgent, each with their own prices and features, I was able to get a comprehensive overview of how they both work. The main differences are in the legal obligations inherent in each business entity; Limited Accounts also calculate Corporation Tax, for example.

The menu system is very easy to navigate and the dashboard home screen lays out all your key information at a glance. You can find out who owes you, when and how much; how much cash your business has over its various bank and online merchant accounts; when your next tax payment is required; recent expenses and even your current profit situation.

All of this data is calculated automatically from uploaded bank statements, saving hours of admin every month. All that is left to do is label each payment, expense and sale. You can then get great overviews of your financial position and obligations.

It is also easy to create a user account for your accountant to log in and download all the information they require once you are done reconciling the double entry book-keeping by checking that your balance matches the balance on your bank statements on the final date of the tax year.

For ease of use it receives top marks, as it beats any alternative I’ve ever used hands down, be it spreadsheet or paper.

Cost

Costs vary from Sole Trader at £15 (+VAT) per month to Partnership or LLP at £20 (+VAT) to Limited Company at £25 (+VAT) per month. There are no set up fees and there is a a 30 day free trial, so it is really easy to test, with no contracts to sign.

A very manageable expense, then, for a product that is designed to ultimately save you more money than it costs.

Savings

You can use the information created in FreeAgent to save money with accountants, saving them from combing your receipts and charging you by the hour for the privilege. You also save time. Lots of time. From the tedium of entering purchases or sales figures into spreadsheets or other software ledgers, you can spend those hours now focusing on growing the business, rather than drowning in it.

I have read in places that some people save an average of 4 hours a month. I’d say, with the integrated invoicing and banking features, that I save at least that; but I expect I save somewhat more given the automated invoice overdue reminders and automated corporation and self-assessment calculations.

Summary

If, like myself, you need to get the books in order in a very efficient way, I can’t recommend FreeAgent enough. It is worth every penny to remain organised in such a tidy and cost effective way.

Finally, as a FreeAgent ‘evangelist’, I can offer you 10% off (forever) the cost of the monthly subscriptions charged by FreeAgent. I will also receive 10% off, which was part of my reason for writing this blog post in the first place, but I can assure you I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t like it. You will also be able to refer people, earning further 10% discounts until the cost is zero.

Click here to go through to the site for 10% off:  http://fre.ag/3tqplzmz

The alternative was another laptop or a netbook. Netbooks were my ideal first choice, but given that we (as translators) type thousands of words a day, keyboards, screen sizes and processing power were major concerns. But early on in my search I came across the AMD Fusion chipset which provides cheap dual-core processing to netbooks. I found a range of netbooks having just been released at around the £300 mark and set about reading reviews and user experiences online. One product stood out; the Lenovo X120e. It had won awards, generated a buzz and looked good to boot.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb-ns5f2dV4

With this new-fangled processor, up to 8GB of RAM, a full size keyboard and a matte screen for working in sunlight, I was amazed to see that much power in a device no larger than a sheet of A4 paper, at the same price as my desktop cost to build last year. The buying process was slightly complicated as the matte screen version was only available in the States, with no international shipping option, so I set about arranging the purchase with the help of friend in New York. I ended up paying extra shipping and taxes, but still within the realm of reasonably priced mobile working. 5 weeks later the order arrived and I got to work setting it up.

Set up

I installed MS Office, MemoQ, Skype, Chrome, Firefox etc. and it all went as well as can be from that perspective. Initially I had trouble working with the US keyboard, having switched from a French one, but remembered where everything should be after a few emails. I then copied over my TMs and project files for a large translation assignment and got started. It was absolutely fine. A little slower than on my desktop, but only marginally, when loading gigabyte-sized TMs for example.

The machine came with 2GB of RAM which I have now, after several weeks of usage, upgraded to 6GB using a 4GB module from Crucial (£30 only, shipped next day!) and now the performance of the machine has leaped forward. And it performs marvellously on even the most complicated of projects.

Out and about

The battery life, around 6 hours, works well when there are no power outlets around. It’s not often that I’m anywhere without power for that long, but when out working in Nottingham city recently I found it lasted for as long as I wanted to work, giving me a freedom I didn’t have with my laptop which consumed a lot more power for a lot less performance.

Another improvement to my working environment, apart from that freedom to change office location at will, is the ability to create a stand-up desk wherever I can put the netbook down at chest height. My office chair is comfortable and protects me from all manner of aches and pains, but now I can actively stand, as I am while writing this, which I’m hoping will have some positive health benefits.

