This month… more than double bill! Spoiling my readers 🙂
For the usual appointment with #ADayInTheLifeOf, I give you Catherine Christaki, English-Greek translator and co-owner of Athens-based Lingua Greca Translations. Find her on Twitter: @LinguaGreca, on her popular translation blog, Adventures in Freelance Translation. Enjoy!
For freelance linguists and translation company (albeit tiny) owners, no day is the same as the previous or the next. There are so many things to do! I’ll try to describe what my typical day looks like, one without work errands (tax office, banks etc.) which my translation partner and hubby Christos usually takes care of and without professional events or client meetings. Basically, a day spent 100% inside the office (my favorite kind!).
7:00-7:30 Wake up, get dressed. Hubby takes care of our cat babies (food for the day, fresh water) and then we drive to our office (5 minutes).
7:30-8:30 Time to have the first coffee of the day (cappuccino, latte, mocha, filter coffee depending on the weather and my mood) and a quick breakfast at the office which usually comprises of a Greek koulouri or an individual cheese pie, while reading the emails that came overnight.
8:30-9:30 Reply to emails and social media mentions, check our blog for new comments and reply to those as well.
9:30-10:30 Read my RSS feeds and choose the best articles to share on Twitter and include in our Weekly Favorites.
10:30-13:30 Time for some translation work. This is the perfect time of the day as our European clients are still relatively quiet and there are minimal interruptions. Great time for lunch too, usually a turkey sandwich from the coffee place two floors down while checking out my Facebook or Twitter feed.
13:30-16:00 Reply to the new emails, add new deadlines to my working schedule and the job tracking system (sounds fancy, but I’m still using an Excel file) and then work on and deliver the small daily and urgent translation and bug-fixing requests from Apple (I am the lead localizer for English-Greek projects). There are usually other urgent requests to take care of as well, such as questions about delivered projects.
16:00-17:30 More work. First, finish the small projects for tomorrow then work on the bigger ones with later delivery dates.
17:30-18:30 Reply to the new emails, plan my workday for tomorrow and publish a scheduled post on our blog (a How I Work interview, the Weekly Favorites if it’s a Friday, a guest post or a post I or Christos wrote if it’s a Wednesday).
18:30 Time to leave and hit the gym for a quick workout and a nice class, like yoga or aqua aerobics.
20:30 After the gym, I usually walk home, it only takes 20 minutes and it’s through a nice area with trees and very few cars. Winters are mild in Greece so my walk is very refreshing.
21:00 Quick shower and then dinner cooked by my hubby chef.
22:00 Cat and reading time! One of my favorite times of the day. First I read a book that requires my mind to be working (translation or business related or anything non-fiction) and then an ‘easy’ book, usually mystery or thriller, to help me sleep. During reading, I take a few breaks to play with my adorable cats, Ozzy and Rocky.
This is my typical day. But time-wise it’s rarely exactly like that. It depends on the projects and in the past few years the number of emails I receive during the day has grown significantly due to my activity on social networks and our blog. It’s so exciting that I have the opportunity to talk to and get to know so many new linguists every day!
We also travel a lot; both sets of our parents live out of Athens (parents in Crete and in-laws in Epirus). That means 2-4 trips to see them each year. Plus, 2-3 conference trips abroad and a vacation trip once a year. This year, our conference schedule will be busy. There are so many great conferences in offer for translators, it’s hard to choose! We’re planning to attend GALA in Istanbul, Locworld in Dublin, maybe FIT in Berlin and of course the ATA annual conference in Chicago. And don’t forget: the 2nd IAPTI conference takes place in Athens this year, an excellent opportunity for linguists all over the world to come see how beautiful Greece is and taste our yummy food. See you there!
Thanks, dear Catherine!
The Blog of Rainy London Translations 
That’s so nice and sounds so productive, Catherine! I wish I were that organised 🙂 Find some time to come visit us in Rhodes, too!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Being a translator isn´t like having a normal job. It is much tougher but at the end of the day there are some positive aspects to this. Your day as a translator depends on how much work you have got on your hands. And that makes you more or less nervous depending on the ammount of work that has to be done. The positive side is that if you get a decent ammount of work you can earn more than a normal person with a average job.