About me

Dear Curious One,

There is nothing quite like an “About me” page to trigger a ten-minute session of me gazing blankly at the computer screen.

I should just mention that I am, in principle, against assigning labels to people lest it turn into a name-calling mud fight.

The string of labels I could apply to myself – or to anyone else, for that matter – could be at once incredibly accurate, possibly surprising and perhaps even original, but they would serve little purpose. Labels never do give the whole picture.

The whole picture is, in truth, is something that no one ever gets. We ourselves are constantly changing, and one hopes, developing. So does our interpretation and expression of ourselves, as well as the general impression we give others.

If you are interested in fragments of the whole picture, I welcome you to enjoy the diverse snippets that I call my blog. My blog is where I relax, as far as that is possible for me to do. It is also supposed to be the place where I train myself to write short sentences. Sadly, it would appear that I love conjunctions and subordinate and relative clauses too much to succeed in this regard.

If you are still curious, you can also find out about my translation and editing services on my website, Allison Wright Translations. I am happy to say that since February 2016, this site is now also in Portuguese.

If you are a translator, you may be interested in reading The Vine Atlas of Spain and Portugal – Hans Jörg Böhm page, or in fact, the work itself, at the Vine to Wine Circle.

Likewise, you may also to wish to read the guest blog I wrote in May 2012 on Catherine Translates (website currently offline), entitled, “Translating a 125,000-word book: connections and corrections” (republished on my own website with the agreement of Catherine Jan), or an article I posted in February 2011 on ProZ.com entitled, “Educating the Client, or Zen and the Art of Sanity Maintenance“. In July 2013, I blogged about two presentations given at the  ProZ International Translators’ Conference held in Porto under the title of Passionate about getting things right on fellow-translator Moira Monney’s blog, The Successful Linguist. Since then Moira has decided to focus her energy on another great passion of hers, and is busy  developing her holistic nutrition business. We agreed that I could re-post the article on my website instead.

As far as labels go, perhaps one of the most thorough examinations of what I think about translation matters is, by dint of fellow translator Caroline Alberoni’s skilful questions, contained in the interview she gave and posted on her very lively blog under the vastly exaggerated title of Greatest Women in Translation: Allison Wright. 2016 seems to have been the year of the longer blog post: There is one on my take of the Aptrad (Association of Portuguese Translators and Interpreters) conference held in June, affectionately known as #aptrad2016 which features a little poem by moi, and the two previous ones on the terminological minefield and a review of a glossary well worth its salt published two days later.

Translator Nikki Graham twisted my arm into just the right position for me to write a guest blog called Revision and the Quality Crate, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing. Despite the numerous instances of sharing on social media, I am disappointed no one took the time to write a comment below the blog, although some discussion has occurred elsewhere. I do love a good conversation.

Other translation-related thoughts populate my blog as I yield to natural compulsions more and more.  These can be found under the Translation-related category on my home page. This classification is a bit silly, since in my world everything is ultimately related to translation, one way or the other. The advantage is that if you are not interested in translation, then you can avoid this category entirely. The choice is yours. 🙂

A new If you would like to be a guest on my blog, please visit the Spare Room page.

I started another communal blog in August 2019 called five stray minutes aimed at a collective effort at honing our writing skills for five minutes every day. Head on over there if you’re interested and send a message one way or another if you would like to join in as an author.

Whichever blog you find yourself on, I would love your responses and comments too, because these are for me the most tangible indications that you have been here.

Happy reading and commenting!

Kind regards – and stay curious,

Allison

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