So as you might be able to tell, I’m happy with the new computer. It should last for many years to come and allow me to keep up productivity while freeing me from the desk.

Fredrik Härén spoke in 2007 on Sweden’s knowledge day (kunskapens dag). This engaging speaker stood and explained his views on the value of knowledge in the global economy. Video in Swedish.

He spoke of how the very meaning of the term “developed country” has lead to complacency, and that “developing countries” are taking advantage of new ideas, not existing knowledge, but what he calls nyskap, or “newledge” as it would roughly translate. He defines an idea as the coming together of two previous concepts, ruling out the possibility that any idea could be 100% original.

He exposes typical Western ignorance of Chinese and Indian leaders and top companies (asking what are the prime minister’s names? And what are their top ten companies?) while highlighting the fact that Chinese and Indians workers are quite familiar with both East and West in terms of politics and business, stressing that we risk being left behind.

He states that while building skyscrapers may not be indicative of a more advanced society (saying they could quite easily be described as extensions of a man’s ego, among other things) they still require new kinds of lifts/elevators, water and waste systems developing, pulling innovation along with the new buildings.

Talk is cheap

He showed that knowledge can be bought for $3 an hour, and that students and statepersons that he has spoken to who think they are smart and knowledgeable should bear this in mind. He says we should focus on imagination, ideas and innovation. Which, to cheekily try to coin a second term in this post, amounts to “the three I’s”.

Finally, he spoke of Niklas Zennström of Skype, described as deserving a medal and as a role-model for Sweden. Given the date of the talk, 2007,  the latest re-sale of Skype was not taken into account when he praised Zennström’s ability to earn 10 billion SEK (£100m)  and paid the resulting tax on it in Sweden, all within 18 months. He finished by saying that these are the Swedes we need leaving school, but unfortunately this is not the case.

The talk could be summed up in one line as follows:

To compete, we need permanent use of imagination, ideas and innovation for the continued development of our “newledge”-based economy.

What do you think? Are we standing idly by in the West as China and India seal deal after deal?

As far as I understand it, the “Semantic Web”, heralded by Tim Berners-Lee as the coming of Web 3.0, is about labelling everything. Because apparently the web as it stands is a big mess that somebody needs to clean up. All data on the global network will be tagged in a variety of ways, allowing computers to group relevant data sets in any way it or its operators see fit.

“The semantic web, bringing together AI and OCD.”

So what will this mean for the translation industry?

My initial thoughts are the quite obvious implications, but further discussion and consideration in this field is welcome; your comments and thoughts can be shared below.

Key impact 1 – Term research
This ought to see a massive improvement in efficiency, with relevant information rising to the top of any related search. Glossary, term and dictionary websites would do well to keep an eye on this in order to capitalise on improved data transparency.

Key impact 2 – Machine translation
This may be improved if the concepts are implemented, with full context being given to any multi-lingual text on the network, mistakes should occur less frequently. As a QA measure machines could also validate their own term selection decisions by comparing like for like texts and highlighting words and terms with lower certainties.

Key impact 3 – Buyers buying less
Companies who buy translation services may be able to search for similar templates of existing human translations, leading to a cost reduction for them on that front. Lower barriers to international business then perhaps increase demand for human-presence-required interpreting services. How private would any given translation be? Would we be forced to share our work when the client publishes online, and in so doing losing any chance of translating that kind of text again?

Key impact 4 – More work!
Translation of international tagging terms will need constant updating and indexing. This potentially represents a slew of new work; unless the process is automated, which is not wholly out of the question.

Opportunities may be plentiful in this evolution of the internet, as with the move towards applications and artificial intelligence. The best strategy may be to seek these out as existing translation services are potentially increasingly automated.

What are your thoughts?

What is fail/failure?

The business community seem to have appropriated the internet-meme of using real-life situational failure pictures as entertainment (titling the images with the single word “FAIL”) and have converted it into a slightly self-aggrandising (surprise, surprise) rags-to-riches, faux self-deprecating “look at my success but don’t think I didn’t pay for it, learn from it and improve myself” way of explaining how great a personal success story they’ve had, and how others should follow suit. But just how much credence should we give to the value of failure in life and work?

Inconsequential fail

Failure itself can be on an inconsequential level, unnoticeable precisely because of its lack of consequences – i.e. not a success. An example of this being poorly presenting a website. Low conversion rate, high bounce rate, no subsequent success story, but enough of a response for some to consider it a partial success.

