The Useful Links & Resources for Translators & Interpreters are five sections detailed on five separate pages with all kinds of links to help you work smarter. They form one of the main categories in a larger part of my site called Links, Tips & Resources, which I’ve added to and reorganised since I last did an update back in January to (hopefully) make it easier for you to find the information you need.

The Links, Tips & Resources now include Abbreviations, Acronyms & Initialisms, the Bite-sized Tips series, Downloadable Files and lots more. Do check out what’s on offer.

Meanwhile, let’s look at what’s new in Useful Links & Resources and go backwards through the five sections for a change (all the headings are clickable).

5. Other Links of Interest

As a result of the pandemic and most events shifting online, a new category on this page is Meetings. It includes Zoom, which I expect most of us are familiar with by now, for audio or video conferencing and webinars, and Wonder.me, a virtual space where you can join or create rooms to meet and talk. The latter’s been used by a few associations during their conferences for coffee-break chats and evening events.

Meetup helps you meet people with similar interests for virtual and in-person gatherings. Just type in the activity and/or location you’re interested in and see what you could get up to.

The SEO category, new in the last update, has three additions. The first is Google Trends, which provides information on top search queries.

The other two are tools to help you write sparkling headlines in your translations, copywriting tasks or for your own writing. They are Headline Analyzer Studio by CoSchedule and Headline Analyzer – Emotional Marketing Value by Advanced Marketing Institute. Most of this blog’s headlines that I analysed using this tool were classified as intellectual. I’ll take that!

I’ve added a link to a RGB Color Codes Chart in the Codes & Shortcuts category. You might find this useful if your website is on WordPress and are now having to use the Gutenberg editor, which doesn’t come with as many colours. All you have to do is type in the code in the ‘custom color’ box. For example, the blue in the subheadings in this post is #0000cd.

Lastly, under Sundry there’s a link to Speedtest by Ookla, the global broadband speed test, to find out how fast your Internet connection really is.

4. Translation-related Tools & Links

Under the GDPR category I’ve added the Identity Leak Checker. This tool helps you discover whether someone is spying on you and it sends you a report of all breaches related to your email. Given that my Twitter account was hacked in the summer, it’s a topic I’m becoming more and more attuned to.

Also as a result of this hack, which ended up with my Twitter account being suspended even though I’d done nothing wrong, readers of this blog recommended two password generators and managers: KeePass and LastPass. They can be found in the Social Media category.

The Terminology category, new last update, has also expanded with: Tb-Scout v2.0, a search engine for exploring, extracting and exporting data from SDL MultiTerm termbases; and TermiFactor, which extracts EN>ES terminology from tmx files to produce an Excel glossary for a small fee.

I’ve added a new job board called Freelanly to the Miscellaneous category. The Freelanly project evolved from a LinkedIn group for freelancing translators and interpreters where they posted job openings and eventually turned into a separate service. Freelanly notifies users via email of available vacancies in language pairs they work with. You get several vacancy notifications every day and can contact the requestor directly. Freelanly is free and the subscription part is currently in a beta-testing phase.

The final addition in this section is the Class Central search engine under MOOCS. If you’re looking to do some CPD and learn more about your fields, Class Central provides an easy way to browse over 40,000 online courses.

3. Writing-related resources

I’ve added the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography under Encyclopaedias for want of a better place to put it. Although a subscription is required, you can access it if you have a UK library card.

The last category on this page, Writing, now includes a link to the SMOG (Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook) readability calculator. It uses seven readability formulas to give a consensus grade level. For example, I tested one of my more recent blog posts (Fees or Rates? A Discussion on Translation Prices) and got a grade score of 12 and a reader’s age of 17-18, i.e. fairly difficult to read. This doesn’t surprise me as that’s the level I usually pitch my texts at on My Words for a Change, but it’s much higher than the recommended plain English level for blogs (reader’s age of 13-15).

There are two more additions in the style guide category, which now lists 45. The new ones are the Association of Art Editors (AAE) Style Guide and the OECD Style Guide.

2. Subject-specific Dictionaries & Glossaries

In the second section I’ve added a new category called Leisure & Entertainment. So far it only has one entry, the Glossary of Filmographic Terms FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives), courtesy of Gwenydd Jones’s newsletter. However, I’m sure this category will expand so please let me know if you can think of any other good links for it.

1. General Dictionaries & Glossaries

Although there haven’t been any changes in this section, don’t forget to explore its many links and resources. I’m sure you’ll find something useful for your translation and interpreting work.