2023 – a year that flew by

What I had planned…

As mentioned in last year’s review post, I had planned to publish blog posts on various language-related topics—one of them on gender-neutral language.

And I had planned to attend various events: the Munich NewSpace Summit, Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen and potentially the UK Space Conference in Belfast.

…and what really happened

Life ended up playing out very differently.

In one area, things turned out to be more productive than anticipated: one planned blog on gender-neutral language ended up turning into a whole series of three posts. I ended up exploring the questions of what gender-neutral language is, how to use it and when.

After that, the blog went into a longer than intended summer break before I came back and picked it up again in September, when I started looking at how to prepare texts for translation and how to find suitable translators for your projects. This series is not complete yet and I am planning to publish more on this topic over the next few months.

In another area, things ended up a lot slower than planned. Of the events I had in mind, I ended up only making it to Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen in November, due to unforeseen time constraints. I published a short review of my visit on the blog page as well, if you are interested.

Aside from that, 2023 has been packed with a lot of interesting projects. One of my favourites ended up being translating the manifesto of Space Renaissance Initiative into German, which was very different from the things I usually work on and therefore a nice challenge and a lot of fun. I am planning to publish a short case study on this site soon.

2024 – new ambitions

As is custom at the beginning of a new year, I have of course also made plans for 2024. The blog topics I have lined up for you are already shaping up to be very promising: I will continue the translation commission series mentioned above, raise the question whether AI is making translators obsolete and provide some interesting insights into the language services profession and landscape.

The events I am planning to attend this year are, of course, the International Astronautical Congress in Milan in October and the ITI translation/interpretation conference in beautiful Edinburgh in early June.

And there are of course other ambitious projects in the pipeline, including some infrastructure improvements and exciting training opportunities.

For 2024, I am looking forward to hopefully putting my plans in practice, to new and exciting work projects and of course to life’s unexpected turns…

Happy new year to all my readers and please feel free to come back next month when there will be a post all about the use of AI and machine translation. Another controversial topic indeed!