Micro-fail

Failure can also be iterative, with no single big failure story becoming important until the business entity is newsworthy. Many micro-fails can, and do, result in success, but micro-fails are hardly anecdotes worth relaying. They are probably most often quite common errors made by the legion of DIY business builders (myself included) that wouldn’t have been made by those with more experience (who are quite probably now retiring that experience on a golf course or in a garden somewhere nearby), nor by the professionals in any one of the dozens of outsource-able trades.

Random fail

I would also have to mention the role of random probability in success, and how persistence increases your statistical odds of achieving a desired goal. From the millions of fail possibilities that could happen to any business, a few will inevitably occur at some stage, and at other stages one or several of the millions of success possibilities will take place. Attributing this solely to skill, while it may have played a role, is risking future successes by assuming the same actions would lead to the same fortunate success result next time.

Even successful companies fail, and fail hard, on a regular basis. Random probability can not be overlooked in the success process. By the same token successes should not be too readily attributed to skill, despite the quasi-illusion that post-failure success gives of having learned and applied knowledge.

Still, just like with learning a language, watching others do it wrong can often help you to do it right and tilt those success odds in your favour. To distill a single message from this blog post would be a challenge, but one I’m happy to take on and potentially fail at:

Avec mon appareil Snom M3 (DECT, sans-fil), et mon fournisseur de VoIP anglais, j’ai pu créer un système téléphonique aux numéros internationales à un prix très raisonnable.

J’ai la possbilité de selectionner mes horaires de disponibilité, avec messagerie automatique qui déclenche en dehors de ces plages journalières. Toute message reçu est envoyé par mail en format .wav.

J’ai également des tarifs d’appel international très bas, qui est un peu le but de l’exercise, ainsi que des frais d’opération flexible – modification de contrat en ligne à tout moment.

Bref, assez content avec cette technologie bien accessible et ouverte. Vous avez un peu la même impression ?

To kick things off, who better to start with than French Silicon-Valley rockstar Loïc Le Meur. In just 4 years he has created a personal brand and company presence that doesn’t often come naturally to Europeans in SF. Not a shy guy, by any means, his face is plastered all over the web and largely in part due to his seismically-social networking service, Seesmic. Recently he has voiced his opinion on Twitter to a French techblog. He’s close to Twitter, in regular contact with the team and so his thoughts are particularly on the pulse. They are in French, so I took the liberty of putting some of them into English. Here’s a roundup of what he said:

- Twitter now want no competitors, as some Twitter clients compete with traffic (eyeballs!) and others with ads.

- Doesn’t affect us, and we’re kept in the loop – Ryan Sarver (Twitter Platform Manager) called me before sending the announcement email. Anything that enriches Twitter is welcome, anything competing is bad.

- Seesmic is becoming a tool for brand management – managing feedback over all social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, Viadeo – 70 so far…)

- Seesmic has 1 million users, 400k active, with good growth (+10k per day), 1/3rd of whom are businesses – which we’ll now focus on. It’s difficult to pursue a strategy of end users and companies at the same time, so we’ve decided to focus on business. This helps us to not compete with Twitter, and have a clearer position and business model.

- Our free product will always be so, but the new business focused model will allow professionals to pay to get analytics. We’re remaining open with 70 plugins for Seesmic, made by companies themselves. They can be made in 2 weeks.

- Seesmic becomes a pro dashboard for engagement, lead generation. The new partnership with Salesforce helps this. Negative comments can be talked about internally. Companies can manage prospects via social networks.

- 10% of Seesmic users are in Japan. Euro-Director Cédric Giorgi now handles partnerships in Europe. He is someone Loïc admires.

- He also talked about ticket sales for LeWeb11 at 40% sold at present, so now is the time to sign up if you want to attend.

Here’s the original video:

Loic Le Meur, CEO de Seesmic from frenchweb on Vimeo.

A lot of this info is also summed up in this French press article.

Opinion

So what to make of all this? It seems as though Twitter is forcing the market to innovate and to develop its own revenue models rather than just hang from Twitter’s coat tails, parasite-like (in the nicest possible way). This can only be good for consumers, provided they don’t mind having their public thoughts scrutinised for marketing purposes.

The age-old argument of increased efficiency versus decreased privacy rears its ugly head again. Twitter could have perhaps embraced their client community and somehow worked alongside them, but the decision has been made. Time to see what comes of it.

