Merlin: Translation News, Services & Directory

It uses a black background and therefore offers great energy savings, because black uses less energy than white on computer monitors.

Called Eco Find, it is interely Portuguese in the making, but it uses Google results.

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The Centre for Regional and Tourism Research of Denmark has updated a study related to online travel sales on teh rise in Europe by 24% from 2006 to 2007 reaching € 49.4 Billion in Europe.

Online travel expenditure is expected to rise another 18% during 2008 and should reach nearly € 67 Billion in 2009.

Countries leading the European online expenditure in travel are:

• UK (30%)
• Germany (19%)

Additional information:

• Direct sales accounted for 65% of the market
• Intermediaries 35%
• Air travel 57%
• Hotels (and other accommodations) 17%
• Package tours 14½%
• Rail 7½%
• Rental cars (and car ferries) 4%

online travel statistics europe, Sante J. Achille, web marketing europe

I started this blog a couple of years ago. I wanted to write about translation, give to the world my unbidden opinions. Mostly, I suppose, it was a case of “me too” other people had blogs, it looked cool (in a nerdy sort of way), and it didn’t look like too many translators had one.

At first I mostly posted short comments about news on translation, then I stared to add, at least occasionally, longer articles.

I didn’t know who my readers would be at the beginning, but I thought I would mostly write for other translators: share my experience with them, sometime some cool tool I found, sometime venting about problems with a CAT tool, sometime about the translation courses I taught. I find that the readers here, at least those who leave comments, are indeed other translators. My most popular posts seem those devoted to advice for beginning translators, translation education, or translation tools (whenever I vent about some Trados misfeature, my site counter goes up for the day).

The posts I worked the most on were devoted to wildcard searches in MS Word. I often refer to those posts myself to refresh my memory whenever I need to try some new complicated MS search.

In 2005 and 2006 I posted more than once a week on average. Last year it was a difficult year: stretches of much pressure at work interspersed with periods of worry when not enough work arrived. I didn’t write much, nothing at all for long stretches of time.

For this year I am resolved to post more often, at least whenever some idea for an interesting post arrives, and not let ideas wither away for lack of attention. They say that if you don’t write down resolutions, you’ll never do anything to make them happen. So here I am: sharing my resolve to write more on this blog and perhaps elsewhere.

Knowing that someone is interested in what I write makes it worthwhile: thank you for visiting here!