Personal Note

I am sorry for being lax for the last four days. I had promised myself that I would have one hundred posts in August but I missed it by a whisker. But that doesn't mater. I understand that you might have found my silences deafening. I am sorry about it but I was too fatigued to write anything here. There was a lot of physical fatigue that caught up with me and I was too busy with some other projects.

Notes

There have been so many things going on in my life that I sometimes feel at a loss to describe everything. But I still feel that I could do a lot more. The more I work harder and the more activities, I find myself involved in, the more I have this feeling that I'm not doing anything at all.

Why do I have this feeling? It isn't a feeling of dissatisfaction... in fact, I'm really satisfied in life but I still have this great burning fire in my belly.

Personal Blogging Milestones

I have reached 115 posts till now and this is the 116th post since May 1, 2008. And in the month of August, I have had 73 posts and this is the 74th post. When I crossed 50 posts earlier this month, I was really excited. And I didn't even inform you people about crossing the 100th post.

When I began this blog, my target was 500 posts in the first year. Now, I have an average of about 30 posts [if I reach 120 posts in August] per month, which means I'm pretty close.

However, my immediate target is 100 posts for the month of August, which means I am about 25-27 posts short and I have 10 days to go. And I would certainly like to maintain the quality of my posts. I would also like to keep my posts informative and helpful to a number of people including my students at the University.

Somebody Wrote About Me

Hey hey.... folks, do you know what happened? A gentleman found out about me and mentioned me on his blog!

Wow! Please go ahead and tell your friends about it and about my blog too.

You can find the gentleman's post here:

http://www.techne-eikon.com/business/a-better-definition-of-blogging

Enjoy!

Personal Notes of a Translator

I have been a translator for such a long time. I received the Katha Translation Award for translating a Gujarati short story into English way back in 1996 and then for a number of years, I have had quite a bit of professional translation experience. Then in 2005, I was interviewed by Dr. Tim Altanero, who was an Associate Professor at Austin Community College, for an article that he wrote on translating airline menus for Multilingual Computing and Technology, which is a well-known magazine that caters to the translation and the localization industry. You can read that article online at this link. And I taught a Certificate in Translation Proficiency for three years in my University. I have also taught Diploma in Translation Proficiency for the last two years.

I was a Moderator of ProZ.com for English-Gujarati, Gujarati-English language communities and also for the Literature Forum from December 2000 to December 2007, when I quit due to personal reasons. Presently, I am one of the co-moderators of the American Translators' Association's Language Technology Division's mailing list.

All this sounds good to those who can understand what it means.

But years ago, things were a bit different. The person who I would like to acknowledge as my guru, the person who really motivated me to begin translating in my life was a gentleman called Professor K Satchidanandan. He is a well known Malayalam writer and he used to be the editor of Indian Literature, a journal published by the Indian Academy of Letters, which is called the Sahitya Akademi here.

I wanted to write this post here to publicly acknowledge my debt to him and I shall remain indebted to him forever. Thanks a lot, Professor K Satchidanandan.