I’m now very tempted to go back to paper. The perceived added benefits of having my diary on my person at all times, synchronised to the web in case I should lose anything, do not really outweigh the advantages of using a paper diary.

Both are portable, easily searchable and quick to add entries to. So why do I still not prefer the smaller, more technologically advanced version?

- I tend to lose entries for long term tasks in the scrolling diary pages of the phone
- Task/to-do lists get filled with “ideas” rather than real tasks
- I cannot take notes as effectively on the phone, as on paper I can quickly refer to a 3 week old note about a supplier, which is trickier to do on the phone

Digital diaries do have a saving grace, however, in the form of automated annual/monthly reminders. These can be useful to keep marketing campaigns on track among other things.

I think from now on I’ll be using a blend of paper and smartphone for notes, tasks, events with reminders and recurring events/tasks.

Do you have a preference or any tips you can offer?

Just what could it all mean? Is it really true that my success is premoderated?

(It’s an error displayed while browsing the Linkedin site…)

I’ve been a big advocate of AVG for at least 5 years, but recently they have
started to turn to the “spam side”, with their adverts dominating my screen on a
regular basis.

I switched over to the Microsoft Security Essentials software that should
probably have shipped with Windows 7, if it weren’t for anti-competition
regulations. I read many reviews comparing it very favourably to all the free
anti-virus software available, and from sources I trust (Ars Technica, for one).

It is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/
And one of the many reviews is here:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/first-look-microsoft-security-esse\
ntials-impresses.ars

Now I have no more advertising on my PC and a solid product I can trust. I am
also using a hardware firewall of sorts and am well versed in not clicking
things I don’t trust, but the most important thing is now in place – solid
anti-virus protection.

Hope that’s of some use.

The machines are taking over

I could really do with getting up in the search results, but for some bizarre reason Google has placed 4 pages of free machine-translation sites ahead of me, including – for another unfathomable reason – their own Google Translate, which makes a galliant effort to be the best “get-the-gist” translation engine out there.

Revolution, the people rise against Skynet

Again, over-sensational, but we could cross-link to each others’ sites to boost our search engine rankings significantly. That’s what I propose, at least. If you don’t work in French to English, we could benefit from a bit of mutual cross-linking.

Anyone interested?

This is the phone of geeks, anyway, featuring a full Linux operating system and root access (admin rights) to let you customise any aspect of the device. It even has Skype integrated; another bonus for a translator on the move.

Now, the CAT tool is the open-source (source code shared freely at no cost), cross-platform (PC, Linux, Mac) OmegaT. I’ve been singing its praises for several years now, much preferring it to the slower, more cumbersome CAT tools.

This may be just a novelty, but it’s great to know that I can use a CAT tool when not in the office. I don’t know if this is a first, translation tools on a mobile phone, but so far I haven’t been able to find it anywhere else online.

Here is a (very) brief rundown of how to set it up:

- get hold of a Nokia N900
-  download and install the easydebian image (instructions on maemo.org, takes an hour)
-  download the Linux OmegaT archive
- open and extract in easydebian
-  run OmegaT.jar (wait a minute for it to start)
- import your OpenOffice, rtf or txt files and get to work!

And now, for your viewing pleasure, some screenshots of OmegaT running on the N900:

Myth 1 – Voice recognition makes too many mistakes to be worthwhile
I have used Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 for two years now and find the amount of mistakes made to be minimal. Those mistakes that appear over and over can be trained away. Common mistakes I find with my accent – a non-region-specific blend of Southern/Midlands UK with hints of other influences – would be “we’re” recognised as “were”, “for” (ie. he’d be there fuh three days) being missed by the software or names of people the software hasn’t heard before. These errors have been trained away in minutes though, and I always keep an eye out for them now, just in case. The software is set to recognise me as a British English speaking male. I have read the training texts for approximately one hour in total.

I don’t use the software on every translation I do as it often isn’t appropriate. VR software seems better suited to dialogue or magazine style texts than, for example, context-less software translations. As I translate comic books, this is where VR really comes into its own. The bottom line, as they say, is that my productivity increases.

Myth 2 – You need the latest computer to run VR software
My computer is a trusty Thinkpad T42 with 1GB of RAM and a 32GB HD. It can be slow. But not that slow, in that as stated above, productivity increases. Obviously a faster computer would make the process a lot more satisfying to work with, however, I have found that my low spec has presented no obstacles in this respect.

