Monday, January 09, 2006

Article on translation blogs; the global blogosphere

The Austin Area Translators and Interpreters Association mentioned this blog in its January newsletter, downloadable here as a PDF file. In the article, on page 5, Frank Dietz explains many crucial elements of blogging in a few informative paragraphs. He points out that you can search blogs on Technorati, a search engine specializing in blogs and news; it's the place to look if you want to know what people are saying this very minute, ahead of any other news media, all over the world.

He also points out that blogs are easy to start -- you can have a free one in 5 minutes if you go to blogger.com -- yet difficult to keep up, as you have to update it regularly or it fades from view.

The AATIA web site looks great and I love how their newsletters are freely available.

Dietz's article highlights the Global Voices site, which has been a useful resource for me. Global Voices tries to monitor and report on the international blogosphere. I've been developing a list of spanish-speaking women bloggers from the Americas (Mostly Latin American, but I want to include Chicana/Latina bloggers in the US/Canada too.) Anyway, Global Voices has been useful for that attempt, and so has Technorati. I'll talk more about this in another post.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Liz - please do keep us up to date on that list. Also, we're always looking for volunteer (and paid) translators at Global Voices if you know of anyone interested.

MBS said...

The AATIA Letter comes out every other month and often has worthwhile resources and news, so it's worth bookmarking the website: www.aatia.org. Literary translators might also be interested in the Literary Special Interest Group (LitSIG) page on the website. We're still working on it, but the idea is to give our members a chance to post their profiles, publications, and literary doings in general. (Literary translators who would like to be able to post a profile somewhere might want to consider joining AATIA so that they can use the service.) The LitSIG is a small but active group. We put out an anthology a few years ago (Thresholds) of which we're all quite proud. You can read about it on the LitSIG page as well. There are even a few copies left for purchase. LitSIG now meets five or six times a year, primarily to critique each other's translations and for general moral support.