Myth 3 – Voice recognition software costs too much for too little return
The latest version of the Dragon software, version 10, (non-affiliate direct link, amazon.co.uk) is only £40 in the UK and $40 in the US. Reviews and descriptions say it does not require training, with over 99% accuracy out of the box. I haven’t tried it yet, but look forward to doing so. I’ll import all of the training I’ve accrued over the last few years at the same time.

I find this excellent value for money, given the speed increase involved.

Fact 1 – Working with others in the room is an issue
Switching the software to “Off” in order to talk to someone in the room can be impolite, as if you’re finishing a conversation that the other person wasn’t aware you were having. Also translating intimate scenes between cartoon characters can be slightly embarrassing, although perhaps I’m in the minority of translators having to deal with that particular issue. General unavailability to talk and being a distraction to others make VR an antisocial piece of software.

A word of advice – don’t leave the room with the VR software and TV/radio on at the same time, it’s not fair on your computer.

Fact 2 – Typical VR errors are hard to detect
Homophones, words that sound similar, are the standard errors with VR. These are figured out with the help of context in the VR software. For example, wants vs once. Which, incidentally, is the kind of error I start to make myself when tired. On a slight tangent, this has started me thinking and googling about words being stored as sounds rather than letters, with spellings being a guide and mnemonic for how to write out the sound, but I haven’t got very far with that research.

Homophones are harder to detect than typos. They aren’t picked up in spell-checkers and even proofreading them can be tricky at times. I proof read every sentence after settling on a translation, and then the whole text again in context. I do this anyway, when not using VR, but keeping an eye out for these specific errors is an additional requirement to consider.

Fact 3 – VR is fully compatible with CAT tools
Wherever you can input text on your computer, you can use VR. Wherever the cursor blinks, the text is entered. All punctuation must be pronounced. This can take some practice. The software can be set to punctuate automatically, but in my case I’d rather have control of that.

As translation requires a stop-go text input method, while our brains search the memory banks for fuzzy matches, the productivity increases would be less marked than if reading from a book into the software. However the speed gains are still present, especially in larger segments, and it is for this reason that I’d still recommend its use.

Examples online
Plenty of examples of typing performance increases can be found through Google et al., here’s the first one I saw, including a video: Typing vs VR. The author found an increase in speed from 73wpm to 126wpm and a reduction in errors. Although as stated in the comments and above, VR errors are of a different nature.

If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them in the comments section below.

PS Contrary to most voice recognition related blog posts, this one was not dictated with VR.

I’m actually just writing from your future, I’ve chosen this guy’s webpage to post to as he seems like he wouldn’t start running around claiming to be a “messiah” like that other guy did when I accidentally dialled in the wrong date. Seems to have caused a little confusion for you back there, but it’ll soon work out.

This all might seem a little unusual for you, dear reader, but it’s quite simple from here. I just fire up my retinal display, open a post page and start thinking out my message. Once done, I select the language I want - in this case English, British standard 2008 version – and the date I’d like to post to. See, science has recently discovered how to travel through time but only for sub-atomic and quantum sized particles. That led to some pretty interesting developments, this transtime mail for one, but I digress.

What I wanted to tell you about, not as a bleak apocalyptic message of destruction, but as a gentle warning to human translators, was that things are going to change quite soon and you may suddenly find a lot less work being sent your way. For translation, at least. Computing and technology are gradually changing your lifestyle in imperceptible stages at the moment, (your moment, that is) so small that the change is almost undetectable. But due to the lowering cost of computer components there will soon be a surge in people connected and trading globally. A critical mass of people requiring just-enough-to-understand translations will be reached in a short time and machine translation will be in vogue.

Human translators will gradually be replaced by proof-readers who check machine text as it comes onscreen. They are paid by the hour at a minimum wage. The job will require editing a stream of text as it is piped onscreen as fast as the proof-reader can go, the slowest readers being replaced daily in the online network of millions. But what about the people who need legal contracts or mission critical texts translating? How can they trust a machine? I hear you cry. Well, AI improvements and processing power have come a long way in a short time and you wouldn’t believe what wonders await you. There’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to retrain, but it may be better to start thinking about your future now. Concentrate on your writing skills because your potential market is about to grow like you wouldn’t believe.

Don’t be disheartened, make the most of the opportunities coming your way, harness the power of your imagination because you people are going to need it when the information exchange really begins.

P. Francberg,
EuroNation,
2047 AD
(4,540,000,0047 ABB)